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Wikibooks
Free resource library of books hosted by the Wikimedia Foundation and edited by volunteers

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.

Initially, the project was created solely in English in July 2003; a later expansion to include additional languages was started in July 2004. As of May 2025, there are Wikibooks sites active for 77 languages comprising a total of 391,266 articles and 1,608 recently active editors.

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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.56 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.

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.

Book content

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.

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.

Multilingual statistics

As of May 2025, there are Wikibooks sites for 121 languages of which 77 are active and 44 are closed.10 The active sites have 391,266 articles and the closed sites have 671 articles.11 There are 4,770,504 registered users of which 1,608 are recently active.12

The top ten Wikibooks language projects by mainspace article count:13

No.LanguageWikiGoodTotalEditsAdminsUsersActive usersFiles
1Englishen97,859292,9194,344,613113,494,8423672,626
2Vietnamesevi51,12491,469526,929218,82117425
3Hungarianhu43,602100,805509,711415,4602821,406
4Germande33,45374,8381,061,9187113,817592,495
5Frenchfr20,95758,770743,0697120,52454169
6Italianit18,76240,846475,968352,53499746
7Japaneseja17,59533,198273,418487,66899157
8Portuguesept13,90680,380498,962370,77232426
9Spanishes9,61340,020422,2209125,364430
10Dutchnl9,38529,942394,589728,8962820

For a complete list with totals, see Wikimedia Statistics.14

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.15

See also

Further reading

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Wikibooks.

References

  1. "Wikibooks Statistics - Article count (official)". Wikimedia. Archived from the original on 14 April 2019. Retrieved 28 January 2018. https://stats.wikimedia.org/wikibooks/EN/TablesArticlesTotal.htm ↩

  2. Wikimedia's MediaWiki API:Sitematrix. Retrieved May 2025 from Data:Wikipedia statistics/meta.tab /wiki/Wikimedia ↩

  3. Wikimedia's MediaWiki API:Siteinfo. Retrieved May 2025 from Data:Wikipedia statistics/data.tab /wiki/Wikimedia ↩

  4. "Wikibooks.org Whois Record". DomainTools, LLC. Archived from the original on 23 January 2022. Retrieved 22 January 2013. http://whois.domaintools.com/wikibooks.org ↩

  5. "Talk:Science Hypertextbook project". Wikimedia Meta-Wiki. Wikimedia Foundation. June 23, 2003. Retrieved October 1, 2022. https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:PermanentLink/153077 ↩

  6. Wick, Karl (June 17, 2003). "a spot for WP textbook devel". [email protected] (Mailing list). Wikimedia Foundation. Retrieved October 1, 2022. https://lists.wikimedia.org/hyperkitty/list/[email protected]/thread/CYNWNQMHZTBDWXLJEGEARN3AAQAP2V4L/ ↩

  7. "Wikipedia, now serving K-12 and over". Mental Floss. 2006-08-04. Archived from the original on 2019-09-28. Retrieved 2019-09-28. https://web.archive.org/web/20190928193247/http://mentalfloss.com/article/14633/wikipedia-now-serving-k-12-and-over ↩

  8. "Wikibooks: Viquillibres: Portada". Bielefeld Academic Search Engine. Archived from the original on 28 November 2022. Retrieved 15 January 2018. https://www.base-search.net/Record/a54c9de5aeca8c528f687d1e1d3827e4a5c3eb8638dc57a0557413f8c3206069/ ↩

  9. "Site Profile for wikibooks.org". compete. Archived from the original on 2010-06-08. Retrieved July 19, 2016. https://web.archive.org/web/20100608021108/http://siteanalytics.compete.com/wikibooks.org/ ↩

  10. Wikimedia's MediaWiki API:Sitematrix. Retrieved May 2025 from Data:Wikipedia statistics/meta.tab /wiki/Wikimedia ↩

  11. Wikimedia's MediaWiki API:Siteinfo. Retrieved May 2025 from Data:Wikipedia statistics/data.tab /wiki/Wikimedia ↩

  12. Wikimedia's MediaWiki API:Siteinfo. Retrieved May 2025 from Data:Wikipedia statistics/data.tab /wiki/Wikimedia ↩

  13. Wikimedia's MediaWiki API:Siteinfo. Retrieved May 2025 from Data:Wikipedia statistics/data.tab /wiki/Wikimedia ↩

  14. "Wikibooks Statistics". Meta.Wikimedia.org. Archived from the original on 13 September 2020. Retrieved 11 September 2020. https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikibooks#Statistics ↩

  15. Lin, Meng-Fen Grace; Sajjapanroj, Suthiporn; Bonk, Curtis J. (October 2011). "Wikibooks and Wikibookians: Loosely Coupled Community or a Choice for Future Textbooks?". IEEE Transactions on Learning Technologies. 4 (4): 327–339. doi:10.1109/TLT.2011.12. Retrieved 2024-03-14. https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/5744067 ↩