Talk:Wikibooks

What Should I do with the book I wrote?
A couple of ten years ago, I wrote a book, Codeword Dictionary. No need to ask, it was a real book, they paid me, I did not pay them. They would have singles that would interfeer.

Anyway, I have the copyright and was wondering what I should do with it, now that the Dead Tree edition is out of print and will probably not inspire a second edition.

The book was a dictionary of military operations names. I have used the files to work on the 'pedia's List of operations and projects (military and non-military) page, but we are talking thousands of entries here.

So what should I do? My options include:
 * Nothing
 * Make about a thousand entries to the page mentioned above.
 * Enter the whole thing as a WikiBook.
 * paying for it to be reprinted and give it away.

Your thoughts, please.PaulinSaudi 11:58, 16 Sep 2004 (UTC)]]


 * If you want to include it there, Wikibooks sounds like the most reasonable place to me. In the format you describe, it sounds more like a complete reference work than an encyclopedia article, so it would be appropriate for Wikibooks. As a complete text, it's probably beyond the scope of Wikipedia itself, though of course pieces of individual information can be added to individual articles as you've been doing. --Michael Snow 15:48, 16 Sep 2004 (UTC)


 * If you put it in Wikibooks, perhaps others can pull out the parts that are useful into individual Wikipedia entries, saving you the work. I might do a few.   – Quadell (talk) (quiz)   16:08, Sep 16, 2004 (UTC)


 * Another option might be to put it all into user subpages. Wikibooks seems an uncomfortable match to me, and Wikisource is out according to their current policy. I think you're doing the right thing raising it here for discussion. It's an excellent offer, and might also be a significant precedent.
 * How do you feel about breaking it into sensible 32k chunks and putting them all up as user subpages? Wikilinks to these from articles would be inappropriate, but wikilinks from talk pages would make the material available to other Wikipedia editors. It seems to me that's exactly the sort of thing the user namespace is here for.
 * That's my best initial thought. But interested in other views. Andrewa 16:19, 16 Sep 2004 (UTC)
 * I am unclear on what breaking it into userspace article entails. Can you point me to an example? Would a person looking at The War in Italy still find a link to Operation Soandso? We could chop it into a million little bits, each entry is a stand-alone. Still, giving it to WikiBook seems to be the low-work option. I am leaving in a few days for vacation. I will do nothing until Ramadan, when I return. PaulinSaudi 16:58, 16 Sep 2004 (UTC)]]


 * I assume it's alphabetical, so the first thing would probably be to break it into 27 or 28 pages, one for each initial letter, plus one for an index and one for non-alphabetic initial characters if needed. This is just to get the page size down. You might want then to break some of the larger pages down further, say BAA-BON and BOO-BZZ instead of B, for example, if this split cuts it roughly in half. That's where the index becomes important. This shouldn't be too much work.


 * So far as the War in Italy goes, at least the more prominent operations and perhaps even all of them would be mentioned, bolded, in the text of a larger article, and these could have redirects or disambiguations pointing to them. This is a lot of work obviously, but putting the material in the user namespace means that other editors can do some of it. Andrewa 12:12, 17 Sep 2004 (UTC)

It would be good to see it, then we could see whether having thousands of articles on it would be good. My gut feeling is that yes, it could be. Intrigue 18:44, 16 Sep 2004 (UTC)

Independently of whatever you may decide to do vis-a-vis Wikibooks, have you considered giving it to Project Gutenberg? [[User:Dpbsmith|Dpbsmith (talk)]] 18:52, 16 Sep 2004 (UTC)

I agree it's a generous offer, and thank you. One concern I have is whether it might be a little too generous. Even though you have the copyright, and could presumably prevent the publisher from re-issuing the book without cutting a deal with you, the contract might give the publisher some rights. At a minimum, it might restrain you from taking any action that kills the market for a possible reprint, by giving the same text away for free. Before you elect any of the options discussed here, you should probably speak with your publisher and/or your lawyer. JamesMLane 01:39, 19 Sep 2004 (UTC)

I would suggest you enter the whole thing as a wikibook anyway it seems as we have the same challenge. &#39;Nickimash&#39; (talk) 16:24, 16 September 2021 (UTC)

Something I'd like to add...
I'd like to add something along these lines:

Development Style

 * The development of a wikibook is closer to the development of an open source software project than it is to the creation of a wikipedia encyclopedia article. An encyclopedic article by nature has a neutral point of view, an agreed upon style, and requires less centralized coordination. A textbook, on the other hand, takes a specific instructive point of view: while verified facts remain facts, how to teach a specific subject can be done in a wide variety of styles. Because an entire textbook is a much larger undertaking than a single article, coordination among a small, dedicated team of authors is typically required. (A reference book that covers a variety of mostly-independent material, on the other hand, would be more condusive to a wikipedia development style.)


