I only subscribed to the list the other day, so I didn't receive Karl's original mail - I'm going to have to reply to two posts in one mail - sorry about this. (See below)
On 3/12/06, michael_irwin@verizon.net michael_irwin@verizon.net wrote:
Karl Wick wrote:
Help!
Wikibooks in in disarray, and we need to work together to make it presentable, if we really want anyone to ever use it.
We have been working on the (English) main page for the last week, getting rid of the bunches of dead links, organizing the information, and makin' it look purty. But there is still work to be done there. Especially making sure that all of the links that are there take people right to the information that will be most helpful to them, and eliminating or consolidating all other options.
And there is still a lot of work to be done to the pages that are linked from the front page, as these are the first and most important pages that newcomers will find. (Especially Wikibooks:About; Welcome, newcomers; Wikibooks:FAQ; etc.)
It is time to begin to elect a couple of books that we can take as far as possible, to ready them for actual real-world use. It is much better to have one great example than have 1,000 bad, mediocre, or half-done examples.
The Wikibooks front page looks good - nice work. I agree that it's vital to have good welcoming pages and help pages, espcially in an environment like a wiki, with which many people are still not familiar. However, these aren't exactly books.Regarding "great examples", is the only place to find these [[Book of the month]]? If so, I think the voting section should be further down the page, and some selected examples left at the top, to impress the curious newcomer. (Is this the equivalent of the Featured Articles on WP?) I'll leave someone who's more knowledgeable on Wikibooks content to decide what they should be.
Michael (Lazy quasar) wrote:
Karl, please be cautious in pruning. We are finally beginning to see real experts and enthusiast show up to begin filling in the fractal knowledge base. Unfortunately, a zeal to look professional to potential students may backfire.
Is it better to attract two thousand highly qualified individuals to write high quality books or a million volunteer students from all walks of life to initialize Wikiversity?
I favor the latter. It is fine with me if material is moved away from the inital portals easy to find by newly arriving wiki neophytes but deleting or excessive pruning is inevitably going to lead to massive conflict as local owners of polished materials competitively discourage newcomers who threaten their dominance from intialization efforts of what everyone hopes will become a massive pivot point for human attention worldwide.
Consider an embryo growing in the womb. Excessive pruning of initial scaffolding to the discouragement of later arriving protein folders probably contributes to defect or abortion ??????
I am not a biologist, physiolist, or medical person. Perhaps we should seek JWSurf's assessment of you and I's inverted images of the best way to proceed?
piles to integrate eventually or high quality singular or low integer count correct complete final files?
Can both paths coexist peacefully or could Wikibooks take one and Wikiversity support the other (among many others obviously).
lazyquasar
I think you're right in as far as what will make a successful Wikiversity community to begin with. We need enthusiasts, not necessarily experts. If we can attract two thousand experts early on, excellent. But they will start trickling in as long as we, as a community, provide for and value theirs and others' diverse experience and needs.
I don't really know what the rest of the mail is about, however :-)
Cormac
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