Wikibooks is a Wiki

Wiki

A wiki is a website that allows the creation and editing of any number of interlinked web pages via a web browser using a simplified markup language or a WYSIWYG text editor. Wikis are typically powered by wiki software and are often used collaboratively by multiple users. Examples include...

 hosted by the Wikimedia Foundation

Wikimedia Foundation

Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. is an American non-profit charitable organization headquartered in San Francisco, California, United States, and organized under the laws of the state of Florida, where it was initially based...

 for the creation of free content

Free content

Free content, or free information, is any kind of functional work, artwork, or other creative content that meets the definition of a free cultural work...

 textbooks and annotated texts that anyone can edit.

In April 2010, Alexa ranked wikibooks.org as the 2,462^nd most popular web site in the world. Compete.com estimates that Wikibooks had 576,838 unique visitors, and Quantcast estimates 646,500 unique visitors, from the United States in that month.

History

Wikibooks was launched on July 10, 2003, in response to a request made by Wikipedia

Wikipedia

Wikipedia is a free, web-based, collaborative, multilingual encyclopedia project supported by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation. Its 20 million articles have been written collaboratively by volunteers around the world. Almost all of its articles can be edited by anyone with access to the site,...

 contributor Karl Wick for a project to host and build free textbooks on subjects such as organic chemistry

Organic chemistry

Organic chemistry is a subdiscipline within chemistry involving the scientific study of the structure, properties, composition, reactions, and preparation of carbon-based compounds, hydrocarbons, and their derivatives...

 and physics

Physics

Physics is a natural science that involves the study of matter and its motion through spacetime, along with related concepts such as energy and force. More broadly, it is the general analysis of nature, conducted in order to understand how the universe behaves.Physics is one of the oldest academic...

. Two major sub-projects, Wikijunior and Wikiversity

Wikiversity

Wikiversity is a Wikimedia Foundation project, which supports learning communities, their learning materials, and resulting activities. It differs from more structured projects such as Wikipedia in that it instead offers a series of tutorials, or courses, for the fostering of learning, rather than...

, 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

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

Wikisource

Wikisource is an online digital library of free content textual sources on a wiki, operated by the Wikimedia Foundation. Its aims are to host all forms of free text, in many languages, and translations. Originally conceived as an archive to store useful or important historical texts, it has...

 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 or to significantly altered versions of existing 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

• CK-12 Foundation
  CK-12 Foundation
  CK-12 is a non-profit organization based in California founded with the mission to reduce the cost of textbook materials for the K-12 market, both in the US and world-wide . They maintain the FlexBook open source tool for creating remixable texts, and as of July 2009 were developing 30...
  
  
• Digital library
  Digital library
  A digital library is a library in which collections are stored in digital formats and accessible by computers. The digital content may be stored locally, or accessed remotely via computer networks...
  
  
• e-book
  E-book
  An electronic book is a book-length publication in digital form, consisting of text, images, or both, and produced on, published through, and readable on computers or other electronic devices. Sometimes the equivalent of a conventional printed book, e-books can also be born digital...
  
  
• European Library
  European Library
  The European Library is an Internet service that allows access to the resources of 48 European national libraries. Searching is free and delivers metadata records as well as digital objects...
  
  
• Free High School Science Texts
  Free high school science texts
  The Free High School Science Texts organization is a South African non-profit project, which creates open textbooks on scientific subjects...
  
  
• Global Text
  Global Text
  Global Text or the Global Text Project is an emerging organisation dedicated to the assembly of free information material and its dissemination to the developing world under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license. Global Text is currently in a proof-of-concept phase with the preparation two...
  
  
• ibiblio
  Ibiblio
  ibiblio is a "collection of collections," and hosts a diverse range of publicly available information and open source software, including software, music, literature, art, history, science, politics, and cultural studies. As an "Internet librarianship," ibiblio is a digital library and archive...
  
  
• Open Content Alliance
  Open Content Alliance
  The Open Content Alliance is a consortium of organizations contributing to a permanent, publicly accessible archive of digitized texts. Its creation was announced in October 2005 by Yahoo!, the Internet Archive, the University of California, the University of Toronto and others...
  
  
• Universal library
  Universal library
  A universal library is a library with universal collections. This may be expressed in terms of it containing all existing information, useful information, all books, all works or even all possible works. This ideal, although unrealizable, has influenced and continues to influence librarians and...
  
  

External links

• English Wikibooks' Main Page
• Wikijunior 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