User talk:Adrignola/2009/05

From Wikibooks, the open-content textbooks collection

Jump to: navigation, search
Replacement filing cabinet.svg

This is an archive of past discussions. Do not edit the contents of this page.
If you wish to start a new discussion or revive an old one, please do so on the current talk page.


Contents

Re: Categories

Hello Adrignola, I'm sorry that I haven't replied sooner. I want to say first that your efforts to get books organized is quite exemplary, thanks! I wrote a little blog post to showcase some of your work and also to explain why the category system here has become so messy over time.

A problem with categories is that there is no unified plan: A lot of people are just making and organizing categories in an ad hoc way, and the lack of planning really starts to show after a while. The planning work that I had done in my user space was an attempt to introduce a roadmap of sorts to future efforts, but obviously that effort never took off. I didn't even get a complete plan written down before I abandoned it myself. If you find anything of value on that page, you are welcome to use it yourself for any purpose.

Following the organization structure of the subject pages is a reasonable idea, but then again those pages were put together in the same ad hoc way that categories were: A lot of it was according to my whims as I was doing it, and so that structure isn't completely sane either. My suggestion is that you can follow it so long as it makes sense, and don't follow it when I've obviously done something stupid (it happens!). I'm very happy to help you out too, just let me know what help you need and I'll take to it. Also, never hesitate to ask if you have any questions. --Whiteknight (Page) (Talk) 13:04, 28 April 2009 (UTC)

I think there should be consistency between subjects and categories but there are also some important differences: subjects use one particular way of categorization (in the case of language books by continent) but categories can include several ways of categorization (e.g. by difficulty for native English speakers: Category:Languages by category). Also, not all categories need to appear in the subject pages (e.g. Category:Soundbite requests, Category:Languages textbook pages). Thus, while there should be consistency, hierarchies of categories and subjects should not be identical . --Martin Kraus (talk) 09:40, 1 May 2009 (UTC)
I am focusing primarily on matching categories to subjects and not the other way around. Soundbite requests and Languages by category won't be showing up in Subject:Languages, I agree. Not every language has been marked as level one, two, or three, anyway, so that would be a poor choice to have show up in the subject hierarchy. Soundbite requests is a maintenance category, so it also won't be showing up in the subjects. -- Adrignola talk contribs 14:14, 1 May 2009 (UTC)

A small hint

Hey Adrignola. First, great job with categorization. It seems every time I check Recent Changes, you've categorized another dozen pages! Also, I appreciate your responses to my post in the Reading Room.

Anyway, I wanted to let you know that there is a template, {{BookCat}}, that automatically adds the book to the appropriate Book Category. It can be used on the main page of a book, or any of its subpages. Furthermore, you can add it to a template. For example, see what I've done to 1 Corinthians. Every page contains a navigation box at the bottom. This is {{1 Corinthians Navigation}}. I simply place {{BookCat}} into this template, and now every page in 1 Corinthians is automatically added to Category:1 Corinthians (assuming it includes the navigation template). The reason BookCat is <includeonly> is because the template itself is not within a book, and the reason the actual category link is <noinclude> is because BookCat does a better job (see how the main page is separate from the rest in the category listing).

Most books don't have a common template like this, but many do. It might make life a little easier if you can exploit that technique. -- Mr. NMC (talk) 23:55, 28 April 2009 (UTC)

Yeah, that's fine the way you use it. I just wanted to let you know, in case you come across a situation it can be used. -- Mr. NMC (talk) 00:16, 29 April 2009 (UTC)
I would like to add that there are several categories to include book categories, in particular Category:Computing textbook pages, Category:Engineering textbook pages, Category:Languages textbook pages, Category:Science textbook pages, etc. All book categories should be in one of these categories (and no other). (At least that's the way I understand the scheme.) --Martin Kraus (talk) 09:44, 1 May 2009 (UTC)
I just realized that you are systematically including book categories in other categories, could you please undo these changes and discuss them first? Thanks. --Martin Kraus (talk) 09:51, 1 May 2009 (UTC)

Adventist Youth Honors Answer Book

Hi Adrignola,

Thanks for adding the Dewey/LOC cats to Adventist Youth Honors Answer Book. That project has been a major part of my life for the past 3.5 years. I would have added it long ago, but I could not decide how it would be classified. I guess 000 is general works (such as encyclopedias?) - I guess that fits.

