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.

This article relies excessively on references to primary sources. (October 2021)

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Wikibooks

Screenshot Screenshot of wikibooks.org home page
Type of site	Textbooks wiki
Available in	Multilingual (77 active)[1]
Owner	Wikimedia Foundation
Created by	User Karl Wick and the Wikimedia Community
URL	wikibooks.org
Commercial	No
Registration	Optional
Launched	July 10, 2003; 20 years ago (2003-07-10)
Current status	Active

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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 April 2024, there are Wikibooks sites active for 77 languages^[1] comprising a total of 375,357 articles and 1,214 recently active editors.^[3]

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] 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.^{[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]

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.

As of April 2024, there are Wikibooks sites for 121 languages of which 77 are active and 44 are closed.^[1] The active sites have 375,357 articles and the closed sites have 671 articles.^[3] There are 4,695,415 registered users of which 1,214 are recently active.^[3]

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

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

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]

• CK-12 Foundation
• Digital library
• European Library
• Free High School Science Texts
• Global Text
• ibiblio
• LibreTexts
• LibriVox, an online digital library of free public domain audiobooks.
• Open Content Alliance
• Open textbook
• Project Gutenberg
• Universal library
• What is Wikibooks? (Wikibooks)
• Wikibooks (Wikiversity)
• WikiToLearn