On 11/13/05, Jimmy Wales jwales@wikia.com wrote:
It is a blatant violation of the charter of Wikibooks and takes the project in a completely wrong direction. Wikibooks is not the place for any random concept of a book that people may have. It is a place for _textbooks_, and the defining rule needs to be the ability to point to a specific course at the early childhood, kindergarten, elementary, junior high, high school, or university level in which such a _textbook_ is _currently_ used.
I don't know how firmly this policy is followed; there have been ongoing debates on this point for a while, and the policy could be clearer. There are arguments to be made for having scholarly or practical texts which are not in standard 'textbook' format, including instruction-manuals for software and tools, biographies, other book-length treatments of specific subjects (there is no place for "Macropedia" style articles in WP at the moment), &c. There are also arguments against these inclusions, and we should have these arguments, and perhaps discuss projects that could supplement a textbook-only wikibooks.
The case you mention, however, is not a random idea for a book; the subject is repesented by courses in many continuing/community education programs, in courses on dating - sometimes specifically for a narrow audience (specific gender or age). There are a handful of such courses going on around Boston at any given moment.
Some random googlable examples : The whole "Skills with Dating" course set at (Fondation Course, Intro workshop, 'for Teens and their Parents') at Strathfield CC in Oz, semanticist Steve Stockdale's "lucid dating" classes at SMU, ... in Boston: http://www.bcae.org/SearchECat?Open&Query=dating http://www.ccae.org/catalog/courses/course_details.php?id=524452
Not to mention all of the self-help and life-improvement courses one can take outside of universities, complete with dozens of sessions and texts and audiotapes.
Is this a naming issue? Would you feel better if the "How to get a date" wikibooks were renamed to "Dating skills", or became a section of longer books with titles such as "Developing healthy relationships"?
I can't say what kinds of texts these courses should use if any; most courses use the teacher's class notes because they're cheaper. Of course having access to a good free textbook might change that...
SJ