Wikibooks talk:Good books

From Wikibooks, the open-content textbooks collection

There are a few things that I think this wikiproject needs to do right off the bat:

1. Finalize a set of grading criteria (or agree on the criteria we already have)
2. Create templates to mark books which are "good".
3. Create a process where books can be nominated for this distinction, and where people can vote on them.

Once we have that, I would say that this wikiprojet will be in business. --Whiteknight (talk) (projects) 16:09, 23 January 2007 (UTC)

I just have one comment about the current listing; the "other related policies" is really vague and has no link, I think we should especially point to the necessity of following the NPOV and NOR, and the copyright policy (those, IMO, are the most fundamental policies). Other than that I think the current criteria are quite good and I would support them. Mattb112885 02:06, 6 February 2007 (UTC)

There is plenty of room for improvement in this area, and any changes that you think should be made, you can feel free to add. I will likely be doing alot of work on this project in the near future myself. --Whiteknight (talk) (projects) 02:21, 6 February 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Changes are made

I must admit, despite wikibooks:be Bold I still am a little leery of editing policy pages but since it is still in development I guess it makes more sense for me to show directly what I felt was missing.Regards. Mattb112885 05:05, 6 February 2007 (UTC)

Quick question: What will be the biggest difference between this and the Editorial Board? They seem to go hand-in-hand; should we maybe make a step-by-step process? I think maybe that would make sense, where an aspiring book first becomes listed under good books, then once listed can go under editorial review, and then finally to the publishing project... I'd like to propose that we make this an "official" part of the project... what do you think? Mattb112885 02:30, 13 February 2007 (UTC)

Good question. The editorial board as I envision it is just a group of people who focus on publishing and distributing. The Good books project will be a group of people who find good books here on wikibooks, and maintain the list at Wikibooks:Featured books. In general, I would say that alot of people should be working hand-in-hand to be authoring and promoting our books, from curriculum planning, book authoring, editing, promoting, publishing, and distributing. --Whiteknight (talk) (projects) 02:59, 13 February 2007 (UTC)

Another quick question: Are we basically purging the current list of featured books and starting over? Or are we going to start from that, prune, and expand from there? I would like to avoid nominating books already on the list if it is the latter. Regards, Mattb112885 20:06, 17 February 2007 (UTC)

I think it's a good idea to start with the existing list, and work from there. Many of the books on that list are acceptable, but should be double-checked anyway. Books can slowly degrade over time, especially as the primary authors lose interest, and other random authors make unwatched changes that are of lower quality then the original text. We might also want to keep an eye on Wikibooks:Nearly complete, as that list will accomplish nearly the same thing (and may even superceed this list). --Whiteknight (talk) (projects) 00:23, 19 February 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Accuracy and completeness

As Whiteknight pointed out (among others), and I had been noticing myself, we don't concentrate on these issues when considering books for Featured status. I think we should - these are just as important (if not moreso!) than our current criteria. While I love to see books following the naming policy, being accurate and complete is far more important in my view.

Adding some wording to cover these aspects would raise a few issues. We already know who will be considering these books; it's a rather limited subset of a rather limited subset of the fairly small community. That is, it will not necessarily be the case that any book nominated will cover a subject we have an expert for (barring the author, who wouldn't necessarily be impartial anyways). So if we don't have someone who knows the subject well, can we evaluate whether it is accurate and complete appropriately?

I don't know the answer here - we may end up simply concluding that we can't assess these things reliably, and therefore cannot add them as criteria. I'd be very unhappy with that conclusion, but I'm unsure how we can come to another one. Perhaps the easiest is to add these as criteria, and figure it out later - if we don't come across a book for which we have no (second) expert, great! If we do, then we can deal with it at that point. Possible solutions there include trying to find an external reviewer from Wikipedia, or from academia.

I'd certainly be interested to hear some thinking on these issues, as writing this was the most consideration I had given the topic to date. I look forward to some good old-fashioned collaboration :)  — Mike.lifeguard | ^talk 11:34, 8 August 2008 (UTC)