For a while I had considered breaking this into nine books instead of having it as one - that would have made it easier to classify. It's just nice to have someone "be bold" like that. Thanks again.

I've also noticed that you have done a lot of other categorization work. I was especially pleased that you added a few of my transcluded modules to my transcluded category. From that I can tell you are really digging into things before making changes. That too is very much appreciated.

--Jomegat (talk) 01:30, 1 May 2009 (UTC)

I saw those pages that I added to the transcluded modules when I first started trawling the uncategorized pages listing. It was then that I realized I would have a hard time figuring out where to categorize books without a bit more order to the current system. One thing led to another, so now I'm trying to do what you see in the paragraph above your comment. You've made an impressive number of pages in your book. It certainly reflects the time you've spent on it. Given the classification under religious organization, {{DDC|200}} or {{LOC|B}} may also be possibilities. The important thing is that it shows up somewhere for people browsing via any method. Take care. -- Adrignola talk contribs 02:12, 1 May 2009 (UTC)

University level mathematics, a better way?

Is there some other way math books could be categorized? All mathematic books could likely be considered university level because at what point in a person's education subjects are taught can depend on the school and where you are in the world. Also unless someone has gone to public schools or a university they may not know which category to look for a book in using this approach. A similar problem was previously discussion and subsequent change made to Wikibooks:Reading Levels because of this issue. --darklama 16:44, 2 May 2009 (UTC)

Probably? I was just following the subjects that were already there. The items in University level mathematics were already targetted for University Level Mathematics. I was just changing case. I don't know enough about math to classify them under, say Calculus or Geometry, etc. Maybe Jomegat could help with that and then Category:University level mathematics and Subject:University level mathematics can be deleted. It is a bad category to have, I agree, but I'm not in a good position knowledge-wise about math to fix it. -- Adrignola talk contribs 16:48, 2 May 2009 (UTC)
I'll see what I can do for the ones that are more obvious, to empty out that category. I do indeed like to not have redundant categories. I was too focused on actually creating a category to go with the subject without looking at the bigger picture. -- Adrignola talk contribs 16:55, 2 May 2009 (UTC)
I sometimes use Wikipedia to quickly read up on a subject I don't know anything about, to help me figure out ways to improve categorization. If something doesn't make sense to you, by all means don't follow it. Sometimes its not a category that needs updating but subject pages or books, because people do make improvements to categories while not making the same improvements to subject pages or books. Being focused isn't necessary a bad thing. I appreciated the work you've been putting into improving the category system. I hope realizing there is a bigger picture won't cause you to slow down any, but will rather help you to see new possibilities. --darklama 17:38, 2 May 2009 (UTC)
Wikipedia's a good suggestion. Looking at the big picture I do see more possible redundancies. If University level mathematics is no good, Subject:Introductory Mathematics might be for the same reason. Also, I'm curious about the differences between Subject:Mathematical analysis and Subject:Calculus and analysis. However, Whiteknight did write way above that he made these off the top of his head and they may need to be changed. I do think I'll go back to working on Computing and save Mathematics for last since it will be the most difficult. I'm thinking Subject:Programming language and its contents will need to be filed under Subject:Compiled languages to differentiate the content from Subject:Scripting languages and a possible Subject to match with Category:Markup languages, all at the same level under Subject:Programming. I still haven't fully sorted everything under Computing either. So that's my plan of attack for later today. -- Adrignola talk contribs 18:05, 2 May 2009 (UTC)
Programming is an area I know something about. I don't really care for the current approach to categorization for some things, but at the same time I'm not always sure what can be done to improve it. There are languages that can be interpreted and compiled for instance. Programming languages may need to be treated similar to how Category:Languages needs to be treated, by using a lot of intermediate categories so people can find what they are looking for by following many different paths. Like maybe "Programming languages by family" and "Programming languages by paradigm". --darklama 19:40, 2 May 2009 (UTC)

