kelvSYC wrote:
The original concept for Wikibooks, according to its founder, [[User:Karl Wick]] I believe, is a wiki for building textbooks. However, Wikipedians for some odd reason decided to offload their unwanted goods to Wikibooks: for examples, the VFD precedent there regarding recipes has largely been the driving force behind [[Cookbook]], even though a cooking textbook should focus little on recipes and more on general cooking techniques. Many of the books here have since defied their original intent: for example, [[Computer and video games bookshelf]] (originally [[Game Guides and Strategy]])
- a textbook on beating a computer game sounds ludicrous to me.
Wikibooks also suffers from the fact that there are few active admins and few active users of action (and thus suffering from repeated vandal attacks). Prior to myself becoming an admin, there were over 200 pages on speedy deletion, some of them being marked for months (although half of these were due to technical constraints). There are possibly another 200 pages that could be easily moved out of en: and onto their respective Wikibooks if only Special:Import was complete (or someone did hard transwiking). Because of this, few Wikibookians are willing to put down concrete policies that are followed and enforced (consider that key pages such as [[WB:HNS]], [[WB:FP]] and even [[WB:WIN]] were in constant flux). Furthermore, Wikibookians tend to be within their own group of books, and rarely venture into collaborating in other books (this is perhaps due to a lack of a consistent Manual of Style). This makes it difficult to judge the purpose of Wikibooks. Only recently have users decided to put their foot down in respect to what Wikibooks is about, and what it is about is instructional material. It could very well be the case that longtime existing books such as [[Jokebook]] could be put up in VFD for not being instructional material.
I do think that this problem will eventually solve itself. Wikibooks, by its nature, takes a little more time for just about everything to happen, and in general cooler heads prevail on just about all editing issues compared to Wikipedia. In stead of featured article and article of the day, we do article of the month, and it takes about a month to decide... as an example.
I've been doing an Alexa scan of Wikibooks, however, and it is showing proportional growth to Wikipedia, although admittedly Wikipedia is an order of magnitude more active. Indeed this seems to be the problem as Wikibooks is the baby sister of Wikipedia, and moderately new users from Wikipedia checking out Wikibooks have a hard time telling the difference. I'll admit that I'm still trying to get a handle on the internal politics of Wikimedia projects, and I'm just barely starting to understand the overall differences between each of the projects at any reasonable depth. An example of this is the 1911 Wikipedia, which I have somewhat successfully moved to Wikisource (although from a certain point of view could be called hijacked...as it is really taking off over there).
I have complained enough on Foundation-l that I was shut up and had content put on [[meta:New Project proposals group]]. The talk page has one of the e-mails I threw to Foundation-l, with one point in particular that many people on Meta consider that Wikibooks to be a dumping ground for many new project ideas that are book lengths in nature, or that they should take their marbles and simply go to Wikicities instead with what could be some good suggestions that could help Wikimedia projects in general. The educational component of Wikibooks really needs to be both demonstrated better and described in more detail at the other Wikimedia projects somehow.