Wikibooks News

Wikibooks: Chicken and the Egg

2009-07-25T08:15:00.000-07:00

I'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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I would love to hear more ideas on this topic, to try and start brainstorming ways we can improve our K-12 books.

Licensing Vote Results

2009-05-21T14:02:00.000-07:00

The results of the Wikimedia licensing vote have been made public today. From Robert Rohde on foundation-l:

The licensing update poll has been tallied.

"Yes, I am in favor of this change" : 13242 (75.8%)
"No, I am opposed to this change" : 1829 (10.5%)
"I do not have an opinion on this change" : 2391 (13.7%)

Total ballots cast and certified: 17462

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.

Update: The board moved pretty quickly on these results, and have already written and approved a resolution:

Whereas the Wikimedia community, in a project-wide vote, has expressed
very strong support for changing the licensing terms of Wikimedia sites,
and whereas the Board of Trustees has previously adopted a license
update resolution requesting that such a change be made possible, the
Board hereby declares its intent to implement these changes.
Accordingly, the Wikimedia Foundation exercises its option under Version
1.3 of the GNU Free Documentation License to relicense the Wikimedia
sites as Massive Multiauthor Collaborations under the Creative Commons
Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 license, effective June 15, 2009. The Board
of Trustees hereby instructs the Executive Director to have all
Wikimedia licensing terms updated and terms of use implemented
consistent with the proposal at
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Licensing_update

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!

Wikibooks First!

2009-05-18T09:48:00.000-07:00

I got a great email today from Cbrown1023. He did a Google search and a result from Wikibooks 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. 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!

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?

Categories Are Doing Great

2009-05-16T06:20:00.000-07:00

Thanks to users like [[User:Adrignola]] and [[User:Darklama]] (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 Color Coded Categories gadget (which is deceptively simple), you'll get a great category browsing experience.

Wikimedia NY Meeting

2009-05-10T18:03:00.000-07:00

Wikimedia is having a meeting at Columbia University on Sunday May 17. Here's the announcement that was sent out on the mailinglist:

Come one, come all!

Our next meeting for Wikimedia NYC is Sunday May 17 at Columbia University.

This is a meeting for volunteers to the projects of the non-profit
Wikimedia Foundation, and everyone else too, who has ever looked at
Wikipedia and wondered what's going on behind it.

One big topic of discussion, out of many, will be preparing for our
'Wiki-Conference New York' at NYU this summer.

Other topics will be recent experiences at the WMF Chapters meeting
and in cooperating with local groups in NYC, photography for Wikinews,
and discussing issues relevant to Wikipedia and the other Wikimedia
projects.

We welcome all guests. If you support open education and free
culture, we are your people. If you have a project you want to work
on with us, this is a great opportunity to get acquainted. If you want
someone to give a talk or teach a class with an inside view of
Wikipedia, meet your volunteers. And if you just have any questions,
we'd be glad to try to answer them.

Remember, the agenda here is up to you! I encourage anyone who is
interested to sign up to give a presentation or suggest a topic for
general discussion at our wikimeetup page (given below).

California Open Textbook Initiative

2009-05-10T17:12:00.000-07:00

I don't know if other people have heard about this one yet: California is pursuing open textbooks to help cut costs. 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.

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.

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.

Public Education Woes

2009-05-03T16:18:00.000-07:00

This is a little bit off topic for this blog, but it's something I wanted to talk about anyway. I read a disheartening news story today about teachers and how it's ridiculously hard to get rid of the ones that are mistreating or simply failing their students.

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.

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.

Thinking about project mergers

2009-04-28T18:20:00.000-07:00

In 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.

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.

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:

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.

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.

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.

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?

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).

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.

Categorization Continues

2009-04-27T16:58:00.001-07:00

I'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. [[User:Adrignola]] specifically has been doing a lot of work getting our terrible category system cleaned up.

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.

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 Subject 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.

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.

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.

WITTIE Grant

2009-04-20T15:21:00.000-07:00

I'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.

A brief overview of the grant is available, I'm trying to get my hands on more information and will post it as I have it.

This group of researchers have been active on Wikibooks, which is where I met them and started working with them. Some of their books, Social and Cultural Foundations of American Education and Foundations of Education and Instructional Assessment, have been highly successfully multi-semester class projects that serve as good archetypes of other such projects in the future.

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.

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, I am looking for interested coders 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.

I will post more information, not only on the project itself but also on my hunt for a coder to help with it.

Wikimedia Licensing Vote

2009-04-13T05:33:00.000-07:00

The 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! Here is the voting page. You must have at least 25 edits before you will be allowed to vote.

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.

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.

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.

Next Wikibooks Community Meeting

2009-04-06T09:42:00.000-07:00

Mike.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:

Thursday, 9 April 2009
21:00 UTC
#Wikibooks on irc.freenode.net

All are welcome to attend. Mike has set up a planning/agenda page at Meta, so everybody can see what kinds of things we want to talk about.

Wikibookian Survey

2009-03-23T04:53:00.000-07:00

Are 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:

http://easstudents.cw.unisa.edu.au/com/survey/wikisurveyen_interface/Results/survey/indexEN.htm

username: motivations
password: wikiproject

It will only take a few minutes, and will help everybody get a better understanding of who we are and what we do.

Updated Wikibooks Store

2009-03-16T12:54:00.000-07:00

Did you know that Wikibooks has a store on CafePress? It has had one for a while, but the selection was relatively small and all the things there used the old logo.

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.

Wikijunior Colors

2009-03-09T15:21:00.000-07:00

Wikijunior Colors 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.

Well, I saw today that there are at least three translated versions of this book: Romanian, French, and Polish. This makes good sense to me, there is very little text so very little effort is required to translate it into other languages.

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.

Social Sciences book

2009-03-03T07:57:00.000-08:00

I'm finally finished my work reorganizing the Social Sciences books today. I've received a few comments about some of my other work with the Humanities books or the Fine Arts 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.

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!

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 Computing section, where our largest collection of books is jammed into the smallest number of meaningful subcategories. The Science 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!

Concurrent Engineering

2009-03-01T06:38:00.000-08:00

I've been following the work of a new class project here on Wikibooks: Concurrent Engineering. I'm an engineer myself by trade, so when I see books like this pop up I take a special interest in them.

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.

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.

Community-Building Meeting Recap

2009-02-23T06:55:00.001-08:00

There 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.

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.

Some of the issues we talked about were:

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.
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.
We talked about book donations and ways to pursue them
We talked about finding ways to attract new contributors to Wikibooks, and how to retain them.
We talked about a lot of small miscellaneous issues as well.

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.

Wikibooks Community Meeting Today

2009-02-20T08:42:00.001-08:00

As 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:

Today (20th February 2009)
#wikibooks on irc.freenode.net
20:00 UTC

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.

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.

Community-Building Meeting

2009-02-16T05:34:00.000-08:00

Mike.lifeguard 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 located on Meta. The meeting will be at:

Friday 20 February
20:00UTC
#wikibooks on irc.freenode.net

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.

On the agenda for this meeting (so far) is:

Book donations, including the efficacy and benefit of donations, and like-minded organizations who might be willing to make some donations to us.
Attracting more volunteers
Discussing FlaggedRevs, and it's current implementation on en.wikibooks

I expect the meeting will last for about an hour.

I'll post more information here on this blog as I get it. I hope lots of people can attend!

Social Sciences

2009-02-09T16:35:00.001-08:00

Continuing my organizational work, I hit the social sciences books pretty hard today. I noticed a few reoccuring problems in these books as pertains to categorization. Unlike the Humanities and Fine Arts 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:

{{Subject|Social sciences|Sociology|Psychology|Cognition|Neuroscience}}

This shows several common problems that I've been cleaning up all day:

People categorizing books in subcategories and their parent categories simultaneously.
Mixing up subjects that are only peripherally related. The book in question was probably a sociology book or a psychology book, not both.
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.
"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.

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.

10th Libre Software Meeting

2009-02-04T09:57:00.000-08:00

I've received this notice from Sub, one of the users at Fr.Wikibooks. The 10th Libre Software Meeting is happening in Nantes France from July 7th to 11th. See this link for more information about the meeting.

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.

Registration closes on 1st March, so anybody who is interested should definitely contact the organizers immediately.

Humanities Books Organized

2009-02-04T07:50:00.000-08:00

I've undertaken a personal mission to fix the categorization system at Wikibooks. Last week I went through and recategorized all the Fine Arts books. Today, I've just finished going through the list of Humanities 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.

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!

I don't know what subject area I will tackle next. I was thinking about doing Social Sciences, but I might also like to look at Mathematics. I was also thinking about moving the various Medicine and health related books out of the "Science/Life Science" subcategory into a top-level "Health and Wellness" category. I'd like feedback on that idea too.

Perl 6 Programming

2009-01-30T10:58:00.000-08:00

I 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 programming language "Perl 6". 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.

There are two free-culture projects that I participate in regularly. One is Wikibooks. The other is an open-source software project called Parrot. 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: [[Parrot Virtual Machine]]. 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.

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.

As part of the grant, I'm writing regular updates (weekly or bi-weekly, depending) on my use.perl blog. I also post some technical updates about my programming work there too, so forgive me if it's not suitable for a general audience.

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?

FlaggedRevs Review

2009-01-24T16:49:00.000-08:00

I'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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Collections Podcast

2009-01-22T15:29:00.000-08:00

Mike.lifeguard forwarded a link to me today, a YouTube screencast about how to create a collection and print a book:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7S0UsTvW6IM

If anybody has any other cool videos or links related to Wikibooks, I would love to see them.

New Logo!!!

2009-01-17T06:45:00.000-08:00

It's finally official! It's officially final! All those haters out there who said we would never do it can eat their words: Wikibooks finally has a new logo!

Come on down to Wikibooks and take a look at the brand new logo. We're quite happy with it.

Trades and Crafts

2009-01-15T07:07:00.001-08:00

I created a new subject page today in my effort to try and rein in our jumbled miscellaneous section. The new subject, Trades and Crafts, is intended to hold information about various skills that don't quite fit into the hobbyist "How Tos" section, but don't really fit anywhere else either. Some of these books like [[Welding]] (which was listed under the Science and Engineering categories) was a perfect fit for this new section. Many such books are in the How-Tos section, but others are strewn about through the category system.

We still have a few other books strewn around that probably belong here as well. We could use some help finding and relocating them all!

RFA Success

2009-01-13T07:05:00.000-08:00

I was reading a blog post by Majorly about how broken the RFA process at Wikipedia has become. It seems to be a common topic of blogosphere ramblings, so I'll toss my own thoughts into the mix as well.

The success of an RFA system rests squarely with the bureaucrats. This needs to be a small group of people who are absolutely trusted by the community and who absolutely have the good of the project at heart. Anybody else elected to this position who does not have these traits should be removed immediately. Bureaucrats should be helpful, dedicated, inspiring. They should love the project so much that they would be willing to leave it voluntarily if they thought it would improve the project. Being a bureaucrat isn't some kind of trophy to put in the trophy case, or another badge of honor to place on the lapel: it's a promise to put the well-being of the project above any other concerns, above any personal relationships, and above any personal ambition.

That said, bureaucrats need to be both trusted and empowered to make processes like RFA Just Work. The question in an RFA is exactly this: "Is this nominee trusted enough to use the new tools to help the project?" During the process people from the community vote, optionally leaving rationales to support their votes, and then the job of bureaucrat begins. Bureaucrats need to look at each individual vote, and they need to look at the ebb and flow of overall community opinion as a whole to come up with a resolution. Here are some guidelines:

Reasons to promote the candidate are listed in the nomination, and the user has a track record that should be self-explanatory. Any oppose vote needs to have an accompanying rationale. Why do you not agree with the nomination? What part of the nomination specifically do you disagree with? What other information do you have about the candidate that should be known and considered? The more information you give, the more powerful and persuasive your vote becomes. Without any information, an oppose vote really isn't anything.
Votes should deal with the matter at hand: Is the nominee trusted to use the tools for the benefit of the project or not? Any voter whose voting rationale doesn't address this question directly isn't relevant and isn't counted. Saying "Oppose because user has only 423 edits and my algorithm requires 500" or "...because the user is a woman" or "...because the user is only 17", or "...because the user misuses commas sometimes" are all non-votes and really don't matter.
Any votes that are unreasonable or irrational don't get counted. This counts votes from known Friends and Enemies of the nominee who obviously vote they way they do because they publicly like/hate the person in question. If your judgement on the topic is clouded by your personal feelings, you shouldn't vote. The question isn't "do I like this person?" it's "Do I trust this person to use new tools for the good of the project?" There have been several occasions where I promoted RFA candidates who I did not like or agree with personally, but who I knew to be good Wikibookians. Notice that "Good Wikibookian" is not the same as "Agrees with my opinions about Wikibooks".

Bureaucrats need to read through the list of votes, separate the thoughtful ones from the cruft and the craziness, and render a verdict based on the needs of the community and the project, not the whims of individual editors. On Wikibooks, bureaucrats and admins are empowered (although generally discouraged from) making decisions on behalf of the project even when such a decision is against the majority of voting community members. This isn't a frequent occurance, but when the chips are down the person making the decision needs to take the available evidence (in the form of votes and their rationales) into consideration. There have been a number of VFD discussions that come to mind where the majority of people voted to "keep" a book but an admin deleted it anyway because the "keep" votes didn't adequately address any of the policy violations that the book represented. Are these tough decisions to make? Of course they are. Do admins take some heat for this when it happens? Yes, they always do.

At the end of any discussion, the question has to be "which of these two alternatives will be best for the project as a whole?". Any decision-maker who doesn't take this question into account, or who willingly answers it incorrectly should be removed from their position immediately. Because it really doesn't matter what I want, or what you want, it's what the project needs that's important. Hopefully, all your bureaucrats know that.

Guest Blog: Mike.lifeguard

2009-01-08T15:13:00.001-08:00

The following is a guest blog post sent in by our own Mike.lifeguard. I've been trying to solicit posts from him for a while, and am thrilled that he finally sent one in. The post he sent me was originally in wikitext and I tried to convert it for blogger but I might have missed some things. If anybody else wants to post some guest commentary here about Wikibooks or Books or Wikimedia, let me know. - WK

I've been considering writing a guest blog entry for Andrew for a while now. I happened upon [[w:Wikipedia:If you could re-write the rules]], which inspired me to re-read All I Want For Christmas again & consider what I would like to see happen in the next year in terms of re-writing how we do things on Wikibooks. I've limited myself to three suggestions, but they are all on a single theme: community, which has been an ongoing topic of conversation and consternation since Wikimania 2008 to present, in particular on [[mail:foundation-l]].