 * The challenges of wikibook development, therefore, are similar to the challenges of open source software development. What sometimes occurs in open source software is that a new software project is proposed with an enthusiastic team of volunteers determining the scope of the project, but not enough coding is done and thus the project can struggle for months without progress. Other times, there can be developers ready to code for a project, but the project itself suffers from a lack of leadership and thus the developers aren't used as effectively as they could have been. In contrast, a wikipedia article can be thought of as a message board, where hundreds of people can post and add on to it. But instead of having threaded messages, the artifact is a single entry that represents the consensus view.


 * Given these differences in development, it is not surprising to see that wikibooks face challenges that the wikipedia itself does not.

MShonle 20:15, 24 Dec 2004 (UTC) (Upon agreement to this idea, I'll post it to the article.)


 * I can certainly see good points from this comment. I however wonder this kind of the comment is appropriate to wikiepdia, an encyclopedia. Like in movie articles, we don't generally put reviews, at most a phrase like "the movie has received bad reviews." or something. I am thinking maybe we can have an article like development style or something where we discuss the difference between wiki or open sources. Because what you are getting at, in my opinion, appears more interesting to those who are interested in various development styles in general like Eric Raymond's cathedral and the bazaar. just my 2 cents. -- Taku 02:22, Dec 25, 2004 (UTC)


 * I can work on making it more NPOV, but it certainly doesn't sound like a review. (The last sentence I can do without, as perhaps that's what you take issue with?) MShonle 06:11, 25 Dec 2004 (UTC)


 * No, this is not NPOV issue at all. The problem is that the point above is not directly about wikibook. For example, I think it would make little sense for those who don't know about wikipedia or open source projects before. Put in another way, wikibooks poses some different challenges, thus we would be needing some different approach than wikipedia. That is relevant to us, but it is not clearly if it is so to the general public. Again, I would like to see this issue discussed somewhere, and, I am just saying, maybe not here. I propose to create an article about development sytle because in this way, the readers don't need to be familiar with the development sytles in wikipedia, open source and any other. Also those who are interested in the development style don't need to come to this article. What do you think? -- Taku 18:08, Dec 26, 2004 (UTC)


 * Were I to change the title of the header to "Wikibook Development Style" you'd realize it was quite related to wikibooks, and therefore meaningful and helpful for the wikipedia entry on wikibooks? I could include links so that a person could "get" it easier, but I think your concern is a little overblown. My main concern is that people will visit the wikibooks site and get confused by how different it is from the wikipedia. The development style is one of the most important differences. MShonle 05:39, 28 Dec 2004 (UTC)


 * Isn't that the exact point: people may get confused when they get to wikibook? We need to carefully identity who is the audience of this article or more generaly any article here. Needless to say, any article in wikipedia is written for the general public. For example, a wikipedia entry reads like it is talking about someone else. It gives strange feelings because you are reading about wikipedia in wikipedia! Also, please notice I have never said what you wrote is not meaningful nor helpful for people who are interested in wikibooks. In other words, forget about the connection between wikibook and wikipedia, which is factual and relevant to us and many people but is irrelevant to an encyclopedic article. If your concern is to clean up the confusions for those contributing or visiting both wikipedia and wikibooks, then you should put a clarification to wikipedia and wikibooks sites, not wikipedia articles. Think of some analogy. A Japanese person differs from an American person in a number of ways and I am sure many people are interested in the differences. We however don't put remaks on such differences in an article like Japanese people. Hope you understand I am only talking about the context, not your remak per se. -- Taku 06:28, Dec 29, 2004 (UTC)

About non technical books
I'm new here so please pardon me if it is a faq (which however I didn't find on the FAQ). What about writing non-technical books, like fantasy, spy stories, SciFi and so on? Anyone can seed a story and then collaboratively some great book can build up. Also, some automatized engine for the creation of e-books formats can be very interesting.
 * See A Million Penguins. Wiki Fiction writing doesn't work. occono (talk) 14:08, 29 October 2010 (UTC)

