Lord Voldemort wrote:
Okay, Jimbo. In an effort to discuss the game guides
issue, I would
appreciate a couple of questions being answered. I will try to
address various points people have brought up on the subject of game
guides as well as Wikibooks (WB) as a whole. I will try to ask them
in a broad sense, including questions that may seem obvious to some.
Bear with me.
1. What was the original purpose of Wikibooks?
2. Is the current purpose the same?
3. Who has control over the overall content of Wikibooks? The
Wikimedia Foundation, the WMF Board, the community of Wikibookians?
4a. Some time ago now, you declared that game guides did not fit with
the intent of WB. Were you speaking on behalf of the Wikimedia
Foundation? Were you speaking just as Jimbo?
4b. Who decided all of a sudden to rid Wikibooks of game guides? Was
there recent discussion on Meta? Between the Board? If so, is there
a record of this discussion?
5. Why specifically do game guides not fit in Wikibooks? Are there
possible tax-exemption implications with having these here? If so,
where is the information regarding this?
6. If the community of Wikibookians disagrees with the decision, and
consensus is formed against it, can the community disregard the
pronouncement?
7. If the community rejects the pronouncement and decides they want
game guides included, what steps would need to be taken to ensure
there place at WB? Would the WMF bylaws need to be changed? If so,
how would they go about doing that?
8. Can video games be an acceptable textbook subject? If so, what are
the requirements? Is a simple walkthrough constitute a textbook?
9. If video game guides are to be gotten rid of, what about board game guides?
10. There is talk of a "Accredited Institution" metric. If one small
institution somewhere develops a class on a topic, does that warrant
that topic's textbook on WB? What about if three institutions have
the class? Should links to some number of courses be provided to show
the suitability for WB? If so, how many?
11. Do classes that you do not earn credit for (either
extra-curricular or within school, but not for credit) count as
classes under the Accredited Institution metric? For example, clubs
used to educate someone on a topic not otherwise found in class.
12. If the removal of video game guides also results in the leaving of
many prolific and trusted WB editors, does the WMF consider this okay?
13. Any other comments on these issues?
I guess this is a start. Forgive me if my biases show through. I
tried to ask questions brought up on both sides of the issue. If I
have forgotten any glaring questions, please forgive me. I understand
some of these are not easy to answer, but I, and others, would
appreciate whatever answers you can provide. Thanks.
--LV
I would like to add that Wikibooks was started because of the Organic
Chemistry article on Wikipedia was growing incredibly huge, and was
becoming more of a book than an encyclopedia article. With some
internal discussion going on with Wikipedia about what to do and Karl
Wick trying to spearhead the move to create a seperate website for this
sort of effort,
http://textbooks.wikipedia.org was started. It was from
this initial effort that subsequent content was added to Wikibooks.
Unlike the perception that seems to be presented at the moment,
Wikibooks was never intended to be strictly for publishable textbooks.
Indeed to prevent this, the clause "Wikibooks is not paper" was added
into "What Wikibooks is not" (now What is Wikibooks?) to note that some
creativity could be done to try and explore some new and experimental
ways of writing content. That spark of creativity seems to be missing
in a huge degree right now from Wikibooks.
Indeed, even the idea of making Wikibooks strictly non-fiction content
is something relatively new, although I think this is a reasonable
focus. The problem that Wikibooks is facing now is the incredibly
limiting restriction of making Wikibooks only for textbooks, with no
real clear definition as to what a textbook really is. Saying that you
must cite a course of study in an accredited educational institution and
that the textbook fits in with a proscribed syllabus is going way too
far in my opinion. How could anything possibly be written at all with
that sort of very strict interpretation? Yet that is precisely the
standard that is being used.
If we (and especially Jimbo) is suggesting that this is the standard
that needs to be applied, perhaps we simply need to nuke the whole
website, such as was done with French Wikiquote. Kill everything and
perhaps bring back the one agreed upon textbook that started it all:
Organic Chemistry. And then make very strict policies that state the
much more strict interpretation that Wikibooks is only for textbooks
alone that meet my above definition, or something similar.
One thing I find especially disturbing in all of this is the complete
lack of discussion of the other language Wikibooks projects. Mind you,
in almost all of the discussions that have taken place on en.wikibooks
we have never said that such policies were manditory for the other
language projects. And the other languages have been largely
independent, with the German Wikibooks being perhaps the most developed
besides en.wikibooks. Or as I've pointed out in several places, over
half of all Wikibooks content is written in languages other than
English. If you are setting up a general policy that excludes a whole
class of content, this should be a general policy for more than just
this one project, en.wikibooks. This is especially if the policy is to
be coming from the Wikimedia Foundation Board as an official policy.
As far as the tax exempt status issue is concerned, I fail to see that
as an argument at all. See my response on:
http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Wikibooks_talk%3AWhat_is_Wikibooks#Referencing…
As long as we keep content available under the GFDL and maintain NPOV
enforcement of Wikibooks content, I fail to see how anything else can
possibly threaten the tax-exempt status of Wikibooks or any Wikimedia
project for that matter. The content alone is not going to cause any
problems of any kind regardless of what is written. Calling in the U.S.
Federal Government on this issue is an attempt to distract from the
issue, which is a policy dispute between one rather prominent individual
(namely Jimbo) and admins on Wikibooks. The real issue is to determine
what the scope of Wikibooks should be, and more importantly, its
relationship to the other Wikimedia sister projects.
And that gets to the heart of the matter and what is causing the
contention here, together with some of the comments from Jimbo. What is
the relationship between Wikia and Wikimedia? Almost all of the
arguments that have been used lately to remove content, including the
Jokebook but also the video game guides and the how-to books, as well as
the biographies, is because there are existing Wikia projects that cover
the scope of this kind of content. However, one of the reasons why
Wikipedia is moving content to Wikibooks in large quantities (including
the Cookbook) is because there is no other Wikimedia project that can
really handle this sort of content. Indeed, this was the very argument
that was also given as to why Wikibooks was chosen to host the Wikimania
proceedings.
So are the various Wikia projects considered sister projects to
Wikimedia projects? Local links (not external references) exist going
both ways, including to the Uncyclopedia. My understanding was that
they were very distinct groups (Wikia and Wikimedia) and the policies
and even existance of a Wikia project has no bearing on Wikimedia
projects. Apparently this line is being blurred considerably now with
the new textbook only philosophy for Wikibooks, and it does have an
impact on future content being developed on Wikibooks. Moving the
How-to books to the How-to Wikia seems like an attempt (to me) of
capturing Wikibooks content without having to do any work, especially
given that the how-to books on Wikibooks predate the How-to Wikia. Six
months ago the idea would have been considered ludicrious to even
suggest removing the how-to books.
--
Robert Scott Horning