Jon wrote: A couple of potential problems you may wish to think about. I am not a wikibookean because I am not a textbook writer. I have used some of your books and left a few comments or questions occasionally in technical areas I was studying. One caveat, some of your authors have started advocating no external links so your "textbooks" look like traditional textbooks. If this becomes the prevailing norm I will no longer use your "textbooks". I will either buy a "real" "textbook" or find another free source online linking around to augmenting or better or different online information so I can cross check things that I do not understand well or that conflict with my growing understanding of the subject material. ** "A textbook is.... * a is a book which is actually usable in an existing class. That class may be at school, college, university, a professional training centre or an adult education centre. We would expect the subject to be taught in a number of learning institutions, one in the whole world is not enough." This is a better definition in my view than some interpretations I have seen that presumed the "textbook" must be currently used in an active class or used in one previously. Obviously this narrow interpretation limits your community members and bookshelf assets to existing textbooks and textbook writers. I assumed at the time the narrow defination was being applied in some kind of wheel war against a perceived opponent but I did not bother to check out what was really going on. Merely noted that if this idiocy spread then the wikibooks site would probably be of very little use in the near future to me or much of Wikiversity, which is currently viewed by many as being on the leading edge of experimenting with new modes of educational materials and self or group study activities that are not traditional formal classes. Perhaps a exposition on the time frames that draft outlines or materials can remain in place UNUSED by courses somewhere while the project lead seeks sufficient expertise and skill and applicable knowledge from your community to get the book to it "textbook" status which complies with specific format requirements and attract a known "course" using it rather than a few students dropping in occasionally via the web. In my view the above definition for inclusion is still severely lacking as I had many undergraduate classes which cited books which were not "textbooks" as useful references in the subject matter for auxillary reading. In my view almost any wikibook written in a somewhat objective matter or well labeled subjective manner (the author's objective view of the universe vs. Jimbo's communities' objective consensus view of the universe hereafter referred to as NPOV) can be useful in some type of learning activity by someone at some time. As an uninformed, not a member, of your author based community; I would expect to find such a book at a site named "wikibooks.org". No doubt someone will eventually start a "not a textbook wikibook.org" sometime and the larger audience's needs or wants for reference books or other books will be met elsewhere. ** "a book written in a similar style to books usable in existing classes and which is about a subject worthy of study" You presume to decide for your future users and authors what subject of human knowledge is worthy of study and what style or presentation is effective? You may find this limits and taints your community of qualified academic writers. Not a large problem for me except some militants from your community are very attached to the concept that "textbooks" that evolve at Wikiversity shall be relocated to "Wikibooks". NO DUPLICATION of materials. If your editors subsequently decide a "textbook" is not worth studying it is going to have a detrimental impact on the Wikiversity community and its customers or students or participants when it is deleted. Sure it can be recovered if it has not been purged completely but who needs the hassle of convincing some Wikibookean bureaucrat or Wikimedia Foundation member to give it back or undelete at Wikiversity? My personal solution is that Wikiversity can maintain whatever materials locally that its active study groups or community members choose as long as they are not illegal according to Florida state law or U.S. Federal law (copyright issues, slanderous material, subversive calls for revolution, movement data on troops or encryption codes ... treason/espionage) or the negotiated terms of tenancy with the Wikimedia Foundation (NPOV, No Nazi propraganda, etc.). No doubt some local community standards will evolve that detail what are appropriate materials. Wikiversity does not need them installed by fiat from external sources. ** "The "not a duplicate" criterion Forking is where a Wikibook on some topic is copied internally in Wikibooks. We should only have one textbook on each subject that is directed at the same audience. For example, having a book on Chemistry for students sitting a specific exam in the UK at aged 18, and another one on Chemistry for students sitting a specific exame in the US at aged 18 is reasonable. Having two textbooks on Chemistry both directed at students sitting the same exam is not." This above is a silly policy. As a student when I hit a subject that is tough going for me personally often the next thing I do is buy a couple of more "textbooks" and "references" on the subject. Different people think, organize, and study in different ways. There can be no "only one best" policy unless you plan on toggling between paradigms as the collective community membership ebbs and sways with the tides and sunspot cycles. When two authors with diametrically opposed ideas on the best order of subject matter for students with a given background show up or a professor teaching four different courses of the same material to sections of students with known different backgrounds how are you going to decide between the two or provide four different books on the same subject? The loser will undoubtedly be a loss of a potentially valuable community member. I note that you specifically deal with the target audience issue and this is a big improvement over the existing de facto standard that I have seen in used as justification for deletion that there can be only one "textbook" per subject. I have seen this used or advocated in cases that were not forks. I am not sure what was really going on. Perhaps it was intended as a temporary policy to jerk the collective quality of "textbooks" up in a specific area to impress, amaze, retain users as future Wikibookeans. All it did for me was give a chill and memories of Nazi bookburning on TV and some religious types and some scientific types advocating exclusion of specific books and subjects in American schools. Only approved books allowed on campus. When an author shows up for the book used throughout the Ivy League and most of the Northwest on a specific technical subject and generously FDL's his book for all future generations covering heat, mass and momentum transfer (3 courses in one textbook) because the equations are all similar and it is better than two books treating singular subject but worse than the remaining one how are you going to decide which books to delete and which to keep? When the existing community starts to thin out to only existing authors using their "textbooks" in their own classes is this a good thing or bad thing for wikibooks? Do you want only a few good people or a large community of volunteers? Keep in mind most "textbooks" published professionally have a huge cast of paid and unpaid persons involved in their creation and maintenance. Pick up any "textbook" and read the credits and foward typically written by the authors attempting to give all credit that is due and the usual ending note appologising for any people they forgot or inadvertently omitted send us a letter reminder and we will put you in the credits for the next edition. Hope the above is useful to you. If not perhaps it will earn it bandwidth by stimulating better wording for your basic policies as written. In conclusion, it was a fairly clear writeup of my dim understanding of what the currrent policies are intended to be at Wikibooks. Once again I am not a Wikibookean, only an occasional user of your ever improving products. Thanks for your efforts! Sincerely, Michael R. Irwin aka lazyquasar

