Dnia Sat, 09 Sep 2006 13:51:43 +0200, Jimmy Wales napisał(a):

1. NPOV is crucial. Textbooks are not advocacy. They are to instruct

and inform, not brainwash and convert (in either direction!).

2. Wikibooks is for _textbooks_, not any random sort of nonfiction book.

One of the tests we should use is: "Does this book serve the specific textbok needs of any actual class offered at any actual accredited institution?" That will be a good way to cut out a lot of nonsense at the start.

I suggest leaving only these religious books which can be useful for studying a religion from a scientific point of view (looking at its features, history, culture etc.).

Currently Christianity is written generally with respect to NPOV. http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/History_of_Islam may be interesting but needs some POV-cleanup (quote from main page: "But in the view of muslims it is the first religion in the world, that is the history of islam starts from 'Adam'"). The same applies to http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/History_of_Islamic_Civilization (with problem with possible copyright violation). But in my opinion http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Imamat_or_Successorship_After_the_Last_Prophet_... and http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Islam_Way_of_Life should be deleted.

On 11/09/06, Andrew Whitworth wknight8111@hotmail.com wrote:

Jimbo: If you want us to use a specific defintion of "textbook" and "accredited institution", then you are going to have to mandate such definitions to us. At the moment we are picking our way through such matters, with varying degrees of success.

It is my observation that TPTB is very reluctant to offer such definitions or mandates, even when requested. "Picking our way through such matters with varying degrees of success" -- it seems to be the wiki way. Try just making your own definitions (as a project), and I guess you'll find out if you've been too WP:BOLD if you notice some personal interventions after that. :)

It doesn't seem ideal, but I guess I can understand why they're reluctant to define such things. Then the criticism of such things also falls to them. The people who are actually running the project should take control of its direction at some stage... although mandates would make life so easy.

cheers Brianna user:pfctdayelise

Andrew Whitworth wrote:

I'm not saying that I want Jimbo to mandate a definition to us, but I also don't want him making generalized statements of what "does and does not belong" on wikibooks if there is no formal policy to back such statements up. If he wants the world to know that material on wikibooks must follow such and such criteria, then that criteria should be laid out unambiguously in policy. There currently is no policy, ergo we cannot be expected to know unambiguously what does and does not belong on our project. We do need to "pick through" such matters, and the outcome might not always be what Jimbo or the foundation wants.

Well, I think the policy is pretty clear, and yes, as the community applies the policy in practice, I don't always agree with the outcome, nor do I expect to always agree with the outcome.

I am not sure why you are saying there is currently no policy.

--- Andrew Whitworth wknight8111@hotmail.com wrote:

Jimbo Wrote:

...

Well, I think the policy is pretty clear, and yes,

as the community

...

applies the policy in practice, I don't always

agree with the outcome,

...

nor do I expect to always agree with the outcome.

I am not sure why you are saying there is currently

no policy.

because to the best of my knowledge there currently is no specific policy that says specifically what a "textbook" is.

Hmmm, well, it seems to me that this policy is actually supposed to be vague and subject to interpretation (though I could be wrong on that). Most of Jimbo's policies seem to run along that vein: I mean, what the heck is a neutral point of view, really? Deciding what's NPOV or not depends on your POV about NPOV, which is great fun to debate (or watch being debated), and doesn't really need to be fixed unless it's broken (which rarely happens).

This policy is currently "proposed", but is a long way away from being enforced:

http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Wikibooks:Textbooks

I get the feeling that that policy (much like the "consensus rules guideline") is going to simply restate the obvious, like all good policies do.

The religious/athiestic texts are POV, because they assume the reader either (a) has that point of view, or (b) should have that point of view (because if not they're (a) damned to hell or (b) just plain stupid).

This policy is a broad cover-all, but again never states specifcally what a "textbook" is, nor how to distinguish between "instructional resources" that do belong here, and "instructional resources" that don't belong here ([[How To Build A Pykrete Bong]] was instructional, and NPOV, but we deleted it anyway as mostly a matter of conscience):

That was deleted? Why? (It's certainly legal in Amsterdam, if not in California or British Columbia). Seems to me that having something like that could be good for interpreting for other projects (presumably it could be modified to make a chimney scrubber or something like that for a wood-burning microgenerator). (And before you ask, no, I don't smoke pot.)

If I might put forward a guess, Jimbo: was your comment about video-game guides more or less just pointing out what seemed common-sensical (i.e.: "those aren't textbooks, silly!")?

