Erik Moeller wrote:
a wiki for developing teaching resources where I'm always disappointed
when I look into
Yes, Wikibooks is another project which is suffering from the software not addressing all of its needs, particularly the modularization of individual books.
While I still hope it will turn into something very useful, I do think writing full-fledged books is something that is much harder to do in a wiki-style form of collaboration, even with software changes. Even on Wikipedia, the "broad overview" articles, with a few exceptions, tend to be at a much lower standard of quality than you might expect by looking at the more narrow articles below them in the hierarchy. This is probably because it's just a lot harder to write a broad/synthesis article in a collaborative fashion---they don't lend themselves very well to division of labor and modularization, since their entire point is to do the big-picture thing.
This isn't to say that decent WikiBooks couldn't be written in a modular fashion, but a *great* book really needs someone to come by and integrate everything---a great textbook is a much different thing than 15 stapled-together individually great chapters, which I think we're much better at doing.
-Mark