Wikibooks



Wikibooks (previously called Wikimedia Free Textbook Project and Wikimedia-Textbooks) is a wiki-based Wikimedia project hosted by the Wikimedia Foundation for the creation of free content digital textbooks and annotated texts that anyone can edit.

Initially, the project was created solely in English in July 2003; a later expansion to include additional languages was started in July 2004. As of July 2024, there are Wikibooks sites active for languages comprising a total of  articles and  recently active editors.

History
The wikibooks.org domain was registered on July 19, 2003. It was launched to host and build free textbooks on subjects such as organic chemistry and physics, in response to a request by Wikipedia contributor Karl Wick. Two major sub-projects, Wikijunior and Wikiversity, were created within Wikibooks before its official policy was later changed so that future incubator-type projects are started according to the Wikimedia Foundation's new project policy.

In August 2006, Wikiversity became an independent Wikimedia Foundation project.

Since 2008, Wikibooks has been included in BASE.

In June 2016, Compete.com estimated that Wikibooks had 1,478,812 unique visitors.

Wikijunior
Wikijunior is a subproject of Wikibooks that specializes in books for children. The project consists of both a magazine and a website, and is currently being developed in English, Danish, Finnish, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Spanish, Arabic and Bangla. It is funded by a grant from the Beck Foundation.

Book content
While some books are original, others began as text copied over from other sources of free content textbooks found on the Internet. All of the site's content is released under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike license (or a compatible license). This means that, as with its sister project, Wikipedia, contributions remain copyrighted to their creators, while the licensing ensures that it can be freely distributed and reused subject to certain conditions.

Wikibooks differs from Wikisource in that Wikisource collects exact copies and original translations of existing free content works, such as the original text of Shakespearean plays, while Wikibooks is dedicated either to original works, significantly altered versions of existing works, or annotations to original works.

Multilingual statistics
As of July 2024, there are Wikibooks sites for languages of which  are active and  are closed. The active sites have articles and the closed sites have  articles. There are registered users of which  are recently active.

The top ten Wikibooks language projects by mainspace article count: For a complete list with totals, see Wikimedia Statistics.

Reception
Meng-Fen et al suggested that while there isn't much social connection between contributors of wikibooks, the contributors had no major issues coordinating to write books.