"How Wikipedia Works" on Wikibooks - Wikimedia-l

18 Jul 2013

Hi all,

I'm pleased to announce that Charles Matthews and I re-licensed the text of
our book "How Wikipedia Works", and the text is now in Wikibooks:
http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/How_Wikipedia_Works

I'd like to issue an open invitation to help format and update the book. We
published HWW in 2008, and while many of the chapters hold up today, others
(especially those dealing with specific templates, etc) do not.

In addition, there's a lot of additional new material to cover. For
instance:
* When the VisualEditor is stable, there should be a chapter about using
the VE, followed up with more advanced chapters about wikitext
* The education program and GLAM projects were just getting going when we
published, and it would be nice to have a full chapter about these (since
in my experience many of the readers of the book have been educators)
* I'd love to see full chapters about each of the sister projects; I didn't
have the space in the printed book or the expertise to write these
originally, but covering all of Wikimedia was always part of my ideal book.

Also, the figures are not in Wikibooks. While I will work on uploading the
originals (it will be slow), I don't have all of them in a good format, and
most of the screenshot-type figures need to be redone anyway. I'd love help
with this.

Of course, one of my great joys about the printed book was that it was so
nicely produced; the publisher, No Starch Press, did a fantastic job of
layout and the book itself is quite high-quality. For those who want that,
the print book is still available for purchase; but making the Wikibooks
text pretty should also be a goal (the current text was cut & pasted, so
there's a lot of formatting that needs to be cleaned up).

I know this has been a long time coming; that's my fault! This has been a
side project for us for many years, and I was happy to recently find some
time to work on it again. It's my hope that the book is still useful, and
that we can make it more useful still for the future. (There's also a new
website for the book at http://howwikipediaworks.net).

best,
phoebe

-- 
* I use this address for lists; send personal messages to phoebe.ayers <at>
gmail.com *