WITTIE Grant

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

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

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

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

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

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

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!