On 5/9/07, Robert Horning robert_horning@netzero.net wrote:
Other than the fact that projects like Wikibooks have already established a brand identity of its own. Not only among Wikibooks users, but also within the general academic community (for good or ill). I'm not suggesting here that the brand isn't weaker than Wikipedia
About 1/200th as weak if Google Scholar results are any indication. I don't mean to denigrate the fantastic efforts of the Wikibooks community by any means. I love the project and try to promote it at every opportunity. But, compared to the Wikipedia juggernaut, it _is_ virtually unknown. I think there is a wonderful opportunity for Wikibooks to benefit from the awareness about WP -- and those who are already aware of the name will easily readjust to "Wikipedia Textbooks" (or "Wikipedia" + anything else), as virtually everyone who has heard of Wikibooks knows Wikipedia. Those who are surprised that the projects are related: well, they'd have learned something important.
So my question I would ask in reverse is what real benefits would happen by this closer association,
I would suggest the list of advantages I enumerated in my initial mail as a starting point for discussion.
and how could the negative aspects (such as increased vandalism and more)
Why do you see a risk of increased vandalism? Simply due to project growth?
Is there any value at all to the separate identities and policies that have been established for each of the independent sister projects?
Absolutely. Policies should be specific to a purpose. But that doesn't imply strong project boundaries. As a matter of fact, even within Wikipedia, communities of interest such as WikiProjects have very different approaches to the organization of knowledge. We think of Wikipedia as a single community with a single purpose, but truthfully, the tasks of writing a good article about Pokemon vs. one about the history of the saffron trade are _more_ different than the tasks of writing a physics encyclopedia article vs. a physics textbook. Nevertheless, we manage to reconcile these differences under a single brand identity just fine.
I understand the fear of a loss of identity, but I believe that's the last thing we need to be concerned about. We are talking about wikis, after all. People will express themselves freely.