[Foundation-l] Deletion of Wikibooks content by Jimbo

[Ray Saintonge]

Delirium wrote:

> Daniel Mayer wrote:
>
>> Jokebooks are completely out of place in Wikibooks because they do 
>> not serve a
>> valid educational purpose. A textbook on comedy that had example 
>> jokes in it
>> would be welcome, however. This type of distinction was decided on 
>> when I
>> helped found Wikibooks, so Jimbo is not acting by executive fiat. He 
>> is simply
>> trying to put that project back on track.  
>
> I may be misremembering, but I don't recall an explicit and narrow 
> requirement that Wikibooks be "educational" when it was set up, and 
> certainly not "educational" in the narrow sense of "something that a 
> university would teach".  Of course textbooks were a major sort of 
> book that people had in mind, but I don't recall anyone saying that 
> *only* textbooks would be permitted (not to mention defining what 
> constitutes a "textbook"!).
>
> Instead, I recall a focus mostly centered around *format*---Wikibooks 
> was to be a place for book-like things that were of a detail, length, 
> or tone (e.g. how-tos or lengthy narrative exposition) unsuitable for 
> an encyclopedia article and therefore unsuitable for Wikipedia, but 
> still useful as information in some sense.  I took as a possibly 
> mistaken implicit assumption that the *content* was to be basically 
> the same as Wikipedia---anything verifiable and neutral. 

This is essentially the way I remember it too. I'm sure that if Mav sees 
it differently he should be able to cite something to support his facts.

Ec