We need to recognize that the community is what makes or breaks the project. I've been in contact with Sue Gardner about this, and Andrew and I had a good conversation on IRC which led to What if we... As a small project, manpower is scarce, and we've not reached critical mass yet. We need to make outreach, marketing and retention an ongoing priority at the community level. The Foundation could certainly help by focusing more broadly on all the projects (yes, I know Wikipedia is the cash cow) - and a Wikibooks Chapter might be worth creating if that level of organization is required in the future. We need to ensure the project is viable in terms of new users coming in, and retention of existing users. As well, we need to think about how to get mid- to long-term users to help with administration - we need more admin powerhouses. This also ties in with the Stanton Usability Grant since there are technical things we could do to get more editors, and some are Wikibooks-specific.

Keep being nice. This is what lead me from Wikipedia to Wikibooks. Since then, I've found a home on two other projects, neither of which are the English Wikipedia. Though Commons and Meta have their ups and downs (currently both experiencing a down IMO), they are full of nice people who do good work. We should learn from the mistakes of English Wikipedia, as well as the examples of Meta and Commons, which have tried to do the same, largely. In some respects they've done well, and we should emulate that. Some stuff they've tried hasn't worked; let that serve as an example for us. Instead of don't bite the newbies, we should simply not bite. I could spell out examples where this could be applied, but I think they're obvious enough already.
Fix the documentation in both the Wikibooks and Help namespaces. The distinction is often muddled. As well, we should have a textbook on how to use Wikibooks. Some amazing work has been done on this recently by Whiteknight and Armchair, but more is needed. We should merge existing help documentation into the relevant textbooks, and move the texts into the help namespace. Wikibookians are good at writing textbooks, and especially technical textbooks or the sort which explain how to use Wikibooks and MediaWiki at various levels: end-user, community member, administrator, devloper, sysadmin.
Explore alternative methods of documentation. Recently, one of Meta's best admins has essentially left the project - he was active in managing spam, so his departure dealth a huge blow to the tiny team of users who do that work. It's highly technical, difficult, thankless (actually, we get yelled at and harrassed more than we get thanked) and oft-invisible work. So, it's unsurprising that very few (read: none) wish to join us. However, I have been asked on multiple occasions to mentor people who wanted to learn about this area - I know what I'm doing and I know how to teach (having done so on both accounts for quite some time). We have lots of text documentation (and it's not even that out-of-date!), but almost nobody reads it. For those who do, it's dense reading - very easy to get lost & discouraged without someone helping you along as I had done with several users. I remembered Ben Yates' screencasts almost immediately. Despite losing my voice entirely earlier in the day, I made a ''huge'' 22-min screencast running through some basics. The 67.04 MB upload took about a half-hour - Brion was amazed it worked at all. The screencast had been downloaded from archive.org 100 times by the end of the day, and at least 4 times from Meta (which doesn't keep track, but I know because people told me).

Describe, Demonstrate, Do: This is a basic technique for instruction in lifeguarding (yes, I'm really a lifeguard), and other practical endeavours like using Wikibooks are little different. ''Demonstrate'' is the key that we're missing in all our attempts to teach people how to use Wikibooks so far. It should hardly be surprising, then, that users find the bar to contribute here higher than elsewhere and thus our community is not flourishing as it could otherwise.

Screencasts will be one of my ongoing projects for the year, I think. I hope to create a series of screencasts for starting your first textbook and other beginner stuff for Wikibooks, but also some of the more involved administrative areas (the spam blacklist will certainly be one). The first two suggestions require the community to be on-board, but this is one I can pursue alone and, critically, for free. Given reports from several users, I think this will be a very productive medium to experiment with. Hopefully we can work together on my other suggestions to strengthen the community for the long-term.

Organizers Needed

2009-01-07T08:23:00.000-08:00

Wikibooks has tons of books (3000+ by some counts), but they're not all organized in a way that makes them easy to find. Last year we deprecated most of our old and unweildy organization methods: manual lists for things like alphabetical ordering, manually-maintained bookshelves, and dewey-decimal categorizations. We've switched over to a method of using categories and DPL lists to keep books organized in various ways.

The method is working very well, but is exposing some of the organizational problems that we have. Some of our books are miscategorized. Some parts of the category hierarchy are very messy or completely illogical.

We're looking for people with a good eye for consistency and a solid understanding of broad subject areas to help us organize a few places:

Sciences. Our science hierarchy is completely messed up, and books throughout it are commonly miscategorized.
Computing. The computing hierarchy is clearly one of those organizational systems that has grown organically in an unguided way over time. Some categories are very big, such as our generic "Programming" category. Computing books are the largest group in Wikibooks, and the one that needs the most attention
Humanities. It's like a catch-all for the "soft sciences" books, and clearly isn't organized well.
Miscellaneous. As it's name implies, it's like the de facto category for things that we just can't place otherwise. Most of the books in this category need to be moved to other places, and some new more-specific categories need to be created for these books

If you're interested in helping with some of these tasks, come on down to Wikibooks and take a look around. We'd be grateful for any help we could get.

New Book In the New Year

2009-01-02T07:36:00.000-08:00

Getting Wikijunior's catalog of books for children improved is a project that I'm highly interested in encouraging, even if I'm not always motivated to do the work myself. You can call me hypocritical if you like. To start off 2009, I wanted to post a link to a very cool book for young pre-readers that uses images from Commons to illustrate counting like objects. [[Numbers from 1 to 20]] is a cute little counting book that presents the ideas that numbers can be introduced through counting pictures. The book isn't perfect, as there is a lot of room for improvement on the general idea, and a lot of room to improve the implementation. However, it's a great example of the kinds of books we can be developing for children using little more then well-selected pictures from the huge library of Commons.

Want to do something like this yourself? Pick a category of cool images together and arrange them into a Wikijunior picture book for kids. The best part of this is that few words are needed so people who don't consider themselves to be great artists can still participate. We've already got picture books for Numbers, Colors, Jobs, and the Alphabet. What other cool picture book ideas can you come up with to teach basic subjects to our youngest students?

Year in Review

2008-12-30T05:51:00.000-08:00

We're getting to the bitter end of the 2008 calendar year, so now seems as good a time as any to recap the year and try to put it into perspective. Here's a brief overview of what 2008 brought to English Wikibooks:

Added only 3 new administrators, but removed a whopping 13 of them for a net total of -10 administrators. With all the new anti-vandalism measures in place, there just doesn't seem to be a huge demand for new admins, and we've seen very few requests or nominations for the position in the last year. Many of the requests we do see are for rollbacker access instead of admin access for fighting vandalism anyway. Page deletion is really just no big deal.
Added 1 new bureaucrat and 1 new checkuser. They were the same person, Mike.lifeguard. He's been a huge help at Wikibooks for a while now, and is a huge positive influence on the site.
Added many editors, reviewers, patrollers and rollbackers. I'm not counting them all, but there were several in each category.
Added 8 new featured books. The first wave of books came in 2007 when we first created the program, and I expected we would have a much slower rate of approval as time went on.
We've been getting around 350,000 - 450,000 page hits per day on average, according to http://wikistics.falsikon.de/.
Our other stats appear to have stopped updating in May 2008, so I don't have any good numbers from there.

In some respects it was a relatively slow year for us, but in others it was quite exciting. We are seeing a little bit less community participation then in the past, but more people are concentrating on their books and building excellent content. There will be plenty of time in 2009 to talk about why things are trending in this way.

All I want for Christmas

2008-12-24T05:47:00.000-08:00

It's that time of year again, where we wrap up one year, and start setting our goals for the upcoming year. The fact that it's almost a major gift-giving holiday means that, like everybody else, I'm putting together a wishlist. Some things on the list are very practical, and some are more fantastic. Without further ado, here is my wishlist of 12 things I want for Wikibooks in the upcoming year:

Replace our old print versions and PDF versions with Collections. We've got javascript tools to help automate the process, and we're working on helpful documentation and templates to facilitate the process. What we need most is manpower to create collections pages and start marking the out-of-date print versions and PDF files for deletion. 2009 will be the year of the collection, mark my words.
Fix our damn documentation! Our whole Help: namespace is a disorganized and out-of-date mess. Our help books, Using Wikibooks and Editing Wikitext are developing nicely and are primed to become our primary help resources. I'm hoping that with few exceptions most of our Help: pages can be deleted or redirected to pages that are more current and are better maintained.
While we're at it, we need to clean up our sloppy category system and rethink the way we use categories to keep pages organized. Currently, they're just used as the unseen backend for our DPL-driven Subject pages.
Higher quality. We have a lot of books with a lot of content. We even have a featured books program now that helps us to pick and promote the best of the bunch. However, we judge "featured" books by relative standards. What we need are absolute quality criteria for judging books, and we need honest and unbiased external reviews to see if books meet those criteria. We need feedback from subject matter experts and potential readers to help make our books better. We need to identify the holes in our bookshelves, especially in the "core" subjects and start writing the books to fill them.
Usability. This topic is in vogue throughout the WMF, and Wikibooks is no exception. We need massive usability improvements as much or more then any other project. The barrier to entry is just too high to attract the kinds of contributors we need for long-term growth. I've done some javascript work that I'm proud of, but we need so much more on so many levels.
Curricula. And this is something we could work on together with the Wikiversity folks. We have lots of books targeted to specific reading audience, we need to start arranging them by grade level into meaningful curricula for students. You should be able to search by grade level and see a list of books which are written for your level.
Outreach. We need more active participants, and especially more people at the admin-level or higher. We need to attract more contributors who can help make the other things in this list happen.
Issue tracking. This is purely an idea from my own imagination, but I would like to have some kind of issue tracking system for our books. This would allow us to find tasks and report them into a queue. Interested contributors could search through the list of open tasks, take ownership of them, and work to complete them. Having a list of finite tasks and tasklets will help people to get started more quickly and gives people progress milestones. Knowing that your work is needed and that you are making real progress on things is a huge benefit to productivity and morale. I would absolutely love it if Wikibooks had an issue tracking system like Bugzilla, even if we had to roll our own with Javascript or maintain our own separate server to host it.
Wikibookians.org, where we could host things like an issue tracker, but also an @wikibookians.org mail server for our members. We could host advertisements for our books on PediaPress (and on Amazon if we can get them to appear there too), we could host book-related blogs and software tools that are more involved then the JavaScripts we're able to make on the wiki. I've wanted this for a long time, and 2009 could very well be the year I put it together.
Institutional support. We need to get schools and universities involved, not just as readers but as content contributors and guidance providers. We don't just write books according to our own whims and ship them out, we need to write books to particular standards. We need something like a "Wikibooks advisory board" (even an informal one) that could help guide us in making important decisions for the site and improving our books in specific ways.
Partnerships. We've worked with groups like the UNDP in the past when they donated a series of their e-books to Wikibooks. We need to expand that, and develop partnerships with other organizations as well. Wikibooks would be a great place for hosting things like software tutorials and documentation, or other free ebooks. Why maintain your own server for ebooks and documentation when you can host it at Wikibooks for free? I bet we could find several groups who fit this bill. I call this idea "Wikibooks as a service".
Design. We're working on finding a new logo, and we might even succeed this time. I would like other improvements to our site design that includes improvements to our site CSS and JS, improvement of many of our interface messages and design improvements to our main page, our main discussion pages, our policy pages, our subject pages, etc. This is not to mention the aesthetic improvements that each individual books need.

This is my Christmas wishlist for Wikibooks, what kinds of things do other people want for the project?

Nomenclature

2008-12-19T15:17:00.001-08:00

I was talking to Pharos today, and he mentioned something that I've been mulling over for a while now in the back of my mind but never took the time to say: We at Wikibooks have a problem with our nomenclature.

Things were easy when we were just an e-book site, because we could extend the "book" metaphor to our creations with ease. A book is broken into little chunks which could be equally referred to as "chapters" or "pages". Wiki wasn't paper, after all, so it didn't matter if one of our "pages" was far longer then a single printed page would be coming out of your printer. The point was moot.

Things are a little bit different now though, because Wiki can indeed become paper in a very real way. All of a sudden we have an insurmountable wall of dense terminology where every word seems to have multiple meanings. Keep in mind that every "book" on our site has two possible incarnations: the on-wiki version and the printed PediaPress version (and even the downloadable PDF version, but let's ignore that for now).

With these two incarnations in mind, what do the words "book", "chapter", "page", "section", "unit", "module", and "heading" mean? If we keep up the metaphor and say the things on our website are "books", then what are those things that PediaPress are printing? A "page" on wiki takes up multiple "pages" in the printed book. A "chapter" in the book is made up of multiple chunks of stuff that we used to call "chapters" on the wiki. In short, we have a terminology nightmare on our hands, and as a result our best tutorials about the subject have descended into opaque and indecipherable jibberish where words are used in multiple different ways, often in a single paragraph or sentence.

And don't even get me started on the difficulty in trying to file bug reports with the PediaPress people, trying to explain how certain "features" in a published book correspond to wikitext syntax in certain places on the wiki. The fact that we've had any meaningful discussions with them is a testament to the sheer courtesy, patience and willpower that the wonderful PediaPress developers have shown. If it's this hard for us to do, I can't even imagine how confused our poor new users are becoming by this all.

Wikibooks mentioned in books

2008-12-17T05:50:00.000-08:00

Darklama alerted me yesterday to this cool link:

http://books.google.com/books?q=Wikibooks&btnG=Search+Books

The word "Wikibooks" appears in 155 book search results. At least on of these books that I have see, "Wikijunior Big Cats" was actually written on en.Wikibooks, and is displayed here on Google. Quite an interesting list. Can anybody else find places where Wikibooks turns up in cool searches or places?

What if we...

