tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-37738076869821335812024-03-12T18:29:21.572-07:00Wikibooks NewsNews from and about en.wikibooks.org, an online open-content free textbook website.Whiteknighthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16207472474429254890noreply@blogger.comBlogger177125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3773807686982133581.post-25261917892811754462009-07-25T08:15:00.000-07:002009-07-26T05:13:09.409-07:00Wikibooks: Chicken and the EggI'm at the Wikiconference NYC today and just got out of a very interesting keynote speech, and Q+A session lead by Jimmy Wales. As can be expected in a room full of Wikipedians, lead by the man who founded Wikipedia there wasn't a whole lot of talk about the various sister projects such as Wikibooks. However, mention of Wikibooks was raised at one point during a question about textbooks and instruction.<br /><br />Jimmy Wales stabbed on a point that I've known for a while but haven't really vocalized before. The problem with Wikibooks, he says, is an issue of K-12 adoption. To be adopted in a classroom a book must comply to a pre-set standard curricula. Without curriculum compliance, there is no hope whatsoever that the book will ever be used in an actual classroom. Without a target audience, it's hard for editors to be motivated to write books, and the cycle continues. This problem is compounded by the fact that many existing curricula are copyrighted and not available to us for free use.<br /><br />Wikibooks has done pretty well so far in the area of college-level textbooks. Many of our editors are college students or college professors (or graduates who managed to retain some of their knowledge), and there has already been good feedback from college courses that are using our books as part of their programs. So, there's a feedback loop here that reinforces and encourages more development in these books. Our collection of college-level books therefore is of a much higher quality then our collection of K-12 books.<br /><br />People have said in the past before that Wikibooks has a dearth of quality books for young children. People have also mentioned in the past that books on Wikibooks don't follow standard curricula. It's the interplay between these two items that is something I've never quite put my finger on before, but that Jimmy nailed. This doesn't necessarily explain why Wikijunior is so stagnant (since children younger than school age don't need to follow a curriculum), although Part of Wikijunior's target demographic does include school-aged children as well.<br /><br />Luckily, I don't think that this problem is a hopeless one. I think that in time we will cross the hurdle and break the feedback cycle of stagnation. A big part of this is the license migration, so now Wikibooks is more compatible with CC-BY-SA content (which is how most other open-content textbooks are licensed). I also think that there are efforts that can be made to conform to existing (although admittedly not often used) free standard curriculums, and also to put pressure on governments to make more existing curriculums freely available.<br /><br />I would love to hear more ideas on this topic, to try and start brainstorming ways we can improve our K-12 books.Whiteknighthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16207472474429254890noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3773807686982133581.post-48874158007441209012009-05-21T14:02:00.000-07:002009-05-21T11:03:35.235-07:00Licensing Vote ResultsThe results of the <a href="http://wikibooks.blogspot.com/2009/04/wikimedia-licensing-vote.html">Wikimedia licensing vote</a> have been made public today. From Robert Rohde on foundation-l:<br /><blockquote><br />The licensing update poll has been tallied.<br /><br />"Yes, I am in favor of this change" : 13242 (75.8%)<br />"No, I am opposed to this change" : 1829 (10.5%)<br />"I do not have an opinion on this change" : 2391 (13.7%)<br /><br />Total ballots cast and certified: 17462</blockquote><br />This is quite a good result, and one that I am happy to see. The WMF board has not made a final decision on the matter, but I sincerely hope that they pursue this license migration.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Update:</span> The board moved pretty quickly on these results, and have already written and approved a resolution:<br /><blockquote><br />Whereas the Wikimedia community, in a project-wide vote, has expressed<br />very strong support for changing the licensing terms of Wikimedia sites,<br />and whereas the Board of Trustees has previously adopted a license<br />update resolution requesting that such a change be made possible, the<br />Board hereby declares its intent to implement these changes.<br />Accordingly, the Wikimedia Foundation exercises its option under Version<br />1.3 of the GNU Free Documentation License to relicense the Wikimedia<br />sites as Massive Multiauthor Collaborations under the Creative Commons<br />Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 license, effective June 15, 2009. The Board<br />of Trustees hereby instructs the Executive Director to have all<br />Wikimedia licensing terms updated and terms of use implemented<br />consistent with the proposal at<br /><a href="http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Licensing_update" target="_blank">http://meta.wikimedia.org/<wbr>wiki/Licensing_update</a></blockquote><br />So it looks like Wikibooks (and all other GFDL WM projects) will be migrating to CC-BY-SA-3.0 dual-licensing by June 15th. Quite a cool thing to happen!Whiteknighthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16207472474429254890noreply@blogger.com8tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3773807686982133581.post-87339988186245188612009-05-18T09:48:00.000-07:002009-05-18T09:54:57.457-07:00Wikibooks First!I got a great email today from <a href="http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Cbrown1023">Cbrown1023</a>. He did a <a href="http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&safe=active&q=cold+war+nuclear+statistics&btnG=Search">Google search</a> and a <a href="http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Modern_History/Cold_War">result from Wikibooks</a> appeared first, even before any results from Wikipedia! What's funny is that it's not on a topic that I would consider to be a particular strength of our collection.