Guillaume Paumier wrote:
On 5/18/07, Andrew Whitworth wknight8111@hotmail.com wrote:
I got this email today, don't know if it's legitimate or what. I also dont know why they singled out me, or thanked me for Wikibooks. Anyway, what do people make of this?
Proposals of collaboration or usage of Wikimedia brands / logos must be addressed to the office. Also, please don't publish private emails containing names, addresses, phone numbers etc. on publicly archived mailing lists :)
I'm not entirely sure what exactly this means. Why is it not possible to request a collaboration with the community that is producing the content rather than having to use individuals who may not even be familiar with the project that collaboration is sought with?
In this case they are only asking to make a deep link within a Wikimedia project. I was not aware that this was a controversial issue with the WMF, or that there was any legal basis or even desire to prohibit individuals or organizations from linking to specific pages within a project like Wikibooks. That is all that is being requested here, although it is nice to know that they are trying to catalog some of our content.
I would try to encourage them to look at some of the featured books that can be found here: http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Wikibooks:Featured_books
It is unlikely that these books are going to be deleted (there have been some notable exceptions!) but I would have strong reason to believe that the links to these Wikibooks would be quite stable, and these are books that of sufficient quality that it would be worth trying to integrate them into a general catalog of e-books. If anything, this is something we have been spending a little bit of time talking about on the Staff Lounge from time to time, and I've hoped that we could encourage external groups that would want to use these books in exactly this sort of fashion.
It may be useful to have some individual Wikibooks users to help with this cataloging effort, as this is usually done on a voluntary basis as well. The authors themselves, or perhaps individuals who have been working with proofreading or cataloging these books on Wikibooks bookshelves would obviously be familiar with the content. This is what I mean be a join collaborative effort between two on-line communities. Andrew is certainly what I would consider to be a legitimate contact point for a request like this.