[Foundation-l] Multilingual Wikibooks

[Andrew Whitworth]

On Jan 9, 2008 10:11 PM, Jesse Martin (Pathoschild)
<pathoschild at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hello,
>
> There is a request for a multilingual Wikibooks at <
> http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Requests_for_new_languages/Wikibooks_Multilingual
> >. I would like some input from the community about how to process it,
> and whether or not it is a good idea.
>
> I personally think this matter should be decided with Wikibooks and
> Foundation community consensus, because it is not a language subdomain
> as the language subcommittee normally processes (it would be a
> language-agnostic wiki for coordination and translation), it would
> overlap with existing Wikibooks subdomains and the Incubator, and it
> would be a major change in how the Wikibooks project is organized.
>
> There are five multilingual projects to date, only two of which are
> for projects divided by language: the multilingual Wikisource and Beta
> Wikiversity. The other multilingual projects are Meta-Wiki,
> Wikispecies, and Commons.

I just wanted to give this idea a quick bump. It's an issue that some
of the wikibookians are actually quite excited about. The
multi-lingual wikibooks project (analgous to the beta.wikiversity
project) would serve a number of roles:

1) Coordinate multi-lingual wikibooks projects. Improve lines of
communication, and help to standardize exactly what "wikibooks" is
supposed to be (there are some differences among different language
projects that actually raise some difficulties). Inconsistencies in
things such as donation and licensing policies has raised troubles in
the past. Things such as the current logo discussion could benefit
from more multi-lingual cooperation. IW links are also sparse on
wikibooks.
2) Create a central place where people could work on book translations
3) A place where donated books could be stored while being translated
from DOC/PDF/HTML/whatever into wikitext En.wikibooks receives regular
book donations in these file formats, and significant transformation
effort is typically necessary to covert them to wikitext.
4) A place where language books (like "how to speak spanish", for a
german-speaking audience) could be coordinated. Language speakers
could submit lessons and proof existing lessons in such books.
5) Serve as an incubator of sorts for book projects for which there is
currently no associated wikibooks language project. A lot of languages
really can't support an entire wikibooks project, but could still
benefit from book organization tools and templates that really aren't
offered at the incubator.

If the languages subcommittee can't process this request, I would like
it if some other foundation participants and board members could look
it over.

--Andrew Whitworth