<a href="http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&safe=active&q=cold+war+nuclear+statistics&btnG=Search" target="_blank"></a> Part of me hopes this page is not being heavily linked to as an example of the worst parts of Wikibooks, but when you see the page in question you might have that thought too. Another reminder of how much more work we need in order to make a great library of free books!<br /><br />My next point of interest is to wonder why Cbrown1023 was searching for information about nuclear war? Do the WP people know something us WB folks don't?Whiteknighthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16207472474429254890noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3773807686982133581.post-46038279509649441862009-05-16T06:20:00.000-07:002009-05-16T06:25:19.257-07:00Categories Are Doing GreatThanks to users like [[<a href="http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/User:Adrignola">User:Adrignola</a>]] and [[<a href="http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/User:Darklama">User:Darklama</a>]] (and others, sorry for those I didn't mention), the Wikibooks category system is much cleaner and more usable now then it ever has been in my recollection. Also, if you active Darklamas new <a href="http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/MediaWiki:Gadget-category-colorcode.css">Color Coded Categories</a> gadget (which is deceptively simple), you'll get a great category browsing experience.Whiteknighthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16207472474429254890noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3773807686982133581.post-79855964494871737372009-05-10T18:03:00.000-07:002009-05-10T18:06:53.971-07:00Wikimedia NY MeetingWikimedia is having a meeting at Columbia University on Sunday May 17. Here's the announcement that was sent out on the mailinglist:<br /><br /><blockquote>Come one, come all!<br /><br />Our next meeting for Wikimedia NYC is Sunday May 17 at Columbia University.<br /><br />This is a meeting for volunteers to the projects of the non-profit<br />Wikimedia Foundation, and everyone else too, who has ever looked at<br />Wikipedia and wondered what's going on behind it.<br /><br />One big topic of discussion, out of many, will be preparing for our<br />'Wiki-Conference New York' at NYU this summer.<br /><br />Other topics will be recent experiences at the WMF Chapters meeting<br />and in cooperating with local groups in NYC, photography for Wikinews,<br />and discussing issues relevant to Wikipedia and the other Wikimedia<br />projects.<br /><br />We welcome all guests. If you support open education and free<br />culture, we are your people. If you have a project you want to work<br />on with us, this is a great opportunity to get acquainted. If you want<br />someone to give a talk or teach a class with an inside view of<br />Wikipedia, meet your volunteers. And if you just have any questions,<br />we'd be glad to try to answer them.<br /><br />Remember, the agenda here is up to you! I encourage anyone who is<br />interested to sign up to give a presentation or suggest a topic for<br />general discussion at our wikimeetup page (given below).</blockquote>Whiteknighthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16207472474429254890noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3773807686982133581.post-75489561805736007492009-05-10T17:12:00.000-07:002009-05-10T17:23:13.343-07:00California Open Textbook InitiativeI don't know if other people have heard about this one yet: <a href="http://news.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/05/10/1815215&from=rss">California is pursuing open textbooks to help cut costs</a>. I've been saying for a long time that the traditional textbook pricing model isn't really scalable, especially not for money-strapped urban school districts. So, it makes good sense that California would be looking to use free alternatives instead of paying premium prices for texts.<br /><br />The cynic in me obviously worries that government bureaucratic processes will miss the point and ruin the whole exercise. Crowd-sourcing and open culture only work if you let the people in and let them self-govern to a degree. If the state of California tries to impose all sorts of oversights and restrictions and controls on the process, they will spend more money and end up with lower-quality books then if they just stuck with proprietary books.<br /><br />I would be interested to hear if anybody knows anything about this California textbook project, and if there is anything that the Wikimedia Foundation and Wikibooks can do to get involved. I think we have a great infrastructure set up and a great environment for developing quality books for a great price, and it's that infrastructure that places like California need if they want to succeed in lowering the cost of education.Whiteknighthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16207472474429254890noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3773807686982133581.post-73815541302393597912009-05-03T16:18:00.000-07:002009-05-03T16:40:26.221-07:00Public Education WoesThis is a little bit off topic for this blog, but it's something I wanted to talk about anyway. I read a <a href="http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-teachers3-2009may03,0,679507.story">disheartening news story</a> today about teachers and how it's ridiculously hard to get rid of the ones that are mistreating or simply failing their students.