Monahon, Peter B. wrote:
Thank you, Andrew,
... for the quick and apparently knowledgeable and well-connected reply.
For your information and feedback, I'm not sure how on my own I'd find
the links you share, and you made many "we have that" comments where you
offered no links. Perhaps I'm too casual a visitor to wander deeply
enough below the main page. This seems a constant on the MediaWiki, er,
WikiMedia, er ... whatever ... projects I've visited - no intuitively
obvious organizational scheme or way to find one form the main page (or
anywhere inside!). Perhaps it will just take time. I'm sure the first
phone systems confused people, now we just "know" the meaning of area
codes and such.
I will note that this is an ongoing issue that we are trying to deal
with. One of the problems we are facing with the English-language
edition of Wikibooks is that we are getting crushed under the weight of
the sheer volume of content that is currently found on Wikibooks, and
trying to come up with an ontologically sound schema for organizing the
content.
I would love to use the Dewey Decimal system, but unfortunately it has
been copyrighted and requires a fairly expensive licensing fee to get
access to the classification guidelines that would help us in terms of
getting a more specific classification codes. There have been abortive
attempts at starting a classification of the content at least down to
the major 1's level (nothing after the decimal point) of categorization
within the Dewey Decimal System, but it has proven to be an absolutely
huge task. While the Library of Congress schema is not nearly as
restricted from an intellectual property standpoint, it is still a near
nightmare to get the necessary resources put together to perform a
proper classification of the content.
One system that has seemed to work out for us in the past, and I think
it should be pushed harder at the moment, is the "bookshelf" system of
organizing Wikibooks content:
http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Wikibooks:All_Books
There is a link to this page right on the "main" page of Wikibooks, but
it isn't quite so obvious as perhaps it should be. Originally the
"main" page of Wikibooks consisted of all of this content, when we
didn't have nearly so many books of fair quality to link to. Most of
the books listed on this page are of pretty good quality, but they are
not the "best of the best" of Wikibooks, which would instead be found here:
http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Wikibooks:Featured_books
These are books that are roughly equivalent of the "article of the day"
feature on Wikipedia, and are complete enough to be usable by somebody
not familiar with the topic. This is a relatively new feature to
Wikibooks as well, as we are still in the process of identifying some of
the more outstanding books that might have been missed, although it is a
good collection. It is from this list that the rotating "featured
books" are drawn from.
I spent a couple of years as a volunteer with the Open Directory Project
(I am no longer involved), and I learned quite a bit working there of
the complexities of having to classify human knowledge, and to keep up
with changing technologies and "user communities". That project
attempted to classify and categorize every web page on the internet, and
the volunteers there have done a pretty good job, all things
considered. Good enough that Google uses the categories in that project
as one of the major criteria for ranking web pages, particularly if your
keywords match one of the category names. It isn't the only criteria,
but it does have an impact.
Wikibooks doesn't have nearly this level of complexity, but it seems as
though trying to come up with a process and page organization schema,
and getting the software to work properly to help organize all of the
different varieties of Wikibooks has been an ongoing challenge. The
MediaWiki software (the name of the software running these websites....
and yes, the name stinks and even those who are major authors of the
software hate the name) does leave some challenges to organizing
multi-page documents such as are developed on Wikibooks. The category
system was designed more for dealing with individual encyclopedia
articles, as is the case on Wikipedia. It was apparently this category
system, which is also used to a certain extent on Wikibooks, that you
stumbled across.
Every method of classifying human knowledge seems to have its own
strengths and weaknesses. My #1 complaint about Melvil Dewey and his
classification system is that it shows a very 1 dimensional way of
thinking about human knowledge, and the major 100's level categories
break down when there are topics that belong in multiple major
categories, in terms of grouping content "near" related thoughts and
ideas. Just check out where the Computer Science books are in the Dewey
System, to give an extreme example of where they are located compared to
digital logic books covering electrical engineering, even though they
cover very similar ideas. The Wikipedia category system takes on a
slightly different approach, and does allow "multiple parents" for a
given category, but other kinds of content are subsequently lost.
Ideally, what I would like to do is to organize Wikibooks in some way
that could show you a book about a topic that you are interested in, and
show other books in decreasing relevance further down the list based on
some sort of cataloging code. That is one of the whole points of
classification systems anyway.... to help organize content and allow you
to see "nearby" content which is closely related, just as you often find
in a library. Of course since Wikibooks is new and original content, it
has not been through the roller mills of librarians trying to figure out
where a specific book belongs in the classification scheme. This is not
an easy task, and those who are good at doing this have decades of
experience at classifying books and understand the classification codes
cold.
Oh, and by the way, I totally disagree with your
conclusions. Names
matter. While I appreciate that "books" includes "textbooks", I see
it
as "all girl-scouts are girls, but not all girls are girl-scouts". I
see you all opening up a "girl" site, and then saying it's only for
"girl-scouts"! You don't set that?
And, I'd go to Wikisources because ... I'm looking for "sources"?
"The
free documentations library" means nothing to me.
When Amazon started, I thought, "what a stoopid name for a book store".
Now, I see they really want to be an "Amazon river on the Internet,
through which everything flows", not just books, but movies, cameras,
personal gear, toys, appliances, and so on. "Books" was just a start,
and now I see "Amazon" as a very savvy name indeed. Also, the name
"Amazon" acquired distinctiveness through their persistent marketing.
Good luck with "Wikibooks .. you're telling me it's NOT the place to go
to learn all about books, they way we go to Wikipedia, to learn all
about everything (almost). Perhaps a compiled list page of what's NOT
on the site so (a) there IS a response to searches within the site and
(b) it clearly tells visitors why not, and where to go?
Thank you, Robert, also for your concise yet complete explanations -
background and alternatives.
- Peter Blaise
BTW, I do share your viewpoint that "Wikibooks is for books" and not
just textbooks. Still, the sheer volume of the types of content that
people do try to add to Wikibooks would simply amaze you, and often the
more outlandish ideas for content tend to have a very short development
period and then languish unedutied for years afterward, never in quite a
completed state of development. The books that best fit our current
policies are those books that do seem to have a solid development
community of several interested author/editors and have shown consistent
growth and development over the years. Those who are on the "cleanup
crew" that tries to police the content have over the years developed a
general feel for what sorts of pages are likely to "make it" and become
something very outstanding, and what sorts of ideas tend to die a slow
death. BTW, most of the "policing" is to keep people from
"vandalizing"
pages by individuals writing complete nonsense and even grossly
offensive content which is so obvious that it should not be on our
project that it doesn't even have to "go to committee.
-- Robert Horning
It has been an ongoing process of trying to find what works and what
doesn't work, and to gently tell those who would use Wikibooks as a sort
of vanity press to move along and try somewhere else. Sometimes we
aren't quite so gentle either, and that does cause some problems,
although that also is something that tends to create problems.