[Foundation-l] Project Wikineur

[Rebecca]

> Wikibooks was set up to be the home of textbooks. Not books, but
> Textbooks. Hence why wikpedia, wiktionary and wikiquote are not on
> wikibooks (other than historical accident). I really dont think it is
> fair to the wikibooks community, that we tell every new wikiproject to
> go set up on wikibooks. Its in risk of becoming the wikimedia dumping
> ground. Either we need to start telling people, go set up on
> wikicities, so we can see what happens and then if we like it we might
> invite you into the wikimedia family (as Jimbo has suggested) or
> create a wikilabs (as me and sj have suggested).

I'm not suggesting to use Wikibooks as an incubator, in advance of
giving a project like this full status. I'm suggesting to make it what
it is: a Wikibook about business (it *is* a textbook - even if it
isn't aimed at a scholarly audience). It shouldn't *be* a specific
wiki - the Wikispecies crew browbeat the board into setting a
particularly bad precedent, and then everyone jumped on the bandwagon.
Let us not make the same mistake again.

There are lots of
> things of wikibooks right now that shouldnt be there. Take the
> cookbook for example; some wikipedians decided the content wasn't
> appropriate for wikipedia, so they pushed it off into wikibooks,
> despite it not being a textbook. The gardening book aswell. This is
> really the same as saying i dont want to throw this out, and i dont
> want to keep it, so ill just put it all in the backyard shed and
> pretend its not there.

We can always take Wikimedia in new directions, and I laud such
proposals, but I strongly despise these subject-specific works. They
have limited potential in terms of both readers and participation, are
much less likely to be successful, and would really be much better
suited to, say, setting up a MediaWiki installation on a business
website. Just because it is a wiki doesn't mean that it has to be
under the Wikimedia banner.

They're something altogether different from projects such as
Wikipedia, Wiktionary, Wikisource and Wikinews - which are Wikimedia's
mainstay. I think a strong case could be made that Wikicookbook would
fall into the first category, but Wikineur (and the disheartening
plague of similar proposals appearing recently) fall well into the
second.

>  I personaly think that something like the cookbook, or the gardening
> book should have thier own wikis, and also another wiki with the
> working title DIYwiki, should be set up. 

I still can't see why it wouldn't just be a Wikibook with a less
scholarly focus. Vocational education can require textbooks, too.

-- ambi