[Textbook-l] Jimmy, my email, Wikiversity, Wikijunior and textbook standards

Sun Jun 18 07:28:22 UTC 2006

The *following email* to *Jimbo* might have inspired a bit of the problems
about the game guides and policy issues:

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Karl Wick < karlwick at gmail.com>
Date: Mar 17, 2006 1:11 PM
Subject: Request for Advice for Wikibooks
To: jwales at wikia.com

...

The situation: For all of the textbooks to be developed on Wikibooks, there
are basically three options I see available for how they are organized, and
I'd like your input on which makes more sense.

   1. The first option: All of the books are housed on the same domain on
   one big umbrella site: en.wikibooks.org . A general biology book for
   high school would differentiate itself from a general biology book for the
   university level through its title, and each book would be linked from other
   pages on the site with other books of a similar level.
   2. The second, intermediate, option: House all of the textbooks on one
   domain with subdomains, like en.univ.wikibooks.org or
   en.k12.wikibooks.org, or replace the /wiki/ with the information, like
   en.wikibooks.org/jr/ etc.
   3. The third option: split everything up into different domains, like
   en.wikiversity.org, en.wikijunior.org, en.wikivideogameguides.org,
   etc.

I can see benefits to grouping it all together on one site, and benefits to
dividing it down into several, more focused sites, directed at each age
group or student type. And that reorganization could take place right now,
or at some determined point in the future.

I actually thought that you could ask Peter
Drucker<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Drucker>,
the management guru who is focused on helping non-profit organizations,
because he could probably tell us in ten minutes what would take us years to
figure out by trial and error. I would contact him myself but since you are
already famous it's more likely that you could get in. You could even take
the opportunity to ask him about uncounted other organizational things you
have had on your mind.
Thanks in advance for your help,

Karl

----
Jimmy seems like he got things cleared up with his last couple of emails. My
two cents is that neither Wikipedia nor Wikibooks would even exist if not
for Jimmy'. So when he makes a decision, I usually just accept it and move
on. We should thank him and try to make his life easier and more
pleasurable, and not try to accuse him of selfish motivation or otherwise
speak ill of him.

As for *Wikiversity*, my opinion is that it should be a part of Wikibooks,
not a separate site. Wikibooks is for "Textbooks, study guides, and other
learning materials." I see no value in splitting it up, and much value in
having them all housed at the same place.

My personal opinion is that there should NOT be an accredited institution
requisite for a textbook. There are other subjects that deserve an
instructional book, such as the Myers-Briggs type
indicator<http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Myers-Briggs_Type_Indicator>,
which I don't know if is taught officially in any school or not.

I agree with Jimmy that to be used in US K-12, most books will need to
adhere to *standards*. How to get books that do that is another question. To
me it makes sense to allow non-standard-compliant books that will eventually
be modified to fulfill the different standards that different schools have.

The other area of wiki-books that I would like to see is *study guides* of
specific books. For example, summaries of current business books, where you
can find an outline of The Seven Habits of Highly Effective
People<http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Seven_Habits_Study_Guide>.

I'd also like to give a plug to the proposed book, Wikijunior Fifth Grade
Math <http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Wikijunior_Fifth_Grade_Math>, for which
our friend Sanford Forte, of the California Open Source Textbook
Project<http://www.opensourcetext.org/>,
provided us with the CA standards and framework to follow.

The original grant for WikiJunior appears to not include the idea of
standards-following development. However it seems like a great experiment to
start at least one book following standards. Right now we do not have any
great examples of completed standards-following books that we can hold up to
show the world. With Wikijunior Fifth Grade Math we have the opportunity to
do so and have the end product actively promoted by someone who is already
on the inside of the textbook industry and the diplomatic/bureaucratic
circles. This would be good on so many levels.