On Tue, Jul 15, 2003 at 09:11:31AM +0200, Krzysztof P. Jasiutowicz wrote:
Hi all,
Wikipedia is a great success and its editorial process proved to be capable of producing collaboratively content of good quality.
I wonder if the same paradigm can be extended to writing open source textbooks. There are textbooks that were released into open source by their authors/publishers but as far as I know there have never been any attempt to write a textbook the wiki way.
Textbooks are mostly written by academics and academics are not very fond of Wikipedia. Textbooks are written by one author or one author writes one or a few chapters. I don't know if people like Karl Wick would be pleased with a crowd of random editors to the text he has already written. It might be counter-productive, time consuming and ineffective for him to discuss, explain, or somtimes fight to defend his vision. He probably would be grateful for comments and ideas but I'm not so sure about re-writing his text and putting in incompatible ideas and frameworks.
I think a cookbook or howto type of books might succeed.
I am not trying to be a critic of the whole idea I would like to discuss some of my concerns in the early phase of the project.
It may be hard to make good university-level textbooks the wiki way, but I think we can do things like: * language courses * computer-related books * elementary and high school level textbooks for almost everything