Wikibooks:Reading room/Archive 11

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This is an archive of past discussions. Please 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 discussion page


Contents

How to Certify a Passport

Erm, I stumbled upon this page, and I don't believe it is to be deleted, but what are we supposed to do with stubs like these? I doubt it would be turned into a complete book, and there are no books (to my knowledge) that this could be merged into.

Another thing that scares me is tha we are becomming Wikipedia's dumping ground. Wikipedia:How-to How-to may fit here, but they should go into a book of some sort, and not just be dumped unorganized into wikibooks. --Dragontamer 03:02, 3 January 2006 (UTC)

I got one side question: were we informed about this dumping of how-to guides? I mean, i'd help out if I knew about it, that way, it'd get done correctly. --Dragontamer 03:04, 3 January 2006 (UTC)

Yeah... and then I find that everything has already been shelved in the how-to section. :-/ --Dragontamer 03:08, 3 January 2006 (UTC)

Wikipedia is getting better, but any transfers to Wikibooks should be through the transwiki namespace first, unless the location for the new Wikibook is clear. We need to simply hold the line on this issue and make sure that the editors on Wikipedia know what qualifies as Wikibooks material. I guess they are trying to do some "house cleaning" on Wikipedia by a bunch of deletionists, and Wikibooks openly proclaims that we are a home to "How-to" books. There is a lot of random junk all over Wikibooks unfortunately at the moment. --Rob Horning 08:41, 3 January 2006 (UTC)

Main pages in books should display their bookshelf

Is there any policy on this? If there isn't, could we create it? At least as a guideline? I think it'd be very helpful to have a link back to a book's bookshelf. --Dragontamer 03:32, 3 January 2006 (UTC)

I've created two templates in my user space that can help with this. Both are intended to be used at the bottom of the page.
  • User:JMRyan/Shelf1 presumes that it will only be used on the main page of a book. It is called with {{User:JMRyan/Shelf1|Bookshelf_name}}. To specify, for example, the Humanities bookshelf, the Bookshelf_name parameter should be "Humanities", not "Wikibooks:Humanities" or "Wikibooks:Humanities bookshelf".
  • User:JMRyan/Shelf2 presumes that it will be used on every of a book. It is called with {{User:JMRyan/Shelf2|Bookshelf_name|Book_name}} where the second parameter is optional.
The idea here is to create a Template:Shelf page by copying one of these two templates. If we want recommend that the bookshelf be linked from every page of a book, then copy from User:JMRyan/Shelf2; if we want to recommend that the bookshelf be linked only from the main page of a book, then copy from User:JMRyan/Shelf1. See User:JMRyan/Shelf templates for examples of use. Please use User talk:JMRyan/Shelf templates for discussion and to make alternative suggestions. --JMRyan 10:22, 4 January 2006 (UTC)
I don't feel it's necessary to link back to the bookshelf from every page -- a link from the main page is sufficient. Some books may fit on 2 bookshelves. Such a book should link back to every bookself it is a part of. --DavidCary 23:19, 25 January 2006 (UTC)

CheckUser elections

CheckUser elections have started. We need vote of as many users as it is possible, so please visit RFA page.--Derbeth talk 21:11, 4 January 2006 (UTC)

I'll add that the debate over the minimum number of people necessary for this to be granted still hasn't been challenged, or a realistic reason for the huge number of votes required other than Wikipedia feels it is something they can get together. I've voiced my opinion, unanswered, about what is really lost when this privilege specifically is abused, and I fail to see why it can't simply be granted to all admins. Still, let's get the votes together for this as best as we can, and it would be cool if we could elect some trusted people to be able to use this feature. If we are shy by just a couple of votes, that may be enough to challenge the minimum number and fuel the debate anyway. --Rob Horning 14:37, 5 January 2006 (UTC)

complaint

this site is so stupid and on top of that you guys want donations??

no non-fiction and no shakespeare!!! amazing no wonder nobody uses this site for anything, until now i didnt even know it existed.


however the wikipedia is gold! dynamite!


my advice is drop the stupid restrictions and make this site a real open gateway for knowledge that u all seem to be pushing. otherwise this page stinks

24.90.109.20 17:18, 6 January 2006 (UTC)Chris

I have no idea why I'm responding to this troll, but...
  • We do allow non-fiction. It is fiction we don't allow.
  • We don't allow Shakespear unless its annotated. Non-annotated books belong on wikisource, another site.
  • The donations are for the WikiMedia Foundation as a whole, which funds Wikipedia, Wiktionary, Wikibooks, Wikinews, the MediaWiki software, etc.
--Gabe Sechan 17:28, 6 January 2006 (UTC)

References to books?

