Wikibooks, previously called Wikimedia Free Textbook Project and Wikimedia-Textbooks, is a sister project to Wikipedia and is part of the Wikimedia foundation, begun on July 10, 2003.

The project is a collection of free textbooks, manuals, and other texts, with supporting book-based texts, that is written collaboratively on this website. The site is a WikiWiki, meaning that anyone can edit any book module by clicking on an "edit this page" link which appears in every Wikibooks module.

The project was opened in response to a request by Wikipedia's Karl Wick for a place to start building open-content textbooks such as organic chemistry and physics in order to reduce the costs and other limitations on learning materials.

Some of the first books were completely original and others began as text copied over from other sources of free-content textbooks found on the Internet. All of the site's content is covered by the GNU Free Documentation License. Contributions remain the property of their creators, while the copyleft licensing ensures that the content will always remain freely distributable and reproducible to allow for further collaboration.

The site is working towards completion of several complete textbooks in several languages, which founders hope will be followed by mainstream adoption and use of texts developed and housed there.

Subprojects

The are two subprojects within Wikibooks: Wikijunior and Wikiversity. Wikijunior is a youth print and online contect project. Wikiversity is a free, open learning environment and research community.

External links

• Wikibooks' Main Page in English
• Wikibooks' multilingual portal