In a message dated 2/27/2011 12:26:22 PM Pacific Standard Time, dgerard@gmail.com writes:
The scope was supposedly textbooks - how-to books.
The problem I see with free books is just that you really need something that says... this is WHY you, the contributor would put in this amount of effort here.
With Wikipedia, I can contribute a word here, a sentence there, parse some grammar over there, fix a bad phrasing, add a source... all to seven articles and call it a day.
A book takes an awful lot of effort. And then I give it away free to the world. Sorry I'm just not seeing that.
Some has been some effort on Knol to create books and collections. The books are not official but the collections are an official tool, even if the results are not.
So on Wikibooks for example, I could create my own How-To Home Repair, and collect *chapters* contributed by a dozen people into a *book*.
So what we should have created it not Wikibooks with which to start, but Wiki...How or WikiChapter or something small, that a person could actually accomplish.
I suppose... maybe I'm just rambling.
But just the name Wikibooks doesn't sound to me like How To, it sounds like 150 to 1000 pages on an overarching topic of some kind.
W
On 27 February 2011 20:37, WJhonson@aol.com wrote:
So what we should have created it not Wikibooks with which to start, but Wiki...How or WikiChapter or something small, that a person could actually accomplish.
Arguably we could have started wikihow.com ... which is CC by-nc-sa, rather than an actually free licence.
- d.
2011/2/27 WJhonson@aol.com:
The problem I see with free books is just that you really need something that says... this is WHY you, the contributor would put in this amount of effort here.
With Wikipedia, I can contribute a word here, a sentence there, parse some grammar over there, fix a bad phrasing, add a source... all to seven articles and call it a day.
A book takes an awful lot of effort. And then I give it away free to the world. Sorry I'm just not seeing that.
This explains perfectly well why wikibooks has not been working very well from its beginning. However, it doesn't explain the decline of admins in the last years someone mentioned earlier in this thread.
I was active a while in the german wikibooks, but eventually got frustrated by the lack of interaction with others. You're working alone on your book project, and all the satisfaction you get is from the work you put in - no feedback, no discovering somebody has improved your stuff while you were away, no discovery that someone has ruined everything in your absence and now you have to fight for your version... very peaceful and absolutely boring.
greetings, elian
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