Wikibooks (previously called ''Wikimedia Free Textbook Project'' and ''Wikimedia-Textbooks'') is a

wiki A wiki ( ) is an online hypertext publication collaboratively edited and managed by its own audience, using a web browser. A typical wiki contains multiple pages for the subjects or scope of the project, and could be either open to the pub ...

-based Wikimedia project hosted by the

Wikimedia Foundation The Wikimedia Foundation, Inc., or Wikimedia for short and abbreviated as WMF, is an American 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization headquartered in San Francisco, California and registered as a charitable foundation under local laws. Best know ...

for the creation of free content

digital textbook A digital textbook is a digital book or e-book intended to serve as the text for a class. Digital textbooks may also be known as e-textbooks or e-texts. Digital textbooks are a major component of technology-based education reform. They may serve as ...

s and annotated texts that anyone can edit. Initially, the project was created solely in English in July 2003; a later expansion to include additional

language Language is a structured system of communication. The structure of a language is its grammar and the free components are its vocabulary. Languages are the primary means by which humans communicate, and may be conveyed through a variety of ...

s was started in July 2004. As of , there are Wikibooks sites active for languages

Wikimedia The Wikimedia Foundation, Inc., or Wikimedia for short and abbreviated as WMF, is an American 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization headquartered in San Francisco, California and registered as a charitable foundation under local laws. Best know ...

MediaWiki MediaWiki is a free and open-source wiki software. It is used on Wikipedia and almost all other Wikimedia websites, including Wiktionary, Wikimedia Commons and Wikidata; these sites define a large part of the requirement set for Media ...

API:Sitematrix. Retrieved from Data:Wikipedia statistics/meta.tab comprising a total of articles and recently active editors.

API:Siteinfo. Retrieved from Data:Wikipedia statistics/data.tab

History

The wikibooks.org domain was registered on . It was launched to host and build free textbooks on subjects such as

organic chemistry Organic chemistry is a subdiscipline within chemistry involving the scientific study of the structure, properties, and reactions of organic compounds and organic materials, i.e., matter in its various forms that contain carbon atoms.Clayden, J ...

and

physics Physics is the natural science that studies matter, its fundamental constituents, its motion and behavior through space and time, and the related entities of energy and force. "Physical science is that department of knowledge which ...

, in response to a request by Wikipedia contributor Karl Wick. Two major sub-projects, Wikijunior and

Wikiversity Wikiversity is a Wikimedia Foundation project that supports learning communities, their learning materials, and resulting activities. It differs from Wikipedia in that it offers tutorials and other materials for the fostering of learning, rather ...

, 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. Since 2008, Wikibooks has been included in BASE. In June 2016,

Compete.com Compete.com was a web traffic analysis service. The company was founded in 2000 and ceased operations in December 2016. Services Compete.com provided two categories of information: *Site Analytics : a free service, where the user can enter any ...

estimated that Wikibooks had 1,478,812 unique visitors."Site Profile for wikibooks.org"
, ''compete'', retrieved July 19, 2016

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 A Creative Commons (CC) license is one of several public copyright licenses that enable the free distribution of an otherwise copyrighted "work".A "work" is any creative material made by a person. A painting, a graphic, a book, a song/lyric ...

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 Wikisource is an online digital library of free-content textual sources on a wiki, operated by the Wikimedia Foundation. Wikisource is the name of the project as a whole and the name for each instance of that project (each instance usually re ...

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 , there are Wikibooks sites for languages of which are active and are closed. The active sites have articles and the closed sites have articles. There are registered users of which are recently active. The top ten Wikibooks language projects by mainspace article count: For a complete list with totals, see Wikimedia Statistics.

References

External links

* * Wikibooks Language Editions: list of Wikibooks for various languages ordered by size. * Wikibooks page on Meta-Wiki
Wikibooks takes on textbook industry
{{ebooks Advertising-free websites Ebook sources Ebook suppliers Internet properties established in 2003 Multilingual websites Wikimedia projects