[Textbook-l] Textbook development and role of Wikibooks (was: Problem with NPOV)

[Robert Scott Horning]

Jimmy Wales wrote:

>Some of the main points that I think are important...
>
>-- Wikibooks is something we can get very passionate about, but that 
>passionate vision is marred if we allow it to become a dumping ground 
>for stuff people don't want in Wikipedia, or a POV haven for nonsense, etc.
>
>-- Wikibooks has a serious possibility to get independent funding, so 
>long as it remains focussed on its serious mission of textbooks.  Such 
>funding can be used to customize and improve the software for wikibooks, 
>as well as to *purchase and liberate* textbook works that already exist.
>
>Suffice to say: we can get funding for Wikibooks to radically change the 
>education world if potential funders come to the project and see a 
>serious project doing good work.  We can not get funding for Wikibooks 
>if potential funders come to the project and look at it and see a bunch 
>of nonsense that we did not have the pride to disallow (random crap that 
>got pushed out of Wikipedia, for example).
>
>Funders are eager to find solutions to important questions facing 
>education.  They are not eager to fund videogame manuals and pokeman 
>trivia reference books.
>
>-- Wikibooks needs to focus on actual courses because we passionately 
>care that our work *actually be used in education*.  In order to get 
>textbooks adopted by real schools, they must meet curriculum standards. 
>  It is as simple as that.
>
>-------------
>
>I could go on, but I think you begin to see... there are some basic 
>standards and concepts, but really we need to work together carefully as 
>a community to build detailed policies to implement these and other 
>natural and sensible guidelines.
>
>A fair amount of that work is already done, of course, and it will be a 
>long and ongoing process.
>
>--Jimbo
>  
>

Jimbo,

I want to thank you for at least providing a pretty clear manifesto 
(even though I don't think that was your intention here) of what you 
think Wikibooks ought to be like and the direction it can and perhaps 
should go.

I do want to say, however, that it has been a very, very, very hard 
uphill battle to even find a strong vision of what Wikibooks was 
supposed to be when it was founded, and what the "typical" Wikimedian 
(if you can use such a term) thinks of Wikibooks that is outside of the 
general Wikibooks development community.  

This huge disconnect between the veiw of Wikibooks as a seed-project 
wiki (especially as evidenced by the Wikimania proceedings), those who 
see Wikibooks as strictly academic textbooks, and those who push more 
for general non-fiction scholarship books (more my viewpoint) have a 
hard time to find a common ground when one viewpoint or another comes up.

I will say that the current Wikimedia Incubator Wiki has provided a 
legitimate forum to send people if they want to develop independent 
projects, a huge number of which I've been involved with moving 
(generally successfully I might add) to places that were more 
appropriate for the content.  I mention the Wikimania proceedings in 
particular because they are clearly not textbook oriented or even book 
oriented, and emotions ran very high when I tried to transwiki that 
content.  So much opposition was had that Brion Vibber himself went and 
reverted just about every adminitrator action that was performed by 
myself in a huge slap on the face without even trying to find out what 
was really going on and why there was opposition to such content on 
Wikibooks.  That and having Anthere threating to block my account wasn't 
too helpful either (it didn't happen, but I did exchange some rather 
heated e-mails over the issue).

I could add things like Wikiversity, Wikijunior, the 1911 Encyclopedia 
Brittanica project, and a Hatian Creole langauge translation project 
(the last two now on Wikisource) that have also helped to blur a mission 
of Wikibooks.  If the idea is that Wikibooks is not to be used as a new 
Wikimedia wiki project seed wiki (arrr, I don't know how else to explain 
this!) this type of activity must simply stop.  I will also point out 
that almost all of these idea were home brewed on Wikibooks and were not 
"dumped" on Wikibooks by Wikipedia editors, although Wikipedia editors 
were instrumental in making the suggestion to use Wikibooks in this 
manner for most cases like these.

----

All this said, I want to point out that I am not directly against using 
Wikibooks for textbook development, and I do believe that even to 
emphasis this viewpoint can and should be done right from the main page 
and from other areas of Wikibooks as well.  It is being done somewhat, 
but certainly a stronger emphasis in terms of encouraging the following 
of academic standards for the development of Wikibooks content could be 
also encouraged.