I do think the argument that we will "lose" a lot of productive bookwriters if the VG guide people are chased off is pretty weak. If you look at the contribs from those writers, they rarely venture into the other parts of wikibooks, and those that do aren't likely to "leave" (it's not as if they're relocationg from New York to LA or anything... it's just a few mouse clicks from "here" to "there").

http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/WB:WIW

Fact is that the wikibooks policy cannon is very incomplete.

Yes, but that's just a cultural divide. Jimbo made wikipedia and wikibooks, and with rare exceptions just leaves it vague and lets things evolve. The people who actually work on the wikis like making things more and more specific (which is why our books/articles/definitions are so damned good). I *don't* think we need to make our policies ever-more specific (i.e., we don't want what the wikipedians refer to as instruction creep), because then we're tying the hands of the next writers. I do think the "Wikibooks:Textbook" page will have some merit though, since we let the VG guides get firmly established, and we need to narrow it a bit so we don't get caught by the "well, if you delete my book, you need to delete those ones too" argument. But I think that defining has to be kept to a level of simply defining what's common-sensical, which shouldn't in any way be a narrow definition.

-johnny.

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Brianna Laugher wrote:

On 11/09/06, Andrew Whitworth wknight8111@hotmail.com wrote:

...

Jimbo: If you want us to use a specific defintion of "textbook" and "accredited institution", then you are going to have to mandate such definitions to us. At the moment we are picking our way through such matters, with varying degrees of success.

It is my observation that TPTB is very reluctant to offer such definitions or mandates, even when requested. "Picking our way through such matters with varying degrees of success" -- it seems to be the wiki way. Try just making your own definitions (as a project), and I guess you'll find out if you've been too WP:BOLD if you notice some personal interventions after that. :)

It doesn't seem ideal, but I guess I can understand why they're reluctant to define such things. Then the criticism of such things also falls to them. The people who are actually running the project should take control of its direction at some stage... although mandates would make life so easy.

Brianna has hit the nail on the head. I believe firmly that the communities are smarter than I am, that I should not be involved to the level of detail that Andrew is asking for, except in an advisory capacity more or less like everyone else.

I think that the charter of *what we are looking for* is pretty clear. Andrew hit the nail on the head when he talked about bogus "accredited" institutions teaching nonsense that we don't want, and about perfectly good community centers teaching perfectly sensible stuff without worrying about being accredited.

That doesn't mean that the "accredited institution" test is useless in every respect, of course, and I am guessing that he would agree. But it does mean that we have to dig into more details.

Some of the main points that I think are important...

-- Wikibooks is something we can get very passionate about, but that passionate vision is marred if we allow it to become a dumping ground for stuff people don't want in Wikipedia, or a POV haven for nonsense, etc.

-- Wikibooks has a serious possibility to get independent funding, so long as it remains focussed on its serious mission of textbooks. Such funding can be used to customize and improve the software for wikibooks, as well as to *purchase and liberate* textbook works that already exist.

Suffice to say: we can get funding for Wikibooks to radically change the education world if potential funders come to the project and see a serious project doing good work. We can not get funding for Wikibooks if potential funders come to the project and look at it and see a bunch of nonsense that we did not have the pride to disallow (random crap that got pushed out of Wikipedia, for example).

Funders are eager to find solutions to important questions facing education. They are not eager to fund videogame manuals and pokeman trivia reference books.

-- Wikibooks needs to focus on actual courses because we passionately care that our work *actually be used in education*. In order to get textbooks adopted by real schools, they must meet curriculum standards. It is as simple as that.

-------------

I could go on, but I think you begin to see... there are some basic standards and concepts, but really we need to work together carefully as a community to build detailed policies to implement these and other natural and sensible guidelines.

A fair amount of that work is already done, of course, and it will be a long and ongoing process.

--Jimbo

Sanford Forte wrote:

I want to second everything that Jimmy Wales has said.

<*snip*>

That said, it bears repeating that public K-12 schools in America will generally adopt ONLY those books that have been peer reviewed at the state level, and approved for having met each particular state's individual curriculum requirements. (some states don't require curriculum frameworks, but follow other state's standards - an issue that relates to the private school scenario, mentioned below)

Whether any of us agree with what those curriculum requirements are, is entirely beside the point - as regards the success of the open source effort in K-12 public schools in America. (it's a somewhat different story in other countries, but challenging in somewhat similar ways).

