> Wikibooks was set up to be the home of textbooks.
Not books, but
> Textbooks. Hence why wikpedia, wiktionary and wikiquote are not on
> wikibooks (other than historical accident). I really dont think it is
> fair to the wikibooks community, that we tell every new wikiproject to
> go set up on wikibooks. Its in risk of becoming the wikimedia dumping
> ground.
While I created the Wikibooks name based on a combination of WikiWiki and
textbooks, that project has never been only about textbooks. It is a place to
build just about any non-fiction reference book with, and this is critical, a
finite end size (if you want to explore a subject area in more detail than
that, start other books). The 'finite' part excludes potentially huge or even
practically infinitely-sized things such as a general quote book, dictionary,
or encyclopedia.
The very different formats for these other projects is also a reason for the
separation; Modules in a wikibook need to be in in a hierarchy and should
ideally be read in a particular sequence, while articles in Wikipedia and
Wikiquote and entries at Wiktionary are anything but hierarchical and can be
read in any order.
True, the emphasis is on instructional-oriented material, but that is an
*emphasis* to encourage the most-potentially positive aspect of the project. It
is ''not'' an exclusionary principle.
ambi wrote:
We can always take Wikimedia in new directions, and I
laud such
proposals, but I strongly despise these subject-specific works. They
have limited potential in terms of both readers and participation, are
much less likely to be successful, and would really be much better
suited to, say, setting up a MediaWiki installation on a business
website. Just because it is a wiki doesn't mean that it has to be
under the Wikimedia banner.
I agree with this statement 100% and can't think of a thing to add.
-- mav
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