Re: Website for Wikibookians

Andrew Whitworth wrote:
>> How much of this is similar to the idea of the "Wikibooks Foundation"
>> idea I floated before the last board elections on the Staff Lounge?
>> (More like a lead balloon that sank at sea, but I still raised it.)
>>
>> There are some activities that the WMF board either doesn't want to get
>> involved with or for various reasons legally can't.... which some
>> Wikibookians do want to get involved with.  Some of what you are saying
>> here about having a completely independent website might have some good
>> merit, and I am liking the general approach you are taking on doing this.
>>
>> I want to make it clear that there certainly is a huge role that a WMF
>> sponsored website for textbook and other book-length material to be
>> hosted, and I'm not trying to say by any means to tell of the WMF off...
>> but at the same time trying to organize activities, particularly some
>> potentially profit-making activities, has been embarrassingly difficult
>> to put together and at the same time maintain a distance to avoid the
>> appearance of ethical conflicts.
>>
>> Wikibooks is reaching a new level of development, and it will be
>> interesting where the community will go from here.
>>
>> -- Robert Horning
> 
> Hello Rob! how are you? You are right, this is basically the "sinister
> alterior motive" that I've had about this. The idea of having a
> separate "Wikibooks Foundation" might not have been a success, but it
> has been influential nonetheless. One thing I want is to have a
> platform that isn't dependant on WMF money or WMF
> developers/volunteers to run. People are busy enough as-is.
> 
> Consider as a parallel issue the fact that Google News refuses to
> aggregate Wikinews directly, because it is "untrustworthy". To
> circumvent this, Wikinews created a news blog to post it's stories
> (once they have been completed), and Google News will link to the
> Wikinews Blog. It's this kind of small step that can go a long way to
> promoting Wikinews, and ideally all other WMF projects. Imagine for a
> short moment a read-only website where "checked" and "approved" books
> could be hosted, and then included in Google Books searches. Think
> about what Veropedia does to improve the reliability of certain
> Wikipedia articles.
> 
> This is sort of a tangent, of course, but it illustrates the fact that
> sometimes our neat self-contained little wikis do need some support
> from other websites which are not necessarily WMF-affiliates.
> 
> --Andrew Whitworth


This said, whilst some of the activities you suggest seem best to "keep" 
aside from WMF, others totally fit under the umbrella of Wikimedia 
Foundation.

Blogs : I think the http://en.planet.wikimedia.org/ is a good start to 
consider.
This aggregation is for all projects, english focused.
http://de.planet.wikimedia.org/ is the same, german focused.

We could perfectly image a http://en.planet.wikibooks.org, for a 
wikibooks focus.

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Also, a website which would host Wikibooks pdf versions of books seem 
perfectly "inline" with the mission.

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News would seem logical to me as well

However, hosting personal website (photos) is really not our job indeed.
Email aliasing as well.

Presumably, a separate association could be created, which could be a 
partner of Wikimedia Foundation, and which would have certain activities 
that the Foundation does not want to be involved in.

Ant