Tuesday, March 15, 2005

Wikibooks, an Internet project which seeks to create free content textbooks using wiki technology, has published its February 2005 statistics. The Cookbook project leads the statistics, both by number of contributors (94) and by total edits (668). Newcomer of the month is “Wikibooks Pokédex“, with 337 edits by mainly one user, followed by “Programming:Ada” (320 edits). Seventy contributors edited on “Wikiversity“, followed by sixty-eight users on the “Jokebook“. Wikiversity is a project of its own which aims to build a collaborative learning environment online.

Wikibooks was originally meant as a place for textbooks and manuals but has increasingly become a community creating books on all kinds of subjects, with the cookbook being the most prominent example. Intended as a collection of recipes from around the world, it hosts recipes from Hamburger to Sushi, ethnic cuisines from the Caribbean to the Mediterranean, and gives background information on ingredients, nutrition, and many cooking techniques.

Wikis are openly editable websites that are often used to create knowledge bases. Wikibooks is a project operated by the Wikimedia Foundation, a non-profit organization based in the United States which runs several free content wikis, including Wikipedia, a free encyclopedia, and Wikinews, a free news source. The statistics for Wikibooks are extracted using an SQL query on the latest Wikibooks database dump.