I figured out that if you type "ISBN" followed by a number, a link is displayed that enables your readers to buy the book from Amazon (or three other stores). I presume that Amazon then pays the 5% referral fee to Wiki. OK, so how do I format it so that "ISBN" and the number are hidden, and the title of book appears as a link? Here's the link I'm working on: ISBN 1573240648 "The Open Mind" by Dawna Markova. I tried various brackets, curly brackets, pipes, etc.

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Help:ISBN_links doesn't offer too much help. I don't believe it can be done due to the way pages are rendered. Your best bet may be to create a template for special use like the help suggests. Also, I don't think Wikimedia is getting any money out of those links. -Matt 05:10, 8 January 2006 (UTC)

The wikibooks resources for a given ISBN seems to be a lot more sparse than the wikipedia equivalent, eg ISBN 0949853054 vs [1] . Is there any particular reason for this? Andjam 07:33, 8 January 2006 (UTC)

There's another danger. Let's say there's a standard way to reference books, and every time a book is referenced, the link goes to Amazon, and Wikimedia earns 5%. Sounds good, right? It won't be long until someone writes a script to spider every Wikimedia page looking for those standardized book references, and changes the account name that Amazon pays the 5% to. I.e., steals money from Wikimedia, and it could be a lot of money.

That's certainly a likely thing... however if the referrer ID was automatically assigned it wouldn't. For example Homestar Runner Wiki recognises when a homestarrunner.com URL has been entered (it has a different external link icon from everything else). Imagine if MediaWiki could automatically append--or, if one's already there, replace--the referrer ID with our own? That would bypass any and all attempts to divert it. And any way to make more money for us would be a Good Thing, especially considering Jimbo's just gone down on bended knee. GarrettTalk 00:38, 9 January 2006 (UTC)

Substantially finished books

I think there really is a need for books that are substantially finished to be in a list at the beginning of the Wikibooks main page.

This has been discussed as "100% finished books". See discussion: http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Wikibooks:Staff_lounge/Archive_8#.22100.25_finished.22_list

Some books are substantially complete and extremely useful even though they are not 100% complete. A recent review of electronic publishing says:

"I recently carried out a non-scientific attempt to survey the best books on Wikibooks. My sample, taken from the adult English-language site, consisted of all the books whose level of development was listed as "comprehensive text" (the highest level), plus all those that had been voted book of the month at some point, plus a list of four books suggested by a Wikibooks user with whom I happened to start up a dialog on Slashdot. This made a total of 20 books.[19] Of these:

  • 11 were not really books, ranging in length from 6 to 50 pages.
  • One was marked with a copyright violation banner.
  • Four or five were books that seemed to have been written entirely outside of Wikibooks, dumped into Wikibooks wholesale, and never really edited much by Wikibooks users.
  • Only three or four were complete books that appeared to have been created and written through Wikibooks itself. " http://www.lightandmatter.com/article/infrastructure.html

I think the situation is a bit better than this and even if there are only about 6 books that are substantially complete they should be advertised to encourage other authors and demonstrate what is meant by a "substantially complete" textbook.

I like the cookbook it is not complete and doesn't even have a green square but its certainly ready "to go". RobinH 19:49, 8 January 2006 (UTC)

Yes, I read this article. I agree that we don't have much books we can show to the public and be really proud of them. Other problem is lack of print versions, author of this article also wrote that problem of Wikibooks is that books are hard to print. IMO the solution is to support Wikibooks:Print versions project. --Derbeth talk 22:13, 8 January 2006 (UTC)
Thanks for the link. I have just had a look at a few sample printed pages from Python. The font is good and the auto format worked well. Its being "picky" but I would like to see a one inch left margin (at least, for binders etc.) and right justification with a half inch right margin. {"font-family:verdana; margin-left='8%'; margin-right='8%'; text-align: justify; font-weight:normal; font-size:12pt} with perhaps a touch of blue in the text TEXT="#00000C"? RobinH 14:29, 9 January 2006 (UTC)
I have just been playing with this facility. Although automatically created printed versions are OK you cant beat PDF. Unfortunately. Perhaps there could be a section at the beginning of Wikibooks that lists substantially complete books and offers either the automatic printed version or a PDF if the authors have taken the trouble to create one. RobinH

RSS Feed for "my watchlist" ?

Would it be possible to get an RSS feed for "my watchlist"? This would be very nice and would make keeping tabs on a book a breeze.

Also, I had a difficult time figuring out if this question had ever been asked before. I did look at the Table of Contents, but I did not look at the archives - there are a lot of them. I looked for a "search archives" option, and didn't see that either. That means one of the following: a) There isn't one; b) It's not in an obvious place; or c) I'm a dolt.

