Jump to content

Wikibooks:Wikibooks gazette/2008/01/Editorial

From Wikibooks, open books for an open world

I sometimes wonder if Wikibooks is as useful as it seems.

I mean, we provide the textbooks for Wikiversity and even real-world colleges, we give out books full of useful information, and even Jimbo Wales says we're one of the better Wikis to belong to.
But we don't hand out ourselves as Wikipedia does (they specialize in making any article you ask, and they edit it to full glory). Wikibooks is smaller and less prominent, too, so people don't use what I see as our usefulness-accurate, well-written textbooks that can enrich those from 2 to 100.
But maybe this is better for us. There isn't a rush of vandals, articles, spammers, and admins that Wikipedia seems to hold a lot of. I wonder if that's why colleges will use our textbooks but shun Wikipedia articles. Maybe, even though we're smaller, we can provide better services. I can personally testify to this. After an 800-edit career on Wikipedia which culminated with watchlist spam, I realize Wikibooks' service is much better than anything Wikipedia can provide. And I realize I want to be a part of it. Laleena (talk)