<br /><br />I know that a major impetus for me to start working at Wikibooks was the textbooks that I was using for my various classes. In short, some of them were absolutely terrible and I was forced to search the internet for quality alternatives. I don't know if the situation is specific to engineering books, but I suspect that books in that subject area are some of th worst offenders. Since I've started writing engineering books on Wikibooks a few years ago, I can't even count how many thank-you emails I've received from students who were also desperately searching for quality books to replace the lousy ones they were forced to use (and pay huge prices for) in school.<br /><br />So that's my short off-topic news post for today. I like to think that we can keep this kind of thing in mind as we do work on Wikibooks and elsewhere to create quality free educational materials. After all, the real issue of concern is the students, many of whom are children and won't have the foresight to pursue education if it isn't properly provided to them by teachers and parents.Whiteknighthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16207472474429254890noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3773807686982133581.post-42716635164521257982009-04-28T18:20:00.000-07:002009-04-28T18:56:43.653-07:00Thinking about project mergersIn idle conversation tonight we started talking about the idea of merging projects. I know it's certainly not a very popular topic, a lot of people have staked out their territories and don't like to think that their "home" project is going to get merged into a larger project and lose it's individual charm and character.<br /><br />It's no secret that in the past I have strongly suggested that Simple English Wikibooks be merged into English Wikibooks. I'm still of that opinion, although recent activity levels at that project have been higher then they were when I first went on crusade.<br /><br />The topic tonight was about a potential merger between Wikibooks and Wikisource. Before the knee-jerk "UR IDEAZ R TEH SUX!!" response that these kinds of suggestions tend to recive on these 'ere internets, consider what such a project would look like:<br /><br />It would be a virtual library, but prepped for crowd-sourcing. We would have all sorts of static "historical" books, a la Wikisource, that are pre-published and are not editable. They would stand as the reference works in the library. Since this is a wiki, we would want an editable section too. These, the "community" books would be normal editable wiki pages, a la Wikibooks, that could evolve and improve over time.<br /><br />Every "book" on this fanciful project could be composed of one or both of these parts: (1) a "base" version, which represents the pre-published static version, and (2) the "current" version, which represents the wiki editable community version of the book. At a click, you could instantly see both the original manuscript, or the updated community version as it evolves.<br /><br />On WB we receive book donations on occasion, where we receive a completed manuscript, post it on the wiki, and ask our editors to update and maintain it. Unfortunately, without the use of a custom template, the original uploaded version gets lost in the sands of the history pages.<br /><br />Now I know that this idea needs a lot of fleshing out. WS obviously contains lots of material that isn't "book-like", and the vast majority of WB's 3000+ books aren't derived from a pre-published base version. Plus, there's the consideration that it's nonsensical to try and update or maintain many of the books that are currently in the public domain. For instance, what will an editor today change about Principia Mathematica, or The Republic, or Beowulf? And speaking of Beowulf, what would become our policy on fictional works? Are we allowed to maintain and update them, and if so are we allowed to create new fiction works from scratch?<br /><br />So the idea isn't perfect, but I think there are some gems hidden in there that are worthwhile to consider. I think it's more feasible to merge WB+WS then it would be to merge WB+WV (which is a suggestion I hear very often).<br /><br />As a disclaimer, I doubt such a merger would ever happen, but it's a fun thing to think about and might lead to cool new ideas in the future.Whiteknighthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16207472474429254890noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3773807686982133581.post-820861367905323972009-04-27T16:58:00.001-07:002009-04-27T17:10:57.955-07:00Categorization ContinuesI've taken a little bit of a break from book categorization myself, other things in life have been eating up a lot of my time. However, just because I've taken a break and have stopped blogging about it doesn't mean that categorization has stopped en masse. [[<a href="http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/User_talk:Adrignola">User:Adrignola</a>]] specifically has been doing a lot of work getting our terrible category system cleaned up.<br /><br />The Category: namespace at Wikibooks has been, to put it nicely, a trash heap. There are a lot of reasons for this, stemming pretty far back in the history of the project. A lack of a clear categorization policy resulted in a number of ad hoc categorization methods being implemented by various people. Early in the project we also had a series of "bookshelves" pages where books were organized into lists by subject manually. Certainly seems like a waste of effort now, but the bookshelves served us pretty well for a pretty long time.<br /><br />A while back we decided to get rid of the bookshelves and replace them with a Category-based alternative. However, instead of using plain category pages, we decided to go with Dynamic Page Lists on our new <a href="http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/WB:AS">Subject</a> pages instead. So even though we are moving in a better direction, we still have plenty of excuse to keep sweeping problems in the Category: namespace under the rug. All that matters to us now is how well things appear on the subject pages.