I want to point out here that there is a sort of disconnect between the typical users and participants of Wikibooks and those who are involved with academia. The books that have been most popular on Wikibooks in terms of content development either have a strong technological orientation to them
I would argue that many of the technology and computer-related books are poorly organized, and are in severe need of help (even if they contain alot of content, and are numerous). A look at the list of the "books near completion" and [[b:Featured books]] shows a much more homogenous distribution across the various disciplines. Many people are inclined to start new books on technology subjects, but we don't have enough authors with enough expertise in those topics to really get the books to a near-completed status.
Even then, there is some final polish and meeting specific curriculum requirements that would prove to be useful if were to use these as formal textbooks.
Perhaps it would benefit everybody to list specifically what the standards are? This would make an excellent addition to [[b:Wikistudy]], to list not only books that meet specific standards, but also list the standards themselves from around the world.
So the question comes on how can Wikibooks be used to help push forward the development and publication of a K-12 school textbook. I do believe that some changes could take place on a number of pages on Wikibooks (mainly introduction pages and perhaps even the front page) that would help encourage Wikibooks participants to try and meet specific academic requirements.
A good solution perhaps would be to write books with a large amount of general information on a topic, and then prepare different Tables-Of-Contents and "Printable versions" of each book that would be targeted at different audiences. In essence, we could transclude the existing pages in different orders. This would save us from having to write multiple versions of the same books. Each different jurisdiction then can simply specify which subjects, and in which order to have the information presented.
As far as finding ways to get physical publication of content accomplished, that is certainly something that I think applies not just to school textbooks, but almost all open source content in general.
It does seem like a waste to prepare "printable versions" of a book, if we can't find an organized way to actually print and distribute them. If copies are distributed at the cost of materials, and there is no profit, I don't quite see how there would be any complications from the distribution process. Do we have/could we get support from the WMF to actually use Wikimedia logos/trademarks in these distributed works? I seem to remember that was a major hangup last time.
--Andrew Whitworth
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