[Textbook-l] Textbook.wikipedia.org and authorship paradigm

[Krzysztof P. Jasiutowicz]

Hi all,

Wikipedia is a great success and its editorial process proved to be capable
of producing collaboratively content of good quality.

I wonder if the same paradigm can be extended to writing open source
textbooks. There are textbooks that were released into open source by their
authors/publishers but as far as I know there have never been any attempt
to write a textbook the wiki way.

Textbooks are mostly written by academics and academics are not very fond
of Wikipedia. Textbooks are written by one author or one author writes one
or a few chapters. I don't know if people like Karl Wick would be pleased
with a crowd of random editors to the text he has already written. It might
be counter-productive, time consuming and ineffective for him to discuss,
explain, or somtimes fight to defend his vision. He probably would be
grateful for comments and ideas but I'm not so sure about re-writing his
text and putting in incompatible ideas and frameworks.

I think a cookbook or howto type of books might succeed.

I am not trying to be a critic of the whole idea I would like to discuss
some of my concerns in the early phase of the project.

Regards,
Kpjas