<br /><br />That's not to say that organization of our category pages is unimportant, in fact it's very important since categories form the underbelly of our whole organizational structure. If they're messy, nothing above them will ever be as good as we need it to be.<br /><br />So, I think it's very cool that people are working to make the category pages better, and I sincerely hope that the good work continues.Whiteknighthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16207472474429254890noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3773807686982133581.post-8193050466631192232009-04-20T15:21:00.000-07:002009-04-20T15:42:41.662-07:00WITTIE GrantI'm pleased to be able to finally announce a pretty cool event. A group of education researchers from Old Dominion University have been awarded a grant from the MacArther Foundation to pursue usability enhancements to MediaWiki wikis especially as pertains to books and collaborative education.<br /><br /><a href="http://digitallearning.macfound.org/site/apps/nlnet/content2.aspx?c=enJLKQNlFiG&b=5106077&ct=6920765">A brief overview of the grant</a> is available, I'm trying to get my hands on more information and will post it as I have it.<br /><br />This group of researchers have been active on Wikibooks, which is where I met them and started working with them. Some of their books, <a href="http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Social_and_Cultural_Foundations_of_American_Education">Social and Cultural Foundations of American Education</a> and <a href="http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Foundations_of_Education_and_Instructional_Assessment">Foundations of Education and Instructional Assessment</a>, have been highly successfully multi-semester class projects that serve as good archetypes of other such projects in the future.<br /><br />This project, called "WITTIE", will not benefit Wikibooks directly, since some of the necessary controls on their experiments won't work in a large open site like Wikibooks. However, I am very hopeful that many of their results will be able to be implemented in Wikibooks, Wikiversity, or other education-based wiki projects after the grant period has concluded.<br /><br />I'm working with this group as a sort of "expert" consultant and programmer. We're hopefully going to be either (a) finding and enhancing a set of existing usability extensions for MediaWiki, or (b) Developing some of our own usability extensions as needed. To that end, <span style="font-weight: bold;">I am looking for interested coders</span> to help out with the MediaWiki and PHP work that's bound to pop up. I am looking for people who are able not only to write decent code, but capable of mitigating the scalability, performance, and security concerns that come with public-facing collaborative websites. If you, or somebody you know fits the bill, I would love to get in touch. Please send me a comment here on this blog or an email if you are interested.<br /><br />I will post more information, not only on the project itself but also on my hunt for a coder to help with it.Whiteknighthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16207472474429254890noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3773807686982133581.post-13514208327168198452009-04-13T05:33:00.000-07:002009-04-13T05:41:23.283-07:00Wikimedia Licensing VoteThe Wikimedia Foundation has started a vote to enable a migration from GFDL licensing to dual-licensing GFDL and CC-BY-SA-3.0. All Wikibookians (in fact, all Wikimedians) are encouraged to vote on this issue, and it's my personal hope that they all vote YES! <a href="http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:SecurePoll/vote/1">Here is the voting page</a>. You must have at least 25 edits before you will be allowed to vote.<br /><br />A number of members of the Wikibooks community have specifically requested some kind of dual-licensing scheme to make our books more interoperable with other open-education websites. Some authors have attempted to use different licensing schemes on a per-book basis, although those attempts were generally thought to be against Wikibooks' terms of use.<br /><br />Dual licensing GFDL and CC-BY-SA-3.0 will keep our material compatible with all the GFDL stuff still, but will also open compatibility to other websites and organizations that are CC-BY-SA-3.0 only. A large number of organizations, especially open-education groups, use CC-BY-SA licenses for their content, and previously Wikibooks was not compatible with these. Now, if the vote is passed, we will be and licensing will no longer be a significant barrier to the free use of quality educational materials.<br /><br />It is my personal opinion that this initiative will be immensely beneficial to the Wikibooks project, with no significant downsides. If people would like to explore other opinions, get in contact with me and I will be happy to send you links to other information that you can use to make a decision.Whiteknighthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16207472474429254890noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3773807686982133581.post-8532690010707079692009-04-06T09:42:00.000-07:002009-04-06T09:54:18.002-07:00Next Wikibooks Community MeetingMike.lifeguard has taken the opportunity to schedule a new Wikibooks Community Meeting, since the last one was such a success. The next meeting will be at:<br /><br />Thursday, 9 April 2009<br />21:00 UTC<br />#Wikibooks on irc.freenode.net<br /><br />All are welcome to attend. Mike has set up a <a href="http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikibooks/Community-building">planning/agenda page at Meta</a>, so everybody can see what kinds of things we want to talk about.Whiteknighthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16207472474429254890noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3773807686982133581.post-54059090599266422892009-03-23T04:53:00.000-07:002009-03-23T04:55:44.984-07:00Wikibookian SurveyAre you a Wikibookian? If so, there's an interesting survey in progress right now that's attempting to gather information about Wikibookians and the demographics of the Wikibooks project. If you're interested and have 10 spare minutes, your input would be much appreciated:<br /><br /><a href="http://easstudents.cw.unisa.edu.au/com/survey/wikisurveyen_interface/Results/survey/indexEN.htm" target="_blank">http://easstudents.cw.unisa.