On 2/8/07, Andrew Whitworth <wknight8111(a)hotmail.com> wrote:
It's a little pretentious to think that wikibooks
should change itself, or
that it should be changed by the WMF to allow any one particular book. Since
it's inception, Wikibooks (and all WMF projects for that matter) have been
primarily concerned with open content and collaboration. The rejection of
one or both of these ideals is not one that should be encouraged or
accepted.
It would indeed be pretentious to think that Wikibooks should be
changed for a single textbook. It would not be pretentious to say
that accepting certain conditions for a textbook is more in keeping
with Wikibooks' ultimate goals than not accepting them, and that if
Wikibooks policy currently doesn't allow it it should be changed.
That's debatable, but it's not pretentious.
WMF projects have not only been about public collaboration. The
earliest project that could roughly be said to fall into the history
of the WMF (even though the Foundation didn't exist then), Nupedia,
permitted only very tightly controlled editing. Its content was still
open and free, in that anyone could reuse or modify it, just as
MediaWiki is free software but very few people have commit access
(which is comparable to my original suggestion). Anyone can use or
modify, but that doesn't mean you can modify the master copy.
The open-content part of the WMF's philosophy is not negotiable, and
will never be violated. Nor should it be. But the collaboration part
was only ever a means to an end, and is most assuredly negotiable.
Stable versions, when they come, will significantly cut down on public
collaboration, and as the general quality of the projects improves, I
predict that changes will be clamped down further. Remember that if
Nupedia had worked better, Wikipedia would have been shut down.
Wikipedia is only a wiki because it advanced the goal of free content
better. The means should not be mistaken for the end. Instead, in
each case evaluate whether the means better advances the end.
And indeed, more concretely, it's perfectly possible for a Wikisource
contributor to copy an entire work and have it permanently locked from
editing. There, the collaborative part is optional. Because it
doesn't serve the goal as well.
But this is hopefully not an argument we need to continue, because I
think everyone will be happy with Wikibooks having a modifiable copy
and linking prominently to the main copy. I think that the focus on
editability and collaboration is not as suitable for Wikibooks as for,
say, Wikipedia, and that in the long run it won't do the project any
good to reject requests like this, but it's probably not going to be
an issue that directly affects me right now, and I have other things
to do than to pursue it. So for now, I'm not very interested in
continuing that branch of the discussion, assuming everyone is fine
with a modifiable copy with links.