What relation does Wikibooks have to Wikipedia?
What guidelines if any are there for keeping Wikibooks and Wikipedia in sync? For example, I see that Wikibooks has a nascent section on Calculus, but Wikipedia has a much more developed set of articles for most any area of mathematics. In contributing to the Wikibooks section, should I simply link from Wikibooks articles to Wikipedia ones, or copy-paste content? Thanks for your advice.
 * I assume it is far too late, but let's hope others may read the old threads. To use Wikipedia content (or content from a few other WMF projects), request an import at b:WB:RFI. An administrator will import the article(s) with (usually) full edit histories in compliance with the GFDL. – Mike.lifeguard  &#124; talk 02:40, 25 October 2007 (UTC)

Wikibooks vs. wikipedia - wikiversity - wikisource - wiktionary...
This may appear as a dumb, misplaced or even indecent question to wikibooks contributors, but believe me I'm far from hostile to this project. The question: why a separate wikibooks? Basic as this question is, I didn't find a real answer anywhere on wikibooks or wikipedia.

I see a certain difference beween the "books" "encyclopedia" and "dictionary" projects, however these seem gradual rather than essential. When I want to inform myself on a topic, I don't care about these distinctions. Definition, description, etymology, related matters, manuals: I don't see why I would one but not the others. Then, why does one have to look in 3 different projects?

More general remark: wouldn't it be easier to pool resources and assign labels, categories, keywords and file properties to each item for easy retrieval?

--Igor 12:18, 3 August 2005 (UTC)


 * What are the specific differences between Wikibooks and Wikiversity? Forgive me for not signing in, my monobook is messing with IE and preventing me from writing this in Wikiversity. Dessydes


 * Wikibooks is intended for things that are not encylopedic, but instructional. e.g. wikipedia will tell you what something is, wikibooks will tell you how to do it. Wikiversity is supposed to be managed courses utilizing wikibooks (or similar materials) to teach specific subjects. Kellen T 06:55, 23 August 2006 (UTC)

You ask a very good question! And one that I think the article should shed more light on... If you work on contributing to WP, you will soon learn that there is some rule somewhere against almost anything that you want to contribute. For example, "sources". There are no sources listed for over 90% of current WP content! And "WP is not a how-to". You could study the subject of "what WP is not" (officially) for a good list of all the reasons we need other places to build good, useful information resources. Don't know how much better things are over at Wikibooks; I'm about to try to find out.

Template:advert
I am a contributor to English Wikibooks. (I do not edit the Wikipedia much.) I have added the advert tag to this article about Wikibooks.

This article only seems to promote Wikibooks. It includes no negative comments about Wikibooks, despite the low quality of some of our projects. Wikibooks:Wikibooks:Staff lounge links to information that might help improve this article.

Instead of editing this article, I will let other users (preferably those external to Wikibooks) improve this article. --Kernigh 22:15, 22 December 2005 (UTC)


 * No, I'm pretty sure that's all wrong. There is nothing to describe about wikibooks besides what is on this page. Only citable referencable opinions can be presented on wikipedia, and there is probably only very obscure media coverage of the fledgeling wikibooks project. As such, there can be neither negative nor positive commentary here. A definition of the project is all we can expect. That said, can we remove that tag? Lotusduck 02:04, 3 January 2006 (UTC)


 * Okay, I'm not the anonymous user that removed the advert tag, but I think that I justified him or her. It's a wikimedia project. Wikimedia is a reasonable source for all the facts here: What it should be, and that it exists. Criticism of it would be true and fair, but inappropriate because wikipedia is not a publisher of original thought, even if those thoughts are true. So if I criticised wikibooks for being incomplete or anything like that, I would be pushing forward my own ideas. If I wanted to make this article ballanced, I would have to source some not self published article or book saying something about wikibooks, which is very very unlikely just by the nature of how tiny and underworked and unknown wikibooks is. Now, this may be a good time to ignore all rules and throw in a comment that wikibooks is less worked through than wikipedia and largely incomplete, but just because someone hasn't broken the rules to make this article better doesn't mean it's an advertisement. The article is as informative as it can be while strictly following guidelines, I'm removing the tag. Lotusduck 18:42, 4 January 2006 (UTC)