2008-12-13T20:15:00.000-08:00

Mike.lifeguard posed an interesting question today in #wikibooks: What ideas for outreach do you have for a group of Wikibookians who have some money available? Quite a loaded question, and we've done (and are still doing) a lot of brainstorming. It's basically a moot question because we don't have any money for anything, but still an interesting mental exercise. Here are some ideas we threw out about what we could do for outreach with a little bit of money:

Contract out some UI improvement work to professional programmers and web designers to improve Wikibooks
Buy a handful of our best books from PediaPress, and donate them to schools and libraries.
Buy commodity laptops, and use them to host workshops for interested groups.
Buy pro-Wikibooks advertisements in magazines for professional educators
Offer prizes to students who donate their appropriate and well-written school papers to Wikibooks after school is over. These papers could make excellent starting points for new books.
Try to convince more teachers to assign writing and editing tasks on Wikibooks
Buy one give one: An event where for every PediaPress-printed book we sell, we donate one to a group in need
Offer bounties to authors to write specific pages or to edit pages in specific ways
Contact publishers and authors to purchase the rights to out-of-print books and have them uploaded to WB for improvement
Purchase rights to use standardized educational curricula (which are often, unfortunately, copyrighted)
Pay to have some of our best books reviewed, edited, and revised by professional editors
Professionally publish some of our better books

These are just a few of the ideas that came out in the brainstorm. What ideas do other people have?

Visual Book Designer Released

2008-12-13T13:21:00.001-08:00

Today I've finally released the next version of my Visual Book Designer gadget. It's a visual outlining tool for designing new books and manipulating existing books. This isn't a major release in that the basic architecture and operation of the gadget hasn't changed in any significant way. However, a number of new features have been added. Here's a brief list:

Added support for collections. You can create a collection (personal or public) from your new book outline, or you can load the TOC of an existing book and create a collection from that.
Added AJAX automation, although right now it's for admins only because it's like a beta test and could be very disruptive. You click the Create link, and the gadget will automatically create all the pages in your outline using any text you've specified.
Simplified adding subpages and page headings, so you don't have to use an edit box. Just click the [ + ] link to add a new subpage or heading to the outline.
Smoothed out the interface a little.

Here's an image of the current interface. Basically, you just click on anything you want to change, input the new values, and save them. I've put in a lot of effort to make this user-friendly and interactive, so I would love to hear about any feedback that people have with this. Maybe I'll post a short tutorial about how to use the tool in the next few days. Eventually, I would like this, or something like it, to be featured prominently as a tool to help our users make new books. There's a long way to go before this is ready for always-on deployment, but it's a decent tool to use right now. Check it out and let me know what you think.

Wikibooks in 2009

2008-12-11T15:58:00.000-08:00

We're getting closer to 2009, a year that I hope will be a big one for Wikibooks. This time a year ago I was very hopeful that 2008 would be a big year, and in many ways it was. We got a few cool new extensions: The gadgets extension, the collections extension, and the flaggedrevs extension. From an anecdotal account, I don't think our "active community" grew or became any more active then it had been in 2007, but I feel like our overall number of contributors has grown. I will need to take a look at some statistics to confirm this. Expect a full statistical review of the 2008 year in an upcoming post.

I talked to Erik Moeller briefly tonight. He's spoken to the people at PediaPress and apparently they've sold 8 books so far. Hardly a mindblowing number, but still an interesting figure. I've bought 3 of those myself. Let's hope this number goes up in the coming year. He also talked a little bit about the usability initiative, and how Wikibooks could definitely benefit from some UI improvements. I'm a big proponent of an improved UI and improved usability, so I hope things improve in this area.

What will 2009 hold for Wikibooks? I have some personal predictions and hopes that I'll post in a few days. What I want is to hear some ideas from other people: What will 2009 bring for en.WB? What should we focus on for the year? Where should we set our sights, and how high should be our expectations? I would love to hear from people about this.

Gadgets Galore

2008-12-08T14:18:00.000-08:00

Some of the folks at PediaPress have been working on a javascript tool to automatically create a collection from a book's table of contents. Today, after some testing, I turned this little tool into a gadget.

The gadget adds a nifty little "get collection" link in the upper-right corner of the screen. When you click the link, it scans the current page for links to subpages, and then opens an edit window with the generated collection text. It is quite a handy tool, I even used it today to create a collection from one of the books I've been working on. I do have my own tool that can create collections too, it's a little bit more involved but has a bit more power. I'll post an update about my javascript work later.

I also added the WikEd editor gadget to Wikibooks a while back. I dont remember if I made any kind of a fanfare about it at the time. However, I've been using it and am very impressed by it. It's not quite WYSIWYG, but the syntax highlighting is a really neat trick. As a programmer, I've become so accustomed to syntax highlighting that I can't remember how I edited wiki without it. I especially like the full-page editing mode too. Just the full-page mode and the syntax highlighting make this cool tool worth a test. The editor has a lot of other features that I don't use personaly, but I imagine they would be useful to some people.

Next time you're at Wikibooks, check out the Collections gadget and the WikEd editor gadget. Quite cool tools.

Usability

2008-12-04T17:02:00.000-08:00

A lot of talk about usability nowadays. Foundation even managed to pick up a sizable grant to try and improve our projects in this regard. I've been arguing that we need better editing tools for a while now, even going so far as to create some of my own tools to try and make things easier for new editors.

I'm a technically inclined person, so I personally don't find wikis too difficult to use. Of course, this is in comparison to some of the other work I've done in the past with HTML and LaTeX markup for documents. I also do a lot of coding work, so symbols and markup and parameters aren't anything new to me. But I'm one of a relatively rare breed of technically saavy people. The vast majorty of people in this world aren't as comfortable with plain-text editors and markup as I am. Hell, the vast majority of people in my family, and at my work, and from my school aren't comfortable with those things either. It's just not the kind of computing that people have been trained to expect.

Wikis are hard. They're hard for the radical conceptual reasons of openness and freedom and collaboration. But they're also hard for the technical reasons: strange and cluttered interface, and the ad hoc markup language. On top of the challenges inherent in MediaWiki, there are the challenges of writing a book, a whole book. It's a lot to deal with, and even if we write all sorts of documentation, it won't be enough. Books are big, they're structured, and they need a particular flow and cohesiveness to them that don't just happen when you click Save page.

Some people won't be able to find the documentation. Some people just wouldn't read it anyway. Nobody is going to read all of it. I haven't even read all of it, and I've personally written a good portion!

We need some form of WYSIWYG, even if it's very simple. There are too many people that just can't or just won't use Wikitext. We need automation, at least at Wikibooks. Books consist of multiple pages, collection pages, table of contents, introductions, and appendices. They have templates too, and categories. We need a button to "Create a book" given a few basic parameters that will create all these kinds of pages automatically and correctly. We need the software to take care of the technical and repetitive work, and leave the authors to do the basic book writing. We need the software to follow the rules, so the contributors don't have to read volumes of documentation just to learn them. If the software just does things the right way, the barrier to entry will be so much lower then it is now. Until we have that, the only people who will be writing books are the technically-saavy editors, a very small subset of the people who we would like to have writing books.

New Wikibooks Logo

2008-12-01T15:14:00.000-08:00

I had planned on posting more updates about the logo selection process, but with all the other big things going on at WB, I completely forgot. Well, now it's over.

That's right. As quickly as it started, the vote for the new Wikibooks logo is over. 310 people voted in total, more then in my wildest dreams. Who would have thunk that we got higher voter turnout when I didn't post any updates on the blog, and very few reminders got sent to public forums like foundation-l. And yet, 310 people have spoken, and Wikibooks has a new logo. Here it is:

Already, Bastique is setting up a series of color alternatives. Once we pick the final color scheme (I'm hoping for red!) Wikibooks has a new logo.

Social Networking

2008-11-29T06:26:00.001-08:00

Did you know that there are some social-networking venues for Wikibookians outside of Wikibooks? It helps like-minded people to get together off-wiki, and to proudly display your non-profit affiliations to others. Here are some social networking sites that I know about, I would love to hear about others from other people!

Facebook: There is a Wikibooks group at Facebook. It's not a huge group, but it's a cool way to keep in touch with other 'bookians off-wiki. You have to have a facebook account to join (you might even need an account to see the page), but if you have one, we would love for you to become a member. Myself and Mike.lifeguard are admins of the group.
Linked-In: We have a group at Linked-In too. There are only two members right now (myself included), but it's a cool way to add "I write books" to your profile.
The blogosphere. It's not quite social networking, but I already have 1 "Follower" on this blog, and manage to solicit a few comments every now and then. It's a fun little way for people to chat about important news topics that happen at Wikibooks. If other Wikibookians are interested in joining this blog as an author, or submitting stories as a guest author, definitely let me know! Sub from Fr.Wikibooks also maintains a French-language blog about Wikibooks at http://wikilivres.wordpress.com/.

These are just the Wikibooks-related groups I'm aware of, I'm sure there are more about Wikibooks, tons about the Wikimedia Foundation and Wikipedia, and more still about open content and open education movements. I would love to hear about all of them.

Print Version Difficulties

2008-11-26T12:15:00.000-08:00

English Wikibooks has three separate ways of preparing a book for print:

Print Versions. A print version is a transclusion of all the pages in a book into a single page, plus the GFDL and a few templates for formatting. These are large and unweildy, only look decent when printed, but do stay up-to-date with changes made to the pages in the book.
PDF Versions. PDF versions are often made from a print version, by converting the large page to a PDF file. PDFs can be downloaded easily, look very nice offline and when printed. They are difficult to edit, however, and that's very un-wiki-like.
Collections. There are still a few software kinks to be worked out, but the dev team is doing great work. Collections stay up-to-date like print versions, and can be easily converted to PDF by any user.

I personally would like to see options #1 and #2 be deprecated in favor of using Collections, but we're some time away from that yet. However, in looking around, I realized that not all books are designed to be printed and published. Some are, some authors have taken great pains to ensure their books are nicely formatted with printed. However, how do you print things like video, or audio, or animated GIFs? Or, how do you print things like our {{dynamic navigation}} template, which relies on Javascript to hide things from readers until clicked. This is especially used, I am told, in our foreign language books that use it for interactive exercises.

Today I threw together [[Template:DoesNotPrint]] to try and mark books like this, which aren't designed or intended to be printed. This is a counterpoint to templates like {{Print version}}, {{PDF version}}, or {{Collection}} which marks books where authors have taken extra care to make sure the book is printed.

In some cases, I think a book is more valuable if it can be downloaded or easily printed and distributed to people without internet access. However, the web is filled with cool technologies that don't work in a printed medium, some of which can have a very beneficial effect on education. It's up to authors to determine what directions they want their books to develop in.

Reviewers Wanted

2008-11-24T17:37:00.000-08:00

Here's an excerpt from our [[Using Wikibooks]] book that contains some of our first guidelines on how to use the new FlaggedRevs extension at Wikibooks. If you have a good eye for content and have good judgement, we could use your help to review our mountains of pages. Also, we could probably use some help improving these guidelines:

Page Criteria

When reviewing a page, there are 3 categories with 5 levels in each. The three categories are Coverage, Accuracy, and Composition. Knowing how to review a page means knowing what these categories are and how to judge a book using them. The levels in each criteria are more then just grades for the page, they are also a checklist that editors can follow to bring a page up to featured quality. If all the pages in a book are basically featured quality, the book could easily be nominated for the honor at WB:FB. Of course, having individual pages be featured doesn't mean that the book itself is also featured quality. There needs to be an emergent quality to the book where pages build on each other in a logical and consistent way for the book to become featured. If the pages don't work together, the book is probably more of a macropedia then a textbook and needs additional work.

Composition

Composition is the basic quality of a page: How well is it written? Wikibooks is a text-based content website, so everything we do here revolves around the quality of our writing. The Wiki process does not demand that everything be written perfectly, but that successive editors and authors can improve a page incrementally by fixing errors and omissions as they are found. Pages should aspire to be technically correct in terms of spelling and grammar, but must also have flow, consistency, and structure. Readers hate to be presented with a bland wall of text, so things like headings, lists, templates, tables, and images should be employed to break the page up into bits that a reader can easily absorb.

Poor/Unreviewed: This page either hasn't ever been reviewed, or else it has been reviewed and is terrible. Spelling and grammar is off, the page has no flow and makes no sense. In short, this page is unreadable.
Good Spelling and Grammar: Using proper spelling and grammar, or very close approximation thereof, is really a minimum requirement. If a page isn't written so that other people can read and understand it, it's worse then having no page at all. This rating doesn't mean that the spelling and grammar must be perfect, but it should be reasonable and easy enough for an experienced editor to clean up quickly. Many web browsers have built-in spell checking functionality, so this shouldn't be too hard to achieve.
Good Structure: Once the words are spelled correctly and the sentences are constructed properly, it's time to focus on the overall structure of the page. Ideas should flow logically from one paragraph to the next. Later topics should build on earlier topics without going on tangents or requiring prerequisite knowledge that has never been discussed. The page should be broken down into sections and subsections, and maybe use some templates and tables to include additional information.
Consistent Style: Consistent style is the next step in page development. The page should not just be technically correct in spelling and grammar, or written with good paragraph and section structure. The page must be written in a consistent voice that properly accounts for the target audience. Wikijunior books for children should be written with high-energy and child-friendly vocabulary. Books for students, adults or professionals should all be written accordingly. To achieve this, the authors of a page should probably be familiar with pages like Wikibooks:Reading Levels.
Featured Quality: This page is not only well written, it is an example that other pages should follow. This page should be an example of good writing and good teaching by any standards.

Accuracy

Information is only as good as it's accuracy. If a page is well-written and has good coverage, it's still worthless if it's untrue or misleading. Wikibooks is an educational resource, and should aspire to teach accurate information to readers. The accuracy metric of a page should show how accurate and trustworthy the information on the page is, and how valuable it will be as an educational tool. Accuracy has five levels:

Poor/Unreviewed: The page is nothing short of absurd, talking about pseudoscience, nonsense, or other garbage. The page is untrue, misleading, and may even be dangerous to readers.
Acceptable: The page contains truth, or partial truth. It's not absurdly incorrect, but isn't well supported either. Important details might be missing and certain aspects may be incorrect. The page will be short on examples, and short on discussion to explain things in an understandable way.
Good/Average: The page presents information that is not obviously incorrect, and maybe only suffers in certain details. The page won't have many, if any, examples to illustrate the topic. The page probably doesn't make use of any references.
Verifiable: A verifiable page is one that presents correct information, but also provides the tools to prove that the information is true. This proof can come in many ways including references to primary sources, do-it-yourself verification, or building logically on topics covered in other pages from the same book. Some books may require a certain amount of prerequisite knowledge in readers, and will take certain facts to be self-evident, so this should be considered when reviewing.
Featured Quality: The accuracy of this page is a goal that other pages should aspire to. This page is a good and reliable resource on the given topic by any standards.

