I really enjoyed reading your mail, Robert, because I could literally feel the love you have for this project.
Quoting Amir, I too would like to share my 2 cents about this.
1 cent: I reflected a lot on some slides Eric Moeller showed us in Gdansk. He compared sister project using some parameters, and one of them was the "work unit": Wikipedia has a lot of granularity, you can do little changes and they are still effective. Wikisource and Wikibooks have big work units (you start or edit books, not smaller articles). It saw a leap (everyone saw that) in the contribution on Wikisource after we installed the Proofreading extension and promoted widely a single "Proofreading of the Month". People started proofreading single pages, they felt their contribution to be tangible and useful, and this literally changed everything. Wikisources still have a long way to do, but they are growing fast, and I definitely believe that reducing the "work unit" was a crucial factor.
2 cent: in Italy, there is a community of high school teachers called "Matematicamente", and last year they wrote and published a mathematical textbook releasing it under Creative Commons. Long story short, the founder of the project told me they tried working on Wikibooks, but the vast majority of the teacher was not comfortable with the wiki mark-up, and at the end of the day it had been easier to work on OpenOffice (I just let you imagine how difficult it was for them to collaborate on a single book...). Moreover, for that project NPOV worked as an additional obstacle, plus all the community rules they had to face. The guy told me he still like Wikibooks, but it did not work, mainly for the people's "wiki illiteracy".
My bests
Aubrey
2010/11/16 Amir E. Aharoni amir.aharoni@mail.huji.ac.il
On Tue, Nov 16, 2010 at 08:11, Robert S. Horning robert_horning@netzero.net wrote:
Something is missing here. I'd like to think it is this tangible medium of a physical book that is what is wrong, but I'm really not sure. If there are other ideas, I'd like to hear them. ... What is wrong?
<my_theory> My theory about the very high profile of Wikipedia and the mostly low profile of the other projects is that in Wikipedia it is very easy to predicate. People love to predicate. Look it up in a dictionary - i refer to all of that word's meanings.
Put simply, Wikipedia is the world's largest and most convenient soapbox. There's a policy page in the English Wikipedia that says that Wikipedia is not a soapbox ([[WP:SOAP]]). But people try to use it this way anyway. It is very, very attractive. Some of them eventually understand that NPOV is a good thing and become good Wikipedia editors.
An encyclopedia, by its nature, is the perfect platform for saying things like "X is a Y". We are all familiar with that: Kosovo IS A country / unrecognized country / partially recognized country / de-facto independent country / province of Serbia / occupied province of Serbia. This opportunity to easily disrupt the NPOV - even temporarily - with one's own version of the predication is a necessarily evil that makes Wikipedia so popular. Other projects are nowhere near offering the opportunity to say such things, at least not as easily.
Wiktionary is supposed to consist of almost nothing but predications, but it's too linguistic. Wikisource is a great place for lovers of archiving and typesetting (like myself), but you can't be original there. Wikinews and Wikiquote... nobody is quite sure what they are at all.
Wikibooks can, theoretically, be a place for making predications and for spreading POV. But most people, given the choice of writing a book about a subject or an encyclopedic article about it, will write an encyclopedic article. Not just because it's shorter, but because it looks like a more natural way of answering the question "What is X?"... the way they want to answer it.
</my_theory>
How to solve it? Sorry, no idea. I love textbooks for all ages, so i would love to see Wikibooks flourish. I made a few corrections to existing Wikibooks, but i find it strange to start a Wikibook from scratch.
-- Amir E. Aharoni
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