Wikibooks

Wikibooks

Screenshot of wikibooks.org home page
Type of site	Textbooks wiki
Available in	multilingual
Owner	Wikimedia Foundation
Created by	User Karl Wick and the Wikimedia Community
Website	www.wikibooks.org
Alexa rank	2,200 ((As of October 2018))
Commercial	No
Registration	Optional
Launched	July 10, 2003 (2003-07-10)
Current status	Active

Growth of the eight largest Wikibooks sites (by language), July 2003–Jan 2010

Wikibooks (previously called Wikimedia Free Textbook Project and Wikimedia-Textbooks) is a wiki-based Wikimedia project hosted by the Wikimedia Foundation for the creation of free content e-book textbooks and annotated texts that anyone can edit.

History

The wikibooks.org domain was registered on July 19, 2003 (2003-07-19). It was launched 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.

Since 2008, Wikibooks is 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 and Arabic. It is funded by a grant from the Beck Foundation.

Book content

File:Development of "Mathe für Nicht-Freaks" from Sep 2009 to June 2016.webm 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, significantly altered versions of existing works or annotations to original 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

• WikiToLearn
• CK-12 Foundation
• Digital library
• European Library
• Free High School Science Texts
• Global Text
• ibiblio
• LibriVox, an online digital library of free public domain audiobooks.
• Open Content Alliance
• Project Gutenberg
• Universal library
• Wikibooks:What is Wikibooks?

Further reading

• Ben Crowell (2005). "All Systems Go: The Newly Emerging Infrastructure to Support Free Books". http://www.lightandmatter.com/article/infrastructure.html. Retrieved June 18, 2006. 
• Michael F. Shaughnessy (2009-07-14). "An Interview with Curtis Bonk: A Look at Wikibooks and Wikibookians". EducationNews.org. http://www.ednews.org/articles/an-interview-with-curtis-bonk-a-look-at-wikibooks-and-wikibookians.html. 

External links

• English Wikibooks' Main Page
• Wikijunior Main Page
• Wikibooks' multilingual portal
• Wikibooks Language Editions: list of Wikiboks for various languages ordered by size.
• Wikibooks page on Meta-Wiki
• Wikibooks takes on textbook industry