Coverage

Coverage deals with the amount of material that the page actually covers, as compared to the amount of material that it should cover. Good coverage means that a page covers all the topics that it intends to cover, and covers all of them well. Consider a page called "Arithmetic" that only covers addition, or a page called "Animals" that only covers mammals. Or, consider a stub page which only has a few short sentences about a large number of topics, without actually providing any interesting information about any of them. These are both examples of pages with poor coverage. Coverage is broken into 5 levels:

Poor/Unreviewed: This is the default setting for pages that are unreviewed. If a page is in this condition, it needs to be improved badly. Pages in this category are typically incomplete stubs, that provide only a brief overview, or only contain a lot of empty sections.
Acceptable: The page covers it's topic in a minimaly-acceptable way. It includes the bare amount of information on the topic, and doesn't include background information, references to other topics, examples, or in-depth discussions. This page needs an author to sit down and start drafting more content as soon as possible.
Good/Average: The page covers it's topic in a reasonable way. It should probably include a high-level overview, some examples, some background information, and other pieces of information that readers will want.
Great: Readers should be able to read this page and get all the information that they need on the topic. The page should have lots of good examples, in-depth discussions, overviews, and background. The page should set the reader up with all the information they need on this topic throughout the rest of the book, and maybe more then that.
Featured Quality: The amount of information that this page covers, and the method in which it covers that information is exemplary. This page is an example that other pages should aspire to follow, and is a good resource on it's topic by any standards.

Book Ideas

2008-11-22T07:10:00.000-08:00

I was supposed to write a Wikibooks blog post three days ago, and now my todo list is saying that I have to write two! I can't afford to wait any longer and maybe stack up a few more of them, I'll never be able to catch up!

I do a lot of planning for new books, I am a firm believer that books with a solid plan will have a higher chance of success then books which are thrown together off the cuff. However, I have more outlines and plans then I possibly have time to implement. Also, I've adopted a number of stub-books which have strong potential, but a lot of redlinks in their tables of contents. I need to be honest about the fact that I can't write all these books myself, but I'm not prepared to just abandon them without finding new contributors to take over first. So, here is a list of books and book ideas that I've done some work on, but am not able to carry on any longer. I warn you that many of these books are very technical, since those are the topics I tend to write about.

Find Employment: How do people find jobs? How do they write resumes and prepare for interviews? This book has a lot of content already, but isn't complete. I'm also not in the job market anymore, so I'm not thinking about it. Authors needed for ongoing maintenance and expansion of a few areas.
Astrodynamics: I started working on this book when I was taking a class on it, and doing some research on satellites for the USAF. I've written up a few chapters, but the second-half of the TOC is mostly empty. Looking for somebody who knows physics and vector caluculus to really expand this book and bring it up to date.
Electrodynamics: This book was originally a chapter in a larger book about "Modern Physics". I felt that it would be better served by being a stand-alone book, so I moved it out and restructured it. This book has some information and equations, but is woefully in need of help. I took a semester of electrodynamics back in school, but don't remember enough to be a help for this book.
Digital Circuits: I started this book back when I was taking classes in the area, but I just am not interested enough in it to continue. This book is very much a stub, and needs a lot of TLC from a knowledgable author.
Automata Theory: Wikibooks doesn't currently have a book about automata theory, but I've been planning one for some time now. I was intending to write this to support other books I was planning such as "Regular Expressions" and "Compiler Theory". None of these books have yet been written, in fact, but the later two I am going to get around to eventually. If you're interested in this, let me know and I will send you my outline and notes.
Digital Storage Media: This is one of the oldest plans I've ever made. I literally wrote my first outline for this book 3 years ago in 2005. This book is intended to be about digital storage: CDs, hard disk drives, and file systems. Basically, how do we store all the trillions of bytes that we generate every year? How does storage work? What storage mediums are useful in which applications? I think this is a very interesting topic, but realistically I'm never going to write it. If you're interested in this topic, let me know and I will send you my outline and notes.

I'm slowly going through my list of old books and outlines, and I'll post more as I find them. If you know about any of these topics and are interested in writing about them, Wikibooks could use your help. Let me know, and I can help you get started.

Collections Redux

2008-11-18T17:25:00.000-08:00

I wrote a blog post about collections a few days back, and people sent me in some comments asking for more updates and some pictures. Here's a picture of my first book:

You'll notice the large flash flare in the center, that's because I'm a lousy photographer. I did take a few other pictures, but they came out all blurry for the same reason. So this is what we get, and everybody is going to have to deal with it. If somebody more handy with a camera then myself can take some pictures and send them to me, I will post them.

I tried to purchase a few more today, and realized that something was wrong. Saved collections cannot be loaded with Special:Collection for some reason. This is the first time I've tested it since the Flaggedrevs extension got installed, so I assume there is some kind of negative interaction going on. If you were planning to check out this collection but haven't had a chance yet, you're just going to have to wait a little longer. I sent out a frantic email to the necessary people, and they are looking into it. Maybe we'll get it back soon, and then I'll have to write yet another post about this extension (and I'm happy to do it!).

Flaggedrevs Extension

2008-11-15T19:36:00.000-08:00

I was planning to write another follow-up post about the new collections extension. Some people had requested links and pictures, and I am more then happy to provide them. However, there's no time for follow-ups now, there is too much exciting news to report.

As of last night, en.Wikibooks has the flaggedrevs extension. We're scrambling to figure it out, get it documented, and figure out how to use it. Plus, we're using a very custom configuration of it, so we're try to evaluate whether we want things changed.

Here's what I do know: It's awesome, with caveats. The flaggedrevs extension seems to interact negatively with new page patrolling, and that's throwing some of our patrollers into a tizzy. It might not make sense to both review and patrol pages (reviewing should suffice), but we have to reconsider some of our existing workflow, and we have to figure out what new flags to give to our patrollers so they can keep working.

Lots has been changing around here in the past few weeks, Wikibooks is barely recognizable anymore. Hopefully when all the dust settles, we're in a much better position then we used to be. With all the changes, now is a very cool time to come down to explore Wikibooks.

My First Book: PediaPress is here.

2008-11-14T08:06:00.000-08:00

After all these years of writing on the wiki and repeating the mantra "wiki is not paper", I've finally gotten my first printed book for my efforts. Yesterday afternoon UPS delivered what is, I hope, the first of a long series of books with my name on the cover. It was an experience like no other.

Because it's more then just a cool opportunity to get some kind of physical justification of all this time I'm "wasting" at Wikibooks. It's more then being able to hold it up and say "See, this is what I'm doing with my time: Writing actual books that people can actually buy and actually use for class." Of course, then I get the question in return "How much money do you make from this?" Maybe one day I'll have a pile of money that I can hold up and show to people in response to that question too, but probably not. Visual aides to make question-answering much easier.

More then having displayable justification, it's an opportunity to learn something new and to teach new things to people. How long do you think it will take me before I start writing a book about how to write books for this new print-on-demand service? I've already been sending out emails rapid-fire to the PediaPress people with bugs, glitches, and issues that I've found from pouring over my precious new book. Every single page is an opportunity to learn something that I can pass on to others about this experience: Best practices for our authors, fixes and suggestions for the software guys, recommendations for our readers. This first book is a treasure trove of information, and it has my name in big blue letters on the cover. It's an experience that is immeasurably cool.

PediaPress and print-on-demand are here. This is it, this is the sign. When that first book shows up in your mailbox, you know that things have changed. Wikibooks is coming of age today, right now, in a way that most of us 'bookians barely dared to dream about a month ago. The work our authors and editors and volunteers are doing does matter, and will help students and teachers around the world in a very concrete way. All the pieces of the puzzle are falling into place, and the last thing we need is you: your contributions, your books, and your ideas. The books that you write will be printed, bound, and sent to people who can't afford books from traditional publishers. We're going to change the world with this, and we can start right now.

Go to Wikibooks and check out print-on-demand. You won't regret it.

Math books for Children

2008-11-11T06:29:00.000-08:00

Wikibooks has traditionally had a bit of a dearth in the "fundamental" subjects. These are subjects, especially those aimed at children, that are almost universally covered in schools and that almost all children learn about. Without having books (and high-quality books at that) the chances that books from Wikibooks will end up in a classroom are slim. We have several good books at the college level, but sheer quality and rigor will probably keep our books from being used there.

One area where our books are a larger mess then usual is in mathematics. We have several books which appear to be aimed at young children, but there isn't a critical mass of contributors for them to really make them grow, expand, and succeed. Here are a few books that could really use a helping hand:

[[Wikjunior:Visual Math]]: is a very fun little concept aimed at pre-readers. The book uses pictures and colors to teach basic mathematical concepts to very young children. At least, it would do these things, but at the moment it's a stub book with tons of redlinks to lots of empty page space. A person who was good at navigating commons for images (or good at making images themselves) would be a great help for this book.
[[Wikjunior:Mathematics in several volumes]]: is an interesting-looking book that I'm not too familiar with. It appears to be very ambitious, breaking up into logical "volumes" for different age groups. However, the development of this book hasn't gotten very far. It's a terrible stub right now, and the first decision to be made here is whether to keep and expand it, or delete it outright.
[[Math for the Young]]: This book isn't part of Wikiunior proper, but it probably should be moved there. It's a relatively new book, but hasn't seen much development since it's original author disappeared in March. It looks to target readers in the 4-7 age range using simple words and sentences and lots of pictures. There is a suggestion that this book should be merged into [[Arithmetic]], but I'm not sure I agree with that suggestion. I do think the name of this should be changed to something a little more descriptive, however.
[[Arithmetic]]: Aimed at a slightly older audience (I'm thinking 8-11?) then any of the other books on the list, this is still definitely a book for young people. I'm torn about whether this book might belong in Wikijunior, but the case could easily be made that this book could be dual-purposed for an older, math-illiterate audience as well.

After these books, we start getting into the territory of [[Algebra]] and higher maths, which are another problem all together (but at least the Algrebra books seem to garner occasional interest and contributions).

We at Wikibooks would love to have better mathbooks like these for children of all ages. If you think you have what it takes to make one of these books a success, we would love to hear from you. Stop on down to Wikibooks and take a look at some of these.

Logo Vote: The final stretch

2008-11-10T15:34:00.000-08:00

I became a little bit downtrodden about the Wikibooks and Wikijunior logo selection processes when I learned that several copyvios had crept in to the list of candidates. What was most upsetting to me personally, some of the copyvios were my favorites from the entire bunch. I took some time off from the discussion after that to clear my head, because a lot of other people were in the same boat: The copyvios were generally considered the favorites by several of the participants. Without them, it felt like we were going to be forced to pick a logo that nobody liked as much.

However, things have changed now, and time heals all wounds. I was planning to get back into the fray of it this week, but others have beaten me to it. Apparently, the final vote is being scheduled for 17 November, and the list of final candidates is quite impressive indeed. I hope that we can select a great logo for Wikibooks to plaster on all these new books we're publishing!

I'll post some more information as I get it.

TEH LICENZE!

2008-11-03T18:00:00.000-08:00

I've been away on vacation for a week, and have had a lot of catching up to do. This does highlight the need to get more people blogging about Wikibooks though: If anybody out there wants to post some news about Wikibooks on this blog, either as a regular author, or through irregular email submissions, that would be awesome. Let me know.

Some news points:

When I left, the last thing I posted about was the new wiki-to-print extension. I've only seen a few reviews of it posted so far, but they've all be remarkably positive. I still need to take some time to test it myself (and I might order a few books to boot!).
The License!! Holy Crap!! The FSF released GFDL 1.3, which includes a migration clause to CC-BY-SA. Wiki sites such as Wikibooks might eventually use CC-BY-SA, or GFDL+CC-BY-SA in the future for all their materials. This is great for interoperability with other open-content and open-education initiatives, but it does create some issues with book donations, where authors in the past have donated books to us under the GFDL, and now those works might be relicensed without their consent. Even if it's strictly legal, it's awfully underhanded, and I'm trying to get in touch with affected people (it's actually a very small list, thankfully) to make sure we aren't burning any bridges.

I'll definitely find more news to report as I start getting back into the swing of things.

Wiki-To-Print Enabled.

2008-10-24T04:40:00.000-07:00

http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/textbook-l/2008-October/001367.html

Just a short update this morning (I know I've been slacking!). The Wiki-To-Print extension has been installed on all language Wikibooks projects. I've been waiting for something like this for years now, so I'm very happy to have it. Of course, it goes live the day before I leave for vacation, and I can't play with it for a whole week!

There are a few known issues with this extension, so I would like to ask people to come check it out and give some feedback for it.

Wikibooks in Print

2008-10-02T06:34:00.000-07:00

I've found out this morning from Brianna's awesome blog that some of our featured books on Wikibooks have been independently published and are available for sale from Amazon:

This is great news, in general, although there are a few things that I obviously wish were different. For instance, we aren't a "project of Wikipedia", but instead are projects of the Wikimedia Foundation. Of course, using the word "Wikipedia" does help the books bank on the popularity of that project, and we aren't totally unrelated to WP either.

My question is, has anybody seen or bought any of these books? What is the quality like on them? 25$ seems a little bit steep to pay for a book that was written for free, but it's a business decision from the people who are doing the publishing, so whatever works for them.

If anybody else knows anything about this, or if you see any more books like this, let me know. It's good to keep track of things!

OKFN Virtual Meeting

2008-09-30T14:11:00.000-07:00

As I posted earlier, OKFN hosted a virtual meeting yesterday for several members of open content textbook enthusiasts and organizations. Sub represented Fr.Wikibooks, Mike.lifeguard and I represented En.Wikibooks. I had to leave a little early, and Mike showed up a little late, but together we canvased the entire thing. It didn't last more then an hour and a half, and a full transcript as been posted online. I'm "Andrew" in the chat.

Some of the topics brought up were the issues of increasing contribution levels and attracting new contributors, and decreasing the technical barrier to entry for some systems, both ideas that I've been preaching for a long time now. Wikis are much more simple to use and edit then raw HTML is (or, it can be if things don't get too cluttered!), but that doesn't mean that plain wikitext is easy for new non-technical editors to pick up and use.

There were lots of groups there and while Wikibooks does seem to be one of the biggest, I doubt it is primed for the most long-term success. The GFDL license we use is becoming more and more obviously a dead weight around our necks! So many other groups in this area are using CC licenses instead, and that means we can't inte-roperate with any of them. In fact, the only groups I saw there that also used the GFDL now or in the past were FHSST and GlobalTexts, both of which were originally started as projects on Wikibooks! Actually, GlobalText uses CC-BY-3.0 now, they relicensed the work they did at Wikibooks long ago.