<wbr>edu.au/com/survey/<wbr>wikisurveyen_interface/<wbr>Results/survey/indexEN.htm</a><br /><br />username: motivations<br />password: wikiproject<br /><br />It will only take a few minutes, and will help everybody get a better understanding of who we are and what we do.Whiteknighthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16207472474429254890noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3773807686982133581.post-75571384086517698652009-03-16T12:54:00.000-07:002009-03-16T12:59:42.027-07:00Updated Wikibooks StoreDid you know that Wikibooks has <a href="http://www.cafepress.com/wikipedia/529053">a store on CafePress</a>? It has had one for a while, but the selection was relatively small and all the things there used the old logo.<br /><br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEja3v-0dwBwfIv0K7ikNZu4g3dSRBztk_S_B15ThCQnkBfHqyVO5uT1TKU5ewLOhewEyViyehBS4_pU-SgR4MJmq4wzyJyt49FaF1toZX0PzIrMEk62rrjKnJ6bBfk8nQZWSGQGplJR6Ipd/s1600-h/366911876v0_350x350_Front.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 320px; height: 320px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEja3v-0dwBwfIv0K7ikNZu4g3dSRBztk_S_B15ThCQnkBfHqyVO5uT1TKU5ewLOhewEyViyehBS4_pU-SgR4MJmq4wzyJyt49FaF1toZX0PzIrMEk62rrjKnJ6bBfk8nQZWSGQGplJR6Ipd/s320/366911876v0_350x350_Front.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5313877550781555634" border="0" /></a><br />Today I'm pleased to announce that, with help from Jay Walsh and Cary Bass, the Wikibooks store has been updated to use the new logo, and an expanded list of Wikibooks products! All the old products with the old logo are still there too, if you're into that vintage look. Proceeds benefit the WMF, of course.Whiteknighthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16207472474429254890noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3773807686982133581.post-57852200192486299572009-03-09T15:21:00.000-07:002009-03-09T15:26:08.879-07:00Wikijunior Colors<a href="http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Wikijunior:Colors">Wikijunior Colors</a> is one of my favorite books at Wikibooks. It's such a simple concept, and such a fun example of how to quickly and easily create books for young children. It's also a good example for how Wikimedia projects can interoperate, with the majority of the books content being images from Commons.<br /><br />Well, I saw today that there are at least three translated versions of this book: <a href="http://ro.wikibooks.org/wiki/Wikijunior:Culori">Romanian</a>, <a href="http://fr.wikibooks.org/wiki/Wikijunior:Les_couleurs">French</a>, and <a href="http://pl.wikibooks.org/wiki/Wikijunior:Kolory">Polish</a>. This makes good sense to me, there is very little text so very little effort is required to translate it into other languages.<br /><br />If you haven't seen it yet, this is a very fun little book and almost rediculously simple in concept. A perfect way to spend a few minutes with your young children looking at colorful images.Whiteknighthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16207472474429254890noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3773807686982133581.post-76808932492029586992009-03-03T07:57:00.000-08:002009-03-03T08:12:17.248-08:00Social Sciences bookI'm finally finished my work reorganizing the <a href="http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Subject:Social_Sciences">Social Sciences</a> books today. I've received a few comments about some of my other work with the <a href="http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Subject:Humanities">Humanities</a> books or the <a href="http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Subject:Fine_Arts">Fine Arts</a> books about how the work I'm doing isn't perfect. That's fine by me, I never was shooting for perfection anyway. One person getting things right the first time isn't what wikis are all about.<br /><br />What I've been attempting to do is clean out clutter and get human eyes looking at every single book, even if only briefly. Also, I'm trying to turn large lists of books into smaller and more manageable lists, by categorizing and subcategorizing. The result is a series of pages that are more organized, cleaner, and easier to browse through. It's up to the rest of our authors and editors and organizers to fine tune the system to be more perfect. In fact, if somebody out there has an artistic flair and would like to make these subject pages a little prettier, that would be a great start!<br /><br />So the Social Sciences books are basically finished being organized now. There are a few issues that I still need to tend to, but nothing serious. In my travels I've found a few very good books that I plan on showcasing here as time allows. I don't know where I am heading next. The biggest mess is in the <a href="http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Subject:Computing">Computing</a> section, where our largest collection of books is jammed into the smallest number of meaningful subcategories. The <a href="http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Subject:Science">Science</a> section is looking pretty lousy now too, so I may head there instead. In either case, there's a lot of work to do getting all our thousands of books organized, and I could use lots of help doing it!Whiteknighthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16207472474429254890noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3773807686982133581.post-49263187113894482712009-03-01T06:38:00.000-08:002009-03-01T06:45:53.368-08:00Concurrent EngineeringI've been following the work of a new class project here on Wikibooks: <a href="http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Concurrent_Engineering">Concurrent Engineering</a>. I'm an engineer myself by trade, so when I see books like this pop up I take a special interest in them.