kelvSYC wrote:
The original concept for Wikibooks, according to its
founder,
[[User:Karl Wick]] I believe, is a wiki for building textbooks.
However, Wikipedians for some odd reason decided to offload their
unwanted goods to Wikibooks: for examples, the VFD precedent there
regarding recipes has largely been the driving force behind
[[Cookbook]], even though a cooking textbook should focus little on
recipes and more on general cooking techniques. Many of the books
here have since defied their original intent: for example, [[Computer
and video games bookshelf]] (originally [[Game Guides and Strategy]])
- a textbook on beating a computer game sounds ludicrous to me.
Wikibooks also suffers from the fact that there are few active admins
and few active users of action (and thus suffering from repeated
vandal attacks). Prior to myself becoming an admin, there were over
200 pages on speedy deletion, some of them being marked for months
(although half of these were due to technical constraints). There
are possibly another 200 pages that could be easily moved out of en:
and onto their respective Wikibooks if only Special:Import was
complete (or someone did hard transwiking). Because of this, few
Wikibookians are willing to put down concrete policies that are
followed and enforced (consider that key pages such as [[WB:HNS]],
[[WB:FP]] and even [[WB:WIN]] were in constant flux). Furthermore,
Wikibookians tend to be within their own group of books, and rarely
venture into collaborating in other books (this is perhaps due to a
lack of a consistent Manual of Style). This makes it difficult to
judge the purpose of Wikibooks. Only recently have users decided to
put their foot down in respect to what Wikibooks is about, and what
it is about is instructional material. It could very well be the
case that longtime existing books such as [[Jokebook]] could be put
up in VFD for not being instructional material.
I do think that this problem will eventually solve itself. Wikibooks,
by its nature, takes a little more time for just about everything to
happen, and in general cooler heads prevail on just about all editing
issues compared to Wikipedia. In stead of featured article and article
of the day, we do article of the month, and it takes about a month to
decide... as an example.
I've been doing an Alexa scan of Wikibooks, however, and it is showing
proportional growth to Wikipedia, although admittedly Wikipedia is an
order of magnitude more active. Indeed this seems to be the problem as
Wikibooks is the baby sister of Wikipedia, and moderately new users from
Wikipedia checking out Wikibooks have a hard time telling the
difference. I'll admit that I'm still trying to get a handle on the
internal politics of Wikimedia projects, and I'm just barely starting to
understand the overall differences between each of the projects at any
reasonable depth. An example of this is the 1911 Wikipedia, which I
have somewhat successfully moved to Wikisource (although from a certain
point of view could be called hijacked...as it is really taking off over
there).
I have complained enough on Foundation-l that I was shut up and had
content put on [[meta:New Project proposals group]]. The talk page has
one of the e-mails I threw to Foundation-l, with one point in particular
that many people on Meta consider that Wikibooks to be a dumping ground
for many new project ideas that are book lengths in nature, or that they
should take their marbles and simply go to Wikicities instead with what
could be some good suggestions that could help Wikimedia projects in
general. The educational component of Wikibooks really needs to be both
demonstrated better and described in more detail at the other Wikimedia
projects somehow.
--
Robert Scott Horning