Other groups are using things like collaboration management tools for getting books written too: Some groups are using things like pledges to attract new contributors. Some groups are using things like issue trackers for software (but with a different name) to parcel out large projects into smaller ones that can be assumed by individual users. For instance, each chapter is an assignment that people can volunteer for, and put their name on. Having a concrete list of tasks that need doing helps keep people focused and organized. It's so much easier to follow a task list then it is to enter a free-form environment and told "you can be bold and make things better!". The wiki way is nice, but I've seen first hand the productivity gains that open-source and open-content groups can reap with a little bit of group organization. I'm sure I'll ruminate at length on this topic later.

Another thing that was brought up was the sheer absurdity of the US educational system, which copyrights educational curricula and standards. Without good access to educational standards, Wikibooks has no hope of writing books to meet those standards which can be used in a real US classroom. Keeping educational standards proprietary is a disgusting profiteering measure and is something that I hope changes in the future. Having standards as a checklist will work like the organization that I talk about above: People are going to be more able to confidently tackle concrete, finite tasks, especially when there are clear progress indicators and a clear goal.

I've also been alerted to a few open textbook aggregation websites, where lists of such books from various projects are being indexed. Wikibooks would do well to make sure we are listed in those places as well.

The meeting altogether was a nice one, but short. I'm hoping a new one get's scheduled, and I might even try to get En.Wikibooks to host one. It really is interesting to see the things that other people are doing, and how Wikibooks fares in comparison. I'll post more information in the coming days and weeks, as I get it distilled down into a readable form.

OKFN Virtual Meetin

2008-09-29T05:52:00.001-07:00

Just a short reminder to people in the wikiverse who might be interested: OKFN is holding a virtual meeting today in irc://irc.oftc.net/okfn about open textbooks. More information about it, including a sign-up sheet for interested participants is here:

http://blog.okfn.org/2008/09/29/open-textbook-virtual-meeting-today/

The meeting is, if I am doing my timezone math correctly today at 17:00 UTC (1PM EST). I hope to see some interested Wikibookians/Wikimedians there!

Foundations of Education and Instructional Assessment

2008-09-23T05:34:00.001-07:00

Quite a long name for a book (at least on Wikibooks), but [[Foundations of Education and Instructional Assessment]] is one of our best. Developed over several semesters by students from Old Dominion University and on it's third edition, this is the kind of book that Wikibookians can point to and say "See? Writing high-quality books on a wiki really can work".

Though the bulk of the book is being written by education graduate students, the group of which changes each semester, the project is being overseen by the same professors and graduate students, [[User:Dwallen11]], [[User:PbakerODU]] and [[User:Jkauf007]], who helped develop [[Social and Cultural Foundations of American Education]], one of our current featured books. Because of the hard work and dedication that I've seen in the past, I have little doubt that "Foundations of Education and Instructional Assessmet" will become one of our featured books as well.

If you want to see what kind of potential the Wikibooks project truely has, come on down and take a look at these wonderful books.

How Wikipedia Works

2008-09-19T10:27:00.000-07:00

Wikipedia's own Phoebe Ayers, Charles Matthews, and Ben Yates have written and published a book about Wikipedia. The book, How Wikipedia Works, is published by No Starch Press and is released under the GFDL license. Yes, that's right: a printed book released under the GFDL.

Is book. Is Wiki. Is GFDL. Is Wikibook? Not yet, but I wouldn't be surprised to see it get translated to wikitext in the future. After all, the beauty of wiki-based textbooks is that they never need to get out of date, and they can be updated as things change by anybody who is interested.

By the way, 5% of the proceeds go directly to the WMF, so that should make you feel better about it.

Zero Revert Rule (0RR)

2008-09-18T18:37:00.000-07:00

Surely the title must be a typo, isn't it the 3 Revert Rule (3RR)? Maybe it is on Wikipedia where you can revert another person twice without running afowl of the authorities, but not so on Wikibooks.

And I know I'm not the only person on in the world who finds it obnoxious, annoying, and down right rude. It's one thing with vandals and spammers (I'm sure that's what the revert and undo tools were originally intended for), but it's another thing to simply remove an edit made in good faith by another editor.

I saw an old post today from 2005 on an under-used talk page from an admin who was warning an IP that 6 reverts was uncalled for, and that the IP in question almost got blocked for it. That's 6 reverts by an IP, and nobody got blocked. Talk about patience! But, that misses the point: Reverts against good faith edits are never really acceptable, and that people should think twice before reverting even once. Edits are the most precious things that a wiki has. Edits make the wiki world go round. And if we're just wiping those edits off the slate without so much as a "hey, I don't understand your edit, can you explain it to me?" is terrible.

Here are two things you can do instead of revert:

Talk about it. It's not so bad, I swear. People won't bite you if you don't chase them around with torches and pitchforks.
Improve it. Edits are valuable, so don't ever just kill one. Make it better. Improve it. On wikis, books are never compete, articles are never perfect, everything needs to be improved. So why is it that some people choose to just delete edits instead of improving them?

0RR isn't a "rule" at Wikibooks (we have very few rules, and like it that way), but it doesn't need to be. We all just know the truth: that reverts are rude and bad, and that we shouldn't use them against good users.

Des nouvelles de Wikilivres

2008-09-13T10:45:00.000-07:00

Speak any French? fr.wikibooks now has a similar blog to this one, operated by User:Sub. It's a news blog for the fr.wikibooks project. If you want to follow along with that progress of that project in an RSS-friendly way, check it out.

Cascading Style Sheets

2008-09-10T16:39:00.000-07:00

Ever wonder how webpages get their pretty on? [[User:Dan Polansky]], who's been with Wikibooks for about half a year now, has been doing some great work on [[Cascading Style Sheets]]. It's an interesting book, and he's been developing a nice print version so you can download and print the whole thing at once. Come on down to Wikibooks and check it out.

OKF Virtual Meeting

2008-09-10T16:37:00.001-07:00

The Open Knowledge Foundation is hosting a virtual meeting on IRC for open-content textbook developers and other like-minded individuals. This announcement was sent to textbook-l this morning. More details are on the OKF Website. I know I'm going to try to make it, any other Wikibookians or book-minded Wikimedians interested?

Daily Pennsylvanian

2008-09-08T13:09:00.001-07:00

Got this link today from Pharos. Haven't even had a chance to read it and don't have time to write anything about it right now:

http://media.www.dailypennsylvanian.com/media/storage/paper882/news/2008/09/05/News/Truth.About.Textbooks.OpenSource.Books.Provide.Digital.Deals-3416905.shtml

Wikitrust

2008-09-01T15:38:00.000-07:00

Luca De Alfaro is a researcher who has been working on an awesome new MediaWiki extension: Wikitrust. Wikitrust is a coloring system for text on a MediaWiki website that uses a computed trust metric for authors to color the words on a page depending on how reliable they are computed to be. The words of a well-trusted author appear white, the words of an untrusted trouble-maker are shown in bright orange. Everybody else is colored somewhere in the middle of the scale. In Wikitrust, there would be a "Trust" tab at the top of every page that you could click on to see what parts of the page are the most stable, and which are most suspicious.

He announced the V2.0 of his extension on wikiquality-l last week, and we've been discussing it ever since. He was looking for some place to install and test it that wouldn't be too big (because we need to evaluate server-load before we install it on en.wikipedia), but would be bigger then a small test wiki. I, of course, nominated en.wikibooks for the honor, and I think there is a little bit of support for that on the list. It's one more item in the queue of desired features, behind flaggedrevs and a few other home-brew extensions we've been clamoring for.

Wikijunior:American Founding Fathers

2008-08-28T14:21:00.000-07:00

[[User:Red4Tribe]], one of our most recently elected admins, has been doing a lot of work today on [[Wikijunior:American Founding Fathers]]. This is a neat way to teach kids more about this important period in American history.

More tory then American? We also have an interesting (if a bit abandoned) book [[Wikijunior:Kings and Queens of England]]. There have been a lot of complaints that this book isn't really written at a level for children and should be moved out of Wikijunior. However, the decisions that need to be made about this book will be left until a capable volunteer comes to make them.

Cookbook

2008-08-26T13:15:00.001-07:00

Hungry? [[User:Mike Hayes]] has been doing a lot of work recently on our own [[Cookbook]]. It's one of our largest books, so large in fact that we've given it it's own Cookbook: namespace. Mike is proving the old mantra that a lot of little fixes add up to big improvements over time.

The Cookbook is a bit of a special case at English Wikibooks, and some of our editors are not entirely happy with the way it's progressed. Specifically, it exists now as a disjointed collection of individual recipes, and is not a coherent book like we usually require. The general consensus is that it should be converted from simply a listing of ingredients and recipes to a teaching resource that uses those recipes to teach larger lessons about cooking. This is a big task, and we're looking for some very ambitious and energetic authors to help make it happen.

Pueblo Colorado

2008-08-25T09:09:00.001-07:00

Are there any Wikimedians out near Pueblo Colorado? I may be traveling that way for work this week by my lonesome. I don't know any of the details yet about the trip (when or if I am actually going, how long I will be staying) but there might be some downtime for a quick meet-and-eat if anybody is interested.

The GIMP

2008-08-24T07:58:00.000-07:00

[[The GIMP]] wasn't just a weird character from Tarantino's Pulp Fiction: It's also a powerful open source image editing software package. Our book on it has been around since 2005, but hasn't always attracted a lot of contributors. Lately, it's been getting some much needed editing and updating from [[User:Chelseafan528]], a member of both Wikibooks and Wikipedia. If you're familiar with the GIMP, especially with recent versions of it, we could use your help and input.

Wikitoddler Flowers Alphabet

2008-08-20T17:01:00.000-07:00

[[Wikijunior:Animal Alphabet]] is one of our more successful and popular* Wikijunior titles, aimed squarely at young pre-readers who need books with more pictures then words. It's a beautiful title, and if you have toddlers at home, it could make for a great interactive read.

Another similar project in the same vein is [[Wikitoddler Flowers Alphabet]], which uses pretty pictures of flowers to teach the alphabet, instead of pretty pictures of animals. As quick-to-get-distracted kids will tell you, a little variety is always nice. This book stub was created by our own [[User:SB Johnny]], and has seen a few helpful edits tonight from Wikibooks regular [[User:Panic2k4]]. More hands are always appreciated, especially hands who are familiar with the huge image library at Commons.

If you want a fun activity to do with the kids, or just like writing some things that are less serious then your average encyclopedia, come on down to Wikijunior and take a look at our titles for kids.

* This book was so popular at one point that a visitor commented that Wikijunior was little more then a "collaborative zoobooks". There are a lot more WJ books available, but most of them weren't as visible.

The Zope 3 Book

2008-08-18T13:47:00.000-07:00

Ever hear of Zope? It's an interesting new web framework for the Python programming language, and now we've got a new book about it! If you're interested in Python and web development, you should check out [[The Zope 3 Book]] which is being actively written now by newcomer [[User:z00perep00z]]. If you're interested in Zope, or know alot about it and want to help, you should come down to Wikibooks and check it out.

Dual Licensing Redux

2008-08-17T16:25:00.000-07:00

On Friday I posted a quick note about a discussion that we've been having at en.wikibooks: The issue of dual-licensing of books has been raised again and it's getting the serious consideration that it deserves. Licensing and issues surrounding that is a perennial topic of discussion.

On one end of the discussion are several editors who are interested in multi-licensing their books to help facilitate use and reuse of our materials in schools and on other websites. Wikibooks is like Wikipedia in some ways, but very different in others. Key among those differences is the way that our content is used, and the target audience we have. For Wikibooks to be called a "success", we can't just have a huge library of free books, but we need to get those books into the hands of students and teachers.

The discussion started in our Reading Room (equivalent of WPs Village Pump), and migrated to textbook-l. Textbook-l tends to be a very low-volume and low-participation list, so I'm planning on writing up a digest to post back to the readers at Wikibooks eventually. Here is a link to the first textbook-l post that started the topic:

http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/textbook-l/2008-August/001302.html

And here is a link to the original discussion in the Reading Room:

http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Wikibooks:Reading_room/Assistance#Is_it_possible_to_create_a_Wikibook_under_Creative_Commons_license.3F

And these, as I mentioned before are not the first places where this issue has been discussed. We have a few precarious books which currently are attempting to use a multi-licensing scheme, and we've basically ignored it when it's happened in the past. I guess there's no more ignoring now, now that the issue is out in the open like this.

I would like to see more input, both on textbook-l and also in our Reading Room. If you have any information, opinions, or ideas to share to help out with this discussion, we would love to hear from you. Alternatively, if you post good messages here on this blog, I'll try to make sure they get seen by the rest of the community as well.

Dual Licensing

2008-08-14T18:47:00.000-07:00

Just a quick update tonight: The issue of dual-licensed books is an old one, and one on which we've never come to any firm conclusions. There are some people who are definitely interested in writing some books under dual licenses, or alternate licensing schemes. Some authors, for instance, are interested in writing books which are completely PD, while others are interested in dual licensing with CC-BY-SA-x.x.

Wikibooks has, in the past, taken a very laissez faire attitude towards this. We have allowed books with these intentions to post message templates to that effect on the main page of the book. I have been very optimistic about this situation historically, although I am becoming more pessimistic as I get more experienced and more educated about licensing issues. I worry that an uneven licensing landscape will make content reuse between books more difficult, will raise the barrier to entry for new users, and will create problems for contributors who are not conscious of licensing peculiarities in individual books.

However, despite my pessimism, I do recognize that there is a lot of motivation on the other side of the line: Increased flexibility, better targetting of books to their target audiences, and an increased awareness of books as being individual projects in and of themselves. A book really is a closed ecosystem, with it's own authors, it's own styles, it's own guidelines and practices. Having it's own license seems like just another logical peice in the customization puzzle.

The question was raised again, first in the Reading Room (our equivalent of the Village Pump) and then on textbook-l where discussion is continuing. I would like to see a lot more feedback, from Wikibookians especially but also from other Wikimedians too.

I don't have time tonight, but I'll post some relevant discussion and textbook-l archive links tomorrow.

Conversational Yiddish

2008-08-14T14:29:00.001-07:00

I feel like I've been advertising a lot of language books lately, but they seem to be the focus du jour for some of our most recently active contributors. Today, I've been seeing a lot of activity on the [[Conversational Yiddish]] book, by [[User:Moyvey]]. It's a book that's been around for a while but has only started to progress recently with the new author.

