[Foundation-l] Deletion of Wikibooks content by Jimbo

Tue Nov 29 22:46:45 UTC 2005

Daniel Mayer wrote:

>Jokebooks are completely out of place in Wikibooks because they do not serve a
>valid educational purpose. A textbook on comedy that had example jokes in it
>would be welcome, however. This type of distinction was decided on when I
>helped found Wikibooks, so Jimbo is not acting by executive fiat. He is simply
>trying to put that project back on track. 
>  
>
I may be misremembering, but I don't recall an explicit and narrow 
requirement that Wikibooks be "educational" when it was set up, and 
certainly not "educational" in the narrow sense of "something that a 
university would teach".  Of course textbooks were a major sort of book 
that people had in mind, but I don't recall anyone saying that *only* 
textbooks would be permitted (not to mention defining what constitutes a 
"textbook"!).

Instead, I recall a focus mostly centered around *format*---Wikibooks 
was to be a place for book-like things that were of a detail, length, or 
tone (e.g. how-tos or lengthy narrative exposition) unsuitable for an 
encyclopedia article and therefore unsuitable for Wikipedia, but still 
useful as information in some sense.  I took as a possibly mistaken 
implicit assumption that the *content* was to be basically the same as 
Wikipedia---anything verifiable and neutral.

-Mark