I, for one, think it is great to work on better defining the mission of Wikibooks. I have one question though, do you know if the definition worked upon is generally shared with other wikibooks people ? Are they other wikibooks that have worked on such a definition, and where the outcome differs widely from yours ?
ant
I wouldn't say at this point that there is alot of disagreement on the basic definition of what wikibooks is, and what a "textbook" is. The policy proposal for the new WB:WIW was recently rejected: it had a numeric majority in favor, but there were some objections raised that could not have been ignored.
Wikibooks in some small part is still suffering from historical ambiguities, questions that nobody ever bothered to answer. For example, We still have some videogame strategy guides on our site, and there are a few people who still fight any attempt to remove those guides.
At one time Jimbo had provided a definition for "textbook", although his definition was so restrictive that it would have caused the deletion of many perfectly acceptable books.
I dont know if the solution is to have the WMF board mandate a definition to us (something that board members have strongly resisted in the past), but at this point I think we could certainly use a little input. I've been very vocal on foundation-l recently about how much potential I think wikibooks has, and I know Rob Horning has a long history of doing the same. Unfortunately, I think we really need to iron out a few policy details before we can really take that next step to becoming a great project and a great textbook resource.
--Andrew Whitworth
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