Ray Saintonge wrote:
If a handful of books are determined to be offensive
that may be ample
reason for deleting those books; those books should not become straw
men to justify policies that have nothing to do with what makes them
offensive. To be sure there have been a few recent discussions on the
mailing list about Wikibooks, but none of it has been particularly
alarming. The Wikijunior and Wikiversity discussions seemed
relatively normal. "How to Get a Girl," has been mentioned, but that
was a fairly focussed discussion about one book. There have been
other discussions about other projects where the persuasiveness of an
elephant's foot would have been far more welcome.
In many respects you ar right when you say that Jimbo can make
arbitrary changes whenever and wherever he wants on a site that
belongs. (The legal niceties about a person's relationship with a
registered non-profit society that he founded are well beyond the
scope of these comments.) Much of what has been built up over what is
now nearly five years has been built on trust and on support for a
fundamental idea. People who have contributed enormous amounts of
time, and more recently money, have contributed to an idea and a
vision rather than a person. They have been able to put aside
staggeringly different political philosophies for the sake of
something in which they all believe. Creators who intervene in the
societies thay have created often do so at a price; it can even mean
that people begin not to believe in God anymore.
Ec
The big deal right now is that if we follow this general policy to its
ultimate conclusion, about half of the current content on Wikibooks
needs to be removed somehow. Of particular note is the Computer Gaming
Guides bookshelf, which are not precisely textbooks but are an
interesting sub-community on Wikibooks.
I mention the Cookbook because I fail to see how that differs in a
substantial way from the Jokebook. Both have very similar internal
organization and both have had some controvercial sections added from
time to time (the current being [[b:Cookbook:Human]], about how to cook
human flesh). Both of these Wikibooks have a very substantial edit
history, including edits by just about every admin past and current and
many users. Neither has been subject to any sort of VfD discussion
until this week, and that is prompted only by Jimbo. The only
difference I see is that Jimbo likes the Cookbook and hates the
Jokebook. How do you make policy based off of that idea?
The other issue is that the only place to move these Wikibooks is to put
them onto Wikicities, as there is no other logical Wikimedia project to
move them to. I know Jimbo has a lot on his plate, and trying to deal
with the internal politics of a minor project like Wikibooks is not
something he is prepared to deal with in a substantial way. Still, I
want everybody on this mailing list to know the turmoil that has
resulted from these actions. Most recently I'm getting into an edit war
of deletion/undeletion with another admin over these books that Jimbo
has declared off limits. It is going to get worse before it gets better.
--
Robert Scott Horning