[Foundation-l] Cleaning up Wikibooks (was Re: Incubator Wiki for New Wikimedia Projects)

Sat Nov 19 01:00:38 UTC 2005

Ray Saintonge wrote:

> If a handful of books are determined to be offensive that may be ample 
> reason for deleting those books; those books should not become straw 
> men to justify policies that have nothing to do with what makes them 
> offensive.  To be sure there have been a few recent discussions on the 
> mailing list about Wikibooks, but none of it has been particularly 
> alarming.  The Wikijunior and Wikiversity discussions seemed 
> relatively normal.  "How to Get a Girl," has been mentioned, but that 
> was a fairly focussed discussion about one book.  There have been 
> other discussions about other projects where the persuasiveness of an 
> elephant's foot would have been far more welcome.
>
> In many respects you ar right when you say that Jimbo can make 
> arbitrary changes whenever and wherever he wants on a site that 
> belongs.  (The legal niceties about a person's relationship with a 
> registered non-profit society that he founded are well beyond the 
> scope of these comments.)  Much of what has been built up over what is 
> now nearly five years has been built on trust and on support for a 
> fundamental idea.  People who have contributed enormous amounts of 
> time, and more recently money, have contributed to an idea and a 
> vision rather than a person.  They have been able to put aside 
> staggeringly different political philosophies for the sake of 
> something in which they all believe.  Creators who intervene in the 
> societies thay have created often do so at a price; it can even mean 
> that people begin not to believe in God anymore.
>
> Ec

The big deal right now is that if we follow this general policy to its 
ultimate conclusion, about half of the current content on Wikibooks 
needs to be removed somehow.  Of particular note is the Computer Gaming 
Guides bookshelf, which are not precisely textbooks but are an 
interesting sub-community on Wikibooks.

I mention the Cookbook because I fail to see how that differs in a 
substantial way from the Jokebook.  Both have very similar internal 
organization and both have had some controvercial sections added from 
time to time (the current being [[b:Cookbook:Human]], about how to cook 
human flesh).  Both of these Wikibooks have a very substantial edit 
history, including edits by just about every admin past and current and 
many users.  Neither has been subject to any sort of VfD discussion 
until this week, and that is prompted only by Jimbo.  The only 
difference I see is that Jimbo likes the Cookbook and hates the 
Jokebook.  How do you make policy based off of that idea?

The other issue is that the only place to move these Wikibooks is to put 
them onto Wikicities, as there is no other logical Wikimedia project to 
move them to.  I know Jimbo has a lot on his plate, and trying to deal 
with the internal politics of a minor project like Wikibooks is not 
something he is prepared to deal with in a substantial way.  Still, I 
want everybody on this mailing list to know the turmoil that has 
resulted from these actions.  Most recently I'm getting into an edit war 
of deletion/undeletion with another admin over these books that Jimbo 
has declared off limits.  It is going to get worse before it gets better.

-- 
Robert Scott Horning