New subject: [Foundation-l] Wikimania

14 Jul 2005


      As you all know, Wikibooks was originally intended for textbooks and  
other instructional material.  But why do many users (meta and  
wikipedians in particular) think that Wikibooks is a dumping ground  
for all their book-length stuff even if it is non-instructional in  
nature (which would be grounds for deletion on [[WB:WIN]])?
It's an interesting discussion on Wikibooks right now about how  
Wikibookians see ourselves vs how others see Wikibooks, all having  
started from the controversial deletion of a book, itself forked from  
Wikipedia over an edit war, which also raised the question on whether  
Wikibooks should allow limited forms of Wikipedia forking as a book  
foundation (currently this is not allowed due to [[WB:WIN]] - WB is  
not an in-depth encyclopedia on any subject).
It also ties in to the question of how effective Wikibooks is in  
enforcing its policies: WB has about 9000 users (as listed by the  
special page), but only 25 are admins (and among the 25, 2 are  
bureaucrats).  Even if 1000 users are active on WB (a very  
conservative estimate), that's still too much for 25 users (assuming  
they are all active) to handle.  Making things noticeably worse is  
that policies on WB are either unilaterily implemented or are stuck  
in a limbo since few will make a consensus (there are also many  
issues on WB that the MediaWiki software cannot address, such as  
finding the book that a given module is associated with).
Anyways, I want the Wikimedia community at large to comment on how  
they think of Wikibooks and its purpose, and that's why I've posted a  
message here.

[Foundation-l] Wikibooks and its purpose