Phil Boswell wrote:

Special:Booksources on en:wikipedia has an Errata option, which takes you to a special section on en:wikibooks where---obviously enough---errata corresponding to various ISBNs are collected.

Were they asked in the first place whether they wanted this?

I am not aware of the history of this cooperative venture, but I am somewhat disturbed by the fact that a group of people at Wikibooks are trying to have this feature removed without apparently letting anybody at Wikipedia know. This seems to be ostensibly on the grounds that whilst it is to do with books, it's not to do with **wiki**books.

If they don't want this feature why can't it stay in Wikipedia when it's the Wikipedia people that want it?

The bit that disturbs me is the impression I get from the discussion that cooperation with Wikipedia is somehow distasteful to some Wikibookians, and that they shouldn't have to help out just because we share a four-letter prefix.

There's an underlying arrogance to this paragraph. "Co-operation" and "help" are not ideas that are on the same level. "Co-operation" allows for working together as equals; "help" implies functioning in a junior capacity. If any kind of helping relationship were to exist you should be helping them to achieve their goals on their own project. Assuming that there was adequate discussion on Wikipedia before a decision was made, you can't expect an other project to accept that decision when they were never a part of the discussion.

Where should this be discussed, and what is the official status of the "Errata on Wikibooks" feature?

Maybe the foundation list would be a better place since this involves interproject relations. My guess about the "official status" is that it is whatever the Wikibooks people decide.

I very strangly believe in the autonomy of the sister projects. There are important underlying principles such as NPOV that underlie all of them, but each became separate because it wanted to explore one principle contrary to what would be acceptable in Wikipedia. For Wikibooks it was because Wikipedia was not set up for whole books; Wiktionary responded to the maxim that Wikipedia is not a dictionary.

Just because the contributors to project A feel that certain materials belong in project B does not imply that the contributors to project B will feel the same way. To maintain harmony between projects the contributors to project B need to control what contents will be acceptable to that project, and how it will be formatted. Once their decisions have been made links to the material on project B should reflect that. If the information is so vital to project A that it cannot accept the will of project B on this, maybe that's a sign that the information should not be so transferred.

Ec