The current article does a better job of presenting facts than the version that I originally tagged. You might be correct: I know of and, but almost no one has information on the quality (good or bad) of textbooks from Wikibooks. --Kernigh 03:42, 6 January 2006 (UTC)

Merge in wikijunior ?
Someone prodded the other article. How about merging the content here. Doesn't seem to meet WP:WEB otherwise. Megapixie 01:45, 4 July 2006 (UTC)
 * This is IMHO a silly rule for Wikipedia to begin with, although in this regard I guess you can delete the Wikibooks article, as well as Wikinews and Wiktionary on the same grounds. This is all that more important because Wikijunior is really using Wikibooks as an incubator site, and essentially acting as an independent Wikimedia project with its own user base and seperate set of rules over content development that are largely independent of Wikibooks.
 * I see very little reason to merge this article other than some nebulous justification to cull references to all Wikimedia projects for lack of notability. Wikijunior does fit the justification as being something more than merely another Wikiproject, and is especially notable for being the first major Wikimedia Foundation project that was initiated by outside effort (the Beck Foundation) rather than coming from an idea by Wikimedia users.  This of course does show some of the tension that exists right now between Wikijunior content developers and fundraising that is happening on behalf of Wikijunior, and something that is missing from the Wikijunior article.  --Robert Horning 13:25, 10 July 2006 (UTC)

Page doesn't work in Internet Explorer
Page doesn't work in Internet Explorer.

I think this is because the SVG image at the top of the page. I'll let someone who knows what they are doing fix this.

Thanks, Kelly


 * Works for me in both IE and firefox. Kellen T 23:22, 27 July 2006 (UTC)

Can a tutur reaserch Nicolesonio (talk) 05:16, 6 October 2021 (UTC)

Errors
1. StrategyWiki has given up on its relicense attempt. and

2. No mention is made of my wiki WikiKnowledge

Books moved to WikiKnowledge:
 * 1) Sonic 2
 * 2) Sonic 3
 * 3) Mega Man
 * 4) Eggerland
 * 5) The entire Wikibooks Pokédex
 * 6) Fighting game moves
 * 7) GTA: LCS
 * 8) Super Monkey Ball
 * 9) Sonic R

I even got some of the VB classic book after one Wikibooks user left the project. Gerard Foley 21:52, 24 August 2006 (UTC)

b:Wikibooks:Wikibooks for wikipedians
Wikibooks is working on a new effort to create pages and programs to help welcome wikipedians to the wikibooks project. The current welcome page (a bit of a draft at the moment) is at b:Wikibooks:Wikibooks for wikipedians. I would like to put a link to this page in a wikibooks-specific high-traffic area here on wikipedia, to try and produce interest in that project. Should I put such a link on this page, or is there a more appropriate place to put such a link? --User:Wknight8111 (WB:Whiteknight) 02:15, 25 August 2006 (UTC)

What are Wikistudy and Wikiprofessional
I`d happy to know wat are them--Tigru 03:40, 16 September 2006 (UTC)


 * This is a pet project of one of the admins on Wikibooks, b:User:Jguk, who tried to reorganize some of the content on Wikibooks into different themes. In addition to the above ideas, he also added Wikiversity and Wikijunior into the mix, even though Wikiversity has since spun off into a completely seperate Wikimedia sister-project.  I'm still not completely sure the direction he wanted to go with this effort.  --Robert Horning 19:47, 19 September 2006 (UTC)

Lots of Wiki-referencing!
A lot of the statements here are linked to Wikimedia-related stuff! There are very few outside sources for any of this. I don't know if Wikimedia stuff is fine to link to as a source, but I'm just pointing out it happens in this article a loooot. I don't know anyhting about it though so I can't fix it myself. :-( Miltopia 10:42, 19 November 2006 (UTC)


 * Keep in mind that the "original" source material for most of this is by definition going to come from within Wikimedia websites. Of course there aren't going to be external references for this material except as a purely secondary (and highly biased) source of information.  Most of the references are to discussion or talk pages, that would also be inappropriate to modify or change and would be considered grounds for administrative action (like blocking accounts) if it were to be modifed.


