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
Slogan(s) Open books for an open world
Website www.wikibooks.org
Alexa rank 2,625 (November 2016)[1]
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 textbooks and annotated texts that anyone can edit.

In June 2016, Compete.com estimated that Wikibooks had 1,478,812 unique visitors.[2]

History

The wikibooks.org domain was registered on July 19, 2003,[3] and 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.

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

Visualization of the development in the German Wikibook project Mathe für Nicht-Freaks

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

References

  1. ↑ "Wikibooks.org Site Info". Alexa Internet. Retrieved 2016-11-17.
  2. ↑ "Site Profile for wikibooks.org", compete, retrieved July 19, 2016
  3. ↑ "Wikibooks.org Whois Record". DomainTools, LLC. Retrieved 22 January 2013.

Further reading

External links

This article is issued from Wikipedia - version of the 11/17/2016. The text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share Alike but additional terms may apply for the media files.