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Wikibooks (previously called Wikimedia Free Textbook Project and Wikimedia-Textbooks) is a wiki-based Wikimedia project hosted by the Wikimedia Foundation for the creation of free content digital textbooks and annotated texts that anyone can edit.

Quick Facts Type of site, Available in ...
Wikibooks
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Screenshot
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Screenshot of wikibooks.org home page
Type of site
Textbooks wiki
Available inMultilingual (77 active)[1]
OwnerWikimedia Foundation
Created byUser Karl Wick and the Wikimedia Community
URLwikibooks.org
CommercialNo
RegistrationOptional
LaunchedJuly 10, 2003; 21 years ago (2003-07-10)
Current statusActive
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Growth of the eight largest Wikibooks sites (by language), July 2003–January 2010

Initially, the project was created solely in English in July 2003; a later expansion to include additional languages was started in July 2004.[2] As of December 2024, there are Wikibooks sites active for 77 languages[1] comprising a total of 384,729 articles and 1,494 recently active editors.[3]

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History

The wikibooks.org domain was registered on July 19, 2003.[4] It was launched to host and build free textbooks on subjects such as organic chemistry and physics, in response to a request by Wikipedia contributor Karl Wick.[5][6] Two major sub-projects, Wikijunior and Wikiversity, were created within Wikibooks before its official policy was later changed so that future incubator-type projects are started according to the Wikimedia Foundation's new project policy.[clarification needed]

In August 2006, Wikiversity became an independent Wikimedia Foundation project.[7]

Since 2008, Wikibooks has been included in BASE.[8]

In June 2016, Compete.com estimated that Wikibooks had 1,478,812 unique visitors.[9]

Wikijunior

Wikijunior is a subproject of Wikibooks that specializes in books for children. The project consists of both a magazine and a website, and is currently being developed in English, Danish, Finnish, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Spanish, Arabic and Bangla. It is funded by a grant from the Beck Foundation.[citation needed]

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Book content

Visualization of the development in the German Wikibook project Mathe für Nicht-Freaks

While some books are original, others began as text copied over from other sources of free content textbooks found on the Internet. All of the site's content is released under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike license (or a compatible license). This means that, as with its sister project, Wikipedia, contributions remain copyrighted to their creators, while the licensing ensures that it can be freely distributed and reused subject to certain conditions.

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How English Wikibooks is structured

Wikibooks differs from Wikisource in that Wikisource collects exact copies and original translations of existing free content works, such as the original text of Shakespearean plays, while Wikibooks is dedicated either to original works, significantly altered versions of existing works, or annotations to original works.

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Multilingual statistics

As of December 2024, there are Wikibooks sites for 121 languages of which 77 are active and 44 are closed.[1] The active sites have 384,729 articles and the closed sites have 671 articles.[3] There are 4,740,827 registered users of which 1,494 are recently active.[3]

The top ten Wikibooks language projects by mainspace article count:[3]

More information No., Language ...
No.LanguageWikiGoodTotalEditsAdminsUsersActive usersFiles
1 English en 97,676 291,421 4,305,995 10 3,481,755 351 2,687
2 Vietnamese vi 50,059 90,831 516,639 2 18,626 16 993
3 Hungarian hu 42,889 106,998 499,365 3 15,222 16 21,343
4 German de 32,802 75,133 1,049,591 8 113,005 62 3,565
5 French fr 20,772 58,424 732,723 7 119,413 48 169
6 Italian it 18,175 39,683 467,013 3 51,883 58 756
7 Japanese ja 16,621 31,819 265,155 4 85,320 163 359
8 Portuguese pt 13,792 80,752 496,775 3 70,144 33 983
9 Spanish es 9,571 39,726 420,306 10 124,632 25 0
10 Dutch nl 9,199 29,647 390,364 8 28,671 22 21
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For a complete list with totals, see Wikimedia Statistics.[10]

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Reception

Meng-Fen et al suggested that while there isn't much social connection between contributors of wikibooks, the contributors had no major issues coordinating to write books.[11]

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See also

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References

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Further reading

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