 * This is something that is going to take some serious research to try and resolve in terms of producing a NPOV Wikipedia article about some of the issues involved, but that doesn't mean that we shouldn't be using Wikimedia-related content here. This is clearly not a case of one article quoting another article in an ad-nausium circle, but original material being generated by participants of the Wikibook project and its relationship with the Wikimedia Foundation board of trustees.


 * In short, this is an invalid comment in terms of this article as the only reliable sources of information that could be possible used for citations for this article would be from Wikimedia derived websites. I frankly wouldn't trust something written about Wikibooks that was in the popular press, particularly for those things that are about internal policy disputes and project directions where a much more reliable primary source would be the talk pages where the discussion actually took place (or the Textbook-l mailing list, for example).  --Robert Horning 18:33, 20 November 2006 (UTC)

New Wikibooks logo
Hi all, whatever happened with the logo renewal could be added to this article. It seems to me that the Finnish Wikibooks is the only one to use it thus far? –Zinjixmaggir 12:25, 21 December 2006 (UTC)

good NPOV
Nice job on the NPOV of this article. It doesn't dodge the issues, and doesn't seem tainted by pro-wiki ideological bias at all.--75.83.140.254 19:47, 3 January 2007 (UTC)


 * Are there any articles that are tainted with pro-wiki ideological bias? – Qxz 21:13, 4 March 2007 (UTC)

Weasel Words?
Under the criticisms section, the phrase "some argue" is used as an argument against Wikibooks.--ॐJesucristo301 (talk) 00:35, 17 December 2007 (UTC)

Please incorporate this text into the article
{| class="collapsible collapsed" style="width:100%;font-size:88%;text-align: left; border: 0px; margin-top: 0.2em;" ! style="background-color: #00B7EB;" | Sister Projects Interview: Wikibooks
 * style="text-align:center;" |
 * style="border: solid 1px silver; padding: 8px; background-color: white;" |
 * style="border: solid 1px silver; padding: 8px; background-color: white;" |
 * style="border: solid 1px silver; padding: 8px; background-color: white;" |

What is Wikibooks? What are its goals and objectives?


 * Wikibooks is an effort to collaboratively write open-content textbooks. There’s often some confusion due to the name, but Wikibooks is for textbooks, not books in general.


 * The project started 10 July 2003 after requests from Karl Wick. As we all know, Wikipedia is not for instructional material. Karl had been working on collating articles on organic chemistry into a format that people could learn from. Of course, there was a VFD, and the book was deleted. That spawned the Wikibooks project, which Jimbo has hailed as “the next big thing in education” and is generally regarded as being a much bigger project than Wikipedia. It’ll probably take 20 years or more to flourish where Wikipedia has flourished in a much shorter time.


 * In terms of history of Wikibooks, there have been a few major changes over the project’s lifespan. Wikiversity (interview) used to be a project within Wikibooks. Wikiversity wasn’t seen as a textbook, and therefore not suitable for inclusion in Wikibooks, so a VFD and proposal resulted in Wikiversity being split off. Wikibooks is still home to two major subprojects. The Wikijunior project is for kids’ books, in an effort to write age-appropriate non-fiction books for kids up to age 12. The second project is our cookbook.


 * Another major development was the formalization of the exclusion of strategy guides (aka game guides). This was always the intent, but was insufficiently and unequally enforced. The rationale is that textbooks are inherently academic. If you take a course in university, there will never be a walkthrough as required reading, so we don’t allow such things at Wikibooks. We do however allow textbooks about video games. If you’re taking video game design, then of course you’ll need that sort of textbook. The line is sometimes hard to draw, but the distinction is between a walkthrough and an academic examination.

Describe what activities do the editors in Wikibooks do most.


 * Wikibooks editors, called ‘’Wikibookians’’, tend to work on their own project. Writing a textbook is a much more ambitious endeavor than writing an encyclopedia article for example, so people who are successful in doing so tend to be very driven, but focus their work exclusively on one book or one subject area. Since textbooks are instructional it is not enough to simply present information as you would in Wikipedia – the writing style and the overall structure must be coherent from an instructional point of view. Readers need to be able to learn from a Wikibook, so structure, organization and tone are very important. From this point of view, it’s much more important to know your subject matter thoroughly. Many of our editors are educators of various kinds. Of course, Wikibooks is no more a meritocracy than Wikipedia, but it is much more difficult to write a textbook well if you don’t know much about the subject compared to writing an encyclopedia article on a subject you’re not familiar with.


