On 15-07-2003, Karl Wick wrote thusly :
Krzysztof P. Jasiutowicz wrote:
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.
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:
It may be hard to make good university-level
textbooks the
wiki way,
I'd like to prove the contrary.
Regards,
Kpjas.