If someone wants to write a non-standards-based approach to a K-12 subject for *private* schools, go right ahead. In doing so, be aware that that open source book will NOT be adopted en masse, by any large entity. It will be a one-at-a-time adoption, by one school at a time (as by public schools in states without curriculum standards, mentioned above)

The great irony here is that many people who participate in open source content directed at public education are thinking not only of the efficiencies and economies that can be brought to the public education enterprise, they are also passionately concerned with the quality of the K-12 enterprise. The latter impulse tends to drive open source projects to the imagined ideal for a particular topic, rather than following the strict adherence to curriculum framework rules mentioned above - with the ultimate result that the work doesn't get considered for large-scale adoption What results is something that the schools won't use.

This is an irony because if we can simply find ways to play by the framework rules to begin with, we will get books written, published, and adopted, en masse. Once that's accomplished, it will provide an opening into opportunities to impact curriculum with open source curriculum materials.

<*snip*>

A final note: Content is no longer the problem - we now understand what the content rules are, and need only to have the will to execute projects based on those rules. The forward challenges for open source K-12 publishing are constraints in content filtering, actual print publishing, and effective distribution. Thus, the California Open Source Textbook Project will continue - as it has in the last year - to alter its primary focus from one of proselytizing for content construction in specific ways, to a focus on innovative means to solving the latter group of problems just mentioned. Stay tuned.

Cheers, Sanford

Sanford Forte, Director California Open Source Textbook Project Palo Alto, CA http://www.opensourcetext.org

I want to point out here that there is a sort of disconnect between the typical users and participants of Wikibooks and those who are involved with academia. The books that have been most popular on Wikibooks in terms of content development either have a strong technological orientation to them (the Technology and Computer Science bookshelves are quite full and have been subdivided several times over the history of Wikibooks) or are focused on linguistics. Of these, I think it would be the linguistics books like [[b:German]] or [[b:Spanish]] that are perhaps closest to being ready for a K-12 academic standards and submitted for professional peer review such as what you have mentioned. Even then, there is some final polish and meeting specific curriculum requirements that would prove to be useful if were to use these as formal textbooks.

As for the technology books, this is clearly an area where submittal to an academic review board is not needed for being widely used. All you have to do is go down to your nearest bookstore and see a major technology section filled with similar kinds of books. Already the [[b:Blender 3D]] book is one of the leading books of any kind on the (admittedly narrow) subject. And there are some other gems that perhaps could use just a minor amount of polish and be usable in a college classroom environment.

So the question comes on how can Wikibooks be used to help push forward the development and publication of a K-12 school textbook. I do believe that some changes could take place on a number of pages on Wikibooks (mainly introduction pages and perhaps even the front page) that would help encourage Wikibooks participants to try and meet specific academic requirements. One thing to keep in mind is that Wikibooks participants come from a huge range of nationalities. Of even just Americans working on Wikibooks, I'm not even sure that two regular participants are from the same state, which causes some minor problems in terms of trying to determine what academic standards ought to be met.

As far as finding ways to get physical publication of content accomplished, that is certainly something that I think applies not just to school textbooks, but almost all open source content in general. New business rules will have to be developed, and perhaps even new laws enacted or at least new interpretations of existing copyright laws and how they apply with this sort of content as printed media. While groups like Lulu Press certainly help out, building the infrastructure to get this working is not going to be easy and there are only skattered pieces available at the moment.

Sanford Forte wrote:

If someone wants to write a non-standards-based approach to a K-12 subject for *private* schools, go right ahead. In doing so, be aware that that open source book will NOT be adopted en masse, by any large entity. It will be a one-at-a-time adoption, by one school at a time (as by public schools in states without curriculum standards, mentioned above)

And outside of Christian schools, who might be actively seeking an alternative to secular texts, there is not much reason for most private schools to want to deviate a lot from state standards.

And I suspect that our NPOV approach to the world is not really going to work very well for most Christian schools. (Though, non-NPOV forks of our basic work might succeed. Someone else will have to make those, though, for the obvious reasons.)

--Jimbo

Jimmy Wales wrote:

Some of the main points that I think are important...

-- Wikibooks is something we can get very passionate about, but that passionate vision is marred if we allow it to become a dumping ground for stuff people don't want in Wikipedia, or a POV haven for nonsense, etc.

