Wikibooks:History of Wikibooks

From Wikibooks, the open-content textbooks collection

This is an obsolete archived project page that is preserved for historical value. It may contain out-of-date information.

Wikibooks, (previously called Wikimedia Free Textbook Project and Wikimedia-Textbooks), a sister project to Wikipedia, began on July 10, 2003. It was opened in response to a request by Wikipedia user Karl Wick for a place to start building open content textbooks such as Organic Chemistry and Physics in order to bring education to humanity and reduce the costs and other limitations to top-quality learning materials.

Some of the first books were completely original and others began as text copied over from other sources of GNU FDL textbooks found on the Internet.

Controversies have included the scope of the project (just textbooks or all kinds of books) as well as how best to deal with licensing of the site content, as well as the name and future URL for the project.

By July 31st 2003 there were 123 modules and 47 registered users.

By October 10th (when Wikibooks was 3 months old) there were 530 modules and 150 registered users.