[Wikimedia-l] Textbooks Which Borrow Heavily from Wikipedia

[Samuel Klein]

I'm meeting with the Boundless team tomorrow.

How could they improve attribution?
What download formats or APIs would we like to see to enable reposting
to Wikibooks, or better cross-platform collaboration?

Is anyone on wikibooks currently working on importing such materials,
in Tamil or English or other languages?

SJ

Have come across a collection of basic college textbooks that appear to be
more or less based on text from Wikipedia. There are 21 of them. The
company claims that they are being used by more than 2 million students.
They are under a CC BY SA license and if you follow the links seen here
http://books.google.ca/books?id=7avpAAAAQBAJ&pg=PA2058 they do eventually
attribute Wikipedia.
They are being offered for free on amazon.com
http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss_2?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=Boudless
and
are being sold for $19.99 on their website. https://www.boundless.com/
So the question is should we have a response? I think this could generate
position press for our movement. Attribution could be better (I would
consider theirs to be borderline). Additionally should we be adding this
textbooks to Wikiversity or Wikibooks to make sure they stay free available?
--
James Heilman
MD, CCFP-EM, Wikipedian
The Wikipedia Open Textbook of Medicine
www.opentextbookofmedicine.com
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[Federico Leva (Nemo)]

Post by Samuel Klein
How could they improve attribution?

What Phoebe said. A link to each history page *might* be enough but,
especially if they're ebooks, a full list of names costs little (even
though it can be ugly).

Post by Samuel Klein
What download formats or APIs would we like to see to enable reposting
to Wikibooks, or better cross-platform collaboration?

Making books or ebooks out of wiki pages is not a trivial task. If a
publisher does so for us, fantastic! Even just giving "us", i.e. the
public, a copy of said ebooks in a free format, for free, would be a
gain. For instance, they could just upload them all as ePub on
archive.org. Then, if they have a continuous production and update,
Wikibooks could establish some interlinking, telling users that there is
an ebook version at X.

Post by Samuel Klein
Is anyone on wikibooks currently working on importing such materials,
in Tamil or English or other languages?

Do they have any original content? In that case it would be nice if
their "fork" shared the sources with us, so that the content can be
remixed. I doubt they use wikitext and at least for some time we won't
have an integrated HTML import in MediaWiki, but having TeX or DocBook
sources, or whatever, would be great.

Nemo