<br /><br />This book is being written by Professor Burke and his ME518 class from Oregon State University. It's a very new endeavor for them, but they are making good progress. There's going to be some work needed to get it cleaned up according to Wikibooks' best practices, but those can wait till the end of the semester.<br /><br />It's heartening to see that new institutions are using Wikibooks, not just the handful who have used it in the past. It makes me wonder if maybe we need a "Looking for a Class Project?" link on the main page wouldn't be a very useful addition to try to get more information to the students and teachers who browse through our site.Whiteknighthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16207472474429254890noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3773807686982133581.post-87767130255647668112009-02-23T06:55:00.001-08:002009-02-23T07:15:45.651-08:00Community-Building Meeting RecapThere was a very cool, if small, community meeting in #wikibooks on Friday afternoon. Originally it was intended to be a live meeting for members from en.wikibooks to get together and work on a few issues and develop a few ideas. Very few members of en.wikibooks ended up attending (scheduling was a major hurdle in that regard, I think), however, but several members from other Wikibooks language projects did show up. I tried to log the meeting, but my IRC client apparently silently failed to save the file, so I didn't.<br /><br />There was good representation from fr.wikibooks and de.wikibooks. We talked about several issues that seem to be affecting all Wikibooks projects, and didn't talk about issues that were restricted to en.wikibooks only. We all generally agreed that holding such meetings more regularly would be a good thing.<br /><br />Some of the issues we talked about were:<br /><ol><li>The problem of community non-involvement, where the vast majority of wikibookians are silent authors and do not participate in meta discussions with the larger community.</li><li>The need for more multimedia. Science books need more diagrams. Language books need more audio clips. Several books need videos. Also, we talked about the idea of making screencasts about using Wikibooks to supplement our existing help documentation. We are looking for lots of help in this department from people willing to make and upload such videos.<br /></li><li>We talked about book donations and ways to pursue them</li><li>We talked about finding ways to attract new contributors to Wikibooks, and how to retain them.</li><li>We talked about a lot of small miscellaneous issues as well.</li></ol>I would like to try to schedule a similar meeting for the en.wikibooks community only to talk about some of our specific issues, and I would also like to schedule a followup multilingual meeting for sometime next month to stay in touch with our international Wikibooks friends. Both of which, I'm sure, I will be writing about in the coming weeks.Whiteknighthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16207472474429254890noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3773807686982133581.post-86035697816482741032009-02-20T08:42:00.001-08:002009-02-20T08:50:29.588-08:00Wikibooks Community Meeting TodayAs I mentioned on this blog before, we are having a short community meeting today for Wikibooks. Earlier I mentioned that the time and date were not set in stone barring some objections, but there were very few objections to be seen. So, the meeting is:<br /><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">Today (20th February 2009)</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">#wikibooks on irc.freenode.net</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">20:00 UTC</span><br /></div><br />There is a short planning page and agenda at Meta. My sincere hope is that this meeting is the first in a regular series of meetings where we try to get more Wikibookians actively involved. I'll be sure to post notes from the meeting here on this blog afterwards.<br /><br />I would invite all interested people, Wikibookians and well-wishers to attend the meeting and show some support for our little project. I don't suspect the meeting will be too large or too long, I envision that it will last about an hour or less. If you can't make it this time, don't worry: We are going to try to schedule another meeting in about a month or so to get more people involved.Whiteknighthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16207472474429254890noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3773807686982133581.post-6053728424227648682009-02-16T05:34:00.000-08:002009-02-16T06:28:36.155-08:00Community-Building Meeting<a href="http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/User:Mike.lifeguard">Mike.lifeguard</a> and I were talking about a few ideas we each had about community building and Wikibooks-specific outreach opportunities. Our little discussion turned into a complete online community-wide meeting for Wikibookians and other well-wishers. A planning page for this meeting and any other such events (I hope to have several this year) is <a href="http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikibooks/Community-building">located on Meta</a>. The meeting will be at:<br /><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">Friday 20 February<br />20:00UTC</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">#wikibooks on irc.freenode.net</span><br /><br /><div style="text-align: left;">We know that this time and location is not going to be suitable for everybody. Of course, with worldwide membership we can't expect that any one time is going to be universally suitable for this meeting. I fully intend that other meetings we have in the future will be at all sorts of different times so other people can more easily attend.