I’ve just been checking out Wikibooks, a project of the Wikimedia foundation that aims to create free books. Like Wikipedia, anybody can contribute to the books either by adding new material or editing existing books. Those books that are complete or voted ‘good enough’ are also available as PDF documents and even print editions created through Lulu.
A branch of the project is devoted to children’s books, WikiJunior, where you’ll find books about things like the solar system, big cats and the Kings and Queens of England. There are also things like A-level and GCSE textbooks, lots of computer science stuff and hundred of others. The community votes on which new books to develop, though looking at the history of many pages, a lot of the books are the creation of one enthusiast with corrections and additions from others. Wikibooks appears to be a considerably more sedate and good-natured bunch than the wikipedia crowd, with little evidence of the edit-wars, vandalism and obsessive nitpicking that characterises some of the more controversial wikipedia items. Perhaps this is because the project is less well-known, with a smaller community. Perhaps it’s because books are typically big things that require a lot of work and so command some respect.
The aims of the project, like wikipedia, are to democratise and spread knowledge and information. Traditional publishers, say the organisers, fail to recognise merit because their business models rely on creating best-sellers and so they’re risk-averse:
Traditional publishing houses make the bulk of their income from re-issues of classic books, new books by authors with long track records, or celebrities who are famous in their own right. The chances of a truly good new work being published solely on the basis of merit skyrocket when you overturn the traditional business model and tap the wellspring of new talent out there using the ‘net.
With this project we have reached a crossroad between the books of yesterday, and the encyclopedia of everything for tomorrow. Simply by reading this book and telling your friends, you have advanced the cause of free access to information and of democratizing the field of publishing.
There are issues, of course. I read through the PDF version of Big Cats, which is deemed complete, available in print-format and on its way to a second edition. The information it contains appears to be accurate, well-researched and carefully written to suit a young audience. Unfortunately, though, it was a bit odd. There’s lots of half-finished edits, changes in tone and register and the layout is pretty basic. Ultimately, I wouldn’t buy it.
So what does that mean? If one of the most highly developed books available is still not good enough, is the project a failure? This is the sort of charge that’s levelled at Wikipedia: it contains incorrect information, so it’s no good.
That’s not really the right way to look at wiki projects, though. The point of wikis, in my view, is that they are always works in progress. That’s their strength and their weakness. Unlike print editions, new information can be added at any time. When Pluto ceased to be classified as a planet, thousands of books were suddenly out-of-date; Wikipedia was immediately up-to-date.
This philosophy intersects strangely with the idea of books, though. The idea of a book has connotations of completeness, correctness and authority. (Correct in the sense that we don’t expect spelling mistakes, etc.) The idea of an unfinished book is paradoxical - if it’s not complete, then in some senses it’s not yet a book.
What you’re looking at when you read pretty much any wiki project is not something analagous to anything produced on a printing press. It is a palimpsest. The Romans wrote on wax tablets that could be re-used. Medieval monks wrote on vellum, a form of calf leather. If they needed new paper or made a mistake, they could peel off the current layer and write on it again. Modern scholars use ultraviolet and multispectral imaging to try to decipher the history of the page. Wikis lay this process bare. The ghosts of previous versions, previous authors, can be seen in the crookedness of the edits; its history page provides an X-Ray of its genesis. Portents of its future are on the discussion pages: some of these prophecies will come to pass while others will be forgotten.
WikiBooks might thus be viewed as the ultimate in post-modern writing. Derrida and Barthes talked about books having a ‘magic tablet’ quality. That there were other meanings and expressions hiding beneath the surface:
The Palimpsest introduces the idea of erasure as part of a layering process. There can be a fluid relationship between these layers. Texts and erasures are superimposed to bring about other texts or erasures. A new erasure creates text; a new text creates erasure.
The “oddness” of Wikibooks is only apparent in the print and PDF versions. To publish them in these formats runs directly against the nature of its progenitor. Wiki pages are liquid; they exist at this moment in time, and they are always moving through time as edits and changes accrete continually. When those moments are frozen, captured into a snapshot, it’s like taking a still from a film. We know that the future and past of that picture already exists, but we can only guess at it.
(found through Derek Wenmoth’s fab education blog)
