[Textbook-l] 2008 Non-technical Wishlist

[Yan Fu]

to someone who may concern:
would you please remove me from the mailing list? thanks.

Fuyan

bestchinese88 at gmail.com



On Fri, Feb 15, 2008 at 11:23 AM, Andrew Whitworth <wknight8111 at gmail.com>
wrote:

> 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
>
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