<br /><br />On the agenda for this meeting (so far) is:<br /><ol><li>Book donations, including the efficacy and benefit of donations, and like-minded organizations who might be willing to make some donations to us.</li><li>Attracting more volunteers</li><li>Discussing FlaggedRevs, and it's current implementation on en.wikibooks</li></ol>I expect the meeting will last for about an hour.<br /><br />I'll post more information here on this blog as I get it. I hope lots of people can attend!<br /></div></div>Whiteknighthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16207472474429254890noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3773807686982133581.post-3187476679053919642009-02-09T16:35:00.001-08:002009-02-09T17:04:18.378-08:00Social SciencesContinuing my organizational work, I hit the <a href="http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Subject:Social_sciences">social sciences</a> books pretty hard today. I noticed a few reoccuring problems in these books as pertains to categorization. Unlike the <a href="http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Subject:Humanities">Humanities</a> and <a href="http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Subject:Fine_Arts">Fine Arts</a> books, which seemed to be characterized by category minimalism, the Social sciences books seemed to be in a constest to be in the most categories. Here is a line that was all too common in these books:<br /><br />{{<a href="http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Template:Subject">Subject</a>|Social sciences|<a href="http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Subject:Sociology">Sociology</a>|<a href="http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Subject:Psychology">Psychology</a>|Cognition|<a href="http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Subject:Neuroscience">Neuroscience</a>}}<br /><br />This shows several common problems that I've been cleaning up all day:<br /><ol><li>People categorizing books in subcategories and their parent categories simultaneously.</li><li>Mixing up subjects that are only peripherally related. The book in question was probably a sociology book <span style="font-style: italic;">or</span> a psychology book, not both.</li><li>Authors tend to get a little grandiose with their conceptions about a book. Just because a book deals with psychology, and a person's psychology is affected by their brains, that doesn't mean every psychology book is also a neuroscience book.</li><li>"Cognition" really isn't a topic for a book, or is a very uncommon one if it is. People tend to treat a bunch of related-words as categories, and every book picks a different set of strange words to use. Categories are supposed to be a way to keep like books together, but that only works if books use a common set of subject names.</li></ol>The sociology books are coming along nicely, but I could always use more people to double-check my work. Plus, if we could get somebody in here who actually is familiar with these subjects at a higher-then-gradeschool level, that would be good too.Whiteknighthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16207472474429254890noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3773807686982133581.post-13446933526850785442009-02-04T09:57:00.000-08:002009-02-04T10:02:29.255-08:0010th Libre Software MeetingI've received this notice from <a href="http://fr.wikibooks.org/wiki/Utilisateur:Sub">Sub</a>, one of the users at Fr.Wikibooks. The 10th Libre Software Meeting is happening in Nantes France from July 7th to 11th. <a href="http://2009.rmll.info/Call-for-communication-2009-topic,33.html">See this link for more information </a>about the meeting.<br /><br />The Libre Software Meeting is all about free and open source software, especially as it pertains to documentation and usability. It's the kind of thing that I really think a Wikibookian should attend, if anybody out there is willing and able.<br /><br />Registration closes on 1st March, so anybody who is interested should definitely contact the organizers immediately.Whiteknighthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16207472474429254890noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3773807686982133581.post-33120537323207275032009-02-04T07:50:00.000-08:002009-02-04T08:06:24.779-08:00Humanities Books OrganizedI've undertaken a personal mission to fix the categorization system at Wikibooks. Last week I went through and recategorized all the <a href="http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Subject:Fine_Arts">Fine Arts</a> books. Today, I've just finished going through the list of <a href="http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Subject:Humanities">Humanities</a> books. I had to create a number of new subject pages to hold the various books, although there are probably more that I could have created. I tried to weigh our need for precision against the number of books we had in various categories. The more books we had on a given subject, the more deeply I would subcategorize things.<br /><br />Anybody who knows a thing or two about the Fine Arts or the Humanities subjects should go through and double-check my work. Also, anybody who is more aesthetically-minded then me could go through and make these pages look more pretty. If somebody wants to join in my organization crusade, I would love the help!