[Foundation-l] Inclusion of Wikibooks

[Robert Horning]

Ivan Lanin wrote:
> Dear list members,
>
> My name is Ivan Lanin, and I'm a bureaucrat from Indonesian Wikipedia.
> We're currently cleaning up our encyclopedia articles. Some of the
> articles regarding cities or areas in Indonesia that we have contains
> too much details (such as lists of good restaurants, addresses of
> public government office, etc.) to be contained in an encylopedia
> article. At least that what most of us think.
>
> There have been a discussion in local "village pump"
> [[w:id:Wikipedia:Warung Kopi]] discussing this matter. Initially the
> suggestion was to set up Indonesian Wikitravel and move the content
> there, under the false assumption that Wikitravel is one of the
> Foundation projects. That idea was withdrawn when people found out
> that Wikitravel is not part of WMF's projects.
>
> Instead, we were discussion of creating a "travel" book inside
> Indonesian Wikibooks. We haven't seen any other wikibooks using this,
> neither we see any other wikibooks holds information about travel. We
> understand that Wikibooks are for "free textbooks contents", but we
> think if we format the content just like a book, we could make it a
> "traveler's book".
>
> May I ask what the list members think about this? Do any of you have
> the same experience as we have. Please share.
>
> Thank you
>   
I would note that this issue has come up on English Wikibooks as well, 
where some travel related books have been up for discussion on the VfD 
pages.  The best example of this is a Wikibook about London which can be 
found here:

http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/London

The VfD decision was to keep this book on English Wikibooks.  And the 
discussion has come up from time to time on the Staff Lounge as well, 
with the general prevailing concensus is to keep these kind of books on 
Wikibooks, even though we don't openly seek or advertise development of 
content like this, at least by having a seperate bookshelf of content 
like this.  London is currently on the "Miscellenaous" bookshelf (a 
cataloging term for finding content on en.wikibooks):  
http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Wikibooks:Miscellaneous_bookshelf

The "Travel Guide" category clearly is something that has been thought 
up here as something that would be legitimate for additional Wikibooks.  
Certainly the Wikitravel website has pulled most of those who might want 
to write content like this, even though it is not a Wikimedia website.  
I think this is why it may be harder to find travel guide information on 
Wikibooks or why more projects like this havn't been started before.

I hope that helps.

Robert Horning