User talk:Martin Kraus

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Good luck! --Panic (talk) 17:41, 16 September 2008 (UTC)

Thank you! I'm really curious to see how things work here. Well, I started working on a wikibook, which I called Spanish by Choice. I just started it today; thus, there isn't much to see yet. Could you have a look nonetheless? I think this project fits best in wikibooks but other people might think differently; thus, I'm curious to get your opinion about it. Thanks again! --Martin Kraus (talk) 18:00, 16 September 2008 (UTC)
I've been patrolling some pages of the book it seems ok (still much work to be done yet but going along great and at a very high speed), one can even use the layout you adopted to create similar books for other languages.
I really liked you forethought on adding...

== License == [[Image:Heckert GNU white.svg|left|42px]] Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.2 or any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no Invariant Sections, no Front-Cover Texts, and no Back-Cover Texts.

to the exercises pages, that enables the printing out of the pages and provide a license indication at the same time, you can even add the URL of the book if you like (so people would contribute or get the latest version).
I realized that this link is included automatically on the final printable page; thus, I thought this was not necessary. --Martin Kraus (talk) 08:51, 22 September 2008 (UTC)
You can chose to create a template on the book to include into those pages in place of adding all the text. (see about templates here, that page makes it a bit more confusing than it is make a try and see if you like it, at a basic level it is like a macro that can be used to replace repetitive texts or structures), if you have any problem talk to me and I will attempt to help you.
Thanks for the hint! The layout is still not fixed (for example the section "exercises" should but currently isn't included in the stubs), but I will take a look into templates once I'm happy with the layout.--Martin Kraus (talk) 08:51, 22 September 2008 (UTC)
Since you have invested much energy and effort in the structuring and layout, you should document some of the options and why you have taken then on the main talk (or a similar arrangement) so to avoid any edit conflicts if some other editor decides to rework it, for instance take a look on the book conventions adopted on the C++ Programming. --Panic (talk) 04:02, 21 September 2008 (UTC)
Yes, I'll do that. But right now, everything is still quite unclear... for example I just changed the overall structure from a level-based to a podcast-based hierarchy (because this way there are no broken links on the top level and the number of lessons on the second level is limited to the number of lessons in each podcast). --Martin Kraus (talk) 08:51, 22 September 2008 (UTC)
On the page Spanish by Choice/Lessons of level A1 the table lists source and ID but the last items seem to have some ids missing 9,12,14,15 did you name the pages in error? if so you can move them to the right location and tag them with the {{delete}} template, if they are still to be done you probably should add a place holder so to inform others that you are still working on them...
The IDs were defined by SpanishPod.com and are included to identify the original SpanishPod lessons more easily; I don't know why they don't use a continuous sequence. (Well, I accidentally created one page for A0009, but this should be deleted. I set a rederict to A0010 for now.) --Martin Kraus (talk) 08:51, 22 September 2008 (UTC)
If you need advertisement or help with the book make a post into the some of the Wikibooks:Reading room sub pages, it still wont guarantee high visibility but you would find some people working on similar projects or without an active project . For publicity the best option is making posts on other sites specially forums or blogs that deal with the book subject, other interesting sites are newsgroups or url sharing services like http://delicious.com (example using C++ Programming). --Panic (talk) 04:23, 21 September 2008 (UTC)
Thanks for the suggestions. Right now I'll try to include some more lessons and to fix the layout before advertising the book. --Martin Kraus (talk) 08:51, 22 September 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Re: Template:Print version change

Hello Martin, how are you doing?

The {{Print version change}} template uses CSS classes to change the text that's displayed on different display media, like print and on screen. To see the difference, you actually need to print the page, or click "Print Preview" in your browser. The changes should be apparent when you do that. Unfortunately, there isn't a good way to show text that only appears on the printable version page here on the wiki.

Let me know if you have any other questions. --Whiteknight (Page) (Talk) 20:03, 13 October 2008 (UTC)

Aha! Thanks, I missed that. --Martin Kraus (talk) 20:19, 13 October 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Spanish by Choice Forums

In case you don't mind, I just wanna ask u. What are these forums all about? And why forums for each and every chapter? A single forum would be enough, wouldn't it - RavichandarMy coffee shop 16:19, 14 November 2008 (UTC)

These forums are for discussions of the lesson content of each lesson. If there was only one forum for all lessons then readers would have to always specify, which lesson they refer to. Also, readers who are studying a certain lesson are probably only interested in the discussions about this lesson. I consider it a service to the reader to offer one forum for each lesson. (Note that there is also a talk/discussion page for each page/module of a wikibook, not just one for the whole book!) Thus, no, one forum wouldn't be enough.--Martin Kraus (talk) 18:33, 14 November 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Vandalism fixing