Programming languages by paradigm

Can't be correctly implemented since several languages do cover several paradigms (some don't). Simple examples C evolved from an imperative programming language model but today it supports objects. C++ is by definition a multiparadigm language so to be rightly classified it would have to be present in most categories even as a functional programming language. Going that way will be painfully hard.
I'm not stating my opposition to any of the changes. Since your opinion is as valid as mine and we still haven't got a community shared vision on the issue, I do consider the changes in the scale you are going a bit premature (a better way to go about it is to get the community backing for a static proposal/system, since the visions are too diverse).
I confess I don't particularly like or agree with some of the changes, but if you can manage to commit to maintain and work on some better model that the chaos it is today, you will have all my support even if I don't appreciate all the changes.
Good luck to you on this endeavor... --Panic (talk) 04:54, 3 May 2009 (UTC)

Category:WMOG plant finder categories

You said that you think this category and its subcategories were never used in its speedy deletion. However when I checked yesterday they were used. I think you must of made some changes since than, perhaps to some templates that caused those categories to suddenly become empty. A quick look suggests Template:Horticat (add "y" where applicable) and Template:Horticat-topic (add "y" where applicable) are at least two of the templates you changed that might be responsible for it. I also notice you renamed a few of the category more general categories rather than in as Category:Horticulture/subcategory. --darklama 11:59, 16 May 2009 (UTC)

You're probably right about that. I forgot I changed those two templates along with the example, profile, and box templates. I'm not entirely sure what you mean by the "category more general categories", but I think you are talking about ones link "Soil-related topics". That and others that are sentence-case (which do in fact conflict with the standard we've been following for subject categories) were already created and I wasn't sure I wanted to endeavor to reclassify all the pages into ones of the form "Horticulture/Subcategory". I will remedy this, then, so as to not leave a job unfinished. -- Adrignola talk contribs 15:22, 16 May 2009 (UTC)
I meant that a few of the categories you had changed went from Category:WMOG/Subcategory to Category:Some_other_page, while most categories you had changed to Category:Horticulture/subcategory, and yes I meant categories like "Soil-related topics". --darklama 20:06, 16 May 2009 (UTC)

Muggles' Guide to Harry Potter

Yeah, I'm going to ask you to back out that change to the categories. The purpose of the category, I believe, is to have a common place to keep everything related to a book (or a subject — though in the case of the subject it's enough to have the landing page there, and everything else in the book can go off that one landing page). The fact that there are 900 pages in the category is a good thing, in my not-so-humble opinion. Additionally, if all the pages are in the one category, you can see any changes to the book by going to the category page and looking for changes on anything in the category.

On tabs and titles, that seems like a useful innovation; we can try that, though I don't know how the PDF tool will handle it. It will, of course, have to be done to all 199 chapter pages... but perhaps we can try it on PS first, and take a look at that before we go hog-wild.

As far as the PDF tool goes, like so much else on any Wiki, it is maintained by volunteers, and as such maintenance can be sketchy. The fact that it doesn't handle relative links is a minor issue, apparently, as it can be worked around, and so a fix for that is low-priority. Chazz (talk) 15:44, 16 May 2009 (UTC)

On the categories, I think I'm going to have to argue with you a bit. Right now, the page Muggles' Guide to Harry Potter/Books/Chamber of Secrets is in the category "Muggles' Guide to Harry Potter/Books". If you go to the category page for "Muggles' Guide to Harry Potter", it is not in the pages listed as being in that category; rather, it shows up as one of the pages in a related category, "Muggles' Guide to Harry Potter/Books". If you expand that category, you can see the books, but not the chapters within the books; to see the chapters, you have to go to the Books subpage, and then expand the related category Chamber of Secrets. If you really want to go in that direction, it is possible, and may be useful; but I would strongly suggest retaining the base category, as [[Category: Muggles' Guide to Harry Potter/Books/Chamber of Secrets]][[Category:Muggles' Guide to Harry Potter]]. Chazz (talk) 16:56, 16 May 2009 (UTC)
Perhaps I'm reading things too fast... I usually do. My apologies.
On the {{Displaytitle}} thing, I have never run the tool myself; it's User:withinfocus who has always done that. I believe that quite possibly the best course is to add the template to the one book, and then PDF just that. I'll check with withinfocus to see if he wants to try the PDF thing, or whether he can give me instructions. Chazz (talk) 18:24, 16 May 2009 (UTC)
Just to let you know: The first step in creation of PDF is to convert to LaTeX, which is done with Hagindaz' Wiki2LaTeX. Chazz (talk) 18:34, 16 May 2009 (UTC)

