Hey everyone! In the open source call today it came up that Pressbooks doesn’t actually have a wikipedia page yet. We should fix that!
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Great idea, @AndrewTurner. Anyone interested in taking this on as a volunteer should check out: Help:Your first article - Wikipedia. I’m happy to help edit/provide background context or info as needed, but am mindful of their contributor guidelines:
The official guidelines are that editors must be volunteers. That means Wikipedia discourages editing articles about individuals, companies, organizations, products/services, or political causes that pay you directly or indirectly. This includes in-house PR departments and marketing departments, other company employees, public relations firms and publicists, social media consultants, and online reputation management consultants. However, Wikipedia recognizes the large volume of good faith contributions by people who have some affiliation to the articles they work on.
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Yes, good idea @AndrewTurner . As @SteelWagstaff says, probably best if it’s not edited by people closely associated with PressBooks. I would be happy to contribute. Do you have any pointers to sources that could establish notability , i.e. significant coverage in independant, reliable secondary sources? Press coverage would be great, information about user base from independant sources, reports from institutions using PB etc.
Here’s some links which might come in handy for references!
- Case studies: https://pressbooks.com/category/case-studies/
- Good orgs: http://oerhub.net/ + http://openedgroup.org/
- Christine L. Ferguson (Contributor) (2017) Open Educational Resources and Institutional Repositories, Serials Review, 43:1, 34-38, DOI: 10.1080/00987913.2016.1274219
- Mandi Goodsett, Barbara Loomis & Marsha Miles (2016) Leading campus OER initiatives through library–faculty collaboration, College & Undergraduate Libraries, 23:3, 335-342, DOI: 10.1080/10691316.2016.1206328
- Taylor McGrath - Library is the New Publisher: Establishing Workflows for Library-based Open Educational Resource Production Programs in Post-secondary Institutions across Canada and the United States: https://libraryisthenewpublisher.pressbooks.com or http://summit.sfu.ca/item/18751
I’ll keep an eye out for more sources that I can think of. It probably makes the most sense to start with https://pressbooks.com/about/ and https://pressbooks.org/
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Great questions, Phil. I don’t have a great handle on broader media coverage (@hughmcguire and @liz would be better placed to help with that, I expect), but a quick search turned up things like these releases from UC Berkeley and eCampusOntario. We also have a short 3 page document with lots of links (written for internal purposes) that might be useful to others.
We don’t do a ton of outbound media outreach, but there are quite a few organic mentions out there.
Here is one article on University of Hawaii’s use of Pressbooks as a platform for its OER program: https://opensource.com/article/17/2/interview-education-billy-meinke
University of Texas Arlington has some info on Pressbooks for OER creators. https://libguides.uta.edu/utacares/pressbooks
Here’s a bit on Pressbooks as part of Kwantlen Polytechnic University’s Open Publishing Suite (OPUS). https://www.kpu.ca/library/OPUS
There are many references on the BCcampus OpenEd site. https://open.bccampus.ca/create-open-textbooks/using-pressbooks/
There is also this page from Unizin: https://unizin.org/solutions/content/production/pressbooks-hosting/
In terms of our own content, I think the historical document Steel sent, along with the case studies category on the website, are probably most relevant!
—L
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@AndrewTurner if you’re looking for another project, there’s an Ethical Ed Tech wiki that would be even more attractive with a Pressbooks stub!
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