Keep up the nice work on the Spanish book and such. I just though you might want to check out Wikibooks:Reverting. It showa how you don't have to undo each edit one by one, you can clean up the whole page all at once. - Taxman (talk) 13:23, 5 December 2008 (UTC)

Thanks! Funny, I read this before but didn't really understand it, I guess. Also I realized that I put the warning on the user page instead of the talk page. Well, I guess that user doesn't really care. :) --Martin Kraus (talk) 13:45, 5 December 2008 (UTC)
Yeah, they don't care for sure. Undo is great for past edits in the middle and sometimes you need to do both. It was a pain before the undo feature was available, since everything that couldn't be simply reverted had to be fixed manually. - Taxman (talk) 14:00, 5 December 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Discussions and contributing

Discussions don't mean that people must stop contributing. Discussion and contributing can go on simultaneously. In fact a few pages recently discussed on votes for deletion that was initially for deletion ended up closing as keep due to substantial changes having been made. Sometimes people may find solutions other than through discussion, and sometimes people may decide changes were not enough or things need to go in a different direction. I think when conflict arises than having people stop contributing might make sense in order to reduce conflict and help prevent things from becoming heated, but even than other people who were not involved in the conflict might find solutions by continuing to contribute. As Wikibooks:Decision making#Following this Guideline says: Wikibookians are encouraged to be bold, and there is no single "right way" to achieve community consensus. I'm posting this here rather than in VFD, because I think its a bit off topic. --darklama 22:21, 17 December 2008 (UTC)

Thanks for the clarification.--Martin Kraus (talk) 09:25, 18 December 2008 (UTC)
Your welcome. --darklama 16:38, 19 December 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Help pages

I noticed some of your changed in the help namespace. I was actually hoping to remove dependency on Help:Introduction 2 completely, and to eventually merge pages which just list other pages in the help namespace together into Help:Contents, so that there would be one table of contents. I hadn't done so yet because I was trying to weed out duplicates and the like first, and have been taking things one step at a time on and off. I was hoping to eventually have a table of contents for the Help namespace similar to Cookbook's or Wikiversity:Community Portal at some point, with other help pages being formatted more like most pages in books on Wikibooks are. Maybe even eventually create a printable version.

What do you think? Do you have any objections to that? Do you mind if I remove inclusion of Help:Introduction 2 from pages you added it to? --darklama 16:38, 19 December 2008 (UTC)

Well, I was just playing around to make the design of the most important help pages more consistent using Help:Introduction 2 as a common navigational element. If you want to replace it by another navigational element to browse through the help pages just go ahead. Also, just go ahead and change Help:Contents if you want to. (But I don't see why you would want to remove the navigational element from pages that you want to delete anyways once Help:Contents contains all the links.) --Martin Kraus (talk) 16:56, 19 December 2008 (UTC)
Well I'm not sure what is left to delete. Like recipes in the cookbook , I don't think the help namespace is really meant to be read in a certain reading order. I think the navigational aids of going from one page to the next hinders more than it helps. Most help pages don't even bother with navigational aids and I think for now at least that is a good thing. I've mostly been using some of the pages that just list help pages to aid in a clean up effort with the intentions to eventually use them as a bases for how to list things on Help:Contents. However with recent renewed interest in the help namespace, I might need to rethink some of my approach and go ahead and change Help:Contents like you said. I've probably been taking lack of interest in the help namespace for granted and relying on it too much. --darklama 17:46, 19 December 2008 (UTC)
I agree that the linear order doesn't make much sense, I just added the links to the "next" page because it was included in some pages and needed to be fixed anyways. I guess my main motivation for all this was that I was annoyed by the different designs of the help pages. The main benefit of the topmost navigational element is probably to provide a link back to Help:Contents; thus, new users can more easily search for something on the pages named introduction, browsing, account settings, and contributing if they are not sure where to look for it. --Martin Kraus (talk) 18:56, 19 December 2008 (UTC)
I edited Help:Contents a bit and added a temporary warning to make the transition to the new design as painless as possible. Some users (like myself) might want to have links to the old help pages until all the important links have been included in the Help:Contents page. --Martin Kraus (talk) 20:58, 19 December 2008 (UTC)
That's fine. I think I did add all the important links to Help:Contents, but other people may disagree with what is important. --darklama 01:26, 22 December 2008 (UTC)

Hello gentlemen,

I noticed Martin Kraus' edits on a few help pages. I've been looking into the available content in the help namespace myself. I pasted a list on User:Swift/Help pages and have been sorting through it. Would you be interested in collaborating on a help-page-cleanup project? I'll be pretty busy and might not be able to contribute much in about a week or so, but am very interested in bringing about some order to the mess.