There is a second book on Yiddish, [[Yiddish for Yeshivah Bachurim]] that hasn't been edited since it's primary author left in January. Both books are featured at a new portal [[Yiddish]], although this will probably be moved to [[Subject:Yiddish]] in the future.

If you're a Yiddish speaker and would like to contribute to either of these books, or even if you would like to start your own book on the topic, we would be glad to have you. Come on down to Wikibooks and take a look around.

New Books and other news

2008-08-12T14:30:00.000-07:00

Interested in computer modeling? [[User:MihalOrela]] has been doing some interesting work on his new book [[Modeling from A to Z]]. There is still a lot of work to be done yet, but it's a promising start and I'm looking forward to see where it goes. [[Clojure Programming]] is a relatively new book being written by [[User:Parth.Malwankar]]. Clojure is a dynamic programming language which is run on top of the Java Virtual Machine. These two projects look pretty interesting to me, and I hope they attract new contributors and continue to develop rapidly.

I created a new template yesterday, {{Not a book}} for flagging newly-created pages which don't appear to be heading in the right direction for inclusion in Wikibooks. Wouldn't you know it, as soon as I create the template I find about a million uses for it? As with any message template, it could probably stand to be more positive ("You know what would be much better then writing something that isn't a book? Writing a book!"), but I think this is a good start.

Erik mentioned yesterday on textbook-l that the PDF extension is being tested now in the wikimedia labs website. What's so cool about this is that the Wikimedia Labs site uses an old dump of the en.wikibooks database. It's like testing on our own wiki, and really gives the feeling for what it will be like when it gets installed for real. I haven't had a lot of time to play with it yet, but it looks fantastic. I definitely encourage all Wikimedians (and Wikibookians especially) to come take a look at the test site and give some good feedback about it.

Manchu Language Book

2008-08-08T07:25:00.000-07:00

[[User:Mashuwen]] has been doing some great work on a book about learning the [[Manchu]] language. It's a language that could be on the verge of extinction unless it is preserved in books like these. Know any Manchu? If so, we could use your help here at Wikibooks.

Punjabi

2008-08-07T11:10:00.000-07:00

Know any Punjabi? [[User:Jaspalkaler]] and newcomer [[User:YoshiroShin]] have been doing a lot of hard work on our new [[Punjabi]] wikibook and are looking for some help. It's still early in the book's development so it will be difficult for non-speakers to learn the language right now. Hopefully, development will start moving more quickly if we can get some more volunteers to work on it.

We've got a lot of other language books that need your help too. If you know a language and think you teach it to others, stop on by and take a look.

Props to my Peoples

2008-08-06T14:27:00.001-07:00

There has been a lot of activity lately, and I feel like I could post a million blogposts about it all, but I'm trying to limit myself to one per day or less.

[[User:Aya]], the bureaucrat that first promoted me to admin several years ago, appeared out of nowhere yesterday. He's been absent without a trace for almost exactly 3 years, and not for lack of us trying to get in touch with him at various points. In the time he's been gone we've passed a new adminship policy that calls for the deadminship of inactive admins (so he's not a bureaucrat at Wikibooks any longer) and we've passed a policy to disallow videogame strategy guides (so the [[Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas]] book he was working on has moved to StrategyWiki. It's sad, I think, to see things change so much. However, I feel like we've made a lot of changes for the better and Wikibooks is a more mature and stable project now then it was three years ago. Hopefully Aya feels the same way.

A while back I started a book about [[Communication Systems]]. It was intended to be a general dumping ground for my notes from several classes I was taking in the field of Communications. Taking the "Wiki is not paper" mantra to heart, and being a bit naive, I tried to create a gigantic communications masterwork that would encompass the entire field in a way that no other traditional book had ever done, or would ever be able to do. A little wiser now, I've since broken the book up into several smaller books, each encompassing a particular aspect of Communications theory and practice. Now that I'm out of school, however, I don't have the time to work on any of them.

Enter [[User:Jugandi]] who's been flying through the [[Communication Systems]] book like a whirlwind. He's writing all sorts of content and examples, adding tables, pictures, diagrams. He's breathing life into the book in a way that I never could. I've long felt that the most important thing to do for a new book was to give it a solid organizational structure. A skeleton book without much content can be easily added to, because people know exactly where and how content should be added. A large formless book filled with rambling content, on the other hand, is much harder to contribute to. Jugandi has been able to take a bare skeleton book and add so much to it in such a short period of time, nice evidence in favor of my idea. [[User:Jeremyb]], a relative newcomer to the project (an SUL-enabled wiki-immigrant), has been helping to convert some images of tables and formulas into ordinary Wikitext or TeX format.

[[User:The Scarlet Letter]] has been doing some excellent editing and authoring in some of our mathematics books. Some of the work he does is gnomish (small fixes here and there), but some of it is very substantial too. He's been doing good work in our books [[Real Analysis]], [[Abstract Algebra]] and [[Functional Analysis]]. He and [[User:Topology Expert]] have also done some good work recently in the [[Topology]] book too. Our mathematics shelf, which has long been a little woeful, is being reinvigorated with these and other's efforts.

The [[Muggles' Guide to Harry Potter]], long one of our largest and most impressive books, is still as active as ever. One of our bureaucrats, [[User:Withinfocus]], keeps watch over the book, but a lot of the great content work recently is being done by [[User:Chazz]] and [[User:PNW Raven]]. So dedicated are Chazz and PNW Raven to their book, that neither one of them has ever requested adminship (and Chazz once turned down the offer outright). Their dedication shows, because this book is one of our crowning acheivements.

This is just a narrow glimpse into the activities at Wikibooks recently, and I'm sure I'm missing plenty of important details. Got something to share? Let me know and I'll post it on the blog.

Open Kids Dictionary

2008-08-04T13:52:00.000-07:00

textbook-l received a cool email today. Karen Fasimpaur, an occasional Wikibooks contributor and open-education activist, wrote to tell us about an open dictionary project that's aimed at children and K-12 education: http://dictionary.k12opened.com. This website seems neat by itself, but what's really cool is the new glossary tool which hopefully could be adapted for use at Wikibooks. We're always talking about increasing our suite of book-building tools, and a glossary builder tool would be a great thing for us to have.

One thing that we at Wikibooks have been kicking around for a while, but have not been able to get developed, is some kind of system for extracting metadata from the pages of a book (word definitions for a glossary, references for a unified bibliography, keywords and terms for an index, etc) and displaying that data on a separate page. Think about our tags, but instead of having the references appear at the , it would appear on a separate page entirely. Now, extend that same concept to be more general, not just for references but for bibliography, indices, glossary, etc. It's a big and ambitious feature request to be sure.

Anyway, if you have some spare time today you should head down to the Kids Open Dictionary project and take a look around. Their project is all PD, so content reuse in Wikimedia-world shouldn't be a big problem. I wonder if some kind of synergy would be possible between them and Wiktionary? Maybe we could get some of our precious few Wikijunior enthusiasts interested as well.

New Book Snapshot

2008-08-03T16:17:00.000-07:00

Here is a snapshot of some of our new books. These books are listed on {{New}}, a DPL-generated template which is populated by the {{New book}} template. Tagging new books with {{New book}} is both an important job and a great way to get familiarized with the community. It isn't a fast-paced task, but it is very valuable.

Obviously, all these books aren't going to "make it", some of them are not suitable for Wikibooks and will eventually be relocated to some place more appropriate or deleted outright. Books which are obviously not going to ever be keepable can be nominated for deletion at [[WB:VFD]]. Books which are borderline cases should not be nominated for at least 7 days (we like to give a book enough time to develop before we start chasing it with torches). If a book has the potential to grow into something which is acceptable, it shouldn't be nominated for deletion, but instead tagged with one of our cleanup tags so people can work to fix them up.

Libre Software Meeting

2008-08-01T15:17:00.000-07:00

Sub, a user from fr.wikibooks that I've been in contact with messaged me yesterday. He sent me a link to the Libre Software Meeting (LSM). The LSM is, from what I can gather, a conference for open-source software proponents. LSM will be held next year in the town of Nantes. Sub, living nearby, is on the planning committee for the event.

He suggested I go to the conference, and maybe take some time to talk about Wikibooks. I don't speak fluent French (or any French, for that matter), but he claims there will be plenty of English speakers in the audience as well. Sub also suggested that there might be the potential for some travel funding for the occasion, which would be a nice incentive if it materialized.

I was personally hoping to make it to OSCON next year, an open source conference that's a little closer to home (although not much closer, if it's in Portland again). My wikiwork would be just as relevant there and it would meld with some of my other OSS projects too. Since both are going to occur in the summer months next year I probably couldn't afford to do both (if I am able to afford either). Being half a world away again, I probably won't make it to next year's Wikimania either.

If any other Wikibookians--or Wikimedians for that matter--are near enough to Nantes France and want to help spread the word, this would be a cool opportunity.

Busy as a bee

2008-07-22T15:27:00.000-07:00

I've been keeping busy with other projects and real life, so I haven't been able to update this blog as often as I would like. There are a few pieces of news worth reporting:

A while ago I started a book [[Editing Wikitext]] as a way to replace our decidedly un-book-like help pages. It sat as a stub for a while, but is now being worked by a relatively new Wikibookian, User:Armchair. Instead of the "a little bit here and a little bit there" approach that I use because of my short attention span, Armchair has been focusing on one chapter at a time, turning each into a carefully-crafted masterwork. Not all chapters have gotten the royal treatment yet, but those that have are looking great. He is doing a great job of speaking to readers of all levels, from the most green newbie to the most experienced wikitexters. Definitely worth a read (and a contribute!).
Another book that is relatively new (in comparison to some of our older tomes) is [[MIRC Scripting]]. MIRC is a popular IRC client for Windows users. Many of our IRC-capable Wikimedians probably use it it. User:PiemanXC has been doing a great job on this book, and I personally have learned a lot from it! Using MIRC? PiemanXC can help you take your experience to the next level.
The [[C++ Programming]] book is an older book of ours, and has seen it's share of ups and downs. Currently, the book has two separate pages that serve as the Table of Contents. These two pages differ in the order of material covered and in aesthetics. This is a cool demonstration that wiki isn't paper, and that we can do things that traditional books can't do.
Wikimedian par excellence Durova has started a cool-looking new book on [[Image Restoration]] that no doubt includes some of her Commons-related expertise. It's a very cool-looking book so far, and likely to be of immediate practical benefit to our cousins over at Commons.
We have lots of new books, as usual. New ones pop up every day. Stop on by, see what all we've got, and find something good to read.

Fifth Anniversary

2008-07-06T17:18:00.000-07:00

The fifth anniversary of the Wikibooks project is coming up this month, and in honor of it I'm trying to round up a few people to guest-post to this blog. I would like to find people who are current or past Wikibookians to talk about their experiences at the project, and their insights about how Wikibooks has changed and where the project might be heading.

If you are interested, or if you know somebody else who is, please let me know.

Candidates speak about Wikibooks

2008-06-18T13:06:00.000-07:00

[[fr:b:User:Sub]] from the French Wikibooks, alerted us to some questions that he asked the board candidates specifically about Wikibooks. Some answers are missing, some are a little bit depressing, and some a brutally honest. Greg Kohs' answer, particularly, seems the meanest, here is an excerpt, where he talks about his observations in the [[US History]] book, one which is currently marked as a "featured book" on en.Wikibooks:

This chapter of UNITED STATES history includes multi-paragraph sections about Henning von Tresckow and Karl Dönitz, but no mention whatsoever of the Flying Tigers, the Doolittle raid, Aleutian Islands campaign, Rosie the Riveter, the Tuskegee Airmen, George Marshall, Dwight Eisenhower, George Patton, Iwo Jima, Okinawa, or rationing of consumer materials on the American homefront.

Am I the only one who finds this appalling? I would not want my daughter learning about the most significant events in American history this way.

He has a couple other criticisms of the book too, all of which are fair and deserved. He then goes on to discuss the culture of expert-exclusion that seems to be one of Wikimedia's hallmark features. I will posit that Wikibooks doesn't have that same problem, we have been not only tolerant but welcoming and encouraging to "experts". We've hosted a number of classroom-related projects, teachers and students working to produce very nice books. I've never heard a single disparaging remark from an expert about the culture of Wikibooks. In fact, the response has always been overwhelmingly positive.

I don't say this to try to disprove what Greg is saying above. I actually agree with him to a point and I don't take offense to people criticising the project. Wikibooks is young, but we are growing and improving. Perfection takes time, even wikipedia hasn't achieved it and they have us beat by two years and several million man-hours.

Writing a book is hard. Ignore the fact that your average book is just a tad longer then your average article (it's not uncommon for a mature book on Wikibooks to be several hundred pages long), there is a lot of stylistic issues that need to be dealt with. Beyond just having length, a book must be continuous: it must build logically from beginning to end, and it must teach along the way. We don't just present information, we must find ways to ensure the target audience can learn. Sometimes, this means we have to cover the same topics over and over again, in different ways for different people.

Wikibooks doesnt have the same mass as WP has, our authors are more spread out around the project. It's not uncommon for some of our users to toil in peace, not interacting with any other users at all. We tend to have about one active author per book, rarely a popular book can attract 2 or 3. This is a far cry from the "many hands" mantra that powers Wikipedia. Mistakes are easy to catch if you have dozens of people reading your book, harder if there are only a few, and near impossible if there is only one. People write what they know, and if a particular author doesn't have Rosy the Rivetter on the top of his head, it likely won't end up in the book.

This isn't a condemnation of Wikibooks, just an admission that we are small and need more people. Everybody needs more people, I read Larry Sanger's blog regularly and he's always trying to convince people to join Citizendium. I might even consider it too, if I had the time or the energy in me to participate in another project. From what I read and from what I hear in casual conversation, Wikibooks is a lot more similar to Citizendium then it is to Wikipedia.

Featured books on Wikibooks are designated rather informally. Sometimes a vote by as few as 4 or 5 people can seal the deal. Voter apathy plays a big part in this, many of our members would rather just write then discuss meta content all day. What we look for in our Featured Books is not perfection, that much should be obvious. We're looking for books which are comparatively good and which are a good model that other developing books can follow. The secret to our method is that books can be de-featured easily, and we do it regularly as the bar gets raised. As we increase our standards, new books rise to the occasion, and old books (like the US History book) fall out the bottom. Finding featured books that aren't good enough to be called "featured" anymore is not a condemnation of Wikibooks or our culture, it's an affirmation that our standards are higher now then they used to be. This is because our editors, while few, are hard working and dedicated. Perfection is the end goal, and Wikibooks is approaching it, slowly, incrementally. We do set reasonable interim goals for ourselves until we reach perfection, and we're not ashamed of that.

