At most, 23% of the English Wikibooks main space pages have been sighted. I
for one am happy that vandals do not get the instant gratification of edits
showing up immediately to readers. Simply by logging in you will see the
most recent version by default and if you intend to make serious
contributions you should be making an account anyway. The one problem would
be lack of people to sight changes and that problem stems not from Flagged
Revisions but rather the state of Wikibooks in general. Without Flagged
Revisions that same state would yield a slow degradation of all the pages as
subtle vandalism slips through the cracks without any notice.
If (English) Wikibooks is dying it's because of a lack of critical mass, the
compartmentalization inherent in having textbooks each with their own scope
(lack of community), intimidation of newcomers in contributing to books that
appear to be the work of one person (lack of continuity between books as one
would see with pages in an encyclopedia or dictionary), and the steeper
learning curve due to more complex link syntax and structure required for
textbooks. These are just issues derived from what Wikibooks is and I don't
feel the implementation of Flagged Revisions or not on Wikibooks will have
any meaningful effect compared to these other factors.
- Adrignola
On Sun, Mar 7, 2010 at 8:59 AM, Mike.lifeguard <mike.lifeguard(a)gmail.com>wrote;wrote:
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I wanted to spur discussion about part of this, specifically:
On 10-03-07 10:41 AM, Mike.lifeguard wrote:
Because Progit (
progit.org) is not freely
licensed (the license
forbids commercial use), and contributing to it is unnecessarily
difficult, I have begun working on a textbook about Git on Wikibooks
Progit is a textbook about git, which is hosted in a git repository on
GitHub. This means that if you want to fix errors or translate, you can
fork the repository, make your changes, and the author can incorporate
them if they want to.
This gives the illusion of being able to contribute, when really your
edits are held hostage by one person. Not only are they a bottleneck,
but they can also refuse to accept your changes. More to the point, in
this case, they don't seem keen on accepting anything that isn't simply
fixing errata, or translating the English text.
Have other folks encountered other seemingly-open textbook-writing
efforts that aren't really open upon further inspection? How can we
capitalize on the frustration that might arise when people are unable to
contribute in practice (or doing so is more difficult than on Wikibooks)?
More to the point, I'm concerned (you may have seen my recent posts to
foundation-l) that using Flagged Revisions is killing Wikibooks because
it is taking us towards this seemingly-open-but-not-really model of
editing, which is contrary to the spirit of openness which got us this
far. I'd be interested to hear whether people think it is time to
abandon the extension, revamp the configuration, or something else.
Thanks,
- -Mike
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