-- Wikibooks has a serious possibility to get independent funding, so long as it remains focussed on its serious mission of textbooks. Such funding can be used to customize and improve the software for wikibooks, as well as to *purchase and liberate* textbook works that already exist.

Suffice to say: we can get funding for Wikibooks to radically change the education world if potential funders come to the project and see a serious project doing good work. We can not get funding for Wikibooks if potential funders come to the project and look at it and see a bunch of nonsense that we did not have the pride to disallow (random crap that got pushed out of Wikipedia, for example).

Funders are eager to find solutions to important questions facing education. They are not eager to fund videogame manuals and pokeman trivia reference books.

-- Wikibooks needs to focus on actual courses because we passionately care that our work *actually be used in education*. In order to get textbooks adopted by real schools, they must meet curriculum standards. It is as simple as that.

---

I could go on, but I think you begin to see... there are some basic standards and concepts, but really we need to work together carefully as a community to build detailed policies to implement these and other natural and sensible guidelines.

A fair amount of that work is already done, of course, and it will be a long and ongoing process.

--Jimbo

Jimbo,

I want to thank you for at least providing a pretty clear manifesto (even though I don't think that was your intention here) of what you think Wikibooks ought to be like and the direction it can and perhaps should go.

I do want to say, however, that it has been a very, very, very hard uphill battle to even find a strong vision of what Wikibooks was supposed to be when it was founded, and what the "typical" Wikimedian (if you can use such a term) thinks of Wikibooks that is outside of the general Wikibooks development community.

This huge disconnect between the veiw of Wikibooks as a seed-project wiki (especially as evidenced by the Wikimania proceedings), those who see Wikibooks as strictly academic textbooks, and those who push more for general non-fiction scholarship books (more my viewpoint) have a hard time to find a common ground when one viewpoint or another comes up.

I will say that the current Wikimedia Incubator Wiki has provided a legitimate forum to send people if they want to develop independent projects, a huge number of which I've been involved with moving (generally successfully I might add) to places that were more appropriate for the content. I mention the Wikimania proceedings in particular because they are clearly not textbook oriented or even book oriented, and emotions ran very high when I tried to transwiki that content. So much opposition was had that Brion Vibber himself went and reverted just about every adminitrator action that was performed by myself in a huge slap on the face without even trying to find out what was really going on and why there was opposition to such content on Wikibooks. That and having Anthere threating to block my account wasn't too helpful either (it didn't happen, but I did exchange some rather heated e-mails over the issue).

I could add things like Wikiversity, Wikijunior, the 1911 Encyclopedia Brittanica project, and a Hatian Creole langauge translation project (the last two now on Wikisource) that have also helped to blur a mission of Wikibooks. If the idea is that Wikibooks is not to be used as a new Wikimedia wiki project seed wiki (arrr, I don't know how else to explain this!) this type of activity must simply stop. I will also point out that almost all of these idea were home brewed on Wikibooks and were not "dumped" on Wikibooks by Wikipedia editors, although Wikipedia editors were instrumental in making the suggestion to use Wikibooks in this manner for most cases like these.

----

All this said, I want to point out that I am not directly against using Wikibooks for textbook development, and I do believe that even to emphasis this viewpoint can and should be done right from the main page and from other areas of Wikibooks as well. It is being done somewhat, but certainly a stronger emphasis in terms of encouraging the following of academic standards for the development of Wikibooks content could be also encouraged.

As far as getting independent funding for Wikibooks, this is an area that is going to be a virtual landmine of political and social problems for the project of an unprecedented scale. There is a potential for a rather large amount of money to be made by some individuals, and it won't necessarily be the individuals who have been putting up the most amount of effort the for creation of content and editing of Wikibooks material either. As soon as one person is starting to make money off of content from Wikibooks (however that happens), there will be people with hurt feelings to wonder why they too aren't getting a "piece of the action".

Wikibooks is right at the cusp of starting to make a huge difference in how open souce textbooks and book-length material is created and edited. I think you acknowledge that too, Jimbo, or you wouldn't be so active in this project. Developments over this past year to identify substantial Wikibooks and release them as *.pdf files have gone a long way to show what can be done so far with even the existing individuals who have been helping out so far.

