Wikibooks:Reading room/Proposals/2017/February

Notability

Notability is something beyond WB:NOT and Wikibooks needs it like Wikipedia as you can find many discussions based on notability in Wikibooks eg. Wikibooks:Requests for deletion/Unlingvae, Wikibooks:Requests for deletion/Kedar Joshi, Wikibooks:Requests for deletion/Kyo. --Doostdar (discuss • contribs) 08:04, 27 February 2017 (UTC)

We have no need for notability. Each project has its own inclusion criteria to suit its character; also, notability has been a focus of bias on Wikipedia, as it's essentially a bureaucratic criterion of form rather than substance and gets used by people who personally dislike a topic as a bludgeon against what other users are interested in. We have inclusion criteria that are appropriate to us and deal with common-sense motivations (with one possible exception I can think of, and that one is a bureaucratic restriction introduced by a dyed-in-the-wool Wikipedian and has been much criticized over the years). The three examples you cited demonstrate that our criteria work just fine: they're based on the notions of original research and self-promotion. There is no problem to solve here, and we need to stay vigilant against instruction-creep. --Pi zero (discuss • contribs)

At least we need some specified restrictions. For example any one may write a coursebook on his/her mother tongue in Wikibooks. But Will this coursebook have enough readers? In another example someone may write basic book on hand crafts made with materials only found locally. What is inclusion criteria in Wikibooks? I can't see any pages describing inclusion criteria. --Doostdar (discuss • contribs) 07:13, 28 February 2017 (UTC)

Some remarks.

• Inclusion criteria are at WB:What is Wikibooks?.
• The language coursebook sounds like a valuable contribution, from what you say. The fact that our readers seldom want to learn that language is not a problem. The book is there who anyone who does want it; if there's so little interest, anyone who does want to learn the language may find it hard to find a good textbook and be especially grateful for ours. Its presence in our collection could be an asset to the collection as a whole, as it increases our overall topic coverage.
• The handcrafts example sounds more peculiar, but that too might be a perfectly valid contribution to our collection — depending on details of the scenario that we don't know because neither of these scenarios is real. There might also be reasons either example would not meet our inclusion criteria, again depending on details we don't know because they're hypothetical scenarios.

--Pi zero (discuss • contribs) 12:43, 28 February 2017 (UTC)