On 5/8/07, Johannes Rohr jorohr@gmail.com wrote:
Besides everything else which has been said already, I do not find these names particularly appealing. "Wikibooks" is short and catchy, "Wikipedia Textbooks" is long and clumsy and has a taste of ugly marketspeak.
Wikibooks is actually one of our most problematic names, as the focus is very much on textbook development. Short and catchy as it ma ybe, it is misleading. Fundamentally, I can see problems with the project's conception around a very specific type of knowledge representation (be it generally a book or specifically a textbook), but if that is how we define it, then we should at least be clear what _kind_ of books we are talking about.
Apart from that, one should be clear about the fact, that the success of Wikipedia is primarily rooted in that it meets a specific demand. There is a strong demand for a free encyclopaedia much more than for a free news portal, simply because gazillions of news sites exist on the Web.
Absolutely. And that only strengthens its role as a flagship in the coming years.