FYI displaytitle relys on javascript, so unless the tool parses javascript, displaytitle should have zero effect. --darklama 20:02, 16 May 2009 (UTC)

I suspected that might be the case, but it's good to have confirmation. I don't see a PDF linked to from the book's main title page, so I may let the tools I downloaded continue to work to try to make a PDF file just for the heck of it anyway. Thanks for the tip! -- Adrignola talk contribs 20:17, 16 May 2009 (UTC)
Not to say displaytitle should be removed; but we might want to leave the Title heading and chapter title so that it appears at printout time. Chazz (talk) 22:18, 16 May 2009 (UTC)
We can leave it like that for the moment... withinfocus is a little busy of late, so it may be a while before he can get back to give that a try. And he's been at this a lot longer than I have, so I sort of tend to defer to him... Chazz (talk) 07:30, 17 May 2009 (UTC)

Interested in Promotion?

Hello Adrignola, how are you? I've been watching your contributions and you're doing a great job cleaning up the messes we've created over the years. I'd like to nominate you for +Rollbacker, as a precursor for an eventual nomination to become an admin. You interested? --Whiteknight (Page) (Talk) 17:03, 17 May 2009 (UTC)

I'd be happy to accept the nomination. I do gain pleasure in straightening things out. I'm a very neat person in my everyday life, so these changes are a natural extension of myself. Thank you for the compliment. -- Adrignola talk contribs 17:10, 17 May 2009 (UTC)

WB:RFP

I've added you to the rollback and editor user groups. If you need help figuring out how to use the tools, feel free to let me know and I'll be happy to help. You've done great work on Wikibooks so far, and I hope you'll continue for quite some time.  — Mike.lifeguard | talk 01:40, 18 May 2009 (UTC)

Thanks. I will look those pages over carefully before actually using the tools. -- Adrignola talk contribs 01:46, 18 May 2009 (UTC)

Category:US law

My opinion is that it should be US Law and it would be cool to be a subcategory of Law... (Only pointing you this since you were working on the categories and subjects.) --Panic (talk) 03:33, 19 May 2009 (UTC)

