Nice to see this list become so active... I wonder
sometimes if Erik is just ribbing us into talking
more, but in any case the renaming thing seems to me
to be a tempest in the bathwater (the baby is fine and
growing).
This sort of reminds me of a story a greenpeace
activist wrote about a convention, where it was
decided that "ChemLawn" just needed to change their
name (and they did, now they're "Truegreen"). It's
still Chemlawn, of course. Likewise, renaming the
project won't make more Wikipedians burst through the
door, because Wikibooks is just really different from
Wikipedia. With the exception of Wikispecies (which is
a metadata project built by biologists), we are the
only project that's named in the plural, and that
plurality shows in how things happen here: we
Wikibookians tend to just work in our little corner,
and don't have hundreds of people popping by and
adding a tidbit here and there to the things that are
on our watchlists. Going to a random page isn't likely
to be an interesting read (not that random page
searching is all that much fun on Wikipedia as it used
to be), because a random page is going to be a page of
some book that you need to read from the start. It's
just different -- inherently so -- and rebranding will
do nothing but annoy the current volunteers, and cause
trobles with everyone's external links and bookmarks.
Books for any topic and any age group -- and thank you
for the trip down memory lane... I *loved* SRAs when I
was a little guy! -- require an author or group of
authors. We can find those by dropping notes to people
in our neighborhood (your child's teacher, your
mechanic, the farmer at the farmer's market, etc.), or
by trying to build relationships with other non-profit
organizations (like Cary Bass is trying to do with the
AARP). Or start a letter-writing campaign to Laura
Bush ("be bold in propagandizing").
We've had a lot of class projects going on lately
(with at least one good book as a result!), and we can
build on that tradition as a path towards building
more wikibooks.
-johnny.
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