Daniel Mayer wrote:
Jokebooks are completely out of place in Wikibooks
because they do not serve a
valid educational purpose. A textbook on comedy that had example jokes in it
would be welcome, however. This type of distinction was decided on when I
helped found Wikibooks, so Jimbo is not acting by executive fiat. He is simply
trying to put that project back on track.
I may be misremembering, but I don't recall an explicit and narrow
requirement that Wikibooks be "educational" when it was set up, and
certainly not "educational" in the narrow sense of "something that a
university would teach". Of course textbooks were a major sort of book
that people had in mind, but I don't recall anyone saying that *only*
textbooks would be permitted (not to mention defining what constitutes a
"textbook"!).
Instead, I recall a focus mostly centered around *format*---Wikibooks
was to be a place for book-like things that were of a detail, length, or
tone (e.g. how-tos or lengthy narrative exposition) unsuitable for an
encyclopedia article and therefore unsuitable for Wikipedia, but still
useful as information in some sense. I took as a possibly mistaken
implicit assumption that the *content* was to be basically the same as
Wikipedia---anything verifiable and neutral.
-Mark