[Foundation-l] Incubator Wiki for New Wikimedia Projects

Tue Nov 15 18:43:03 UTC 2005

On 11/15/05, Daniel Mayer <maveric149 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> --- Anthony DiPierro <wikilegal at inbox.org> wrote:
> > I brought that up earlier, and I'm really not sure what to make of it,
> > because Wikipedia certainly shouldn't be made a part of Wikibooks.  I
> > can think of two possible reasons:
> >
> > 1) Wikibooks is for textbooks, and this should be narrowly construed
> > to mean classical textbooks, not to include any learning resources
> > such as encyclopedias.
> >
> > 2) Wikipedia is too big for Wikibooks (combined perhaps with the fact
> > that Mediawiki is not sophisticated enough to handle both of them
> > under a single project).
>
> Both are true. Also, a collection of articles does not a book make. You can
> bind them together and present them like a book, but they will never be
> something that somebody is going to read cover to cover in sequence. Articles
> are self-contained entities that stand perfectly well on their own. Pages or
> even chapters in a book should be part a much larger self-contained work that
> itself has a specific goal on where it wants to lead the reader.
>
> -- mav

That's actually a good point I didn't think about.  Applying it to
Wikijunior, I think you could actually argue either way depending on
your idea of the scope of the project.  If the point of Wikijunior is
just to make a bunch of educational books based on Wikipedia articles
("Big Cats" I believe was an example title proposed by Theresa), then
Wikibooks is probably appropriate.  More than that, such as trying to
create an entire encyclopedia for kids, and it's probably outside the
scope of Wikibooks.

I think that's a good proposal for where to draw the line - "books" in
Wikibooks should consist of coherent works that it's reasonable to
want to read cover to cover in sequence.  Of course, I remember as a
kid reading volumes of our encyclopedia at home cover to cover, but I
was a weird kid.  :)

Anthony