Well, it seems to me that the purpose of Wikibooks is to be "the open-content textbooks collection", not "the open-content textbooks collection that anyone can edit". But perhaps this is a matter that the Foundation should be consulted on. I know that Jimbo has stepped in to reorient the site in the past, with the game guides and so on.
It's a little pretentious to think that wikibooks should change itself, or that it should be changed by the WMF to allow any one particular book. Since it's inception, Wikibooks (and all WMF projects for that matter) have been primarily concerned with open content and collaboration. The rejection of one or both of these ideals is not one that should be encouraged or accepted.
Even if the professor's motivation is not financial, the desire for recognition still counts as personal gain. If the selection as wikibooks as the webhost for the book is made only because of readership traffic, and it benefits the author more then it benefits the project, then I would certainly call it an attempt to use Wikibooks as a personal webhost.
This point is true, but wikibooks is not supposed to be an advertising platform or a personal webhost.
No, but it is supposed to get quality textbooks to as many readers as possible. That goal is better served, leaving aside for the moment how fundamental wiki is to Wikibooks, by accepting a quality textbook than by refusing one.
The stated goal of wikibooks is "the creation of open content textbooks". No part of that statement may be omitted and still have it be truth. We are more concerned with content creation then content hording, and the books must be "open content" (and therefore free from unilateral editorial control). Plenty of quality textbooks have been turned away from wikibooks in the past, and many will likely be turned away in the future. We are not currently desperate for new books enough to compromise our policies.
Now, she's perfectly happy for other people to modify it. She would be fine if there were two copies, each linking to the other, one written by her and one editable by anyone. In her words:
I'd also be happy to have a version of it available for people to revise, so long as that one is clearly marked as an open mss and, this is the key point, so long as the one I wrote (perhaps revised as per some of the suggestions, as I have with the comments of 150 CCNY students and various art historians) remains posted, clearly marked as the work I wrote.
Perhaps this would be acceptable? Possibly the unmodifiable one need not even be hosted by Wikibooks, just linked to by it, which would neatly solve all the problems. I assume that Wikibooks would be happy to put a prominent link to the original at the top of every module, if it's available online somewhere.
This would be perfectly acceptable. As has been done in the past, if a book is donated to wikibooks, prominent links will be displayed to the original version of the book, and information will be posted about the original author. If she has a PDF or other version of the book already, that version could even be uploaded to our server for reference (although we can't make a guarantee that any files uploaded won't be modified or overwritten, but it is more difficult).
--Andrew Whitworth
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