There's an article about Wikipedia on the New Yorker: http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/articles/060731fa_fact
Please note one thing: three other Wikimedia projects are mentioned: Wikisource, Wikinews and Wikiquote - Wikibooks is not. It should be an alert for us: media don't see us and don't write about us.
I am very disappointed that there were no articles about our third anniversary, an important event for our project. We missed a big chance to get more attention. Perhaps we should think about what have we done wrong?
Piotr "Derbeth" Kubowicz wrote:
There's an article about Wikipedia on the New Yorker: http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/articles/060731fa_fact
Please note one thing: three other Wikimedia projects are mentioned: Wikisource, Wikinews and Wikiquote - Wikibooks is not. It should be an alert for us: media don't see us and don't write about us.
I am very disappointed that there were no articles about our third anniversary, an important event for our project. We missed a big chance to get more attention. Perhaps we should think about what have we done wrong?
I don't think we are doing anything wrong, as there has been quite a bit of press about Wikibooks within this past year, including articles specific about Wikibooks. I will agree that we missed an opportunity to really do a big P.R. splash, but there are a few things that need to be fixed first before we are really "ready for primetime". Mainly it is spit and polish on the both the content as well as some of the "gateway" pages on Wikibooks to really show off the content that is of high quality.
I will admit that some huge improvements on the "Main Page" have occured in this past year, and it is now possible to start out on http://en.wikibook.org/ and find some worthwhile content that would be worth reproducing. Please note this website:
and in particular note the Ada Programming Wikibook that is slated for inclusion into a list of the best e-books on the internet. Certainly Wikibooks participants need to be involved with efforts like this more, and work to make more Wikibooks content up to a professional level that would be included with similar e-book content.
It is also important to note that according to Alexa, that Wikibooks is the #1 most visited e-book website on the internet, at least for independent statistics. I don't know if this says something about e-books in general as a dismal failure for traditional publishers or if there is something more to e-books that could be said and should be done through Wikibooks. The Alexa ranking of Wikibooks vs. The Gutenberg Project can be found here:
http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details?compare_sites=gutenberg.or...
One other thing is that the political uphevals on Wikibooks need to end now. [[User:Jguk]] has suggested that all of the content removal and changes on Wikibooks havn't made that big of an impact on actual content development. If you look carefully at the usage graph, there has actually been a plateu or even a slight drop in Wikibooks usage over the past six months, and I do think that has a direct correlation to the political turmoil that occured within the Wikibooks community. Of course other plateus can be seen in the usage statistics, but it is something to think about. I do think the large-scale content removal is now a thing of the past as many of the buried issues have now been brought forward and largely dealt with.
About the only remaining "issue" left is to see what is going to happen with Wikiversity and if Wikiversity content is removed from Wikibooks, what kind of an impact that will have on remaining content on Wikibooks. Deciding what content is going to remain on Wikibooks is going to be a fun task to deal with.
Robert Scott Horning wrote:
snip
One other thing is that the political uphevals on Wikibooks need to end now. [[User:Jguk]] has suggested that all of the content removal and changes on Wikibooks havn't made that big of an impact on actual content development. If you look carefully at the usage graph, there has actually been a plateu or even a slight drop in Wikibooks usage over the past six months, and I do think that has a direct correlation to the political turmoil that occured within the Wikibooks community. Of course other plateus can be seen in the usage statistics, but it is something to think about. I do think the large-scale content removal is now a thing of the past as many of the buried issues have now been brought forward and largely dealt with.
About the only remaining "issue" left is to see what is going to happen with Wikiversity and if Wikiversity content is removed from Wikibooks, what kind of an impact that will have on remaining content on Wikibooks. Deciding what content is going to remain on Wikibooks is going to be a fun task to deal with.
I do not think the issue of what goes on Wikiversity vs. Wikibooks is going to be much of a problem.
Somebody has decided that Wikibooks should not have links to other online resources and has been busy deleting them so Wikibooks look like self constained hardcopy books. Personally I find this reduces the utility of the reduced Wikibook substantially. If others feel this way then we may end up with annotated and linked internet ebooks or study materials at Wikiversity while paper books in electronic form stay at Wikibooks. If this happens it should naturally segregate two different audiences with difference preferences for the style of online ebooks or study materials they find useful.
Your previous suggestion of forking the databases and letting the two different communities make their own decisions regarding what to delete and what to modify or integrate into the permanent databases seems rather efficient to me. I think it should minimize much of the confusion and debate unless we have crossover participants attempting to dictate policy percieved as beneficial to their native/preferred project but hostile or detrimental to the visited project.
regards, lazyquasar
Another story: http://www.westword.com/Issues/2006-07-27/news/message.html
I am curious why did these people decide not to continue to use Wikibooks for developing their textbooks but created new wiki page instead. Was the reason our license, technical limits of the MediaWiki software or something else?
Piotr "Derbeth" Kubowicz wrote:
Another story: http://www.westword.com/Issues/2006-07-27/news/message.html
I am curious why did these people decide not to continue to use Wikibooks for developing their textbooks but created new wiki page instead. Was the reason our license, technical limits of the MediaWiki software or something else?
I would guess chaos and non academic bias. In the early days of Wikipedia there were quite a few academics who disliked jostling elbows with commoners presumably less informed in various fields of endeaver.
Interesting. In the article they express interest in a $300 ebook reader that can store 100K pages. I wonder what is wrong with a 400 dollar Dell computer that could be used to support entrepreneurial business activities using free software when its student owner was not busy studying. To be fair they stated they are also interested in MIT's $100 portable computer initiative.
Also interesting. I wonder what they need $400K seed money for to get started. It is hard to imagine a U.S. college with no IT deparment and internet accessible server resources. Maybe they need the services of professional copyeditors and secretaries to coordinate finalization of the etexts.
Further item of interest. A student written XML book in a U.S. college class is cited as the inspiration for the project. Perhaps the only problem with wikibooks is its lack of publicity and lack of active participation from active groups of students. Too bad it has taken a couple of years to activate/initiate the Wikiversity project.
regards, lazyquasar
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