[Foundation-l] Rethinking Wikibooks (was Re: PediaPress)

Tue Nov 16 21:00:47 UTC 2010

I really enjoyed reading your mail, Robert, because I could literally feel
the love you have for this project.

Quoting Amir, I too would like to share my 2 cents about this.

1 cent: I reflected a lot on some slides Eric Moeller showed us in Gdansk.
He compared sister project using some parameters, and one of them was the
"work unit":
Wikipedia has a lot of granularity, you can do little changes and they are
still effective.
Wikisource and Wikibooks have big work units (you start or edit books, not
smaller articles).
It saw a leap (everyone saw that) in the contribution on Wikisource after we
installed the Proofreading extension
and promoted widely a single "Proofreading of the Month". People started
proofreading single pages, they felt their contribution to be tangible and
useful, and this literally changed everything.
Wikisources still have a long way to do, but they are growing fast, and I
definitely believe that reducing the "work unit" was a crucial factor.

2 cent: in Italy, there is a community of high school teachers called
"Matematicamente", and last year they wrote and published a mathematical
textbook releasing it under Creative Commons. Long story short,
the founder of the project told me they tried working on Wikibooks, but the
vast majority of the teacher was not comfortable with the wiki mark-up, and
at the end of the day it had been easier to work on OpenOffice (I just let
you imagine how difficult it was for them to collaborate on a single
book...). Moreover, for that project NPOV worked as an additional obstacle,
plus all the community rules they had to face. The guy told me he still like
Wikibooks, but it did not work, mainly for the people's "wiki illiteracy".

My bests

Aubrey

2010/11/16 Amir E. Aharoni <amir.aharoni at mail.huji.ac.il>

> On Tue, Nov 16, 2010 at 08:11, Robert S. Horning
> <robert_horning at netzero.net> wrote:
> > Something is missing here.  I'd like to think it is this tangible medium
> > of a physical book that is what is wrong, but I'm really not sure.  If
> > there are other ideas, I'd like to hear them.
> > ...
> > What is wrong?
>
> <my_theory>
> My theory about the very high profile of Wikipedia and the mostly low
> profile of the other projects is that in Wikipedia it is very easy to
> predicate. People love to predicate. Look it up in a dictionary - i
> refer to all of that word's meanings.
>
> Put simply, Wikipedia is the world's largest and most convenient
> soapbox. There's a policy page in the English Wikipedia that says that
> Wikipedia is not a soapbox ([[WP:SOAP]]). But people try to use it
> this way anyway. It is very, very attractive. Some of them eventually
> understand that NPOV is a good thing and become good Wikipedia
> editors.
>
> An encyclopedia, by its nature, is the perfect platform for saying
> things like "X is a Y". We are all familiar with that: Kosovo IS A
> country / unrecognized country / partially recognized country /
> de-facto independent country / province of Serbia / occupied province
> of Serbia. This opportunity to easily disrupt the NPOV - even
> temporarily - with one's own version of the predication is a
> necessarily evil that makes Wikipedia so popular. Other projects are
> nowhere near offering the opportunity to say such things, at least not
> as easily.
>
> Wiktionary is supposed to consist of almost nothing but predications,
> but it's too linguistic. Wikisource is a great place for lovers of
> archiving and typesetting (like myself), but you can't be original
> there. Wikinews and Wikiquote... nobody is quite sure what they are at
> all.
>
> Wikibooks can, theoretically, be a place for making predications and
> for spreading POV. But most people, given the choice of writing a book
> about a subject or an encyclopedic article about it, will write an
> encyclopedic article. Not just because it's shorter, but because it
> looks like a more natural way of answering the question "What is
> X?"... the way they want to answer it.
> </my_theory>
>
> How to solve it? Sorry, no idea. I love textbooks for all ages, so i
> would love to see Wikibooks flourish. I made a few corrections to
> existing Wikibooks, but i find it strange to start a Wikibook from
> scratch.
>
> --
> Amir E. Aharoni
>
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