Daniel Mayer wrote:
Jokebooks are completely out of place in
Wikibooks because they do
not serve a
valid educational purpose. A textbook on comedy that had example
jokes in it
would be welcome, however. This type of distinction was decided on
when I
helped found Wikibooks, so Jimbo is not acting by executive fiat. He
is simply
trying to put that project back on track.
I may be misremembering, but I don't recall an explicit and narrow
requirement that Wikibooks be "educational" when it was set up, and
certainly not "educational" in the narrow sense of "something that a
university would teach". Of course textbooks were a major sort of
book that people had in mind, but I don't recall anyone saying that
*only* textbooks would be permitted (not to mention defining what
constitutes a "textbook"!).
Instead, I recall a focus mostly centered around *format*---Wikibooks
was to be a place for book-like things that were of a detail, length,
or tone (e.g. how-tos or lengthy narrative exposition) unsuitable for
an encyclopedia article and therefore unsuitable for Wikipedia, but
still useful as information in some sense. I took as a possibly
mistaken implicit assumption that the *content* was to be basically
the same as Wikipedia---anything verifiable and neutral.
This is essentially the way I remember it too. I'm sure that if Mav sees
it differently he should be able to cite something to support his facts.
Ec