Wikibooks

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Wikipedia

Wikibooks
Wikibooks logo from 2009 to the present
Screenshot
Screenshot of wikibooks.org home page
Type of site
Textbooks wiki
Available inMultilingual (78 active)[1]
OwnerWikimedia Foundation
Created byUser Karl Wick and the Wikimedia Community
URLwikibooks.org
CommercialNo
RegistrationOptional
LaunchedJuly 10, 2003; 22 years ago (2003-07-10)
Current statusActive
Growth of the eight largest Wikibooks sites (by language), July 2003–January 2010

Wikibooks 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.[2] As of August 2025, there are Wikibooks sites active for 78 languages[1] comprising a total of 393,806 articles and 1,358 recently active editors.[3] At primary stages it was called Wikimedia Free Textbook Project and Wikimedia-Textbooks.

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.[5][6] Three major sub-projects, Wikijunior, Cookbook 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.[clarification needed]

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.[citation needed]

Book content

Visualization of the development in the German Wikibook project Mathe für Nicht-Freaks

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.

How English Wikibooks is structured

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 August 2025, there are Wikibooks sites for 122 languages of which 78 are active and 44 are closed.[1] The active sites have 393,806 articles and the closed sites have 667 articles.[3] There are 4,783,736 registered users of which 1,358 are recently active.[3]

The top ten Wikibooks language projects by mainspace article count:[3]

No.LanguageWikiGoodTotalEditsAdminsUsersActive usersFiles
1 English en 98,054 294,475 4,382,131 12 3,501,109 300 2,624
2 Vietnamese vi 51,344 91,696 533,140 2 18,895 26 425
3 Hungarian hu 44,489 102,139 514,777 5 15,562 19 21,420
4 German de 33,577 74,753 1,068,520 7 114,227 69 1,900
5 French fr 21,338 59,292 748,342 7 121,039 39 169
6 Italian it 19,124 41,338 480,113 3 52,786 60 702
7 Japanese ja 16,834 32,163 279,603 4 88,752 72 156
8 Portuguese pt 13,965 80,473 500,166 3 71,086 33 424
9 Spanish es 9,674 40,088 422,940 9 125,704 31 0
10 Dutch nl 9,511 30,278 401,727 7 29,002 29 20

For a complete list with totals, see Wikimedia Statistics.[10]

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.[11]

See also

References

  1. 1 2 3 Wikimedia's MediaWiki API:Sitematrix. Retrieved August 2025 from Data:Wikipedia statistics/meta.tab
  2. ↑ "Wikibooks Statistics - Article count (official)". Wikimedia. Archived from the original on 14 April 2019. Retrieved 28 January 2018.
  3. 1 2 3 4 Wikimedia's MediaWiki API:Siteinfo. Retrieved August 2025 from Data:Wikipedia statistics/data.tab
  4. ↑ "Wikibooks.org Whois Record". DomainTools, LLC. Archived from the original on 23 January 2022. Retrieved 22 January 2013.
  5. ↑ "Talk:Science Hypertextbook project". Wikimedia Meta-Wiki. Wikimedia Foundation. June 23, 2003. Retrieved October 1, 2022.
  6. ↑ Wick, Karl (June 17, 2003). "a spot for WP textbook devel". wikien-l@lists.wikimedia.org (Mailing list). Wikimedia Foundation. Retrieved October 1, 2022.
  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.
  8. ↑ "Wikibooks: Viquillibres: Portada". Bielefeld Academic Search Engine. Archived from the original on 28 November 2022. Retrieved 15 January 2018.
  9. ↑ "Site Profile for wikibooks.org". compete. Archived from the original on 2010-06-08. Retrieved July 19, 2016.
  10. ↑ "Wikibooks Statistics". Meta.Wikimedia.org. Archived from the original on 13 September 2020. Retrieved 11 September 2020.
  11. ↑ 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.

Further reading