First, we think it's wonderful that O'Reilly has done this; TMM is a fantastic book and a great introduction for newbies. (We have been giving copies away as gifts for a while.) I believe Frank is planning to blog about this in more detail soon. Please do show them some love for doing this; it's obviously highly unusual and very nice. :-)
O'Reilly took the initiative to release the book under a free license, and we've encouraged it - but we don't have any formal agreement with them that it ought to be posted on Wikipedia. That's a community decision, and neither we nor O'Reilly would want it to be any other way. My personal take is that it should live where it's most likely to be used and maintained, and regardless of its dead tree origins, the help section of en.wp seems to be a pretty logical place. But that's just my take - in future, we are also considering to set up a dedicated portal with various learning resources for wiki newbies, where static copies could live.
Erik
2009/1/28 Michael Peel email@mikepeel.net:
Hi all,
The author of Wikipedia: The Missing Manual, John Broughton, has just uploaded the book to Wikipedia under the GFDL, see:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:Wikipedia:_The_Missing_Manual
My reaction when I spotted this was: great, but shouldn't this be on Wikibooks? Part of the author's response to this was that "the agreement between O'Reilly Media and the Wikimedia Foundation was that this would be at /Wikipedia/ ... [do] not remove it from this site without a /lot/ more discussion among a /lot/ of other people."
Did the WMF really make an agreement saying that the content should be on Wikipedia, rather than a WMF project or simply under a free license?
Does anyone want to weigh in with comments on this on the talk page?
Thanks, Mike Peel
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