Wikibooks

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.<ref name="WikiStats">Template:Cite web</ref> As of December 2025, there are Wikibooks sites active for Template:NUMBEROF languages<ref name="Sitematrix">Wikimedia's MediaWiki API:Sitematrix. Retrieved December 2025 from Data:Wikipedia statistics/meta.tab</ref> comprising a total of Template:NUMBEROF articles and Template:NUMBEROF recently active editors.<ref name="Siteinfo">Wikimedia's MediaWiki API:Siteinfo. Retrieved December 2025 from Data:Wikipedia statistics/data.tab</ref> At primary stages it was called Wikimedia Free Textbook Project and Wikimedia-Textbooks.

History

The wikibooks.org domain was registered on July 19, 2003.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref> 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.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref><ref>Template:Cite mailing list</ref> 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.Template:Clarify

In August 2006, Wikiversity became an independent Wikimedia Foundation project.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref>

Since 2008, Wikibooks has been included in BASE.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref>

In June 2016, Compete.com estimated that Wikibooks had 1,478,812 unique visitors.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref>

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.Template:Citation needed

Book content

File:Development of "Mathe für Nicht-Freaks" from Sep 2009 to June 2016.webm 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-ShareAlike 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 December 2025, there are Wikibooks sites for Template:NUMBEROF languages of which Template:NUMBEROF are active and Template:NUMBEROF are closed.<ref name="Sitematrix" /> The active sites have Template:NUMBEROF articles and the closed sites have Template:NUMBEROF articles.<ref name="Siteinfo" /> There are Template:NUMBEROF registered users of which Template:NUMBEROF are recently active.<ref name="Siteinfo" />

The top ten Wikibooks language projects by mainspace article count:<ref name="Siteinfo" />

No.	Language	Wiki	Good	Total	Edits	Admins	Users	Active users	Files

For a complete list with totals, see Wikimedia Statistics.<ref name="Wikimedia Statistics">Template:Cite web</ref>

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.<ref>Template:Cite journal</ref>

See also

• 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
• WikiToLearn

Further reading

• Template:Cite web
• Template:Cite web

External links

• Template:Official website
• Wikipedia:List of Wikibooks's
• Wikibooks Language Editions: list of Wikibooks for various languages ordered by size.
• Wikibooks page on Meta-Wiki
• Wikibooks takes on textbook industry
• What is Wikibooks? (Wikibooks)
• Wikibooks (Wikiversity)