Piotr \"Derbeth\" Kubowicz wrote:
There's an article about Wikipedia on the New
Yorker:
http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/articles/060731fa_fact
Please note one thing: three other Wikimedia projects are mentioned: Wikisource, Wikinews
and Wikiquote - Wikibooks is not. It should be an
alert for us: media don't see us and don't write about us.
I am very disappointed that there were no articles about our third anniversary, an
important event for our project. We missed a big chance
to get more attention. Perhaps we should think about what have we done wrong?
I don't think we are doing anything wrong, as there has been quite a bit
of press about Wikibooks within this past year, including articles
specific about Wikibooks. I will agree that we missed an opportunity to
really do a big P.R. splash, but there are a few things that need to be
fixed first before we are really "ready for primetime". Mainly it is
spit and polish on the both the content as well as some of the "gateway"
pages on Wikibooks to really show off the content that is of high quality.
I will admit that some huge improvements on the "Main Page" have occured
in this past year, and it is now possible to start out on
http://en.wikibook.org/ and find some worthwhile content that would be
worth reproducing. Please note this website:
http://libertytextbooks.org/
and in particular note the Ada Programming Wikibook that is slated for
inclusion into a list of the best e-books on the internet. Certainly
Wikibooks participants need to be involved with efforts like this more,
and work to make more Wikibooks content up to a professional level that
would be included with similar e-book content.
It is also important to note that according to Alexa, that Wikibooks is
the #1 most visited e-book website on the internet, at least for
independent statistics. I don't know if this says something about
e-books in general as a dismal failure for traditional publishers or if
there is something more to e-books that could be said and should be done
through Wikibooks. The Alexa ranking of Wikibooks vs. The Gutenberg
Project can be found here:
http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details?compare_sites=gutenberg.o…
One other thing is that the political uphevals on Wikibooks need to end
now. [[User:Jguk]] has suggested that all of the content removal and
changes on Wikibooks havn't made that big of an impact on actual content
development. If you look carefully at the usage graph, there has
actually been a plateu or even a slight drop in Wikibooks usage over the
past six months, and I do think that has a direct correlation to the
political turmoil that occured within the Wikibooks community. Of
course other plateus can be seen in the usage statistics, but it is
something to think about. I do think the large-scale content removal is
now a thing of the past as many of the buried issues have now been
brought forward and largely dealt with.
About the only remaining "issue" left is to see what is going to happen
with Wikiversity and if Wikiversity content is removed from Wikibooks,
what kind of an impact that will have on remaining content on Wikibooks.
Deciding what content is going to remain on Wikibooks is going to be a
fun task to deal with.
--
Robert Scott Horning