[Textbook-l] 2008 Non-technical Wishlist

[Andrew Whitworth]

This is something that is inspired by Florence's post to foundation-l
about her personal wishlist for 2008. I know that I'm severely late in
posting a continuation of that idea, so I apologize if people are
already past their new years resolution phases. This is a list of
things that I would like to see Wikibookians focus on for the 2008
year. Of course, this is just a personal list, and I would love to
hear what other people are interested in too. These don't appear in
any particular order, so the top isn't necessarily the highest
priority (it's just the first thing that fell out of my head).

1) Actively solicit book donations. This one might be a little bit
controversial, because the goal of any wiki project (with Wikisource
as a possible exception) is to generate new content, not just
consolidate old content. However, book donations allow us to start
with books of decent quality, and update/expand/improve them. This is
especially useful for authors who have written free books a long time
ago, and have not been able to maintain them themselves. Receiving
book donations will help to improve our public image, and will help
create the perception that we have plenty of ready-to-use high-quality
books, not just a series of works in progress.

2) Look for "friends" and "partners". I know the foundation has a
policy (or at least I seem to remember that it used to) against
forming official partnerships, but that doesnt mean we can't find
like-minded organizations and open pathways for communication and
possibly collaboration. Some sites that immediately come to mind are
libsuccess.org and textbookrevolution.org. It has been discussed
before, but we should be aiming to get our best core books pre-loaded
onto OLPC laptops. These are just a few of many possibly
collaborations we could form. We can share GFDL-based content and
contributors between many such "friends".

3) Quality. This was a big deal for Florence, and it should be a big
deal for us too. I would like to break this down into three
sub-components:

3a) Focused collaborations. We no longer have the COTM program for
many reasons. However, we should try to encourage groups of
contributors to focus attentions, even if on a weekly basis, on
particular books. These groups could proof-read, fact-check, and
simply improve books, especially in preparation for PDF creation or
some other form of "publishing". Most Wikibookians are, as is my
perception, authors and not editors. We don't have the large corps of
copyeditors that WP has, and as a result our books do not benefit from
the endless tweaks and improvements that their articles do. The idea
of "Wikiprojects" have been dismissed in the past, but we need these
or some other way to organize people and give them a sense of focus
and purpose.

3b) Stable Versions. We've talked about this endlessly in the past,
and I'm sure there is more talk still. If we want our core audience,
school classrooms, to use our books, we need to provide them with
versions which are immutable for the duration of a term, and which are
known to be of a relatively high quality. Veropedia serves a purpose
like this for Wikipedia articles, and maybe we need to either
collaborate with the Veropedians, or create our own site with a
similar purpose. Maybe, if we can sell the idea well enough, we could
get the foundation to help out with a stable.en.wikibooks.org, where
we could upload stabilized versions of books. Notice that the
automatic PDF generation functions, and the "wiki-to-print" feature
aren't going to solve this problem, because they don't guarantee that
pages will remain immutable: a PDF generated today may be far
different from a PDF generated tomorrow.

3c) Core subjects. A combination of several other points listed above,
we need to seriously improve the quality of books on core topics.
Devising even a list of such books (books that currently exist, or
books which do not currently exist but which we need) would be an
excellent start. Through collaboration, book donations, and various
other methods, we need to increase the quality of books in core
topics, produce stable versions from them, and find ways to put these
books into a classroom.

4) Make inroads into the classroom. Class projects have been immensely
successful for us, and have generated some of our best books.  We
should try hard to advertise wikibooks as being a suitable platform
for these projects, and try to attract more groups to our site. Beyond
students writing books, we also need students to read our books as
well. With high-quality, stable versions of books, we will be in a
position to "sell" them to the students and teachers who need them
most. For large districts, being able to save even 50$ per child per
year would be a financial miracle. Or, schools who have traditionally
avoided costs by reusing old books year after year could be given the
opportunity to upgrade their entire curricula for free. This would be
an excellent collaboration opportunity for some of our sister
projects, as as WV and WS as well.

5) Documentation and Usability: We need a better way to describe who
we are and what we do. We need help pages or help books that are
easily accessible, easy to navigate, and easy to read. In addition, we
need to develop more tools to help automate the most important tasks.
Let's face it: new users have a lot that they need to know before they
can start their first book or project. People should be able to sit
down and start writing a book, without having to (a) take the time to
learn how to do all the necessary book-formatting by hand, or (b) make
a large series of mistakes that need to be corrected later. Maybe we
need to make a lot of complicated tools using Javascript. Maybe we
need to hassle the devs to give us books-specific extensions, or maybe
we need to write our own extensions. Maybe we need to get on the tool
server and start setting up tools on there that people can use. Maybe
we need a different solution entirely. The fact is that there's a
barrier to entry on our site because the documentation is generally
poor, and because the learning curve is much steeper then it is at
wikipedia.

I really do believe that Wikibooks is in a great position right now.
We've done a lot of work in the previous years, and we have a great
project. That said, there are a few more hurdles that we need to pass
before our full potential as a free textbook resource can be realized.
I would like to see 2008 be the year that we really come into our own.

--Andrew Whitworth