[WikiEN-l] Textbooks (was: Announcing Wikimedia Foundation)

[Daniel Mayer]

Erik wrote:
>Magnus-
>> Oh, if someone creates "textbook.wikipedia.org", could we 
>> also have a test wiki for the gunpedia project set up?
>
>Oh boy, that's gonna be hard to keep NPOV ;-)

IMO it can't and shouldn't. The POV of whatever textbook is being worked on 
should be a "Discipline Point Of View." This means that if a textbook is on 
Biology then the POV of biologists should be in the book. There will be 
neutrality rules but they only apply from within whatever discipline the 
textbook is being written for. So for example a chapter on evolution would 
focus on the major differing views on the subject that exist from within the 
biological sciences but it would not seriously consider the POV of groups 
outside the biological sciences. 

The reason why our encyclopedias have to be NPOV is because our audience is a 
general one. The reason why our textbooks have to be DPOV is because our 
audience is very focused (the biology student, for example) and we need to 
bring that student through the material in a logical and efficient way. 

Same thing is true for a section of a medical textbook on abortion ; we leave 
out most of the history and the different political views on the subject and 
just talk about the procedure itself and maybe have a single paragraph at the 
end sating something about access to the procedure and that risks doctors 
face when they choose to specialize in this area. 

So textbooks are inherently POV - that is why each time somebody tried to 
write a textbook in Wikipedia their efforts were quickly thwarted.

Textbooks are organized in a very different way than an encyclopedia and they 
also have a specific audience. These two things make textbook material 
completely incompatible with Wikipedia. Thus a separate project is needed 
(and probably a few tweaks to the software to make it easy to have chapters).

Hm. Maybe http://textbook.wikimedia.org would be better... I guess it doesn't 
really matter because that URL will be replaced by a real name for the 
project as soon as somebody thinks of one.  

--- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)