 Open books for an open world | |
 Screenshot of wikibooks.org home page | |
Type of site | Textbooks wiki |
|---|---|
| Available in | multilingual |
| Owner | Wikimedia Foundation |
| Created by | Karl Wick and the Wikimedia Community |
| URL | www.wikibooks.org |
| Commercial | No |
| Registration | Optional |
| Launched | July 10, 2004 |
| Current status | Active |
Wikibooks (previously called Wikimedia Free Textbook Project and Wikimedia-Textbooks) is a wiki hosted by the Wikimedia Foundation for the creation of free content textbooks and annotated texts that anyone can edit.
In April 2010, Alexa ranked wikibooks.org as the 2,462nd most popular web site in the world. Compete.com estimates that Wikibooks had 576,838 unique visitors, and Quantcast estimates 646,500 unique visitors from the United States in that month.[2][3]
History edit
Wikibooks was launched on July 10, 2003, in response to a request made by Wikipedia contributor Karl Wick for a project to host and build free textbooks on subjects such as organic chemistry and physics. Two major sub-projects, Wikijunior and Wikiversity, were created within Wikibooks before its official policy was later changed so that future incubator type projects are started according to the Wikimedia Foundation's new project policy. In August 2006, Wikiversity became an independent Wikimedia Foundation project.
Wikijunior edit
Wikijunior is a subproject of Wikibooks that specializes in books for children. The project consists of both a magazine and a website, and is currently being developed in English, Danish, Finnish, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Spanish and Arabic. It is funded by a grant from the Beck Foundation.
Book content edit
While some books are original, others began as text copied over from other sources of free content textbooks found on the Internet. All of the site's content is released under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike license (or a compatible license). This means that, as with its sister project, Wikipedia, contributions remain copyrighted to their creators, while the licensing ensures that it can be freely distributed and reused subject to certain conditions.
Wikibooks differs from Wikisource in that Wikisource collects exact copies and original translations of existing free content works, such as the original text of Shakespearean plays, while Wikibooks is dedicated either to original works or to significantly altered versions of existing works.
The project is working towards completion of textbooks on numerous subjects, which founders hope will be followed by mainstream adoption and use of textbooks developed and housed there.
See also edit
References edit
- ^ "Wikibooks.org Site Info". Alexa Internet. Retrieved 2012-07-02.
- ^ "Site Profile for wikibooks.org", compete, retrieved June 15, 2010
- ^ "wikibooks.org", Quantcast, retrieved June 15, 2010
Further reading edit
- Ben Crowell (2005). "All Systems Go: The Newly Emerging Infrastructure to Support Free Books". Retrieved June 18, 2006.
- Michael F. Shaughnessy (2009-07-14). "An Interview with Curtis Bonk: A Look at Wikibooks and Wikibookians". EducationNews.org.