<br /><br />I don't know what subject area I will tackle next. I was thinking about doing <a href="http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Subject:Social_sciences">Social Sciences</a>, but I might also like to look at <a href="http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Subject:Mathematics">Mathematics</a>. I was also thinking about moving the various Medicine and health related books out of the "<a href="http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Subject:Life_Sciences">Science/Life Science</a>" subcategory into a top-level "<a href="http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Subject:Health_and_Wellness">Health and Wellness</a>" category. I'd like feedback on that idea too.Whiteknighthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16207472474429254890noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3773807686982133581.post-14435229249947983102009-01-30T10:58:00.000-08:002009-01-30T11:34:56.379-08:00Perl 6 ProgrammingI mentioned this issue on the wiki a while back, but haven't made any kind of public announcement about it until now. I was selected to receive a "Perl 6 Microgrant" to write a book on Wikibooks about the new <a href="http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Perl_6_Programming">programming language "Perl 6"</a>. The money involved isn't whoo-hoo fantastic, I'm not going to quit my day job over this. However, I'm not really in this for the money anyway. I work on Wikibooks because I genuinely want to do it and enjoy doing it.<br /><br />There are two free-culture projects that I participate in regularly. One is Wikibooks. The other is an open-source software project called <a href="http://www.parrot.org/">Parrot</a>. Parrot is a virtual machine, similar in many respects to the Java virtual machine. However, instead of running Java, Parrot aims to support a wide variety of dynamic programming languages like Perl, Python, PHP, and Ruby. My work on that project has inspired my work on a related book: [[<a href="http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Parrot_Virtual_Machine">Parrot Virtual Machine</a>]]. This also put me in touch with some of the people doing work on the compiler for Perl 6, a compiler which is targeting Parrot. They asked for people to submit grant proposals, I submitted one. Waited a while. Got the grant.<br /><br />On one hand we have plenty of people who get paid to do their work on Wikibooks: The teachers, professors, and graduate students who are writing and organizing some of the class projects that we host, or the researchers to receive grant money to do research related to Wikibooks. On the other hand, I'm the first whose [publicly] been getting money specifically to just write books without being part of a larger job. It's an interesting situation, but one that hasn't drawn any level of controversy at all from my fellow Wikibookians. They've all been very supportive, making vague warnings on one hand about avoiding possible conflicts of interest, but being excited about all the possibilities that this opens up on the other hand. imagine if more people were making money to write good-quality books on our site? Imagine if there were more grant money available to fund people to work on books? This happens with some regularity in the open-source software world, so it's not a big stretch to think we could leverage the almighty dollar to make things happen at Wikibooks too.<br /><br />As part of the grant, I'm writing regular updates (weekly or bi-weekly, depending) on <a href="http://use.perl.org/%7EWhiteknight/journal/">my use.perl blog</a>. I also post some technical updates about my programming work there too, so forgive me if it's not suitable for a general audience.<br /><br />I would love to hear feedback about this project. What do people think about funding for writing books? What do people think of my work on this particular book? Do people think that maybe Wikibooks could be more proactive in this area?Whiteknighthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16207472474429254890noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3773807686982133581.post-72344197527435798472009-01-24T16:49:00.000-08:002009-01-24T17:05:02.246-08:00FlaggedRevs ReviewI've seen a lot of blog posts today about how English Wikipedia is preparing to get the FlaggedRevs extension installed. I think that's a good idea, English Wikipedia is a project that could really use it to great effect to improve it's reliability and decrease it's spam volume.<br /><br />At English Wikibooks we've had that tool for a while now, and some of us are starting to question whether it's suiting our needs appropriatey. There have been plenty of complaints about our autopromotion requirements for +Editor (I can't even tell you what the current requirements are, since they are so complex). I've advocated drastic reduction of the requirements (after 10 edits or so), although some people have said that we should just tack +Editor on at the same time members get autoconfirmed, which is a simple 4 day timer. I like that idea too, although I'm not sure it is going to perform the promotion quickly enough.<br /><br /><br />We've also been worrying that we don't quite have a large enough community to support this tool anyway. The list of pages that have been reviewed is certainly growing, but it's woefully small compared to the total number of pages we have at Wikibooks. We just aren't reviewing pages quickly enough, and I'm not even sure that we're reviewing pages as fast as we are creating them. Of course, if we have more +Editors who are automatically sighting pages with every edit, that number will increase pretty dramatically.<br /><br />Also, as if we need more factors to worry about, we need to think about whether or not our current grading metrics are sufficient. We have three metrics now: Composition, Accuracy, and Coverage. These are nice, but they don't necessarily cover all the things that we might want to look at. Also, I find there are lots of areas of overlap: Accuracy tends to go up as we get more coverage, and the quality of writing goes up with volume too. Being more accurate also requires more precise and higher-quality writing. In short, it's rare to get a bad grade on one if you've gotten good grades on the other two.<br /><br />We have questions to ask, and questions to answer. Plenty of things will definitely change, and maybe we as a community might decide to uninstall the extension entirely. We'll see how things play out.Whiteknighthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16207472474429254890noreply@blogger.com2