Wikibooks

Wikibooks
	Screenshot Screenshot of wikibooks.org home page
Type of site	Textbooks wiki
Available in	Multilingual (77 active)
Owner	Wikimedia Foundation
Created by	User Karl Wick and the Wikimedia Community
URL	wikibooks.org
Commercial	No
Registration	Optional
Launched	July 10, 2003;21 years ago
Current status	Active

Last updated December 05, 2024

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.

History

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

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

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.

Multilingual statistics

As of December2024, there are Wikibooks sites for 121 languages of which 77 are active and 44 are closed.^[1] The active sites have 384,163 articles and the closed sites have 671 articles.^[3] There are 4,738,318 registered users of which 1,596 are recently active.^[3]

The top ten Wikibooks language projects by mainspace article count:^[3]

No.	Language	Wiki	Good	Total	Edits	Admins	Users	Active users	Files
1	English	en	97,621	291,194	4,301,451	10	3,480,705	315	2,687
2	Vietnamese	vi	50,055	90,827	516,566	2	18,609	17	993
3	Hungarian	hu	42,826	106,887	498,629	3	15,202	18	21,343
4	German	de	32,767	75,245	1,048,180	8	112,947	59	3,723
5	French	fr	20,767	58,396	732,408	7	119,341	51	169
6	Italian	it	18,124	39,590	466,331	3	51,837	99	756
7	Japanese	ja	16,401	31,551	264,329	4	85,117	143	359
8	Portuguese	pt	13,738	80,701	496,434	3	70,094	30	983
9	Spanish	es	9,568	39,720	420,207	10	124,586	28	0
10	Dutch	nl	9,199	29,647	390,129	8	28,649	27	21

For a complete list with totals, see Wikimedia Statistics.^[10]

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.^[11]

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References

1 2 3 Wikimedia's MediaWiki API:Sitematrix. Retrieved December2024 from Data:Wikipedia statistics/meta.tab
↑ "Wikibooks Statistics - Article count (official)". Wikimedia. Archived from the original on 14 April 2019. Retrieved 28 January 2018.
1 2 3 4 Wikimedia's MediaWiki API:Siteinfo. Retrieved December2024 from Data:Wikipedia statistics/data.tab
↑ "Wikibooks.org Whois Record". DomainTools, LLC. Archived from the original on 23 January 2022. 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". Mental Floss. 2006-08-04. Archived from the original on 2019-09-28. Retrieved 2019-09-28.
↑ "Wikibooks: Viquillibres: Portada". Bielefeld Academic Search Engine. Archived from the original on 28 November 2022. Retrieved 15 January 2018.
↑ "Site Profile for wikibooks.org". compete. Archived from the original on 2010-06-08. Retrieved July 19, 2016.
↑ "Wikibooks Statistics". Meta.Wikimedia.org . Archived from the original on 13 September 2020. Retrieved 11 September 2020.
↑ Lin, Meng-Fen Grace; Sajjapanroj, Suthiporn; Bonk, Curtis J. (October 2011). "Wikibooks and Wikibookians: Loosely Coupled Community or a Choice for Future Textbooks?". IEEE Transactions on Learning Technologies. 4 (4): 327–339. doi:10.1109/TLT.2011.12 . Retrieved 2024-03-14.

External links

This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.

[Sitematrix-1] 1 2 3 Wikimedia's MediaWiki API:Sitematrix. Retrieved December2024 from Data:Wikipedia statistics/meta.tab

[WikiStats-2] "Wikibooks Statistics - Article count (official)". Wikimedia. Archived from the original on 14 April 2019. Retrieved 28 January 2018.

[Siteinfo-3] 1 2 3 4 Wikimedia's MediaWiki API:Siteinfo. Retrieved December2024 from Data:Wikipedia statistics/data.tab

[4] "Wikibooks.org Whois Record". DomainTools, LLC. Archived from the original on 23 January 2022. Retrieved 22 January 2013.

[5] "Talk:Science Hypertextbook project". Wikimedia Meta-Wiki. Wikimedia Foundation. June 23, 2003. Retrieved October 1, 2022.

[6] Wick, Karl (June 17, 2003). "a spot for WP textbook devel". wikien-l@lists.wikimedia.org (Mailing list). Wikimedia Foundation. Retrieved October 1, 2022.

[7] "Wikipedia, now serving K-12 and over". Mental Floss. 2006-08-04. Archived from the original on 2019-09-28. Retrieved 2019-09-28.

[8] "Wikibooks: Viquillibres: Portada". Bielefeld Academic Search Engine. Archived from the original on 28 November 2022. Retrieved 15 January 2018.

[9] "Site Profile for wikibooks.org". compete. Archived from the original on 2010-06-08. Retrieved July 19, 2016.

[Wikimedia_Statistics-10] "Wikibooks Statistics". Meta.Wikimedia.org . Archived from the original on 13 September 2020. Retrieved 11 September 2020.

[11] Lin, Meng-Fen Grace; Sajjapanroj, Suthiporn; Bonk, Curtis J. (October 2011). "Wikibooks and Wikibookians: Loosely Coupled Community or a Choice for Future Textbooks?". IEEE Transactions on Learning Technologies. 4 (4): 327–339. doi:10.1109/TLT.2011.12 . Retrieved 2024-03-14.

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Wikibooks

Contents