Latest revision as of 12:16, 20 April 2011

WikiBooks is a service created by the WikiMedia Foundation (the same group who maintains Wikipedia) as an environment for collaboratively authoring and sharing open-content textbooks. See the about page on the WikiBooks site for more information.

[edit] Benefits

Creating and sharing a book on WikiBooks has the following benefits:

• Easy distribution and access
• Easy collaboration in the MediaWiki authoring environment (the same software Wikipedia uses)
• High visibility (since the WikiBooks site is heavily trafficked)

[edit] Limitations and Potential Concerns

Utilizing this resource does have a few limitations/parameters and may cause a few concerns, depending upon a variety of factors:

• Authors do not maintain copyright on materials, since all content is released under a Creative Commons ShareAlike license
• Anyone can edit or contribute to pages, so if authors are concerned about undesired contribution, they will need to carefully watch pages

[edit] Example Textbooks

• Foundations of Education and Instructional Assessment
• Investigating Critical and Contemporary Issues in Education
• Applied History of Psychology

[edit] Alternatives

• Separate MediaWiki install
• Google Knol