Resource #15: Wikibooks (in German)
Site Name: Wikibooks in German
URL: http://de.wikibooks.org/wiki/Hauptseite
Owner: Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. It is an American non-profit charitable organization headquartered in San Francisco, California, United States, and organized under the laws of the state of Florida, where it was initially based. It operates several online collaborative wiki projects including Wikipedia, Wiktionary, Wikiquote, Wikibooks, Wikisource, Wikimedia Commons,Wikispecies, Wikinews, Wikiversity, Wikimedia Incubator and Meta-Wiki. Its flagship project, Wikipedia, ranks among the top ten most-visited websites worldwide.[5] The creation of the foundation was officially announced on June 20, 2003 by Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales,[6] who had been operating Wikipedia under the aegis of his company Bomis.
Type of Resource: open-content textbooks collection that anyone can edit.
Description: Wikibooks is a collection of open-content textbooks. Wikibooks is a Wikimedia project for collaboratively writing open-content textbooks that anyone can edit. Contributors maintain the property rights to their contributions, while the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License and the GNU Free Documentation License makes sure that the submitted version and its derivative works will always remain freely distributable and reproducible.
Uses: Wikibooks is for textbooks, annotated texts, instructional guides, and manuals. These materials can be used in a traditional classroom, an accredited or respected institution, a home-school environment, as part of a Wikiversity course or for self-learning.
Be careful: Wikibooks is not censored for the 'protection of minors' (content-rated). First, anyone can edit a module and the results are displayed instantaneously, so we cannot guarantee that a child will see or read nothing their parents may find objectionable. Second, Wikibooks has no organized system for the removal of material that might be thought likely to harm minors. However, modules can be, and are, censored by consensus.
Usefulness: Teachers and students can either use the books that are on Wikibooks or make their own book as a class project.
I would use this site, in German, with my advanced students, for their independent reading. Some of the subjects I would have them look into is the section about culture, language and school, where film, art, literature and music, German as a foreign language and school books are presented. The books in Wikijuniors might also be good, because the language might be simpler.
For beginner students, I found some great lessons, with audio, to learn language basics.
Quality: The quality of this website is excellent.
Authorship: Open content, so written by thousands of authors and edited continually.
Point of View or Bias: none. Should be educational. Many authors, so possibility of different views.
Referral to Other Sources:
Verifiability:
Currency: 2011.
Accessibility: WAVE (http://wave.webaim.org/) reports 11 accessibility errors.
URL: http://de.wikibooks.org/wiki/Hauptseite
Owner: Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. It is an American non-profit charitable organization headquartered in San Francisco, California, United States, and organized under the laws of the state of Florida, where it was initially based. It operates several online collaborative wiki projects including Wikipedia, Wiktionary, Wikiquote, Wikibooks, Wikisource, Wikimedia Commons,Wikispecies, Wikinews, Wikiversity, Wikimedia Incubator and Meta-Wiki. Its flagship project, Wikipedia, ranks among the top ten most-visited websites worldwide.[5] The creation of the foundation was officially announced on June 20, 2003 by Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales,[6] who had been operating Wikipedia under the aegis of his company Bomis.
Type of Resource: open-content textbooks collection that anyone can edit.
Description: Wikibooks is a collection of open-content textbooks. Wikibooks is a Wikimedia project for collaboratively writing open-content textbooks that anyone can edit. Contributors maintain the property rights to their contributions, while the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License and the GNU Free Documentation License makes sure that the submitted version and its derivative works will always remain freely distributable and reproducible.
Uses: Wikibooks is for textbooks, annotated texts, instructional guides, and manuals. These materials can be used in a traditional classroom, an accredited or respected institution, a home-school environment, as part of a Wikiversity course or for self-learning.
Be careful: Wikibooks is not censored for the 'protection of minors' (content-rated). First, anyone can edit a module and the results are displayed instantaneously, so we cannot guarantee that a child will see or read nothing their parents may find objectionable. Second, Wikibooks has no organized system for the removal of material that might be thought likely to harm minors. However, modules can be, and are, censored by consensus.
Usefulness: Teachers and students can either use the books that are on Wikibooks or make their own book as a class project.
I would use this site, in German, with my advanced students, for their independent reading. Some of the subjects I would have them look into is the section about culture, language and school, where film, art, literature and music, German as a foreign language and school books are presented. The books in Wikijuniors might also be good, because the language might be simpler.
For beginner students, I found some great lessons, with audio, to learn language basics.
Quality: The quality of this website is excellent.
Authorship: Open content, so written by thousands of authors and edited continually.
Point of View or Bias: none. Should be educational. Many authors, so possibility of different views.
Referral to Other Sources:
Verifiability:
Currency: 2011.
Accessibility: WAVE (http://wave.webaim.org/) reports 11 accessibility errors.