One of our current proposed policies, http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Wikibooks:Title_pages states that title pages should, "link to a list containing the names of all the users actively working on the project - it can be placed in manual of style, foreword or separate 'Authors' page." So we're already requesting that the authors of each book be identified in a prominent place. For an active book, this group of active contributors should be able to determine the content of the book. Any request to delete a particular module should come from this group. One self-professed "expert" would have to convince all the other editors of the value of any new content. If the community finds a book's content is not in line with the overall policies, they should join the group of active contributors of the book and work to improve it, or delete the entire book. Outsiders sweeping in and deleting specific modules without buy-in from the editors will cause bad feelings, and may cause good editors to leave the project. The formating of the book will be broken, filled with red-links to no-longer existing pages. In the longer term the content may simply be recreated at the same or another title in the book, or be incorporated into existing pages in the book, by the old contributors. The opposite is also true. If all the authors of a book want a module deleted, the outside community shouldn't force them to keep it. If that were to happen, the editors of the book would likely "virtually" delete the page, by eliminating all links to it from the rest of the book. I have for a long time espoused the idea that once a book reaches a certain size, it should be given more and more autonomy. This includes creating its own policies, its own manual of style, its own naming conventions, and even overall control on its own content. John (gentgeen) ----- Original Message ---- From: Lord Voldemort <lordbishopvoldemort(a)gmail.com> To: John Pozniak <gentgeen(a)yahoo.com>om>; Wikimedia textbook discussion <textbook-l(a)wikimedia.org> Sent: Friday, June 16, 2006 6:40:04 PM Subject: Re: [Textbook-l] Rewrite of Wikibooks:What is Wikibooks On 6/16/06, John Pozniak <gentgeen(a)yahoo.com> wrote: I am not sure I agree. Books are not written by just the few who actually type the letters. It should be seen (not in a legal sense) that the entire community writes every book. For example, if a book was being written that the authors wanted certain elements included, but the rest of the community disagreed with, you feel it should be included because the authors have the most knowledge? I can't see this as ideal. We would be inundated with crap and people claiming "Hey, I wrote this. You can't tell me what I can and can't have! I know more about it than you." Sometimes individual modules/chapters/pages do not fit in the community's goal, and it would be reasonable to take them to VfD, no? --LV

On Sat, Jun 17, 2006 at 01:02:06PM -0400, Lord Voldemort wrote: Sure, but the more important issue is deletions desired by the contributors of larger books. For the cookbook this is especially important; we get lots of piecemeal, unfinished or downright bad contributions by more people than any other book. We shouldn't need a full scale VFD for each module we want to do away with and yet marking these modules as speedies raises objections from admins who see potentially usable content. There needs to be a greater degree of trust in the major contributors to decide what is not appropriate for their book. Kellen

