Wikibooks

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Wikibooks
Wikibooks logo from 2009 to the present
Screenshot
Type of site
Textbooks wiki
Available inMultilingual (76 active)[1]
OwnerWikimedia Foundation
Created byUser Karl Wick and the Wikimedia Community
URLwww.wikibooks.org
CommercialNo
RegistrationOptional
LaunchedJuly 10, 2003; 18 years ago (2003-07-10)
Current statusActive
Growth of the eight largest Wikibooks sites (by language), July 2003–Jan 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 September 2021, there are Wikibooks sites active for 76 languages[1] comprising a total of 306,311 articles and 1,452 recently active editors.[3]

History[]

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. 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.

In August 2006, Wikiversity became an independent Wikimedia Foundation project.[5]

Since 2008, Wikibooks is included in BASE.[6]

In June 2016, Compete.com estimated that Wikibooks had 1,478,812 unique visitors.[7]

Since 2021, video game strategy guides are accepted again after being excluded in 2007.[8]

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 .

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.

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.

Multilingual statistics[]

As of September 2021, there are Wikibooks sites for 120 languages of which 76 are active and 44 are closed.[1] The active sites have 306,311 articles and the closed sites have 671 articles.[3] There are 4,444,208 registered users of which 1,452 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 93,248 274,722 3,944,746 11 3,354,572 437 2,712
2 Hungarian hu 33,510 83,685 404,434 3 12,365 16 20,886
3 German de 29,970 75,101 969,052 8 103,259 136 7,692
4 French fr 17,566 54,227 663,103 7 106,183 42 167
5 Italian it 15,024 34,326 415,183 4 45,346 43 763
6 Portuguese pt 13,190 79,163 473,934 4 61,711 26 1,031
7 Japanese ja 12,644 23,775 183,880 4 64,067 71 377
8 Vietnamese vi 9,630 20,641 334,307 3 15,585 23 969
9 Spanish es 9,032 37,571 398,361 11 115,866 65 0
10 Dutch nl 8,495 27,831 350,420 10 25,419 18 17

For a complete list with totals, see Wikimedia Statistics.[9]

See also[]

References[]

  1. ^ Jump up to: a b c Wikimedia's MediaWiki API:Sitematrix. Retrieved September 2021 from Data:Wikipedia statistics/meta.tab
  2. ^ "Wikibooks Statistics - Article count (official)". Wikimedia. Retrieved 28 January 2018.
  3. ^ Jump up to: a b c d Wikimedia's MediaWiki API:Siteinfo. Retrieved September 2021 from Data:Wikipedia statistics/data.tab
  4. ^ "Wikibooks.org Whois Record". DomainTools, LLC. Retrieved 22 January 2013.
  5. ^ "Wikipedia, now serving K-12 and over". mentalfloss.com. 2006-08-04. Retrieved 2019-09-28.
  6. ^ "Suchmaschine BASE (Bielefeld Academic Search Engine): Wikibooks: Viquillibres : Portada". www.base-search.net. Retrieved 15 January 2018.
  7. ^ "Site Profile for wikibooks.org" Archived 2010-06-08 at the Wayback Machine, compete, retrieved July 19, 2016
  8. ^ https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Wikibooks:Strategy_guides
  9. ^ "Wikibooks Statistics". Meta.Wikimedia.org. Retrieved 11 September 2020.

Further reading[]

External links[]

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