[Textbook-l] Dual-licensed wikibooks

[Andrew Whitworth]

On Sun, Aug 17, 2008 at 6:11 PM, adam hyde <adam at flossmanuals.net> wrote:
> can i suggest something I know will be fruitless and i apologise
> knowingly in advance but i feel a little compelled to suggest it
> anyway...mediawiki might not be the right technology for wikibooks...i
> would think it might be a bit sane to actually address this issue, even
> just on the 'what if' level... i understand the institutional and legacy
> issues however it might be an interesting academic excercise to consider
> _not_ bending mediawiki to solve something when it is clearly not
> designed for book content...instead take the issue through a technical
> 'needs' process and look for technical solutions that suit these
> needs...

Not to be rude, but "Duh!" Of course MediaWiki isn't the right
software for our purpose. It's not completely inappropriate, but there
are some serious aspects that would need to be addressed in an ideal
world. Our technical wishlist is so long that Santa Claus won't even
read it all, and I've been a VERY good boy so far this year :).

Technical momentum dictates that we stay with MediaWiki, however. It
would be a gargantuan exercise to translate our database into another
format for another software platform, and translate the wikitext in
all our pages to be suitable for a different rendering engine. Plus,
all the documentation we would have to rewrite, etc. Fortunately for
us, we're able to get incremental changes made through bug reporting,
and the WMF has been demonstrably more supportive of our needs in
recent months, so things have been changing for the better. I've long
advocated that we create a picture of what an "ideal" Wikibooks would
be for us, and start approaching it in baby steps. Things like the
FlaggedRevs extension and the new PDF extension are strong steps in
that direction. We have a few more requests in the queue regarding the
hierarchical structure of books and the way MediaWiki can support that
architecture better. After that, I really think automated attribution
needs to be high up on our list of needs.

--Andrew Whitworth