Wikibooks update, Week of June 9

2008-06-11T07:20:00.001-07:00

Wikibooks has been slowly picking up lately, resurrecting itself from the slump we've been in for a few months now.

Our active membership is picking up again. As always, a large portion of our population is "silent" in that they focus on their books and don't get involved with the community discussions. This population is hard to measure, but I think it's the most important group that we have.
Some old faces are coming back from wikibreaks. As the semester ends (for students) or as the seasons change (for working adults) people who used to be very busy in real life suddenly find themselves less so. Of course, new groups of people are going to find summer to be their busy time, and they will temporarily disappear until fall.
We've got a new bureaucrat nomination, which is a relatively rare occurrence on en.wikibooks. Our "newest" bureaucrat was promoted back in April 2007, so I think it's high-time we had some fresh blood added to the mix.
SUL has increased our account-renaming load considerably, and we've created a dedicated page where such requests can be made. This is probably only a temporary measure, until the SUL account-conflict frenzy has died down.
Despite problems with copyright violations (a number of candidates were deleted) the new logo discussion for Wikibooks is continuing. There still seem to be some problems that will need to be worked through, however, so we aren't trying to follow any kind of strict timeline now.
We've been working on our desired custom FlaggedRevs configuration, and even though discussion is spread out all over creation, we're slowly coming to consensus on some of the outstanding details. Hopefully, we can reach agreement on the last few details and put in our bugzilla request soon. Being able to flag a particular stable revision of a book is going to be a big help for us to "sell" our books to teachers who need things to stay calm in order to use a book in their class.

That's probably not all the news there is to report, but it's everything I can think of off the top of my head. If you've never been to Wikibooks, or are just in the mood to try something new in the world of wiki, stop on by and see what we've got going on.

SUL Mania

2008-06-03T08:11:00.001-07:00

en.wikibooks, like many other projects, is feeling the heat from the SUL-inspired usurpation mania. It seems I can't shake a stick without hitting a usurpation request somewhere. En.wikibooks has a page for all "administrative assistance". This covers everything from reports of vandalism, requests for rename, behavior problems, etc. We used to have multiple dedicated message boards, but these were all relatively low traffic, and admins hated having to keep them all on their watchlists. So, a while back, we merged all these pages into the single administrative assistance page. Now, we have a convenient single-point-of-contact where people can get all sorts of help from administrators.

This system works fine (and is a model of efficiency!) under normal use, but with the incoming wave of SUL name conflicts, we've become swamped. People post requests on the noticeboard. When they feel like we aren't responding fast enough, they post to our talk pages as well. I'm having to perform several renames every day, and it's wearing on my good nature. After all, I'm here to write books, not perform millions of renames. Plus, my time on wikibooks is limited each day, and I would like to spend that time writing.

I sent a message to our other three bureaucrats saying a few things:

I wanted to create a sub-page for rename requests. This might only be a temporary thing, but it would help to streamline things, and keep the administrators noticeboard free from rename-related clutter. I have just created this page this morning.
I think we need new bureaucrats. We only have 4, and not all of them are models of activity. Of course, a lot of our admin staff have been less active lately (we're in a bit of a seasonal slump right now). Either way, I think it's time we got some new blood into the mix.
We needed to standardize some things. At the moment, we don't have pesky "rules" and "procedures" governing when and how a bcrat performs a rename or a usurpation. We leave this up to the best discretion of our bureaucrats. I generally like this state of affairs (it beats the nightmare of having to draft policy, heaven forbid), but a standard and efficient way to get this work done might be worthwhile. We still won't draft up a policy for it, but i would like to come to some general agreements between the bcrats nonetheless.

Yesterday, I got my account "Whiteknight" usurped at nl.wikipedia. To return the favor, I usurped two accounts for nl.wikipedians too. I've interacted with people from fr, vi, id, nl, and many other language projects. This is the most inter-language cooperation we've ever had!

Disaster: Logo Copyvio

2008-05-26T15:07:00.001-07:00

There has been a bit of a disaster this weekend with the Wikibooks logo selection process. Logo option D, my personal favorite and one of the apparent front runners, was found to be based on a copyvio.

Some of the proposed variants are dissimilar enough that they might not be considered copyvios. However, I'm no expert on this and would like to invite a second opinion from people in the community. The question is, are any of the proposed logo variants in this family dissimilar enough to be considered "safe"?

If not, we have a real problem on our hands. The logo selection process has gotten this far without noticing that one of the favorites was a copyvio. Could there be others hidden in the pack as well? Also, there have been some allegations that logos in the Wikijunior discussion are copyvios as well, although I personally can't confirm this.

We might be in a bad enough position here that we have to declare this whole discussion moot. I would hate for that to be the case, but it's better to stop now if we are running into problems like copyvios and the like.

Utah's Open Highschool

2008-05-19T06:19:00.001-07:00

Textbook-l received an interesting email from Brianna Laugher about a new "Open High School" in Utah. Brianna frequently sends interesting information and news to that list, and might be one of the most active people on it. Unfortunately, textbook-l is an oft-unused communications medium.

Anyway, I haven't done any digging yet to see if there is truth to this story (I have no particular doubt that it is true). If anybody has more information about Utah's open high school, or information about what educational materials they are going to be utilizing, I would love to hear about it. If we could find a way to get Wikibooks' foot in the door there, that would be awesome as well.

Logo Discussion: Come and Vote!

2008-05-07T14:29:00.000-07:00

It's stage 2 of voting at the Wikibooks logo discussion, and there are some awesome logos to be picked from. The best part is that many of the logos have new and interesting color schemes, far cries from the gray-meets-blue scheme (Wikinews, Wikisource, old Wikibooks) or the red-green-blue scheme (commons, wikispecies, meta) that the other projects use.

During this stage of the vote, logos are broken into "families" of similar images. Right now, we are trying to pick the best individual logo from each family to compete in the final stage. Here is what I want everybody to do:

Go to [[m:Wikibooks/Logo]]
Under the heading "Surviving Logos", there are multiple images. Each image corresponds to a subpage where discussion about that logo is happening. Here is a list of the subpages:

Current logo, and variants
Iconic book-in-circle (almost-winner of the last logo selection process)
Iconic W-and-book in a circle
Colorful stylized textbook
Book with a world above it
Golden Puzzle Book
Wikimarkup Book
Bookshelves
Book with pages fanned out
Stylized Book

On each subpage, pick the logo that you like the best and comment on it.

It's really very simple. By May 15th, all the winners from each family will be selected, and pitted together in head-to-head logo combat to decide the winner. All Wikimedian's should come take a look at the options!

On a side note, I'm becoming concerned about the Wikijunior logo selection process. It isn't drawing a lot of attention, and people don't seem to be too enthusiastic about the available logo candidates. I propose that we abandon the second discussion, and derive a Wikijunior logo from the winning Wikibooks logo. This will help to add continuity between the two projects. Plus, many of the Wikibooks logo candidates are significantly higher then most of the Wikijunior candidates. There are a few gems in the Wikijunior runnings, but none of them are gathering much public support so far. If anybody has any comments or opinions on this matter, please let me know ASAP. I would hate to pick a "winner" for WJ that nobody likes, just because too few people said they disliked it.

Wikimedia2pdf Tool

2008-05-07T07:10:00.000-07:00

Textbook-l received a notice this morning from the team at blogpaper.com about a new tool that they've been working on: wikimedia2pdf. Apparently the tool was originally titled "Wikibooks2pdf" because of it's focus on creating PDF versions of existing multi-page wikibooks. However, it seems that some changes have been made to allow creating PDFs from Wikipedia as well. I'm not sure about all the details about how this works, so I'm going to spend some time playing with it today or tomorrow.

I tried to make a quick PDF this morning for a new book I've been working on, but the formatting came out a little strange. I didn't have time to really play with the settings, and I'll try it again later hoping for better results.

The website also includes several pre-made PDF versions of books that you can look at. Specifically, they seem to have already made PDFs of all our featured books. I took a look at the PDF version of [[Control Systems]], a book that I wrote most of and the only book that I've authored to become featured so far. I know that Control Systems is about 250 pages long (at least when I created the PDF manually using my own software), so I was surprised to see that the version from Wikimedia2pdf was over 1350 pages! The algorithm used by this tool appears to be a little bit naive. Control Systems has 4 "print versions", pages into which the rest of the pages in the book are trancluded. In a sense, a "print version" is like a book-on-a-single-page. Wikimedia2pdf transcluded the entire copy of all 4 print versions into the PDF it created. In essence, the PDF contains 5 copies of the book, back to back. What would be very cool here would be to provide a list of all the pages that the tool finds, and ask the user to check or uncheck pages which do not belong in the final PDF (like print versions, meta-data pages, etc). If this issue gets sorted out, Wikimedia2pdf will be a very cool tool for us to use.

Visual Book Designer

2008-04-29T08:12:00.001-07:00

I've been writing and maintaining a set of javascript tools or "gadgets" to help facilitate the creation and organization of books. By adding in some AJAX functionality, these scripts are able to automate, or semi-automate some common tasks for new editors. One of my older tools that I called the "Book Designer Gadget" was useful for outlining and designing a new book. You would type in a list of pages, one per line, and the gadget would create all the necessary wikitext for the table of contents page in your book. It would also do things like help assist you in creating basic navigation templates for your book, and properly categorizing your new book.

I decided to give the Book Designer Gadget a major overhaul, and I've created a new "Visual Book Designer" tool that should be even easier to use and more powerful. I would like to talk about that tool a little bit here, because I feel like it's a great prototype for the kinds of tools that Wikibooks is going to need in the future to help attract a new generation of technically un-savvy authors. This new gadget is completely visual, and it doesn't require any technical expertise to use.

To install and use the gadget, there are three easy steps:

Create an account on en.wikibooks
Go to [[Special:Preferences]], and on the gadgets tab check the box "Whiteknight's Book Creator". This will install all my tools, including the Visual Book Designer automatically. No need to edit your monobook.js file at all, the gadgets extension does all the work for you.
Go to the form at [[User:Whiteknight/Visual Book Designer]] to see and interact with the gadget.

So what does the gadget do? When you load the page, you should see the following screen. Notice that there are some slight differences in IE, which are still being ironed out.

Everything you see here can be clicked on, and many options can be changed. If we click on the title "New Book", we can change it:

The rename function performs a quick AJAX page request to determine whether the page exists or not. You are not allowed to create a new book with the same title as an existing book.

The small links below the book title, "Headings" and "Subpages" are the most important. These are the buttons that allow you to construct your outline. Clicking either "Headings" or "Subpages" will open a box where you can list the names of page headings or subpages, respectively. I'll demonstrate with subpages since they are the most important. Click the "Subpages" button, and enter a list of pages that should be added to your table of contents, one per line. Click save when you are done adding subpages to your outline:

You will notice that on each subpage, we have the option to add sub-subpages, and more headings. In this way, you can easily create books using a variety of hierarchies, like "Book/Page", "Book/Chapter/Page", "Book/Chapter/Subchapter/Page", etc. Astute observers will notice little links for "Wikitext" under each page in our outline. Clicking on the "Wikitext" link will automatically generate the necessary wikitext to create that page:
Notice that it adds all the necessary templates for organization, it adds necessary categories, and it creates links to all your subpages. From here, you can copy+paste the text to your page. Very astute observers will also have noticed a small link that says "Edit" under the subpages as well. On wiki, when I show you a button or a link that says "Edit", what comes to mind? Clicking on that link will open an embedded edit window, right here in the middle of the gadget, where you can edit the page in question automatically:

When you open the edit window, all the text and a handy summary are filled in for you. You can save or preview your edit just like you can in a normal edit window (because it is a normal edit window). You can do this for each page in your book too, not just the main page.

There are many more options that I won't discuss in detail here, but I hope that you get an idea of how useful a tool this is for new book authors. You can layout and design a book, following Wikibooks community best practices, without having to write a single character of wikitext. Here is a quick list of additional features:

You can save a partially completed outline to a page on the wiki, and load it into the gadget again later.
You can add your book to one or more subject categories by selecting from a convenient list. You don't need to know the exact name of the category, or the location of the bookshelf, or anything to make this work.
You can create the necessary navigation templates, but picking from one of a small set of predefined alternatives. Once the template is created, you can modify it to your heart's content.
You can add text to each page and each heading by clicking where it says "[Click here to edit page text]". The editor isn't as large as the regular page editor, and it doesnt have any of the normal editing buttons, but you can write a short blurb to get yourself started.
You can add comments to the outline by clicking where it says "[Click here to edit comments]". Comments are visible to you on the outline, for making reminders and short notes, but are not visible in the book when you create it.

This should serve as a good, but brief, introduction to the new gadget. People who may be interested in writing a new book, but have been worried about the learning curve of learning how should definitely check it out. I'm also looking for people who would be willing to test it out, help me identify any bugs or shortcomings, and make feature suggestions.

Adopt A Book - April 2008

2008-04-24T10:35:00.000-07:00

As always, Wikibooks tends to have a high-author turnaround rate. This means that people tend not to finish what they start, and many books are abandoned before they are finished. The problem with this, of course, is that books in poor condition take a daunting amount of work to get fixed up, and do not readily inspire new contributors to help out. Here then is a short list of some books that I've found today that could really use a helping hand:

[[Data Structures]] This book isn't in poor condition, in fact I would say that it's in a particularly good condition. However, it isn't featured yet and it isn't under active development. This book really does have the capability to move up to that next level if a few of the details could be worked out. Chapters here tend to be large, and a reorganziation effort might be required here as well. If you know a little bit about computer science and data structures, and are willing to do some work on organization, it would be much appreciated.
[[Java Programming]] This book is pretty big, and also in decent condition. However, problems with formatting and page naming are really keeping this book down. This book needs some organizational and aesthetic work, and a few of the later chapters are empty or stubbish. This is another book that, with some TLC, could become a featured book on Wikibooks.
[[Programming:PHP]] This is a prime example of the old-style naming convention that these old programming books used to use. The Programming: pseudonamespace has been deprecated, and this book should be renamed to "PHP Programming", or something similar. The formatting in this book, at least on most of the pages I saw, is pretty fantastic, although there hasn't been any major contributions in a few months. A few of the later chapters need to be improved, however.
[[Wiki Science]] You almost wouldn't believe it, but in Wikibooks some of our books about wikis are in pretty poor condition. This one is off to a good start, and there is some material here that a new contributor can really grab on to. If you know a thing or two about wikis, and want to share your knowledge with the world, this book could use your help.
[[MediaWiki Administrator's Handbook]] Are you an admin, bureaucrat, checkuser or steward? Do you have a little experience with some special user rights on a MediaWiki project? There are a lot of tools that aren't really open for the public to view, and a lot of the admin tools aren't always well documented. This book is a good start in this, but it's obviously outdated and incomplete.