 * Wikibooks has all the same maintenance tasks as Wikipedia does, but let’s focus on the differences. As you can imagine, cataloguing our books is a major challenge. Until recently we used static lists to keep track of our books. Needless to say, this method isn’t scalable, so we’ve now harnessed an extension called Dynamic Page List which allows us to dynamically list items in a category. We’ve created a new Subject: namespace for these catalogue pages. We also catalogue books by various other methods (Dewey Decimal, Library of Congress & Alphabetical), but these methods are becoming less and less important. Subject:Engineering is a great example of this new method. Exploring around in the Subject: namespace is always a great way to find books you’re looking for but can’t necessarily find in other ways. Maintaining these pages is as easy as ensuring that new books are properly categorized, which we did in the past anyways.

What are some of the tasks done by administrators?


 * Again, most administrator tasks are consistent across all wikis. One task which will not be familiar to most Wikipedians is importing. At Wikibooks, administrators may import pages from other projects with a full edit history (barring technical errors of course). Content is often imported by request – someone starting a new text will often want to use Wikipedia articles as seed material. Importing in this manner allows us to comply with the GFDL instead of the much more cumbersome copy-paste method.


 * There are sometimes irritating situations with this, and I’ll focus on Wikipedia here, though it’s not the only example. Wikipedians will often want to move content to Wikibooks after an AFD, but nobody bothers to check whether it’s suitable for inclusion. Wikipedia has an inclusion policy, and few would be thrilled with people from other wikis dumping their unwanted content in Wikipedia. Likewise, Wikibooks is not a place to dump unwanted pages. It’s not hard to determine what’s acceptable – we’re a very friendly folk, so just ask :)


 * Helping new contributors is actually one of the main tasks at Wikibooks. The bar is a little higher for beginners because we’re writing textbooks not encyclopedia articles, so we try to focus very much on making our processes easy to follow, and the regulars are very available to help out new contributors. If you can’t figure something out, there’s a very active helpful community ready to help you out. In the past, I’ve had many emails using an amazing array of adjectives to describe how much more welcoming the Wikibooks project is to new contributors, and how helpful the community is. This is especially true of class projects. Wikibooks is sometimes used as a teaching tool, especially in universities. This results in a big influx of new contributors who need to be “herded” in the right directions. The professor often doesn’t know any better how things work than the students to, so it falls to the community to help them along. And we’ve had many projects like this which have been highly successful. One such project was the Social and Cultural Foundations of American Education which is a recurring class project out of Old Dominion University.

If I want to become an active editor, what should be my first step (other than signing up)?


 * We try to keep the bar to entry as low as possible. Most people will find that Wikibooks is a much more laid-back environment for contributing than Wikipedia. We’re a very tight-knit group of contributors, and we tend to work very well together.


 * If you’re interested in writing a text, first see if there’s something you can add to or re-work. Just like there should be one article per topic in Wikipedia, there should be one text per subject in Wikibooks. Only when scope or audience is significantly different should there be more than one text on a subject. If there is a pre-existing book, then get crackin!


 * If not, then you’ll want to start off with a detailed outline of the structure of the book. You want to detail the scope of the book, and the overall picture of what you’ll be teaching. Once that’s complete, then start filling in content. Many new authors at Wikibooks make what I consider to be a mistake: they dive right in with contributing content with no clear idea of what the text should look like in the future. “Scope creep” is common, and can be easily avoided by planning what you want to do ahead of time.

Does the project have any plans to promote itself or recruit more members?


 * Contributors are the number one thing Wikibooks needs to succeed. Wherever I can, I try to talk up Wikibooks, and I know other regulars do too. Beyond that I’m not aware of any organized large-scale efforts to get new authors to come to Wikibooks. User:Whiteknight has given several talks on Wikibooks, which are certainly helpful. We need more press to gain the scale Wikipedia has. This is something that Wikibooks should be dealing with as a community, and I don’t think we’ve done enough in the past.


 * For any Wikipedians involved in a WikiProject, you may well be interested in coming over to see whether we have texts that you can contribute to, or if there’s a gap in coverage you can help to fill.


 * Recently there have been a number of book donations – authors of books have decided to release their book into the wild and add it to our collection. Getting the book converted to wikitext is often a major hurdle, but it’s great to have a book added all in one go. While this increases the number of books we host, it doesn’t usually add more contributors. Content is great, but without the people to back it up, that’s all it is.

