Wikibooks (previously called ''Wikimedia Free Textbook Project'' and ''Wikimedia-Textbooks'') is a

wiki A wiki ( ) is a form of hypertext publication on the internet which is collaboratively edited and managed by its audience directly through a web browser. A typical wiki contains multiple pages that can either be edited by the public or l ...

-based Wikimedia project hosted by the

Wikimedia Foundation The Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. (WMF) is an American 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization headquartered in San Francisco, California, and registered there as foundation (United States law), a charitable foundation. It is the host of Wikipedia, th ...

for the creation of

free content Free content, libre content, libre information, or free information is any kind of creative work, such as a work of art, a book, a software program, or any other creative content for which there are very minimal copyright and other legal limi ...

digital textbook A digital textbook is a digital book or e-book intended to serve as the text for a class. Digital textbooks may also be known as e-textbooks or e-texts. Digital textbooks are a major component of technology-based education reform. They may serve as ...

s and annotated texts that anyone can edit. Initially, the project was created solely in English in July 2003; a later expansion to include additional

language Language is a structured system of communication that consists of grammar and vocabulary. It is the primary means by which humans convey meaning, both in spoken and signed language, signed forms, and may also be conveyed through writing syste ...

s was started in July 2004. As of , there are Wikibooks sites active for languages Wikimedia's

MediaWiki MediaWiki is free and open-source wiki software originally developed by Magnus Manske for use on Wikipedia on January 25, 2002, and further improved by Lee Daniel Crocker,mailarchive:wikipedia-l/2001-August/000382.html, Magnus Manske's announc ...

API:Sitematrix. Retrieved from Data:Wikipedia statistics/meta.tab comprising a total of articles and recently active editors. Wikimedia's

API:Siteinfo. Retrieved from Data:Wikipedia statistics/data.tab

History

The wikibooks.org domain was registered on July 19, 2003. It was launched to host and build free textbooks on subjects such as

organic chemistry Organic chemistry is a subdiscipline within chemistry involving the science, scientific study of the structure, properties, and reactions of organic compounds and organic matter, organic materials, i.e., matter in its various forms that contain ...

and

physics Physics is the scientific study of matter, its Elementary particle, fundamental constituents, its motion and behavior through space and time, and the related entities of energy and force. "Physical science is that department of knowledge whi ...

, in response to a request by Wikipedia contributor Karl Wick. Two major sub-projects, Wikijunior and

Wikiversity Wikiversity is a Wikimedia Foundation project that supports learning communities, their learning materials, and resulting activities. It differs from Wikipedia in that it offers tutorials and other materials for the fostering of learning, rather ...

, were created within Wikibooks before its official policy was later changed so that future incubator-type projects are started according to the Wikimedia Foundation's new project policy. In August 2006, Wikiversity became an independent Wikimedia Foundation project. Since 2008, Wikibooks has been included in BASE. In June 2016, Compete.com estimated that Wikibooks had 1,478,812 unique visitors.

Wikijunior

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

Book content

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

Wikibooks differs from

Wikisource Wikisource is an online wiki-based digital library of free-content source text, textual sources operated by the Wikimedia Foundation. Wikisource is the name of the project as a whole; it is also the name for each instance of that project, one f ...

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

Multilingual statistics

As of , there are Wikibooks sites for languages of which are active and are closed. The active sites have articles and the closed sites have articles. There are registered users of which are recently active. The top ten Wikibooks language projects by mainspace article count: For a complete list with totals, see Wikimedia Statistics.

Reception

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

References

External links

* * Wikipedia:List of Wikibooks's * Wikibooks Language Editions: list of Wikibooks for various languages ordered by size. * Wikibooks page on Meta-Wiki
Wikibooks takes on textbook industry
* What is Wikibooks? (Wikibooks) * Wikibooks (Wikiversity) {{ebooks Ebook sources Ebook suppliers Internet properties established in 2003 Multilingual websites Wikimedia projects Textbooks