Cheers, --Swift (talk) 10:34, 2 January 2009 (UTC)

Sorry, I don't have the time to contribute to a systematic help clean up; however, I've decided to clean up help pages when I discover missing links, out-dated or inconsistent help pages, etc. Thus, I guess I will contribute in an unsystematic way. :) --Martin Kraus (talk) 11:05, 2 January 2009 (UTC)
No worries! Thanks for your efforts and Happy Editing. :-) --Swift (talk) 12:46, 2 January 2009 (UTC)
Ya I've been operating mostly in an unsystematic way too. My only real vision has been to treat the namespace more like a single book with similar basic style guide as used with others books on Wikibooks, to try to get pages to use a consistent style like with other books, to add illustrations, diagrams and other images to pages to make understanding concepts covered easier, and to try to shift the reading level and audience to a more general one. Ambiguous, just not well organized or systematic. I don't expect anything to change overnight, and I'm a bit surprised that anyone has retained an interest in the help namespace. I've been merging, deleting, renaming, changing, etc. pages in the help namespace mostly alone for awhile now, sometimes there has been talk of doing something, but people seem to not have been motivated to really do anything. Disagreement of where to go or what to do with the help namespace hasn't really helped either. I'd be willing to try to collaborate. We probably need to discuss stuff so we're working together instead of against each other. Maybe on Help talk:Contents --darklama 04:09, 3 January 2009 (UTC)
Great, I'll take whatever comments I have there. --Swift (talk) 04:26, 3 January 2009 (UTC)

[edit] Re:dynamicpagelist

The version of DPL we use here at Wikibooks is very limited. I don't know all the exact restrictions, but it wouldn't surprise me to learn that only 5 notcategories could be used with it. Unfortunately, this is the best we can get. More recent versions of DPL are too resource-intensive to be used by the WMF projects because of our high traffic volume. We've asked in the past to have it upgraded and all requests have been denied.

Fortunately, even in this state DPL is a very useful tool for us, and it has helped us to generate some very helpful and informative pages. --Whiteknight (Page) (Talk) 16:19, 7 January 2009 (UTC)

I noticed that Subject:Languages suffers strongly from these limitations as almost all of the books in the "Languages Books" column are actually in one of the "Subtopics". It's just a question of which subtopics were not included the list of "notcategory"s in the employed dynamicpagelist command. Thus, the selection of "Languages Books" shown on Subject:Languages is more or less random (in addition it is not sorted alphabetically). All this could be fixed manually, if you wouldn't overwrite manual changes of the page Subject:Languages using your template for generating subject pages. Thus, I actually don't know how to help improving Subject:Languages since any of my changes might be lost the next time you recreate the whole page using your template. I wouldn't be worried about all this if I hadn't learned that Subject:Languages is supposed to replace Wikibooks:Languages bookshelf sooner or later. But I probably shouldn't worry anyways. :) --Martin Kraus (talk) 16:40, 7 January 2009 (UTC)

Is there a reason you moved things from Visual languages to Sign languages?  — Mike.lifeguard | talk 23:29, 9 January 2009 (UTC)

I think that the term "sign languages" is more common in everyday language and therefore more appropriate for a categorization in Wikibooks, even if the term "visual languages" is more precise. (Personally, I associate "visual languages" with the use of icons and symbols for communication, e.g. the icons in graphical user interfaces of computers or in airports etc., compare "visual programming", but that might be because I'm working in the field of computer visualization.) Moreover, I didn't like the idea of a whole category for a single book. On second thoughts, I guess no harm is done by the additional category and, in fact, my strategy is to keep all categories (unless I rename them); thus, I've now undone my changes to the category "visual languages". However, I insist that the book is easier to find for many users if it is also categorized under "sign languages". I hope you agree. --Martin Kraus (talk) 00:15, 10 January 2009 (UTC)
On third thoughts I realize that "sign languages" should be a subcategory of "visual languages", but I think that it would be rather hard to find if it is there. What do you think? Also: should the book "American Sign Language" also be categorized under "visual languages"? --Martin Kraus (talk) 00:19, 10 January 2009 (UTC)
Ah, it was me who removed the category "visual languages" from the "American Sign Language" book. :) I've inserted it again. Well, what do you think about redirecting the category "sign languages" to "visual languages" in order to get rid of one of the two? --Martin Kraus (talk) 00:26, 10 January 2009 (UTC)
Oh, it was also me who introduced the category "sign languages". I've removed it. :) Thus, we are back at the beginning. Well, apart from my renaming of "Visual Languages" to "Visual languages". --Martin Kraus (talk) 04:20, 10 January 2009 (UTC)
I have no opinion on capitalization. Was there another question?  — Mike.lifeguard | talk 07:10, 10 January 2009 (UTC)
No. --Martin Kraus (talk) 07:14, 10 January 2009 (UTC)
Some people have been moving non-book category names to all lowercase, so that there is less of a possibility for conflict between book names and book categories. --darklama 13:55, 10 January 2009 (UTC)
I wasn't aware of this. I solved the conflicts by using "Category:X language" if there are multiple books for language X (usually one of them is named X) where X is Chinese, English, French, German, Spanish, etc. --Martin Kraus (talk) 09:30, 12 January 2009 (UTC)
Oh, I guess since the first character is case-insensitive I was more or less following the all-lowercase style without knowing about it (apart from continent and country names, which I still put in uppercase, e.g. Category:Languages of Asia). --Martin Kraus (talk) 12:12, 12 January 2009 (UTC)

