Wikibooks

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.

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 (2003-07-10)
Current statusActive
Growth of the eight largest Wikibooks sites (by language), July 2003–January 2010

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 October 2023, there are Wikibooks sites active for 77 languages[1] comprising a total of 369,254 articles and 1,164 recently active editors.[3]

History

The wikibooks.org domain was registered on July 19, 2003.[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.

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

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.

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.

How English Wikibooks is structured

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

As of October 2023, there are Wikibooks sites for 121 languages of which 77 are active and 44 are closed.[1] The active sites have 369,254 articles and the closed sites have 671 articles.[3] There are 4,656,453 registered users of which 1,164 are recently active.[3]

The top ten Wikibooks language projects by mainspace article count:[3]

No.LanguageWikiGoodTotalEditsAdminsUsersActive usersFiles
1 English en 97,157 288,066 4,188,699 11 3,442,718 327 2,690
2 Vietnamese vi 49,761 90,279 503,408 2 17,923 12 1,009
3 Hungarian hu 38,318 93,499 450,111 3 14,549 16 21,313
4 German de 31,066 76,999 1,016,372 8 110,489 75 7,699
5 French fr 19,526 56,858 707,099 8 115,877 28 169
6 Italian it 16,838 37,013 444,427 4 49,949 40 769
7 Japanese ja 14,171 27,305 236,749 4 79,496 74 425
8 Portuguese pt 13,491 80,209 487,436 3 68,234 34 1,031
9 Spanish es 9,196 38,692 411,793 9 122,446 40 0
10 Dutch nl 9,051 29,248 383,525 9 27,953 26 21

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

See also

References
  1. Wikimedia's MediaWiki API:Sitematrix. Retrieved October 2023 from Data:Wikipedia statistics/meta.tab
  2. "Wikibooks Statistics - Article count (official)". Wikimedia. Archived from the original on 14 April 2019. Retrieved 28 January 2018.
  3. Wikimedia's MediaWiki API:Siteinfo. Retrieved October 2023 from Data:Wikipedia statistics/data.tab
  4. "Wikibooks.org Whois Record". DomainTools, LLC. Archived from the original on 23 January 2022. 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. Archived from the original on 2019-09-28. Retrieved 2019-09-28.
  8. Suchmaschine BASE (Bielefeld Academic Search Engine): Wikibooks: Viquillibres : Portada. Archived from the original on 28 November 2022. Retrieved 15 January 2018. {{cite book}}: |website= ignored (help)
  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. Archived from the original on 13 September 2020. Retrieved 11 September 2020.

Further reading
Wikimedia Commons has media related to Wikibooks.
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