How did Wikibooks start?
Wikibooks was started on July 10, 2003 as a sister project to Wikipedia. It was opened in response to a request by Wikipedia user Karl Wick for a place to start building open-content textbooks. Longtime Wikipedia contributor Daniel Mayer helped Karl advocate for starting such a project, and once the project was started, he helped set it up and coined the name “Wikibooks” and registered the domain names for the project. Soon the focus of the project was expanded to include any book resource that may be used in the classroom. This does not include encyclopedias, dictionaries or quote books, since there are specific Wikimedia projects for those (see next FAQ entry).