Wiki book

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The term wiki book is ambiguous and means several things:

• A collection of wiki pages about a topic. The best example are the Wikibooks from Wikipedia. Sometimes PDF versions are made available too.

• A print book authored on the wiki and then post-processed for typesetting and minor adjustments. A typical example are the WikiReaders, collections of articles from Wikimedia Foundation projects on a certain topic, in the form of PDFs published for download and intended to be printed, and also to be sold in printed form.

• A real print book prepared on the wiki, but heavly edited once imported to a word processor.

• A collection of wiki articles assembled on the fly by a user into a PDF document.

See also open content and open educational resources (OER). Wiki books are a favorite tool for open content authors.

Why wiki books

There are several arguments:

1. Wikis are good tools for mass collaboration (social computing) as well as for fairly large groups work. This idea seems to work in some Wikibooks projects.
2. Books as "after thought". Some people create wiki pages about isolated subjects and that could grow into a collection of related subjects. Making a "book" out of these should be as easy as possible.
3. Evolving tutorials. With a wiki one can test (and change in real time) tutorials. These could then be assembled into a printable textbook. E.g. with (lots) of extra work I could do this for my Flash tutorials. Already now we generate PDFs for handouts. In addition, one get get occasional help from users to fix small mistakes and broken links.
4. Cross-references and references to external sources are easy to create and to manage in a wiki. In some word processors this is troublesome, e.g. Word (all versions) is a total disaster with respect to crossreferencing and other tagging.

Mediawiki technology

Mediawikis (like this one) or the wikipedias rely on an infrastructure that is badly suited for producing books in any form. Firslty the wiki syntax fairly complicated to parse. Worse, most mediawikis inlude at least some (or hundreds) of so-called templates, e.g. {{incomplete}} will insert a banner on top of a page in this wiki. Still worse, there exist extensions (e.g. to define digrams with a code) that rely on complex external markup languages.

We could find any easy strategy to produce high-quality PDF or insure perfect export/import to text processing software.

Information on various Wikipedia servers is fairly chaotic and many pages are not really updated. See for example the discussion about Paper Wikipedia.

Strategies for creating PDF from mediawiki

Tools

• The Eclipse Wikipedia Editor with PDF Exporter

• Collection is an extension that you can intall in your own wiki. It will allow a user to organize personal selections of pages in a collection. Collections then can be structured with chapters, exported in ODF, DocBook or PDF using other extensions or ordered as print book through http://pediapress.

Strategies for creating real print books

software

• []

Links to wikibooks and organisations that publish them

Wikipedia books

• Wikibooks “Wikibooks is a Wikimedia community for creating a free library of educational textbooks that anyone can edit. Wikibooks began on July 10, 2003; since then Wikibooks has grown to include over 35,021 pages in a multitude of textbooks created by volunteers like you!”, retrieved 18:18, 20 March 2009 (UTC).

• Wikibooks.org (List of international Wikibook wikis).

Other organizations

There are lots of educational organizations that use wikis or similar CMS technology, e.g.

• WikiEducator. Some of its contents can be considered virtual books, but you'll have to dig a bit - Daniel K. Schneider 18:18, 20 March 2009 (UTC)
• Connexions
• Scholarpedia (not a collection of books actually, but it does include "encyclopedias about subjects")

See also open contents and open educational resources

Publishing companies

• WikiReader. Published some print books in German made from Wikipedia articles.
• Flexbooks
• weBook, online writing and reading in several areas. Read also Wiki book publisher for collaborative writing.
• Random House will publish a synthesis of the 50'000 most popular german wiki articles.
• PediaPress has an interesting model. You select the content from your favorite wiki and PediaPress takes care of typesetting, printing and shipping.

Wikibooks in educational technology

Orey, M.(Ed.). (2001). Emerging perspectives on learning, teaching, and technology. Retrieved <insert date>, from http://projects.coe.uga.edu/epltt/

Various links

• Wikinomics has some propaganda for the "collective intelligence" argument.

• Rick Sapir explains with Writing a Book, the Wiki Way why (and a bit how) he wrote TikiWiki for Smarties, an online document.

• Penguin Books Proves The Entire Internet Can't Write A Novel (2008).

Bibliography

• Barton, Matthew D. et al (n.d.), Rhetoric and Composition, Wikibook, http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Rhetoric_and_Composition. (Good example of a wikibook, but also includes good information on composition and collaborative writing).

• Mason, Bruce and Sue Thomas (2008). A Million Penguins Research Report, Institute for Creative Technologies, De Montfort University. PDF. Good reading about why a million penguins can't write a very good novel. This paper includes also further links to related blogs.