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Wikibooks

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For "books" on Wikipedia, see Wikipedia:Books.
Wikibooks
Wikibooks logo from 2009 to the present
Detail of the Wikibooks main page. All major Wikibooks projects are listed by number of articles.
Screenshot of wikibooks.org home page
Web addresswww.wikibooks.org
SloganOpen books for an open world
Commercial?No
Type of site
Textbooks wiki
RegistrationOptional
Available inmultilingual
OwnerWikimedia Foundation
Created byKarl Wick and the Wikimedia Community
LaunchedTemplate:MONTHNAME 10, 2003 (2003-07-10)
Alexa rank
Decrease 3,297 (August 2015[[Category:Articles containing potentially dated statements from Expression error: Unexpected < operator.]])[1]
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 textbooks and annotated texts that anyone can edit.

In April 2010, Alexa ranked wikibooks.org as the 2,462nd 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

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The wikibooks.org domain was registered on Template:MONTHNAME 19, 2003 (2003-07-19),[4] and launched 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

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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

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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.

See also

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References

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  1. ^ "Wikibooks.org Site Info". Alexa Internet. Retrieved 2015-08-01.
  2. ^ "Site Profile for wikibooks.org", compete, retrieved June 15, 2010
  3. ^ "wikibooks.org", Quantcast, retrieved June 15, 2010
  4. ^ "Wikibooks.org Whois Record". DomainTools, LLC. Retrieved 22 January 2013.

Further reading

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Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.beta.wmflabs.org/w/index.php?title=Wikibooks&oldid=277043"