As far as how to allocate financial resources to improve Wikibooks, I'm not completely sure what the best approach ought to be. I will say that the current approach being used to raise funds for Wikijunior is, IMHO, a complete utter and dismal failure of the worst kind. That Wikijunior has brought in some funds to be generally used by the Wikimedia Foundation for purchasing servers and paying the light bill is a nobel thing, but there is no reasonable way to provide accounting to say that Wikijunior hosting cost $xxx and money from the Beck Foundation (or others that I'm not aware of) raised $yyy. Promises were implied, deadlines demanded (and met in a couple of cases), and herculan efforts made by volunteers to help out. But their efforts were wasted in vain other than in a general view that Wikijunior now a slightly better project because of their efforts. However the money raised had absolutely nothing to do with those efforts to produce Wikijunior in any way, shape, or form, other than an intangible view that Wikibooks might have been shut down without that money which nobody ever even claimed might have been the case anyway.

Point being here that if money is used to try and purchase textbooks and then host them on Wikibooks, it is going to take a very similar kind of herculean effort on the part of Wikibooks volunteers just to get them moved over to Wikibooks, proofread the content, update to current standards and knowledge, and to reconvert them back to something capable of being used in the print textbook industry. Simply buying the content is just 10%-20% of what is needed to even develop the content and make it available for use as a textbook through Wikibooks. A useful 10%-20%, but only the beginning.

For a slightly larger "bang for the buck", I would try to encourage something of a sort of X-prize type arrangement to encourage skilled professionals to develop perhaps targeted textbooks of specific themes and audience targets (such as a high school Algebra textbooks, for example) that meets specific curriculum requirements. When a book is 100% complete, has gone through some sort of academic review to compare against the standards, and is available in a pdf (or similar) document format that is press-ready for print publication, that the participants would be able to claim some sort of prize and decide how and where to spend the money from the prize. Even if the money is mainly folded back into the Wikimedia Foundation or some other charity like the International Red Cross (decided by the participants), you would find some keen interest and some surprising volunteers to help out and make it happen.

Think here something like what Nupedia tried to do in terms of its review process, but using a Wiki-editing interface for the content development in the first place. You could even have "competing" books that try different approaches to the material for a real competition.

There are many other potentially useful ideas for spending money on Wikibooks. Direct grants to school teachers to develop textbooks during the "summer" instead of working as a construction sub-contractor? Advertising campaigns of various sorts for the purpose of recruiting volunteers? Setting up a physical book publisher of Wikibooks content?

I do have the attitude that the volunteers at Wikibooks have the capability of creating the kinds of textbooks that you are looking for, Jimbo. And that other than recruiting more talented wordsmiths we can pull off the kinds of ground breaking shifts in the textbook publication industry that have only been hinted at so far.

Many states have curriculum framework standards. Textbook companies write their books based primarily on standards from California, Texas, and Florida. They try to write books that will meet the standards in those three states. If they get a book or program adopted, especially in elementary language and/or other early development programs in just one state, they can break even, and leverage that win to adoption in smaller states. From there, it's all gravy. The K-12 textbook sector is a $6-7B enterprise. Margins are pretty good.

It's not rocket science to write a book that conforms to standards, but it *does* take discipline. The irony is that so may people in open source are extraordinarily creative types, so writing to a "standard" can seem a burden. That said, writing to these standards is the ONLY way to get past peer review, and get a book or program materials recommended on a list of valid choices for adoption.

It's also important to realize that writing a book for elementary education - like a language development book - is a HUGE undertaking. It's better to start with something for high school, because the process by which high school books are adopted is less demanding.

Something like this really needs critical mass, and MUST be managed, like any other project.

Here are the California State Department of Education Curriculum Frameworks http://www.csun.edu/~hcbio027/k12standards/

Cheers, Sanford

*************************************** Sanford Forte, Director California Open Source Texbook Project Palo Alto, CA http://www.opensourcetext.org

On Oct 24, 2006, at 4:59 PM, Jimmy Wales wrote:

Robert Scott Horning wrote:

...

I do have the attitude that the volunteers at Wikibooks have the capability of creating the kinds of textbooks that you are looking for, Jimbo. And that other than recruiting more talented wordsmiths we can pull off the kinds of ground breaking shifts in the textbook publication industry that have only been hinted at so far.

I agree with this completely of course. I don't know how it can happen, but a part of what needs to happen is that Wikibooks needs to really encourage people to make use of the existing frameworks... Sanford can probably help us by pointing out where to find them on the web, etc., and by being here to help start making the right kind of noises to get them adopted, at least in California, which is one place to start.

--Jimbo

---

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