I'm still not sure what Wikibooks is. Although you
can try to educate
me, why not enhance the Wikibooks front page for everyone, and then just
share a link here?
The wikibooks front page already does tell what wikibooks is all about. Here
is the first sentence from the main page:
"Welcome to Wikibooks, a Wikimedia project that was started on July 10, 2003
with the mission to create a free collection of open-content textbooks that
anyone can edit."
The term "textbooks" is used unambiguously in the very first sentence on the
very first page. I really don't feel like any additional information beyond
that needs to be crammed onto the main page, because we have enough
information crammed on there already. Also, in that very first sentence, the
word "Wikibooks" links to a help page that talks all about our project
(including the types of books that we do and do not include).
Are you saying Wikibooks is for cooperative
authorship of NEW technical, non-fiction, and how-to manuals? Let me
study the NOR No Original Research policy on that one!
Yes, that is what wikibooks is for, and no it is not a violation of the NOR
policy. Wikipedia is similarly for the authoring of NEW encyclopedia-style
articles, and that doesnt violate the policy either.
Or, is Wikibooks
only OLD stuff that's not copyrighted anymore ...
No, that is what Wikisource is for.
Are you saying that because fiction is
too hard to cooperatively co-author, the Wikibook site has evolved away
from fiction?
Wikibooks never included fiction. It has nothing to do with the difficulty
of writing fiction, or the perceived value of it. Books on wikibooks should
be "instructional", such as a textbook or a manual. Fiction, while it may
have educational value, is not by itself instructional, and is therefore not
included. For more information about what we do and do not included
(including a discussion on fiction and the like), see:
http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/WB:WIW
You make my own point in why you didn't share links
to Wikibooks: "they
are not particularly well-maintained nor aesthetically pleasing"! Hey,
Andrew, I'm not faulting anybody. I'm just saying. Why are we writing
here when we could find and fix 'em, instead?
The most important organization method that we have right now are the
bookshelves. As Robert pointed out in his reply earlier, there have been
attempts by people to institute other organizational methods. If you are
interested in making these organizational tools better, you are welcome to
try (this is a wiki after all).
"Nike" is a GREAT mark in
that it does not define ONE product. If they had called themselves
"Sneakers", they'd eventually have a challenge selling non-sneakers. By
calling themselves Nike after the Greek goddess of victory, they can
sell anything to anyone who wants to feel victorious. Very savvy.
This assumes that Wikibooks is interested in producing or distributing
things in the future that are not textbooks, which we do not. Nike's name is
generic because they want to sell lots of stuff: more stuff = more money.
However, wikibooks is a non-profit and our value as a resource will be based
on our focus and on our strength. If we included a whole bunch of stuff,
some textbooks, some fiction, whatever, we would lose our strength as a
textbook producer, and textbook consumers would be less-less likely to take
us seriously. As a wikimedian, i'm sure you are aware that instead of
diluting one project with unrelated materials, the WMF has historically
chosen to create new projects. Instead of creating a "textbook" namespace in
wikipedia, for instance, the new project wikibooks was formed. Instead of
polluting Wikibooks with fiction and nonsense, you should petition to create
a new Wikifiction, or whatever. I would probably vote against such a
proposal, but I won't discuss that issue here.
"WIKI"-anything is descriptive; a
"Wikibooks" that excludes SOME books
is by definition misdescriptive. I'm just trying to find out what
Wikibooks IS, if it's not where to find "quick, community built books"
of any type, totally in the control of the individual teams of
contributors.
Wikinews is not a general purpose news repository, they have policies and
guidelines that discuss what kinds of news are fit to print. Wikipedia
likewise has guidelines (verifiability, notability, etc) that limit what
kinds of materials they host. I could list every WMF project, and every
single one of them has limits as to what they will allow. But of all the
projects, you seem to think that wikibooks should be some kind of
free-for-all, some kind of general-purpose repository, or perhaps even a
garbage dump.
Also, the fact that Wikibooks is for "textbooks" is written both on the
front page, and has been mentioned by myself several times. I'm sorry if you
still have confusion on the matter, but i can't really keep repeating
myself.
It absolutely IS our job to provide Wikibooks visitors
with information,
especially about what Wikibooks is NOT, and share where others go to
find non-Wikibooks offerings.
There are lots of places on the internet that contain stuff that wikibooks
doesnt contain. Should we post links to everything? Wikipedia doesn't give
you links to other websites if you search for something that wikipedia
doesnt include, and Wikibooks does not either. We are not some kind of web
directory, nor a general-purpose search engine, nor a web-hub to direct
traffic around the internet. We have textbooks, and if you don't want
textbooks, then our site cannot and generally will not help you.
We already had it, we deleted it because it was redundant. Again, see:
http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/WB:WIW
This page discusses what wikibooks is, and if you can't find something on
that list, it likely means that wikibooks is not for that.
--Andrew Whitworth
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