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

[Andrew Whitworth]

On Wed, Jan 28, 2009 at 4:45 AM, Michael Peel <email at mikepeel.net> wrote:
> 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?

I'm obviously in favor of having more books at Wikibooks, but then
again it does make some sense to keep the documentation close to the
website it documents. If the book is GFDL, couldn't we just copy/fork
it to Wikibooks too?

--Andrew Whitworth