The Wikimedia foundation, those folks behind Wikipedia, announced last week the Bookself Project, which is designed to encourage people to contribute to Wikipedia. As you might expect, it’s spawned its own wikispace at http://outreach.wikimedia.org/wiki/Bookshelf_Project.

The project is in its pilot phase so there are a limited number of
materials available. Worth browsing are the guiding principles and timeframe (the expected
rollout for the project is Q4 in 2010) as well as the positioning messages for different target audiences.
Named target audiences include journalists and participants in secondary and higher education. “Corporate
Communicators” are named as a target audience too, which makes me uneasy. I’m sure that the message is not
going to be, “Have at it! Spin your clients left right and forward on Wikipedia!” but I still worry.

Another “target audience” that the Bookshelf project is looking for is people willing to make
screencasts about editing Wikipedia. I thought there must already be resources like that available; a
quick look at YouTube shows that there are least a few screencasts already made, like this
well-made video from the American Society for
Surgery of the Hand.

The Bookshelf Project Wikispace also has resources for discussion and development of tools as well as
“open questions.” Actually there’s only one open question at the moment but I’m looking forward to the
answer — what’s a good open source alternative to Camtasia?