On 6/18/06, listspam(a)cretin.net <listspam(a)cretin.net> wrote: Okay, then let's make another template for speedies within the cookbook namespace. Make it a be subcategory of the regular speedies. Then, if it is a regular author of the cookbook, we will be more liberal in deletion. (Is there some page where regular cookbook authors are listed? Sorry, it's been awhile since I checked out the cookbook.) I dunno, just throwing out an idea. --LV

Jon wrote: However, I don't mind the participants of the cookbook adding additional restrictions or standards to the cookbook as a whole for cookbook-specific guidelines. And other books can do the same thing among their participants. Why exactly should this be something bad? This is not difficult to do, and if there is truly only one contributor, it isn't a problem. But make sure there is only one contributor. The deletion policy also allows you to nominate for deletion content to which you are the only editor/contributor, which should be a no-brainer about being reasonable about contributions. A user that tried to do a massive overhaul of a Wikibook should still be watched carefully if they are working with an older Wikibook that might have inactive contributors. In that case they should at least try to start a dialog on the main discussion page of the Wikibook, which should be fairly obvious to participants. Generally this is the talk page of the table of contents, but it can be elsewhere. That, especially for Wikibooks, is an incredibly short period of time, particularly since you havn't mentioned this on the Staff Lounge either. You are talking about a major overhaul of a fundimental policy for the entire project, and expecting that there will be little opposition to even the idea of doing the overhaul? The "What is Wikibooks?" and its predecessor "What Wikibooks is not." came from painful discussions (in terms of arguments and verbal language) that have developed over the courses of years, not months or even days. This is not something that should be done quickly, and is something that should be very widely advertised in terms of seeking input. Something like a global announcement that is site-wide and displayed on every Wikibook page in terms of user input, lasting at least six weeks for the comment period alone. I am saying this due to my own experience with Wikibooks users, and I would strongly object to a major overhaul of a policy page like this (even if it is warrented) if it was changed and I never knew about it. It is a good first step, but substantially more user comments should be sought before it replaces a policy page like [[WB:WIW]]. I want to add here that I think this is a good approach to go. Just that we may have to be going a little slower than you are used to with Wikipedia. -- Robert Scott Horning

Robert Scott Horning wrote: As an outsider with a limited exposure and understanding of the community and what it needs to successfully create numerous (every subject known to man) and high quality (best presentation possible in all of the myriad layouts and forms such that a parallel information economy is trending towards superior not inferior to previous methods of production such as socialism, communism, capitalism, divine inspiration, cave painting, etc.) this reminds me of the early debate at Wikipedia over dribbles of information and excellent articles only. The excellent articles only crowd viewed a good inspiring public presentation as the only possible way to gain adequate participation to succeed with continued high quality generation of articles. The stubs are valuable framework and encourage people to start participating by leaving a tiny improvements or questions on the discussion page of some kind crowd insisted that these dribbles and stubs not be routinely and automatically reverted by roving bands of vandalism fighters or automated reversion tools. Personally I see Wikiversity as a valuable workspace for all the other projects where sloppy messy creative unfinished stuff can be stashed and the tweakers can be encouraged to polish their skills or information content. When lightening strikes; a group product or a group is ready for the bigtime; it can be relocated or merged with great fanfare and celebration over to the other projects which have shifted slightly in focus; a little more towards stewardship of excellent product and higher level producers of excellent product; a little less required attention towards upgrading or integrating dribbles of less than perfect information product created by beginners. Notice that I do not advocate any project (that wishes to survive longterm) screaming at its neophytes and customers that this place is for high quality producers only, go get some useful skills at Wikiversity before wasting our time at WikiX. Also, I do not agree with any project being able to inform Wikiversity student groups or organizations enough is enough you are killing us with these superior products that belong on WikiX. I think an effective project leadership or participant should be able to show our successful Wikiversity producers (any who wish to continue thriving inside the effective zones carved out in the midst of the hordes of undisciplined free participants rather than relocate to a outside project percieved as hostile and a failure prone place of over zealous disciplinarians) how they can derive benefits to their microproject or task from the proposed new location with just adequate conformance with necessary project X policy and procedures. If nobody can agree then the materials can be forked and the random chaotic Wikiversity people can continue to apple polish while helping newcomer's study; while the better focused more mature projects can support serving to the huge internet accessible (and possible published CD) crowds looking for specific high quality work. Periodic cross integration of tiny evolving improvements can be an excellent beginner's task for both environments. We really should not be attempting to avoid duplication of effort, rather encouraging sufficient participation that the production of free knowledge is percieved by our entire species as a useful beneficial thing to do for individuals and for all of posterity. regards, lazyquasar