[Foundation-l] Rethinking Wikibooks (was Re: PediaPress)

[Amir E. Aharoni]

On Tue, Nov 16, 2010 at 08:11, Robert S. Horning
<robert_horning at netzero.net> wrote:
> Something is missing here.  I'd like to think it is this tangible medium
> of a physical book that is what is wrong, but I'm really not sure.  If
> there are other ideas, I'd like to hear them.
> ...
> What is wrong?

<my_theory>
My theory about the very high profile of Wikipedia and the mostly low
profile of the other projects is that in Wikipedia it is very easy to
predicate. People love to predicate. Look it up in a dictionary - i
refer to all of that word's meanings.

Put simply, Wikipedia is the world's largest and most convenient
soapbox. There's a policy page in the English Wikipedia that says that
Wikipedia is not a soapbox ([[WP:SOAP]]). But people try to use it
this way anyway. It is very, very attractive. Some of them eventually
understand that NPOV is a good thing and become good Wikipedia
editors.

An encyclopedia, by its nature, is the perfect platform for saying
things like "X is a Y". We are all familiar with that: Kosovo IS A
country / unrecognized country / partially recognized country /
de-facto independent country / province of Serbia / occupied province
of Serbia. This opportunity to easily disrupt the NPOV - even
temporarily - with one's own version of the predication is a
necessarily evil that makes Wikipedia so popular. Other projects are
nowhere near offering the opportunity to say such things, at least not
as easily.

Wiktionary is supposed to consist of almost nothing but predications,
but it's too linguistic. Wikisource is a great place for lovers of
archiving and typesetting (like myself), but you can't be original
there. Wikinews and Wikiquote... nobody is quite sure what they are at
all.

Wikibooks can, theoretically, be a place for making predications and
for spreading POV. But most people, given the choice of writing a book
about a subject or an encyclopedic article about it, will write an
encyclopedic article. Not just because it's shorter, but because it
looks like a more natural way of answering the question "What is
X?"... the way they want to answer it.
</my_theory>

How to solve it? Sorry, no idea. I love textbooks for all ages, so i
would love to see Wikibooks flourish. I made a few corrections to
existing Wikibooks, but i find it strange to start a Wikibook from
scratch.

--
Amir E. Aharoni