As far as getting independent funding for Wikibooks, this is an area 
that is going to be a virtual landmine of political and social problems 
for the project of an unprecedented scale.  There is a potential for a 
rather large amount of money to be made by some individuals, and it 
won't necessarily be the individuals who have been putting up the most 
amount of effort the for creation of content and editing of Wikibooks 
material either.  As soon as one person is starting to make money off of 
content from Wikibooks (however that happens), there will be people with 
hurt feelings to wonder why they too aren't getting a "piece of the action".

Wikibooks is right at the cusp of starting to make a huge difference in 
how open souce textbooks and book-length material is created and edited. 
 I think you acknowledge that too, Jimbo, or you wouldn't be so active 
in this project.  Developments over this past year to identify 
substantial Wikibooks and release them as *.pdf files have gone a long 
way to show what can be done so far with even the existing individuals 
who have been helping out so far.

As far as how to allocate financial resources to improve Wikibooks, I'm 
not completely sure what the best approach ought to be.  I will say that 
the current approach being used to raise funds for Wikijunior is, IMHO, 
a complete utter and dismal failure of the worst kind.  That Wikijunior 
has brought in some funds to be generally used by the Wikimedia 
Foundation for purchasing servers and paying the light bill is a nobel 
thing, but there is no reasonable way to provide accounting to say that 
Wikijunior hosting cost $xxx and money from the Beck Foundation (or 
others that I'm not aware of) raised $yyy.  Promises were implied, 
deadlines demanded (and met in a couple of cases), and herculan efforts 
made by volunteers to help out.  But their efforts were wasted in vain 
other than in a general view that Wikijunior now a slightly better 
project because of their efforts.  However the money raised had 
absolutely nothing to do with those efforts to produce Wikijunior in any 
way, shape, or form, other than an intangible view that Wikibooks might 
have been shut down without that money which nobody ever even claimed 
might have been the case anyway.

Point being here that if money is used to try and purchase textbooks and 
then host them on Wikibooks, it is going to take a very similar kind of 
herculean effort on the part of Wikibooks volunteers just to get them 
moved over to Wikibooks, proofread the content, update to current 
standards and knowledge, and to reconvert them back to something capable 
of being used in the print textbook industry.  Simply buying the content 
is just 10%-20% of what is needed to even develop the content and make 
it available for use as a textbook through Wikibooks.  A useful 10%-20%, 
but only the beginning.

For a slightly larger "bang for the buck", I would try to encourage 
something of a sort of X-prize type arrangement to encourage skilled 
professionals to develop perhaps targeted textbooks of specific themes 
and audience targets (such as a high school Algebra textbooks, for 
example) that meets specific curriculum requirements.  When a book is 
100% complete, has gone through some sort of academic review to compare 
against the standards, and is available in a pdf (or similar) document 
format that is press-ready for print publication, that the participants 
would be able to claim some sort of prize and decide how and where to 
spend the money from the prize.  Even if the money is mainly folded back 
into the Wikimedia Foundation or some other charity like the 
International Red Cross (decided by the participants), you would find 
some keen interest and some surprising volunteers to help out and make 
it happen.

Think here something like what Nupedia tried to do in terms of its 
review process, but using a Wiki-editing interface for the content 
development in the first place.  You could even have "competing" books 
that try different approaches to the material for a real competition.

There are many other potentially useful ideas for spending money on 
Wikibooks.  Direct grants to school teachers to develop textbooks during 
the "summer" instead of working as a construction sub-contractor? 
 Advertising campaigns of various sorts for the purpose of recruiting 
volunteers?  Setting up a physical book publisher of Wikibooks content?

I do have the attitude that the volunteers at Wikibooks have the 
capability of creating the kinds of textbooks that you are looking for, 
Jimbo.  And that other than recruiting more talented wordsmiths we can 
pull off the kinds of ground breaking shifts in the textbook publication 
industry that have only been hinted at so far.

-- 
Robert Scott Horning