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This article may require cleanup to meet Wikipedia's quality standards. Please improve this article if you can. (August 2007) |
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 Screenshot of wikibooks.org home page |
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| URL | www.wikibooks.org |
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| Slogan | Think free. Learn free. |
| Commercial? | No |
| Type of site | Textbooks wiki |
| Registration | Optional |
| Available language(s) | multilingual |
| Owner | Wikimedia Foundation |
| Created by | Jimmy Wales[citation needed] and the Wikimedia Community |
| Launched | July 10, 2003 |
| Alexa rank | 2132[1] |
Wikibooks (previously called Wikimedia Free Textbook Project and Wikimedia-Textbooks) is a Wikimedia Foundation wiki for the creation of free content textbooks and annotated texts that anyone can edit.
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[edit] History
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 Wikibooks' 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.
[edit] 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 and Spanish. It is funded by a grant from the Beck Foundation.
[edit] 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 covered by the GNU Free Documentation License. This means that, as with its sister project, Wikipedia, contributions remain copyrighted to their creators, while the copyleft licensing ensures that the content will always remain freely distributable and reproducible.
Wikibooks differs from Wikisource in that content on Wikibooks is expected to be significantly changed by participants. Raw source documents such as the original text of Shakespearean plays are hosted on Wikisource instead.
The project is working towards completion of several textbooks in numerous human languages, which founders hope will be followed by mainstream adoption and use of text developed and housed there.
[edit] Similar projects
- Project Gutenberg
- MyMCAT - a not-for-profit site for students preparing for the MCAT
- wikiHow - a for-profit site with a collection of how-to guides
[edit] See also
- Digital library (or Virtual library)
- e-book
- Elibrary
- Global Text
- ibiblio
- Open Content Alliance
- Open hardware
- The European Library
- Universal library
[edit] External links
- English Wikibooks' Main Page
- Wikibooks' multilingual portal
- Wikibooks Language Editions: list of Wikibooks for various languages ordered by size.
- Wikibooks page on Meta-Wiki
- Wikibooks takes on textbook industry
[edit] References
- ^ Most popular in Germany, #589 wikibooks.org - Traffic Details from Alexa
- "All Systems Go: The Newly Emerging Infrastructure to Support Free Books". Ben Crowell. http://www.lightandmatter.com/article/infrastructure.html.
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