It seems that these days everyone has been talking about Wikipedia. How cool it is, its growing pains, or people getting caught trying to change history, but very few people seem to have noticed the quiet but epic growth of it’s younger sibling, WikiBooks.
Since it’s start in July 2003, the WikiBooks project has quietly amassed hundreds of books of varying quality from near empty outlines to reasonably good beginnings to books that (in their finished chapters) are better then some of the ones I remember from my college days. Unsurprisingly, the books are more complete and comprehensive if you are looking to learn certain programming languages or how to win a 1st person shooter. Still, this project absolutely reeks of potential.
By looking at the list of texts, clearly most of the wikibooks on the site today are in their infancy, but the framework is there, and it’s growing only slightly slower then wikipedia did when it was roughly the same size*. Expect big things from this project over the second half of the decade.
* about january 2003: Wikibooks stats, Wikipeda Stats