Wikibooks

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Wikibooks
Wikibooks logo from 2009 to the present
Screenshot
Detail of the Wikibooks main page. All major Wikibooks projects are listed by number of articles.
Screenshot of wikibooks.org home page
Type of site
Textbooks wiki
Available inMultilingual (77 active)[1]
OwnerWikimedia Foundation
Created byUser Karl Wick and the Wikimedia Community
URLwww.wikibooks.org
CommercialNo
RegistrationOptional
LaunchedJuly 10, 2003; 19 years ago (2003-07-10)
Current statusActive
Growth of the eight largest Wikibooks sites (by language), July 2003–January 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 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 March 2023, there are Wikibooks sites active for 77 languages[1] comprising a total of 360,628 articles and 1,601 recently active editors.[3]

History[edit]

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

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[edit]

As of March 2023, there are Wikibooks sites for 121 languages of which 77 are active and 44 are closed.[1] The active sites have 360,628 articles and the closed sites have 671 articles.[3] There are 4,595,965 registered users of which 1,601 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 96,295 282,481 4,117,158 12 3,419,164 353 2,717
2 Vietnamese vi 49,464 90,008 498,246 3 17,240 20 1,009
3 Hungarian hu 36,047 90,047 436,742 3 13,996 28 21,269
4 German de 30,939 76,729 1,009,014 8 108,862 102 7,699
5 French fr 18,778 56,088 691,966 8 113,638 43 169
6 Italian it 16,255 36,153 436,938 4 48,710 55 764
7 Japanese ja 13,851 26,315 224,754 4 75,142 62 397
8 Portuguese pt 13,322 79,707 482,553 3 66,250 34 1,031
9 Spanish es 9,324 38,558 409,298 9 120,771 34 0
10 Dutch nl 8,871 28,824 372,330 9 27,274 24 20

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

See also[edit]

References[edit]

  1. ^ a b c Wikimedia's MediaWiki API:Sitematrix. Retrieved March 2023 from Data:Wikipedia statistics/meta.tab
  2. ^ "Wikibooks Statistics - Article count (official)". Wikimedia. Retrieved 28 January 2018.
  3. ^ a b c d Wikimedia's MediaWiki API:Siteinfo. Retrieved March 2023 from Data:Wikipedia statistics/data.tab
  4. ^ "Wikibooks.org Whois Record". DomainTools, LLC. 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". mentalfloss.com. 2006-08-04. Retrieved 2019-09-28.
  8. ^ Suchmaschine BASE (Bielefeld Academic Search Engine): Wikibooks: Viquillibres : Portada. www.base-search.net. Retrieved 15 January 2018.
  9. ^ "Site Profile for wikibooks.org" Archived 2010-06-08 at the Wayback Machine, compete, retrieved July 19, 2016
  10. ^ "Wikibooks Statistics". Meta.Wikimedia.org. Retrieved 11 September 2020.

Further reading[edit]

External links[edit]