On 2/8/07, Andrew Whitworth wknight8111@hotmail.com wrote:
It's a little pretentious to think that wikibooks should change itself, or that it should be changed by the WMF to allow any one particular book. Since it's inception, Wikibooks (and all WMF projects for that matter) have been primarily concerned with open content and collaboration. The rejection of one or both of these ideals is not one that should be encouraged or accepted.
It would indeed be pretentious to think that Wikibooks should be changed for a single textbook. It would not be pretentious to say that accepting certain conditions for a textbook is more in keeping with Wikibooks' ultimate goals than not accepting them, and that if Wikibooks policy currently doesn't allow it it should be changed. That's debatable, but it's not pretentious.
WMF projects have not only been about public collaboration. The earliest project that could roughly be said to fall into the history of the WMF (even though the Foundation didn't exist then), Nupedia, permitted only very tightly controlled editing. Its content was still open and free, in that anyone could reuse or modify it, just as MediaWiki is free software but very few people have commit access (which is comparable to my original suggestion). Anyone can use or modify, but that doesn't mean you can modify the master copy.
The open-content part of the WMF's philosophy is not negotiable, and will never be violated. Nor should it be. But the collaboration part was only ever a means to an end, and is most assuredly negotiable. Stable versions, when they come, will significantly cut down on public collaboration, and as the general quality of the projects improves, I predict that changes will be clamped down further. Remember that if Nupedia had worked better, Wikipedia would have been shut down. Wikipedia is only a wiki because it advanced the goal of free content better. The means should not be mistaken for the end. Instead, in each case evaluate whether the means better advances the end.
And indeed, more concretely, it's perfectly possible for a Wikisource contributor to copy an entire work and have it permanently locked from editing. There, the collaborative part is optional. Because it doesn't serve the goal as well.
But this is hopefully not an argument we need to continue, because I think everyone will be happy with Wikibooks having a modifiable copy and linking prominently to the main copy. I think that the focus on editability and collaboration is not as suitable for Wikibooks as for, say, Wikipedia, and that in the long run it won't do the project any good to reject requests like this, but it's probably not going to be an issue that directly affects me right now, and I have other things to do than to pursue it. So for now, I'm not very interested in continuing that branch of the discussion, assuming everyone is fine with a modifiable copy with links.