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

[phoebe ayers]

On Wed, Jan 28, 2009 at 2:13 AM, Erik Moeller <erik at wikimedia.org> wrote:
> First, we think it's wonderful that O'Reilly has done this; TMM is a
> fantastic book and a great introduction for newbies. (We have been
> giving copies away as gifts for a while.) I believe Frank is planning
> to blog about this in more detail soon. Please do show them some love
> for doing this; it's obviously highly unusual and very nice.  :-)

But, so far,  not that unusual for books about Wikipedia! ;)

> O'Reilly took the initiative to release the book under a free license,
> and we've encouraged it - but we don't have any formal agreement with
> them that it ought to be posted on Wikipedia. That's a community
> decision, and neither we nor O'Reilly would want it to be any other
> way. My personal take is that it should live where it's most likely to
> be used and maintained, and regardless of its dead tree origins, the
> help section of en.wp seems to be a pretty logical place. But that's
> just my take - in future, we are also considering to set up a
> dedicated portal with various learning resources for wiki newbies,
> where static copies could live.
>
> Erik

I'm clearly not unbiased in the matter, but it seems to me that it
would make sense to have it at Wikibooks, since it's a complete work
that can stand alone. It's also, of course, not the only book about
Wikipedia, and I think we were planning to put "How Wikipedia Works"
on Wikibooks eventually.* Clearly these books should be close to
Wikipedia and well-linked from there, but I'm not sure they should
actually be *on* Wikipedia.

It makes sense to me to make an area with all sorts of multilingual
learning resources in all sorts of formats as well, like Erik
suggests. Currently on the English Wikipedia there is the out of the
way http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Instructional_material, but
this needs to be greatly improved. I'd be glad to work on a project to
do so.

-- phoebe

* this hasn't happened mostly because I've been busy this winter.