Does anyone have any pull with Jimbo Wales to get him to participate in this
discussion? I saw one of his posts where he said, under no uncertain terms,
that there would be no original research. Is that the definition you were
referring to?
-Kathy
-----Original Message-----
From: Andrew Whitworth [mailto:wknight8111@hotmail.com]
Sent: Thursday, May 10, 2007 5:51 AM
To: textbook-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
Subject: Re: [Textbook-l] [Foundation-l] Rethinking brands
I, for one, think it is great to work on better
defining the mission of
Wikibooks. I have one question though, do you know if the definition
worked upon is generally shared with other wikibooks people ? Are they
other wikibooks that have worked on such a definition, and where the
outcome differs widely from yours ?
ant
I wouldn't say at this point that there is alot of disagreement on the basic
definition of what wikibooks is, and what a "textbook" is. The policy
proposal for the new WB:WIW was recently rejected: it had a numeric majority
in favor, but there were some objections raised that could not have been
ignored.
Wikibooks in some small part is still suffering from historical ambiguities,
questions that nobody ever bothered to answer. For example, We still have
some videogame strategy guides on our site, and there are a few people who
still fight any attempt to remove those guides.
At one time Jimbo had provided a definition for "textbook", although his
definition was so restrictive that it would have caused the deletion of many
perfectly acceptable books.
I dont know if the solution is to have the WMF board mandate a definition to
us (something that board members have strongly resisted in the past), but at
this point I think we could certainly use a little input. I've been very
vocal on foundation-l recently about how much potential I think wikibooks
has, and I know Rob Horning has a long history of doing the same.
Unfortunately, I think we really need to iron out a few policy details
before we can really take that next step to becoming a great project and a
great textbook resource.
--Andrew Whitworth
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