Wikipedia's book about 'The Solar System'

[DarkRevenge]

Hi everybody!

I was looking if someone had posted this before and haven't found anything (perhaps I didn't see it - In that case I apologize), so here it is.

For those who don't know, Wikipedia has an option that allows downloading or buying a book about our favourites topics. We can make our own books from Wikipedia's articles or just read one already done. This option is new in Wikipedia in Spanish and isn't very well known here in Argentina so that's why it caught my attention, but I don't know how long it has been in Wikipedia in English (I hope I am not posting sth well known by everyone :shrug:).
So anyway, for those who don't know it: I entered Wikipedia, I searched for 'Solar System' article and I saw, almost at the end of the article, a box which said 'Book: Solar System'. I selected 'Download PDF' and got a very interesting PDF file with articles related to our System to copy to any device or e-book reader.
There're also books about 'Astronomy' and other topics related to our favourite hobby ;)
The books can be bought, too. They print it in good format and send it to you.

Cheers, Luis.
- Again: I wish I'm not posting something obvious! :(

[CraigS]

Hi Luis;

And … G'day !!

I didn't know that which you mention, in your post !

Thanks kindly for the 'heads-up' !
I've always been frustrated with buying lots of textbooks, clogging up the house with books and then finding they're all out of date, within a year or so.

The Wiki book approach might alleviate that problem !

People tend to speak poorly of Wiki, but in this modern day, a quick knowledge boost is very important. The finer details may require a formal education and years of training in a specific discipline, which is also important if one intends to live/work in that world. The real issue in Science is first understanding .. and then updatedness .. simply because of the rate & volume of research going on in the various fields of study.

For the purposes of discussions in these Forums however, I think the suggestion of taking the approach you mention is a very valuable one !

Cheers & Rgds

[Ro84]

As a wikipedia writer, I can confirm that it can be a good resource for astronomy. This "book" feature was implemented on en.wiki at least 1 year ago, and it's now available on all major wikis, including german wikipedia, french wikipedia and italian wikipedia. A book is a collection of wikipedia articles that follows a common matter/instruction. I will press to create some new books and to increase the quality of already existing ones, anyway some other astronomy books are available here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Wikipedia_books_on_astrono my.

I write mostly on it.wiki, where I'm describing all star formation regions of Milky Way. Unfortunately my articles are in italian, and google translate provides a bad translation of astronomical articles... May be in future I will think to translate by myself some of my works.

[DarkRevenge]

It happens the same to me... I have a lot of books about astronomy and most of them are more than twenty years old. And, unfortunatly, new books are sooo expensive!
So I agree with both of you when you say Wikipedia can be an excellent tool for amateurs astronomers. For my part, I have learnt lot of things thanks to it and I can not understand those who don't like it.


Thanks Roberto, I didn't know that :D.

Two other books that can be useful are these:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book:Messier_objects
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book:Caldwell_catalogue

Cheers, Luis.

[higginsdj]

So how are the books created? Who creates them?

[DarkRevenge]

Some of them are already created (by other users, I suposse - Roberto can probably explain this better), or you can create your own books by clicking on 'create a book' in this link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Wikipedia_books

Cheers, Luis.

[higginsdj]

Yes, not a very reliable process though. Clicking on some links in Wiki removes the book once creation has started and it's off into the ether never to return....