This article needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. (September 2010)

Wikibooks

Screenshot of wikibooks.org home page
URL	www.wikibooks.org
Slogan	Open books for an open world
Commercial?	No
Type of site	Textbooks wiki
Registration	Optional
Available language(s)	multilingual
Owner	Wikimedia Foundation
Created by	Karl Wick and the Wikimedia Community
Launched	July 10, 2004
Alexa rank	2,877 (June 2012[update])[1]
Current status	Active

Wikibooks (previously called Wikimedia Free Textbook Project and Wikimedia-Textbooks) is a wiki hosted by the Wikimedia Foundation for the creation of free content 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.^[2][3]

  History

Wikibooks was launched on July 10, 2003, in response to a request made by Wikipedia contributor Karl Wick for a project 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.

  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 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

  Growth of the eight largest Wikibooks sites (by language), July 2003 – Jan 2010

• CK-12 Foundation
• Digital library
• e-book
• European Library
• Free High School Science Texts
• Global Text
• ibiblio
• Open Content Alliance
• Universal library

  References

  Further reading

• Ben Crowell (2005). "All Systems Go: The Newly Emerging Infrastructure to Support Free Books". http://www.lightandmatter.com/article/infrastructure.html. Retrieved June 18, 2006. 
• Michael F. Shaughnessy (2009-07-14). "An Interview with Curtis Bonk: A Look at Wikibooks and Wikibookians". EducationNews.org. http://www.ednews.org/articles/an-interview-with-curtis-bonk-a-look-at-wikibooks-and-wikibookians.html. 

  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