Well, the subject categories have been getting standardized to sentence-case to avoid conflicts with books of the same name, like Category:First aid (subject category) and Category:First Aid (book category), to name one that comes to mind. If you put aside the name case, it does appear that Category:US law actually is already a subcategory of Category:Law, unless I'm missing something? The subjects also appear to match that same structure, with Law being a parent of US law. I haven't had a chance to go over the Social sciences tree yet, so that whole area is probably disorganized currently. I hope I've addressed any concerns you have. -- Adrignola talk contribs 03:41, 19 May 2009 (UTC)
My opinion on the name collision is that books should avoid generalist titles like US Law or Law in this case, a book per definition shouldn't overcrowd a generalist namespace like First Aid, but I see your point and I don't think that the solution to accommodate the issue is the best one. I disagree with having a book named only "The US Law", as it is, is just as bad.
The issue here is that the books names should be addressed/fixed, so that other works on the same fields can be created and read on a even plain field, keeping the practice will probably centralize people in the more general titles, this was an issue with the Programming:<language> books (and other) titles that was a reason for the last change. This to me is the same issue.
As for the structure, I haven't examined it, just noticed US law and Law and didn't particularly like it, since you were working on this subject I refrained messing things.
In any case I still dislike the standardization to sentence-case to avoid conflicts with books, since it looks funny and is just as scheme to avoid the real issue.
The other and also related thing I have an opinion regarding categories is the use of plurals in some topic it seems fine but a standardization on the singular would be best. For instance Art, Architecture and Law could all be pluralized. --Panic (talk) 04:38, 19 May 2009 (UTC)
Books starting with "A", "An", or "The" don't sort well, so I would agree that "The US Law" is bad. Plus, there's more than one law in the US. The category and subject Art were both renamed to Fine arts a bit ago, so that is now plural. I've not heard "Architectures" used and "Law" would be better to cover the entire legal field as compared to "Laws" which could be interpreted as the legislative items. Most of the categories do work well pluralized. (I'm not sure where you stand on that, as you wrote "singular would be best", but then added "...could be pluralized". I certainly agree that specific titles are a good way to avoid confusion, especially for those that don't pay attention to small details like whether that second word is capitalized or not. The many C++ books do a good job of that.
Sentence-case, title-case, singular, plural. Unfortunately, like many hot-button issues of the day, there's only one side or the other. I have been leaning toward the style Wikipedia uses for its categories, namely, sentence case and plural, when it makes sense. I've noticed Darklama follows this pattern, which is good, in that we don't work against each other. Since books are usually given a title in title case, following Wikipedia's lead in that respect avoids conflicts, though it may indeed look funny. Truth is, we could go one way or the other on title/sentence case and singular/plural and no matter what somebody would not be entirely satisfied. There's a cleanup tag on the top-level subject to this day. I read over the discussions on title versus sentence case on the top-level subject page before I started working on things to try to decide which way to go. They didn't seem to reach a consensus there on the issue. I had to make a decision at that point how to proceed, otherwise I could not proceed. My bottom line is, at least, a goal of consistency. -- Adrignola talk contribs 05:15, 19 May 2009 (UTC)

I agree that books should use better names rather then generic titles, but we have to deal with what the situation is rather than what the ideals are. Panic if you would like to see that change, you could create and propose a new policym or create an unstable branch of the naming policy, that tries to address this concern. I would likely support a policy that required books (and even chapters) to use more descriptive names, but until then using casing and plurals to differentiate subjects from books is as good a method as any.

As for "US law" I would like to see that expanded to "United states laws" or "Laws of the united states". One of my things has been an attempt to reduce the use of abbreviations and acronyms as well, not everyone may be familiar with abbreviations and acronyms used and Wikibooks should strive to be as geographically/location-neutral and age-neutral as possible with categories. --darklama 08:30, 19 May 2009 (UTC)

"US law" may not be the best example of this problem, but "US" could also refer to Union State according to US (disambiguation). --darklama 08:49, 19 May 2009 (UTC)

Template:Copyvio

Please don't subst that template & others like it. The ones that need to be substed have that noted on them: Template:nld for example. Thanks.  — Mike.lifeguard | talk 21:20, 19 May 2009 (UTC)

"Broken" noinclude tag

I saw your edit to my header template. It probably is a good idea to move some of my ugly HTML to XHTML. However, the noinclude tags were not broken: They were setup that way intentionally. The templates are not designed to be transcluded like normal templates, they're supposed to be substituted in order to create other templates. Here's a quick rundown:

  1. The User:Whiteknight/Simple Header template is substituted at Template:Foo/Page. The <includeonly> tags disappear, leaving the complete <noinclude> tags in Template:Foo/Page.
  2. Template:Foo/Page is transcluded into the pages in the book, and the stuff in the <noinclude> tags is not displayed on the book pages.

So it's complicated and very ugly, but intentional. I have a few other templates in my namespace that use this same trick (or trices that are even worse!) to do some fancy-schmance stuff. I'll fix up the weird tags, but I'll try to keep your XHTML fixes in place. Thanks! --Whiteknight (Page) (Talk) 01:49, 23 May 2009 (UTC)

That's actually pretty neat trick and I don't ever recall seeing documentation on it before. I learn something new every day! -- Adrignola talk contribs 01:57, 23 May 2009 (UTC)
Of course I've just gone and improved the trick so it doesn't expose itself when looking at the head template. --darklama 15:51, 23 May 2009 (UTC)

Fine arts

The wikipedia article says this type of art is often expressed in the production of art objects using visual and performing art forms, including painting, sculpture, music, dance, theatre, architecture, photography and printmaking. Schools, institutes, and other organizations still use the term to indicate a traditional perspective on the art forms, often implying an association with classic or academic art.

