Wikibooks

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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 (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–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 2022, there are Wikibooks sites active for 76 languages[1] comprising a total of 313,067 articles and 1,451 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. 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 has been included in BASE.[6]

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

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.

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 2022, there are Wikibooks sites for 120 languages of which 76 are active and 44 are closed.[1] The active sites have 313,067 articles and the closed sites have 671 articles.[3] There are 4,492,797 registered users of which 1,451 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 95,804 280,013 3,995,854 10 3,375,011 356 2,711
2 Hungarian hu 33,914 86,571 416,544 3 12,865 23 21,091
3 German de 30,288 75,648 988,811 8 105,484 107 7,695
4 French fr 18,039 54,901 672,085 7 108,735 51 167
5 Italian it 15,638 35,178 424,253 4 46,570 61 769
6 Portuguese pt 13,235 79,367 477,319 3 63,194 35 1,031
7 Japanese ja 12,972 24,273 195,194 4 67,174 68 393
8 Vietnamese vi 10,049 21,738 383,802 3 16,140 24 991
9 Spanish es 9,284 38,079 402,514 11 117,546 38 0
10 Dutch nl 8,617 28,133 361,574 10 25,979 31 20

For a complete list with totals, see Wikimedia Statistics.[8]

See also[edit]

References[edit]

  1. ^ a b c Wikimedia's MediaWiki API:Sitematrix. Retrieved March 2022 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 2022 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. ^ "Wikibooks Statistics". Meta.Wikimedia.org. Retrieved 11 September 2020.

Further reading[edit]

External links[edit]