On Wed, Jan 28, 2009 at 2:13 AM, Erik Moeller erik@wikimedia.org wrote:
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. :-)
But, so far, not that unusual for books about Wikipedia! ;)
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
I'm clearly not unbiased in the matter, but it seems to me that it would make sense to have it at Wikibooks, since it's a complete work that can stand alone. It's also, of course, not the only book about Wikipedia, and I think we were planning to put "How Wikipedia Works" on Wikibooks eventually.* Clearly these books should be close to Wikipedia and well-linked from there, but I'm not sure they should actually be *on* Wikipedia.
It makes sense to me to make an area with all sorts of multilingual learning resources in all sorts of formats as well, like Erik suggests. Currently on the English Wikipedia there is the out of the way http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Instructional_material, but this needs to be greatly improved. I'd be glad to work on a project to do so.
-- phoebe
* this hasn't happened mostly because I've been busy this winter.