--- Andrew Whitworth <wknight8111(a)hotmail.com> wrote:
Jimbo Wrote:
Well, I think the policy is pretty clear, and yes,
as the community
applies the policy in practice, I don't always
agree with the outcome,
nor do I expect to always agree with the outcome.
I am not sure why you are saying there is currently
no policy.
because to the best of my knowledge there currently
is no specific policy
that says specifically what a "textbook" is.
Hmmm, well, it seems to me that this policy is
actually supposed to be vague and subject to
interpretation (though I could be wrong on that). Most
of Jimbo's policies seem to run along that vein: I
mean, what the heck is a neutral point of view,
really? Deciding what's NPOV or not depends on your
POV about NPOV, which is great fun to debate (or watch
being debated), and doesn't really need to be fixed
unless it's broken (which rarely happens).
This policy is currently "proposed", but is
a long
way away from being
enforced:
http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Wikibooks:Textbooks
I get the feeling that that policy (much like the
"consensus rules guideline") is going to simply
restate the obvious, like all good policies do.
The religious/athiestic texts are POV, because they
assume the reader either (a) has that point of view,
or (b) should have that point of view (because if not
they're (a) damned to hell or (b) just plain stupid).
This policy is a broad cover-all, but again never
states specifcally what a
"textbook" is, nor how to distinguish between
"instructional resources" that
do belong here, and "instructional resources" that
don't belong here ([[How
To Build A Pykrete Bong]] was instructional, and
NPOV, but we deleted it
anyway as mostly a matter of conscience):
That was deleted? Why? (It's certainly legal in
Amsterdam, if not in California or British Columbia).
Seems to me that having something like that could be
good for interpreting for other projects (presumably
it could be modified to make a chimney scrubber or
something like that for a wood-burning
microgenerator). (And before you ask, no, I don't
smoke pot.)
If I might put forward a guess, Jimbo: was your
comment about video-game guides more or less just
pointing out what seemed common-sensical (i.e.: "those
aren't textbooks, silly!")?
I do think the argument that we will "lose" a lot of
productive bookwriters if the VG guide people are
chased off is pretty weak. If you look at the contribs
from those writers, they rarely venture into the other
parts of wikibooks, and those that do aren't likely to
"leave" (it's not as if they're relocationg from New
York to LA or anything... it's just a few mouse clicks
from "here" to "there").
http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/WB:WIW
Fact is that the wikibooks policy cannon is very
incomplete.
Yes, but that's just a cultural divide. Jimbo made
wikipedia and wikibooks, and with rare exceptions just
leaves it vague and lets things evolve. The people who
actually work on the wikis like making things more and
more specific (which is why our
books/articles/definitions are so damned good). I
*don't* think we need to make our policies ever-more
specific (i.e., we don't want what the wikipedians
refer to as instruction creep), because then we're
tying the hands of the next writers. I do think the
"Wikibooks:Textbook" page will have some merit though,
since we let the VG guides get firmly established, and
we need to narrow it a bit so we don't get caught by
the "well, if you delete my book, you need to delete
those ones too" argument. But I think that defining
has to be kept to a level of simply defining what's
common-sensical, which shouldn't in any way be a
narrow definition.
-johnny.
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