Wikibooks

Infobox Website
name = Wikibooks

url = [http://www.wikibooks.org/ www.wikibooks.org]
commercial = No
type = Textbooks wiki
language = multilingual
registration = Optional
slogan = Think free. Learn free.
owner = Wikimedia Foundation
author = Jimmy Wales Fact|date=April 2008 and the Wikimedia Community
launch date = July 10, 2003

Wikibooks (previously called Wikimedia Free Textbook Project and Wikimedia-Textbooks) is a Wikimedia Foundation wiki for the creation of free content that anyone can edit.

History

Wikibooks was launched on July 10, 2003, in response to a request made by Wikipedia contributor Karl Wick for a project to host and build free textbooks on subjects such as organic chemistry and physics. Two major sub-projects Wikijunior and Wikiversity were created within Wikibooks before Wikibooks' official policy was later changed so that future incubator type projects are started according to the Wikimedia Foundation's . In August 2006, Wikiversity became an independent Wikimedia Foundation project.

Wikijunior

Wikijunior is a subproject of Wikibooks that specializes in books for children. The project consists of both a magazine and a website, and is currently being developed in English, Danish, Finnish, French, German, Italian, Japanese and Spanish. It is funded by a grant from the Beck Foundation.

Book content

While some books are original, others began as text copied over from other sources of free content textbooks found on the Internet. All of the site's content is covered by the GNU Free Documentation License. This means that, as with its sister project, Wikipedia, contributions remain copyrighted to their creators, while the copyleft licensing ensures that the content will always remain freely distributable and reproducible.

Wikibooks differs from Wikisource in that content on Wikibooks is expected to be significantly changed by participants. Raw source documents such as the original text of Shakespearean plays are hosted on Wikisource instead.

The project is working towards completion of several textbooks in numerous human languages, which founders hope will be followed by mainstream adoption and use of text developed and housed there.

Criticisms

Wikibooks has many incomplete texts, and even the comprehensive texts (books rated at the highest level) are of poor qualityFact|date=October 2008. The wiki model encourages the creation of abortive book projects that linger indefinitely without being improved or deletedFact|date=October 2008, and it can be extremely hard for a visitor of the Wikibooks site to find any high-qualityFact|date=February 2007, completed books. Wikibooks also inherits all the criticisms levelled towards wiki-process editing in general.

The counter arguments to these criticisms are that Wikibooks content is available for almost continuous peer review, and thanks to the wiki-style editing, this project also inherits all of the strengths of wikis. For popular titles and items that gather interest from several participants, the quality of the content tends to improve rapidlyFact|date=October 2008. Noted books that have achieved this are all highly technical booksFact|date=October 2007, especially related to computers and the Internet, as well as linguistic booksFact|date=October 2008 related to (human) language learning.

imilar projects

*Project Gutenberg
* [http://www.mymcat.com MyMCAT] - a not-for-profit site for students preparing for the MCAT
*wikiHow - a for-profit site with a collection of how-to guides

ee also

*Digital library (or Virtual library)
*e-book
*Elibrary
*ibiblio
*Open Content Alliance
*The European Library
*Universal library
*Global Text

External links

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* [http://www.wikibooks.org/ Wikibooks' multilingual portal]
* [http://news.com.com/Wikibooks+takes+on+textbook+industry/2100-1025_3-5884291.html Wikibooks takes on textbook industry]
*

References

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