In regards to open access, the London School of Economics and Political Science has an article asking the question, does academia need a wake up call on Wikibooks? The various Wikibooks are non-fiction works and cover a range of topics. They are all licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License which fits well within the Open Access movement in general.
Wikibooks receives nearly half a billion page views annually, but has hardly featured in academic debates on open access. Caroline Ball argues that by working with the platform to create open educational resources academics have much to gain.
Journal articles and monographs have dominated debates around open access. The infrastructure, campaigns, and funding models central to OA advocacy tend to revolve around these traditional formats. But in doing so, are we overlooking a platform that has been quietly producing free, editable, collaboratively written textbooks for over two decades?
I'm talking about Wikibooks: the Wikimedia project launched in 2003 to create and share open educational resources in the form of textbooks and instructional manuals. Like Wikipedia, Wikibooks is built by volunteers around the world. All content is freely licensed (CC BY-SA) and editable by anyone. It is, effectively, an OA book publishing platform hiding in plain sight.
The Wikibooks project is maintained under the parent organization the Wikimedia Foundation, the same parent as for Wikipedia.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by bzipitidoo on Sunday November 09, @03:17AM (1 child)
The people who need waking up the most, or perhaps smacking down the most, are the politicians and publishers. They're the ones most responsible for textbook racketeering. Nearly every year, they like to release another edition, not because it was really needed, but only to push students and schools onto their textbook update treadmill.
Groups of anti-intellectual morons such as this Moms For Liberty that ban books and run around trying to force schools to take those books off the shelves add to the troubles and expenses of schools, and the profits of unscrupulous publishers. The social conservative nutball politicians have their anti-intellectual agenda in which they are trying to twist educational books into spewing propaganda and religious dogma. They push the biology textbook that tries to present Creationism alongside Evolution, as if the pseudoscience merits being presented on an equal footing with real science. One of the worst cases of this was in Oklahoma recently, in which the state official responsible didn't even bother with pseudoscience, he just up and required Oklahoma public schools to buy Bibles, and not just any Bibles, but Bibles connected to Trump that would both hand Trump an enormous profit, and would spread a little more favorable propaganda about him. It was a scam of incredible brazenness.
Social conservatives are always gunning for the kids, on the thinking that naive youths are much easier to brainwash. They're also always trying to rewrite history. They're still trying to deny that the Holocaust happened. Indeed, it seems that for every such genocidal atrocity ever, there's some group of liars that wants to cover it all up. Widespread adoption of a high quality online library of educational textbooks could well forever put an end to such shenanigans.
(Score: 2) by aafcac on Monday November 10, @10:43PM
Working at and hanging around colleges for decades, it's a combination of excessive mergers and the people choosing which books doing so on the basis of personal preference and Correctness, but failing to pay attention in terms of whether the book can be read or not and how well it does the job of communicating the basic ideas to the students.
The open books are often times as good, and sometimes better, but they don't have a publisher's rep and when you can print a copy of the book for $10 in a hard copy form, it makes it hard for the various companies to grift off of it.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Frosty Piss on Sunday November 09, @05:15AM (1 child)
Academics get paid to write, edit, proof read the textbooks they choose for their classes. As long as this is the case, few will deviate from specifying the textbooks they are essentially paid to use.
(Score: 2) by aafcac on Monday November 10, @10:46PM
Academics rarely get to choose their books, the department usually makes the decision. If they were choosing their own, it would make it a lot harder to ensure that the content the students are being taught covers the necessary aspects to prepare them for the next class.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by maxwell demon on Sunday November 09, @01:38PM
The article author obviously is very confused:
Journal articles/monographs and textbooks are very different things. Journal articles and monographs are for publishing primary research. Wikibooks explicitly states: [wikibooks.org] "Wikibooks is not a place to publish primary research."
So no, Wikibooks is explicitly not an alternative to journal articles and monographs.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 2) by mrpg on Sunday November 09, @02:45PM
I think wiki-anything might have more errors. I was watching a YT video and the person said something wrong about grub. Sometimes small things but I wonder if they carry over time.
Thanks for your time.