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