[Foundation-l] Agreement between WMF and O'Reilly Media about Wikipedia: The Missing Manual on Wikipedia?

[Gerard Meijssen]

Hoi,
Let us fist congratulate O'Reilley and John Broughton with their decision to
make their work available to us. This is in my opinion excellent news. The
question where this manual should be is not that straight forward. Wikipedia
NEEDS better help text and this truly puts all this information where it is
most needed; on the English language Wikipedia itself.

When you consider the usability of software, good documentation is definetly
part of it. This justified that this book is on en.wp itself. The least it
will do is spark attention on our documentation and how the book should be
integrated in our project documentation. I can imagine that the book itself
also gets its place on Wikibooks. The rationale behind that would be that it
survives as a book. This book will need maintenance as does the help text
but they are essentially two different things.
Thanks,
       GerardM

2009/1/28 Michael Peel <email at mikepeel.net>

> Hi all,
>
> The author of Wikipedia: The Missing Manual, John Broughton, has just
> uploaded the book to Wikipedia under the GFDL, see:
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:Wikipedia:_The_Missing_Manual
>
> My reaction when I spotted this was: great, but shouldn't this be on
> Wikibooks? Part of the author's response to this was that "the
> agreement between O'Reilly Media and the Wikimedia Foundation was
> that this would be at /Wikipedia/ ... [do] not remove it from this
> site without a /lot/ more discussion among a /lot/ of other people."
>
> Did the WMF really make an agreement saying that the content should
> be on Wikipedia, rather than a WMF project or simply under a free
> license?
>
> Does anyone want to weigh in with comments on this on the talk page?
>
> Thanks,
> Mike Peel
>
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