Sorry to favor the computer books so much this time, but I've been going through the list of them recently looking for naming convention stragglers. The computer and programming books have a history of being improperly named and organized, and even today some of these old problems persist in these books. People who know these subjects and are willing to do some authoring or organizing work are definitely encouraged to come help out with these.

Wikijunior Big Cats

2008-04-09T16:37:00.000-07:00

[[Wikijunior Big Cats]] is finally receiving some of the attention that it deserves. It's an excellent book aimed at young children, and has a lot of great images of cool cats. Textbook-l received a note today about how this book has been published on Scribd.com, and about how the book was in preparation to be published and distributed. I'm not closely involved in this project, so I don't know much about it. I do know that this has been in the works for a long time, and has been the subject of several heated discussions between Wikibookians and WMF "outsiders" in the past. Many Wikibookians who were involved in this project have since left Wikibooks, so it's amazing to me that work has continued on it silently but diligently all this time.

Anyway, this is just a short update note. Like I said, I don't know all the details about this, but I'll post information when I learn it.

"Reasonable Basic Algebra" Book, LaTeX help needed

2008-04-07T08:26:00.000-07:00

Textbook-l received a very nice email yesterday from a Mr. Alain Schremmer, who operates the website FreeMathTexts.org. Mr. Schemmer (and I apologize right now if he should be referred to by a different salutation) has graciously given permission--but more importantly also a suggestion--that the books that he's been developing should serve as the basis for books on Wikibooks.

His books are already released under the GFDL, so technically no permission would be required anyway. I do think it's more friendly and polite to get permission anyway, as getting into contact with authors before we "steal their stuff" tends to build some much-needed friendships for our little project. More importantly, he alerted us to the existence of these books and suggested that they would make excellent additions to the Mathematics bookshelf at Wikibooks. I agree with him. As anybody who has read my blog before should know our mathematics book, and especially our Algebra-related books, are in need of help. We recently received a donation of a Linear Algebra book, and that project is going slowly but progress is being made nonetheless.

The problem with these books, the first of which is called "Reasonable Basic Algebra", is the same as the problem we are having with the Linear Algebra book: These books are written in LaTeX, and conversion to wikitext is proving to be very difficult to do. There are some specific problems that I've been finding, and I'll try to list some of them here:

There are no automatic conversion tools, at least not ones that are robust, that can do the conversion automatically. Even the best tools require a lot of human intervention for even moderately-complex LaTeX. The books that I've been seeing are definitely "extremely complex".
LaTeX mathematics have far more options then the MediaWiki mathematics rendering engine. Even if we properly insert the tags where they need to go, many equations are going to produce errors because of unknown directives
#2 assumes that we put the tags in the right places. this is not easy, and often requires human intervention.
LaTeX has far more formatting commands and options then MediaWiki does. We could, of course, try to create a million templates to handle all of these, but that isn't particularly practical from my point of view. Plus, pages with hundreds or thousands of template inclusions is going to put a huge strain on the servers.

I was interested at one point in trying my hand at creating a scalable recursive descent parser for LaTeX that could help with the conversion process. Unfortunately, I haven't had the time to do it myself and I don't expect to have that much time available in the foreseeable future.

I want to put out an open call to software developers or volunteer coders who might be interested in helping to create a LaTeX -> MediaWiki book converter. Since there is a little bit of time left in the application cycle, this might make a good Google Summer of Code project. If anybody is interested in this, I would love to hear from you.

Videogame Guides, Rehash

2008-03-24T19:12:00.000-07:00

It was basically decided, over time, that video game strategy guides do not belong on Wikibooks. There were many concerns and a few objections over this, but I think that the majority of Wikibookians really agreed that it was the right move. So, over time, the guides were phased out in a peaceable and civil way.

What we have now is a policy that says videogame strategy guides are not acceptable at Wikibooks. It seems simple on the surface of it, if we see videogame strategy guides, we work to have them moved to a more appropriate venue (typically StrategyWiki, where several former-Wikibookians are active members). However I worry now, in hindsight, that maybe the policy is too cut-and-dry. Let me give an example.

Today, a book about the board game "Dungeons & Dragons" was nominated for deletion. At least one person voted to delete the book, and then switched the vote to keep because Dungeons & Dragons is not a videogame and therefore isn't part of the blanket deletion mandate.

When we look at books about games in general, not just video games, we need to weigh many factors about that game and about the style of the book itself. Books which are completion guides or strategy guides with no educational value, probably don't belong on Wikibooks whether the game in question is a videogame or not. Similarly, a book written about a videogame does not necessarily need to be deleted if the book is well written and discusses more then just game play strategy. The quintessential example of this was a book (unfortunately, now abandoned) about how the game SimCity 3000 could be used to teach readers lessons about urban planning. Another example is the concept of programming books where the reader is instructed on how to create new videogames or modify existing videogames programmatically.

Being about videogames is not a condemnation that a book be deleted. Being about board games should also not be some kind of immutable protection against deletion either. The spirit of the policy, at least the spirit as the the policy was intended to be) is that books about games need to follow the same requirements as all other books on our site:

Books must be instructional and educational
Books must be non-fiction
Books must be verifiable

If we apply the same standards to all books the issue about videogame guides, or guides about ordinary games, all come out in the wash.

Citizendium Blog Post

2008-03-23T17:59:00.001-07:00

I read an interesting post on the Citizendium blog, posted by Larry Sanger. The post is HERE. In it, he compares the atmosphere and community of Wikipedia and Citizendium. It shouldn't come as a surprise, but in his comparison, Citizendium won.

What caught my attention most was not really that he was taking a swipe at WP, but that his description of Citizendium reminded me so much of Wikibooks. In this paragraph especially, if you replace all mentions of "Citizendium" or "CZ" with "Wikbooks" and "WB", respectively, it would still be perfectly accurate:

By contrast, on the Citizendium, it’s extremely easy to get your edits to stick. There are zillions of topics that are still wide open, or that need great expansion. We genuinely love it when new people get involved; we won’t shoo you off. And how many self-appointed ”managers” will your work have? If you’re lucky, a few. But, at this point, it’s more likely you’ll have one or none. If you like to work largely free of the typical Wikipedia busybodies and know-it-alls, you’ll find CZ much more congenial. And how quickly will editors or constables “lay down the law”? Well, you can get away with a lot on CZ, I’m afraid. That’s because people behave themselves so well most of the time that we are genuinely surprised when someone needs to be reined in.

It's something that I've said a lot (and I'm sure I'll say it more and more in the future) but we really are a different kind of environment from what Wikipedia is. Of course, maybe it's a function of our size. Maybe Wikibooks hasn't yet reached the critical mass where people spend more time arguing then they spend authoring, but it is destined to do so. I like to think, in contrast, that we've laid a very different ideologic foundation at Wikibooks, and that we won't develop in the same way that Wikipedia did. Only time will tell, of course, and once we do reach our critical mass point we can start to make more observations about it. Larry had a similar observation about size:

Now, I know that our wiki is open, bottom-up, and largely free of “command-and-control” in part because we’re still much smaller than Wikipedia. Yes, that’s obvious. Yes, I know that growth has a way of making governance harder. But that doesn’t change the fact that we are for now much freer and less constrained than Wikipedia is. ... And we at least still have a chance to retain the more open, freer, more congenial nature of our “small town” community as we grow; it’s too late for Wikipedia, which has become largely a “big city” mobocracy, one that I for one find more oppressive than liberating.

Again, you can see his clear bias against Wikipedia here, but that doesn't make what he's saying untrue. This is another example of where you can replace "Citizendium" with "Wikibooks", and still have an accurate statement. He ends with this statement, that I think is good enough to end my blog post with as well, because it also describes Wikibooks accurately:

Maybe, just maybe, we’ve learned something from Wikipedia’s governance mistakes.

Wikibooks and Wikijunior Logos: Discussion Round

2008-03-20T14:41:00.000-07:00

The submission stage for the Wikibooks and Wikijunior logo selection process has finished. We are no longer accepting new logo submissions. All told, there are about 33 submissions for WB, and 13 for WJ. During this round, which is scheduled to last until about April 15, we are discussing and voting on the submissions. Some changes can be made based on suggestions. We are trying to select the top 10 "logo families", or groups of logos which are very similar except differ in small details and color schemes.

Starting on April 16th, after the top 10 logo families have been selected, there will be a discussion round to select the best particular logo from each family. This discussion time will last until about 15 May. Until 15 May then, the logos may be modified, including changes in detail, changes in rendering, changes in color scheme, etc. In essence, we are allowing time for the artists to get feedback from the community, and for each submission to be perfected.

Starting 16 May, there will be a final vote to determine the single winning logo. The selected logo must include a 16x16 favicon, logos in black & white and greyscale, and must be available in SVG.

All Wikimedians (THIS MEANS YOU!) are invited to take a look at some of our logo submissions, and discuss or vote on them. I'll post regular updates here on this blog, and I'll probably spam a few of the mailing lists too.

WritersUA Conference

2008-03-18T11:20:00.000-07:00

I'm at the WritersUA conference in Portland Oregon, where I'm acting as a general evangelist for Wikibooks and Wikimedia. I'm giving my presentation, "The Wikibooks Paradigm for Collaborative Content Creation" in less then three hours. I hope to have a nice-sized audience.

Since there is more to talk about then just Wikibooks/Wikimedia, I've been posting updates about the trip on my personal blog. Check that out if you want to see how things are going.

I plan to post my presentation slides, and a video of the presentation online once this whole ordeal is over. I'll post more details about that in the coming days.

New Bureaucrat and Admin Nominations

2008-03-12T18:39:00.000-07:00

One of my favorite things to do on Wikibooks is to nominate deserving individuals for adminship or bureaucratship. It's bittersweet for me, however. Since I'm a bureaucrat, if I make the nominations I can't do the promoting myself.

[[User:Mike.lifeguard]] is a person who started out as the almost unknown author of our little [[First Aid]] book. Since promotion to admin, he's become one of our most active administrators. He is an active vandal fighter and because of it he was promoted to CU late in 2007. His [[First Aid]] book has also become a featured book at en.Wikibooks.

[[User:Neoptolemus]] is one of the first users who were given the rollbacker rights, since that ability was added by the developers. I personally think that rollbacker and patroller rights are an excellent stepping stone for potential new admins, and Neoptolemus is the first example of that process in action.

We also are starting to reexamine some of our de facto policies for dealing with bots. We have some proposals for bot policies, but none of them have been accepted yet. In lieu of these policies, we've been trying to figure out the situation on our own, and in some cases we've been conservative almost to the point of absurdity. Knowing how we have been doing things, and also how we would like to change things, a lot of people are talking about heavily streamlining the process of giving the bot flag. Some people have even suggested that we move to allow admins to grant the flag (instead of just bureaucrats as it is now). I personally like that idea, but time will tell what the wikibooks community thinks about it.

[[Linear Algebra]]

2008-03-12T08:06:00.001-07:00

Our [[Linear Algebra]] text has been around a long time, but it has been in bad condition for most of it's life. It was part of a set of three books, including [[Algebr a]] and [[Abstract Algebra]] that were all in bad shape. The problem with these books (and a few others as well) was that they were heavily cross-linked, and interdependent. Material that belonged in one could be found in another. Pages were moved from one book to the other creating a maze of redirects and double-redirects.

A while back, we started a project to separate these conjoined books, and to set them up properly. A lot of progress was made, but instead of having three books that were heavily interdependent, we now had three stub books that were completely independent.

I received a question a while back from [[User:Shahab]] who asked what our policy was on book donations. If he could find another book that was released under the GFDL, could we import it to Wikibooks? I said yes we could, but I recommended that he get permission from the original author, as a courtesy. Permission was gotten, and now we have access to a brand-new, complete linear algebra book. We are uploading and developing this new book in parallel to our old book. Eventually, we may merge the two, but that depends on how things progress.

The book, however, is written entirely in LaTeX, and multiple contributors have produced files that don't have any kinds of standard formatting rules. Plus, the book relies heavily on macros for a number of common tasks. There are some LaTeX->Wiki translation programs available, but none of them can accurately handle macros, and all of them are restricted to a small subset of LaTeX directives, which this book does not follow. So I pulled out my bot and started the slow process of incrementally translating the book to wikitext. In retrospect I should have written a proper parser, but I was convinced that I could use Regexps to handle most of the conversions, and then manually tweak pages after the fact to cleanup any remnants. Certainly, I could do just as good a job, or better, then some of the other tools I had seen, given the input data.

I was partially correct.

I was able to do a lot of the conversion work automatically, and the results are very promising. I'm still working on it to fix some residual nonsense, but for the most part the pages are nice and mostly LaTeX-free. There are about 80 pages, and all of them need editing assistance to help complete the conversion process. If you are interested in helping with this process, head over to the "NEW Table of Contents" in the [[Linear Algebra]] book, and dig in. Here are some things that we need from editors, that cannot really be done by bot:

#Add headings to break the long pages into managable sections.
#Determine whether inline math equations need to be surrounded by

tags or not.

#Seek and destroy residual punctuation marks, like "/" and "&".
#Fix numbered lists so they are continuous
#Find and fix malformed

equations. The original book used some advanced formatting that our LaTeX engine doesnt support.

Every little bit helps!

[[Inorganic Chemistry]]

2008-03-07T13:29:00.000-08:00

The [[Inorganic Chemistry]] book, one of the oldest books on Wikibooks (dating back to March 2004) has finally been adopted by a new volunteer author. However, the task ahead is daunting, and more contributors are desired. This book, while old, has attracted relatively few contributors and contributions in it's time here, and is still in a very early state of development.

If you know a little bit about inorganic chemistry and would like to help out with this project, we would love to hear from you. If you are interested in helping with the Inorganic Chemistry book, contact [[User:Thewinster]], or leave a message on the discussion page.