[edit] User:Whiteknight/Simple Subject

I've seen in the RC list that you've been using my template. As you can probably tell, I'm no artist: It's a no-nonsense basic template that tries to cram lots of information into a little space. If you have any suggestions for how to make the template better, or nicer-looking or whatever, I would love to hear them. Thanks! --Whiteknight (Page) (Talk) 02:36, 10 January 2009 (UTC)

Well, first of all: User:Webaware mentioned here that he had written a Javascript class to sort dynamicpagelists and also a gadget. Does that actually work or could it be used in the template for sorting? --Martin Kraus (talk) 02:42, 10 January 2009 (UTC)
More suggestions: an additional parameter for the list of supersubjects, an additional parameter for the list of notcategory's, an additional parameter for "see also" links (or any other text), maybe additional parameters to deactivate certain sections of the design (if they are known to be empty), a additional section for "Stubs" (maybe by default collapsed such that most users are not bothered with them). Well, but the highest priority has the problem of sorting! ;) --Martin Kraus (talk) 17:19, 11 January 2009 (UTC)

[edit] Brazilian Portuguese

In a reply to what you said:

["I'm looking very much forward to your fully-featured Brazilian Portuguese course!"]

The Brazilian Portuguese course is already up and running, with one completed lesson already!

Theunixgeek (talk) 14:44, 24 February 2009 (UTC)

Good luck with finding someone to do the audio recordings! For the exercises: it might be a good idea to use templates like {{Question-answer}} such that users don't need to scroll back and forth to check their answers. --Martin Kraus (talk) 14:57, 24 February 2009 (UTC)

[edit] Subject work

Just noticed your hard work on the subjects and wanted to leave a note of appreciation! --Swift (talk) 17:14, 21 March 2009 (UTC)

Thanks! :) Actually, it's a bit frustrating. Bookshelves have their weaknesses but since there is no way to alphabetically sort the items in the "automatically" generated subject pages, we should definitely not have switched to the new subject pages. IMHO the "unsorted" (i.e. not alphabetically sorted) lists on the subject pages look like crap: like random, incomplete sets of links. Another point is that IMHO featured books (and books with PDF versions, etc) should appear in the top level subject pages, even if they are categorized in a subtopic. The term "featured" implies this almost by definition. I'm currently using a hack for the language subject pages which requires manual editing, which violates the very idea of automatically generated subjet pages. Thus, from my point of view the step from bookshelves to the new subject pages was a step backwards. --Martin Kraus (talk) 11:20, 22 March 2009 (UTC)
That's a real pity. Would it be possible to merge the benefits of the bookshelves with the subject pages? As far as I know, subject pages weren't thought of as automatic bookshelves, but rather a category-like organisation structure where a book can belong to multiple subjects. There is no reason why there couldn't be a part of the subject page for a manually updated list of alphabetically ordered books.
Well, books can belong to multiple bookshelves and at least the language bookshelves are already organized hierarchically. The only new thing about subject pages, as far as I understand it, are that they are automatically generated from the categories set on each book. (Which has benefits for new books but makes changes to the categorization a pain.) --Martin Kraus (talk) 17:14, 22 March 2009 (UTC)
Furthermore, subject pages don't seem to have been intended as a replacement for bookshelves. The latter were simply seen as redundant once subject pages were starting to get implemented.
OK. For some reason I thought that the main page no longer links to the bookshelves. But this isn't the case. --Martin Kraus (talk) 17:14, 22 March 2009 (UTC)
I haven't looked at the templates that are used to generate the automatic lists on the subject pages. We might be able to work on a feature to allow alphabetic ordering (we already have sortable tables). A (temporary) alternative would be to simply refer to the subject category for an alphabetical index.
Well, the subject category will usually include categories, which make it more difficult to browse the books. For example, language books are categorized by continents as well as by their difficulty for native English speakers and then there are additional linguistic categories and further technical categories (e.g. the category for all book categories). --Martin Kraus (talk) 17:14, 22 March 2009 (UTC)
I'm currently a bit busy with travels so I won't be able to spend much time on this, but I'd love to be kept informed and I'll see if I have some time next month. --Swift (talk) 16:24, 22 March 2009 (UTC)
I would really appreciate it if you could look into the sorting problem.--Martin Kraus (talk) 17:14, 22 March 2009 (UTC)
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