I figured the best option is to keep visual and performing arts under fine arts, but have fine arts be under humanities, since the arts are considered to be a field of humanities. This should also keep the humanities category from growing too big. --darklama 15:17, 25 May 2009 (UTC)

Okay, I see where you're going with that. I'll work toward that end goal and straighten this all out. It would end up with Fine arts having two children of visual arts and performing arts, performing arts having music, singing, and dance, and visual arts including the others. I had been working based on Humanities on Wikipedia. Guess they should consult each other when writing their articles. -- Adrignola talk contribs 15:24, 25 May 2009 (UTC)
This also benefits us in that general art topics or arts that mix visual and performing arts have a place to go, other than in humanities. --darklama 15:37, 25 May 2009 (UTC)
Indeed. You do a great job of double-checking my work and correcting any mistakes I make. Glad you've "got my back" so to speak. -- Adrignola talk contribs 15:41, 25 May 2009 (UTC)

Category:Education

Seems like your having some trouble deciding how best to categorize books under there. Like with study guides, all books are educational if you really think about it. The education category should probably have a very limited scope. Like for books about:

  • Learning or teaching methods/approaches that aren't subject specific,
  • Educational institutes (colleges, universities, etc),
  • Financial aid programs (grants, tuitions, etc), and
  • School life

Categories like "Tertiary education" should IMO be avoided due to being dependent on location. If there are ever enough books, I would suggest breaking things down by country instead like "education in the united states", "schools of the united states", "financial aids programs in the united states", etc. How does that sound to you? --darklama 21:17, 28 May 2009 (UTC)

Bullet one will be Education theory, then. Bullet two would be Educational institutions. Bullet three would be Financial aid. Bullet four would be School life. You're right about the study guides and books being educational. I keep getting stuck in the existing subjects instead of "being bold". I'll work to reduce the redundancy to books that are about education, rather than ones that simply educate. I might have to move some of them back into Education temporarily to keep track of them, just to let you know. -- Adrignola talk contribs 21:25, 28 May 2009 (UTC)
I'm having a hard time differentiating between Education theory , Education Psychology, and Teaching and instruction. -- Adrignola talk contribs 23:15, 28 May 2009 (UTC)
After reading up on education theory and education psychology on Wikipedia, I think education theory is broader subject area that includes education psychology and other subject areas. Education psychology seems to be concerned with the study of how students learn. I guess you could say its also like the difference between theory and psychology. Theories are based on any/general observations, and Psychology is about observation of human behavior, which is a more specific type of observation. Teaching and instruction is likely more about doing rather then understanding the whys and hows, or if you will, applying what education theory and education psychology teaches, turning theory into practice. Does that sound right to you? --darklama 00:24, 29 May 2009 (UTC)
It does. Thanks for taking the time to look into that. I'll have to make sure books in those categories match up with their subjects. On a brighter note, I've eliminated several categories and Education is already looking a lot less crowded. -- Adrignola talk contribs 00:34, 29 May 2009 (UTC)
Education being less crowded is good to hear. Looks like w:Instructional design, w:Instructional theory, w:Learning theory or w:Teacher education might be the actual name for "teaching and instruction". --darklama 17:21, 29 May 2009 (UTC)
I'm liking "Instructional theory" because Subject:Education theory would be better named "Learning theory" based on the content of the books in it. -- Adrignola talk contribs 18:52, 29 May 2009 (UTC)
Your right it does look a bit backwards. "Learning theory" and "instructional theory" I guess are both subfields of "Education theory". --darklama 18:59, 29 May 2009 (UTC)
Retrieved from "http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/User_talk:Adrignola/2009/05"