[Foundation-l] Glycerol information

Thu Nov 11 14:14:05 UTC 2010

I will try to address several points brought up by Nikola Smolenski.

Regarding the lack of interlinking between books at Wikibooks, you have to
understand that each book is usually designed to stand alone, without having
to link to other books or even Wikipedia.  While some might wonder why
anyone would want to use PediaPress to print articles/create books for
Wikipedia, at Wikibooks of course people would want to create books.
There's a big difference between Wikipedia "books"[1] and Wikibooks books in
terms of their design for offline use.

Wikibooks can have information that might be found in an encyclopedia, but
they will present the information in a different way.  Topics will be
covered in comprehensive detail and not just through an overview, with
prerequisite information (up to the scope of the book) provided so that the
reader will not need to go anywhere else.

Why aren't people interested enough in working on Wikibooks?  The following
could be possible reasons.

*  People don't like the fact that each book can have its own unique style,
making it harder to contribute across the entire wiki.
* Contributors to individual books don't usually communicate with
contributors to similar books or even with the tiny project-wide community.
* The project is not working on one large whole such as an encyclopedia or
dictionary, so the community is fragmented and few contribute with any big
picture in mind.
* Reliance on references is not required to the extent seen at Wikipedia, so
maybe some see Wikibooks as unreliable.
* As mentioned before, the project doesn't get the same ranking in search
results so people feel contributions will be ignored.
* Sister links from Wikipedia are relegated to the absolute bottom of
articles so people stop reading by that point.
* The project is not as mature as Wikipedia, so people feel it's a risk to
contribute.  See the below quotes.

"The vast majority of our users are using Wikipedia and not the other
projects, which means even a small improvement to Wikipedia is likely to
have more impact than even a large improvement to one of the other
projects." -Thomas Dalton [2]

"It's absolutely not clear to me (and I don't think anyone) that a focused
investment in, say, textbook development is actually going to result in
predictable payoff in a transformatively larger number of sustainable
content contributors." -Erik Moeller [3]

Regarding the making of antifreeze, there would be no problem with it at
Wikibooks, but it would likely need to be integrated into a larger
textbook.  I would suggest adding it to Automobile Repair [4] which is
already linked from "auto mechanic" at Wikipedia [5].

If your topic is developed enough, it will garner readers on its own.
Wikibooks provides a valuable place for in-depth books on topics.  Jimmy
Wales was excited about the project in 2005 but noted that it will take 20
years to come to fruition because it is a much bigger project [6].  The time
and effort will pay off.  I hope to see you there soon and will be happy to
assist you in getting started.

Aaron Adrignola
User:Adrignola

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Books
[2]
http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/foundation-l/2010-October/061533.html
[3]
http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/foundation-l/2010-October/061608.html
[4] http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Automobile_Repair
[5] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auto_mechanic#External_links
[6] http://www.ted.com/talks/jimmy_wales_on_the_birth_of_wikipedia.html(19:15)