What are some difficulties that Wikibooks faced?


 * The major difficulty that I see for Wikibooks is getting new contributors. The only thing that will make us successful is more people to maintain the wiki, but more importantly contribute content. Many contributors come and write a single book, then leave. We need people to come and stay. Even if you’re not going to contribute another entire textbook, there is always editing to be done. Slow, steady and long-term work in a variety of areas is preferable to contributing only one book and leaving.


 * To do this, we need to become more recognizable. One way is by choosing a new logo for our project. The discussion about our new logo isn’t restricted to Wikibookians – anyone can come help improve the options and help us decide what to pick.


 * Another ongoing set of issues is technical. MediaWiki was written for Wikipedia, so it’s unsurprising that the software isn’t ideal for writing textbooks. We have many wishes for software features, but there’s been little progress in getting anything major done. My hope is that the Foundation may hire another developer which would allow some additional time to go into developing features for the non-Wikipedia wikis (Wikibooks is not the only project that feels ignored). I should be clear that the fault doesn’t lie with the developers – they’re doing excellent work. In recent months we’ve seen fruition of efforts on SUL and FlaggedRevs. Global blocking seems to be coming along shortly; same for rev_deleted; and global groups are potentially in the near future. It’s just that none of these developments are helpful for Wikibooks to overcome some problems in using software designed for a slightly different purpose.

How can I recognize the best works of Wikibooks?


 * Wikibooks has Featured Books just like you find Featured Articles at Wikipedia. We’ve divided the books by subject on Featured Books, and there’s a corresponding subject page at Subject:Featured books. These books must meet certain criteria and are discussed thoroughly before being marked as featured. We’re excited to get Stable versions enabled to assist this process.


 * I'm not sure whether my interview is considered a reliable source. &mdash; Mike.lifeguard &#124; @en.wb 19:44, 25 January 2009 (UTC)

Paper from sustainable sources ?
as of March 2010 there appears to be no information on the type of paper used to manufacture physical Wikibooks. FSC promotes sustainable wood production. 79.75.31.167 (talk) 16:30, 29 March 2010 (UTC)

Wikijunior
Seems there was afd consensus to merge the former Wikijunior article into this one. However, as can be seen from the link, there is much content that got left behind. -- &oelig; &trade; 09:21, 12 August 2010 (UTC)


 * Which tends to happen with mergers and deletions. Why should this be a surprise?  --14:56, 12 August 2010 (UTC)


 * It shouldn't happen, especially if the old article is much more informative. If the AfD consensus was to merge then there should be a proper merge that takes into account all relevant content. -- &oelig; &trade; 00:03, 14 August 2010 (UTC)


 * That almost never happens during a merger from my experience with any article. Information is almost always lost.... which is one reason why I usually complain about deletions in the first place.  Yes, a "proper merge" should bring in all of the relevant information, but that almost never happens in practice and is one of the shortcomings of mergers and deletions in general.  --Robert Horning (talk)


 * True indeed. I chalk it up to laziness and apathy amongst most users. Seems AfD closers couldn't be bothered performing merges on articles dealing with subjects they don't care about. Myself, although I'll be the first to admit I'm a procrastinating lazy-ass, when I do take the time to do a merge I make an effort to preserve as much non-redundant content as possible, and comply with all the CC-BY-SA and GFDL licensing requirements. And the subject of the article is usually irrelevant to me. My agenda is improvement of Wikipedia, not a certain subject ON Wikipedia. -- &oelig; &trade; 11:38, 16 August 2010 (UTC)

Off task
This page is for improvements on the Wikibooks article, not the project. 64.92.53.159 (talk) 23:54, 24 December 2013 (UTC)

External links modified
Hello fellow Wikipedians,

I have just modified one external link on Wikibooks. Please take a moment to review my edit. If you have any questions, or need the bot to ignore the links, or the page altogether, please visit this simple FaQ for additional information. I made the following changes:
 * Added archive https://web.archive.org/web/20100608021108/http://siteanalytics.compete.com/wikibooks.org/ to http://siteanalytics.compete.com/wikibooks.org/

When you have finished reviewing my changes, you may follow the instructions on the template below to fix any issues with the URLs.

Cheers.— InternetArchiveBot  (Report bug) 01:13, 22 March 2017 (UTC)