The wiki based development suffers a lack of cohesion. The purpose of many of the books is not very well defined, specifically the target audience and the guidelines on writing for that audience.
The FHSST project will develop only raw content on WikiBooks, then extract it all and edit it properly to produce a final book which can be printed. We'll put the final content back for the community but keep a fixed stable copy. The dynamic nature of the wikis also ensures that schools and governments will never have confidence in the quality of the content they would pull off one of the wikis, there is no reason to assume that someone hasn't maliciously modified the content and waving changelogs around isn't going to be very convincing.
My 2 cents worth.
Mark
Delirium wrote:
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
foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@wikimedia.org http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l