On 15-07-2003, Karl Wick wrote thusly :

Krzysztof P. Jasiutowicz wrote:

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I don't know if people like Karl Wick would be pleased with a crowd of random editors to the text he has already written.

I have no problem with this, in fact it should take some of the work off my shoulders. However I imagine that there are others who would prefer autonomy and would be dissuaded from contributing to a wiki even if they wanted to release their work into the public domain .. there is no shortage of hubis in academia.

OK. You are pioneering in Wikimedia with a new kind of project with the idea, established concepts and substantial amount of content that seems to be more or less complete.

I am excited and looking forward to seeing how other textbook-from-scratch projects will fare. Written not by one author but by hundreds. Commited but not necessarily with teaching experience.

Encylopedia is in a way fragmented into autonomous entities that do not have to create continuity (although they can). I think that a good textbook in most fields needs some master plan and methods to lead students through material, building their knowledge. I think pedagogical background and methodology is vital to writing a sensible textbook. No need to say personality of the author plays a very important role ;-)

I suppose that a large computer program can't be written in a Wiki way and we'll see if textbooks can.

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There are textbooks that were released into open source by their authors/publishers

If you know where I could get my hands on some of these textbooks please tell me. That would be a great starting point for further work.

Not in organic chemistry that I know of but a book on programming in Ruby programming languge http://www.rubycentral.com/book/ and I think several other computing books published by O'Reilly.

Tomasz Wegrzanowski wrote:

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It may be hard to make good university-level textbooks the wiki way,

I'd like to prove the contrary.

Regards, Kpjas.