Wikibooks
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Screenshot  Screenshot of wikibooks.org home page | |
Type of site | Textbooks wiki |
|---|---|
| Available in | Multilingual (77 active)[1] |
| Owner | Wikimedia Foundation |
| Created by | User Karl Wick and the Wikimedia Community |
| URL | www |
| Commercial | No |
| Registration | Optional |
| Launched | July 10, 2003 |
| Current status | Active |
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 digital textbooks and annotated texts that anyone can edit.
Initially, the project was created solely in English in July 2003; a later expansion to include additional languages was started in July 2004.[2] As of May 2023, there are Wikibooks sites active for 77 languages[1] comprising a total of 362,808 articles and 1,461 recently active editors.[3]
History[edit]
The wikibooks.org domain was registered on July 19, 2003.[4] It was launched to host and build free textbooks on subjects such as organic chemistry and physics, in response to a request by Wikipedia contributor Karl Wick.[5][6] 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.[clarification needed]
In August 2006, Wikiversity became an independent Wikimedia Foundation project.[7]
Since 2008, Wikibooks has been included in BASE.[8]
In June 2016, Compete.com estimated that Wikibooks had 1,478,812 unique visitors.[9]
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, Arabic and Bangla. It is funded by a grant from the Beck Foundation[citation needed].
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, significantly altered versions of existing works, or annotations to original works.
Multilingual statistics[edit]
As of May 2023, there are Wikibooks sites for 121 languages of which 77 are active and 44 are closed.[1] The active sites have 362,808 articles and the closed sites have 671 articles.[3] There are 4,615,928 registered users of which 1,461 are recently active.[3]
The top ten Wikibooks language projects by mainspace article count:[3]
| № | Language | Wiki | Good | Total | Edits | Admins | Users | Active users | Files |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | English | en | 96,456 | 283,459 | 4,144,737 | 12 | 3,426,872 | 464 | 2,716 |
| 2 | Vietnamese | vi | 49,477 | 90,029 | 498,614 | 2 | 17,510 | 16 | 1,009 |
| 3 | Hungarian | hu | 37,152 | 91,332 | 440,460 | 3 | 14,138 | 25 | 21,307 |
| 4 | German | de | 30,996 | 76,798 | 1,011,638 | 8 | 109,397 | 74 | 7,699 |
| 5 | French | fr | 19,060 | 56,332 | 695,924 | 8 | 114,295 | 50 | 169 |
| 6 | Italian | it | 16,364 | 36,344 | 439,200 | 4 | 49,115 | 72 | 764 |
| 7 | Japanese | ja | 13,966 | 26,756 | 229,525 | 4 | 76,534 | 58 | 397 |
| 8 | Portuguese | pt | 13,357 | 79,949 | 484,256 | 3 | 66,947 | 33 | 1,031 |
| 9 | Spanish | es | 9,333 | 38,580 | 409,860 | 9 | 121,253 | 32 | 0 |
| 10 | Dutch | nl | 8,951 | 29,152 | 378,385 | 9 | 27,558 | 27 | 21 |
For a complete list with totals, see Wikimedia Statistics.[10]
See also[edit]
- 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
- Open textbook
- Project Gutenberg
- Universal library
- Wikibooks:What is Wikibooks?
References[edit]
- ^ a b c Wikimedia's MediaWiki API:Sitematrix. Retrieved May 2023 from Data:Wikipedia statistics/meta.tab
- ^ "Wikibooks Statistics - Article count (official)". Wikimedia. Retrieved 28 January 2018.
- ^ a b c d Wikimedia's MediaWiki API:Siteinfo. Retrieved May 2023 from Data:Wikipedia statistics/data.tab
- ^ "Wikibooks.org Whois Record". DomainTools, LLC. Retrieved 22 January 2013.
- ^ "Talk:Science Hypertextbook project". Wikimedia Meta-Wiki. Wikimedia Foundation. June 23, 2003. Retrieved October 1, 2022.
- ^ Wick, Karl (June 17, 2003). "a spot for WP textbook devel". wikien-l@lists.wikimedia.org (Mailing list). Wikimedia Foundation. Retrieved October 1, 2022.
- ^ "Wikipedia, now serving K-12 and over". mentalfloss.com. 2006-08-04. Retrieved 2019-09-28.
- ^ Suchmaschine BASE (Bielefeld Academic Search Engine): Wikibooks: Viquillibres : Portada. www.base-search.net. Retrieved 15 January 2018.
- ^ "Site Profile for wikibooks.org" Archived 2010-06-08 at the Wayback Machine, compete, retrieved July 19, 2016
- ^ "Wikibooks Statistics". Meta.Wikimedia.org. Retrieved 11 September 2020.
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. Archived from the original on 2016-08-29. Retrieved 2009-08-02.
External links[edit]
- Official website
- Wikibooks Language Editions: list of Wikibooks for various languages ordered by size.
- Wikibooks page on Meta-Wiki
- Wikibooks takes on textbook industry
