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

[Krzysztof P. Jasiutowicz]

On 15-07-2003, Karl Wick wrote thusly :
> Krzysztof P. Jasiutowicz wrote:
> >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.
> 
> I have no problem with this, in fact it should take some of
> the work off my shoulders. However I imagine that there are
> others who would prefer autonomy and would be dissuaded
> from contributing to a wiki even if they wanted to release
> their work into the public domain .. there is no shortage
> of hubis in academia.
OK. You are pioneering in Wikimedia with a new kind of project
with the idea, established concepts and substantial amount of 
content that seems to be more or less complete.

I am excited and looking forward to seeing how other textbook-from-scratch projects will fare. Written not by one author but by hundreds.
Commited but not necessarily with teaching experience. 

Encylopedia is in a way fragmented into autonomous entities that do not
have to create continuity (although they can). I think that a good textbook 
in most fields needs some master plan and methods to lead students
through material, building their knowledge.
I think pedagogical background and methodology is vital to writing a
sensible textbook. No need to say personality of the author plays a very
important role ;-)

I suppose that a large computer program can't be written in a Wiki way
and we'll see if textbooks can.

> >There are textbooks that were released into open source by
> >their authors/publishers
> 
> If you know where I could get my hands on some of these
> textbooks please tell me. That would be a great starting
> point for further work.
Not in organic chemistry that I know of but 
a book on programming in Ruby programming languge 
http://www.rubycentral.com/book/ and I think several other computing books
published by O'Reilly.
> Tomasz Wegrzanowski wrote:
> >It may be hard to make good university-level textbooks the
> >wiki way, 
> I'd like to prove the contrary.

Regards,
Kpjas.