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(a)verizon.net <michael_irwin(a)verizon.net> wrote: 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. 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

Karl Wick wrote: I'd like to note that the pruning and interior cleanup of Wikibooks has been happening now for some time. The very active Votes for Deletion is a demonstration of this, which has also served as a general forum for trying to determine on a case by case basis what kinds of content ought to remain and what should go. For the record, I tend to try and keep stuff here rather than remove stuff all over the place, but there has been some content added to Wikibooks that simply didn't belong. Several projects like the 1911 Encyclopaedia Brittanica or posting the Quoran have been moved to Wikisource, some content has been moved to the Academic Publishing and Fiction Wikicities, and the Jokebook has become its own independent project all to itself and completely removed from Wikibooks. Is the the kind of pruning that was being refered to? I also like what Karl has been doing on the front page. The previous front page had been a good introduction to Wikibooks and served its purpose, but Wikibooks has simply grown so much that all of the books on Wikibooks is now simply overwhelming to a brand new user. If you look at the bottom of the page, even the number of active Wikibooks projects in other languages has grown considerably, and (unofficially) I've culled out those alternative language Wikibooks projects that have less than 10 pages of actual content. If you look at the front pages of the top six (by page count) language Wikibooks, you see a huge variety of approaches to cataloging this information. Indeed the discussion that took place on Staff Lounge for English Wikibooks took special note of the French and German Wikibooks as well as from other Wikimedia projects and some of the ideas that seemed to fit our current situation were adopted. A good demonstration about the growth and development of Wikibooks is clearly the number of Wikibooks that are now available in PDF format. I count over 21. Because it does take some effort to make a PDF version, this is an example of content that has developed at least to a point that somebody found it worthwhile to assemble the pages of the Wikibook and put a printable edition out. This is an outstanding development. These have been available for some time, but I've got to thank Robin for putting these together in one place. -- Robert Scott Horning