[Foundation-l] Friendliness (was: Missing Wikipedians: An Essay)

[WJhonson at aol.com]

In a message dated 2/27/2011 12:26:22 PM Pacific Standard Time, 
dgerard at gmail.com writes:


> The scope was supposedly textbooks - how-to books.
> 

The problem I see with free books is just that you really need something 
that says... this is WHY you, the contributor would put in this amount of 
effort here.

With Wikipedia, I can contribute a word here, a sentence there, parse some 
grammar over there, fix a bad phrasing, add a source... all to seven 
articles and call it a day.

A book takes an awful lot of effort.  And then I give it away free to the 
world.  Sorry I'm just not seeing that.

Some has been some effort on Knol to create books and collections.  The 
books are not official but the collections are an official tool, even if the 
results are not.

So on Wikibooks for example, I could create my own How-To Home Repair, and 
collect *chapters* contributed by a dozen people into a *book*.

So what we should have created it not Wikibooks with which to start, but 
Wiki...How or WikiChapter or something small, that a person could actually 
accomplish.

I suppose... maybe I'm just rambling.

But just the name Wikibooks doesn't sound to me like How To, it sounds like 
150 to 1000 pages on an overarching topic of some kind.

W