Magnus Manske wrote:
While aimlessly browsing through wikibooks, I suddenly realized that our textbooks don't look like - well, textbooks.
Suppose I want to learn from a wikibooks textbook. I open a chapter (sorry, a "module";-) and it looks like wikipedia. That is not bad in itself, however, IMHO it has some drawbacks. First, I'm distracted by the sidebar. If I want to learn about a topic, I don't want to go to the "staff lounge" or the "community portal". And when I scroll down, the sidebar is replaced by - a really blank space. That's all fine on wikipedia, where you come to be part of the experience, or to look up some topic, then leave. Learning from a textbook is another process altogether.
This is something I've fought against in many instances, and it should be pointed out that the MediaWiki software that we have tends to encourage this kind of behavior if only because it has been tweaked and specialized explictly for the creation of encyclopedic entries.
Furthermore, a very large portion of the users that come to Wikibooks have mainly experience with Wikipedia (although there are some "home grown" Wikibooks users that hardly touch Wikipedia). Into that viewpoint, it is hardly surprising that many of the modules (not all of them) tend to have a look and feel very similar to Wikipedia articles, and are often even written in a fashion similar to a major "A-grade" Wikipedia article. Indeed, the Wikijunior pages (to give a specific example) almost all have a strong feel of being individual articles very loosly tied together by topic.
Keep in mind, please, that Wikibooks is still trying to define some of these concepts that you are complaining about here. While in a few cases we actually have sufficient content together to actually have something strongly resembling a textbook, clearly we need to move on and try to go beyond the basic concepts found on Wikipedia for article navigation.
Another huge issue is that on Wikibooks each seperate book almost takes on a sense of being its own seperate Wikimedia project, if sufficient numbers of people are involved. This said, the more mature Wikibooks tend to have a unique style almost unto themselves. This also includes often navigation sidebars and more.