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

[Tomasz Wegrzanowski]

On Tue, Jul 15, 2003 at 09:11:31AM +0200, Krzysztof P. Jasiutowicz wrote:
> 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.

It may be hard to make good university-level textbooks the wiki way,
but I think we can do things like:
* language courses
* computer-related books
* elementary and high school level textbooks for almost everything