Jim Thomas 21:05, 9 January 2006 (UTC)

This is an oft-requested feature, but one that hasn't been implemented. This is because many users would consider their watchlist to be private, and RSS feeds don't support logins as such, therefore allowing you to access the watchlist of any given user. Googling "Watchlist RSS feed" or the like will come up with endless discussion and some possible solutions.
Using the live bookmark (or similar) feature of your web browser is probably the easiest way, although it means bookmarking every page you add to your watchlist. Doubtless someone will come up with a Firefox extension to do this quicker, but for now there is no ideal solution. :(
I'm not sure if it's been asked here before, but certainly it's made its way onto Wikipedia's "perennial proposals" page.
EDIT: as for a search archives function there isn't one, but Googling "site:en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Wikibooks:Staff_Lounge <keyword>" works just as well. GarrettTalk 21:47, 9 January 2006 (UTC)

Suspicious-looking groups of new non-contributing users

The Maori [mi] Wikibooks (which is basically not progressing, though a few of us keep an eye on it for the sake of the reputation of our country's indigenous language) has recently had new users adding themselves, suspiciously close together, not doing anything yet. A week ago we got Bulban; Fiuyhfkurty; Pigmey; Pisuar over the space of a few hours. Earlier ones were even more jumbled words. Any other wikibooks got this happening? Is it a precursor to a massive spam attack? Robin Patterson 06:19, 10 January 2006 (UTC)

I don't know... when spam shows up on Wikicities it's always by anons. Therefore I can't see why a spammer would bother creating an account unless they wanted one of its specific advantages, such as a massive bot-assisted page-move attack. GarrettTalk 07:01, 10 January 2006 (UTC)
I agree with Garrett. Vandalism cases by registered users are really rare. Most people creating accounts do this just to try how it works or to change display preferences, it's normal. Of course, there's always a group of people with odd sense of humour. If you have a bureaucrat there, you can rename vulgar and offensive nicks. --Derbeth talk 07:40, 10 January 2006 (UTC)

I would suggest that some users create accounts to read Wikibooks (and set their preferences), not contribute. However Maori Wikibooks seems to have almost nothing to read. "Random page" links me to the Main Page, which is in English.

I suggest that maybe these users are creating accounts so they can make interwiki links. (For example, if en:x linked to de:x and de:x linked to mi:x, you might want to add a link from mi:x to en:x.) They might have done this in expectation that someday mi will actually have books. --Kernigh 18:08, 10 January 2006 (UTC)

Corset literature access

Hello,

I have reviewed your listing for Corset:Bibliography:Old English. How can I access the old Periodicals on the list ?

Such as:

Anonymous. "Death from Tight Lacing." The Lancet, May 23, 1869, 675.

I have preparing a paper and would love access to these old articles. Let me know..Thank You for your time and services.

Christine Upton
christine.upton@lmco.com
christineupton@hotmail.com

Hello Christine. If you're not already associated with an academic institution, how about enquiring at a large public library in the first instance?  Otherwise you might try contacting the kind of institutions that might carry the material you're after, or seeing if there's an affordable pay-to-view internet option or the like. Re The Lancet, for instance, I'd hope any university offering biochemistry or physiology (if not medicine itself) would carry it, otherwise I'd look for a publisher's website – all this assuming it's not possible / too expensive / too lengthy to obtain via a public library. Hope something in all that helps. Best wishes, David Kernow 21:06, 10 January 2006 (UTC)
I might add here that any contributions of this sort to our sister project, Wikisource, would be significantly appreciated. Another perhaps even better place to turn for help in digitizing text of older periodicals such as a 150 year old medical journal would be to enlist the support of Distributed Proofreaders, where a number of older scientific journals have been scanned and are being proofread and reviewed for mistakes. Distributed Proofreading is a sister project to Project Gutenberg, which has a collection of over 7,000 books and periodicals from a wide variety of interests. All of these places are free for viewing, and are run by volunteers. A major problem at the moment is trying to index all of this content, but most of it has been indexed by Google and you can do serches on all of it by using the site: tag to narrow the search to one domain (I've done that to search for stuff on Wikipedia, for instance). Unfortunately most works that have been published after 1923 are copyrighted, so you are going to have to use a commercial service to access most of the scientific literature that was recorded in the 20th Century. --Rob Horning 14:27, 11 January 2006 (UTC)

Wikiversity:School_of_Medicine:Anesthesiology

Hi, I'm an italian WB user, that page was recently traslated un Italian, but IMHO it seems a page copied from some internet or from elsewhere and Google didn't give any response. Could someon else check the page? The Doc 15:48, 11 January 2006 (UTC)

Confine search to a specific book or a subtree

Is there a way to search within a book or within a subtree? By subtree I mean things like the Staff Lounge and its archives. Without the ability to confine the search to a specific book it is very difficult to find anything. I dare say that this question might have been asked and answered before but I couldn't figure out how to find it. --kwhitefoot 19:27, 11 January 2006 (UTC)

The prefix-index special page should provide a way to search inside that list of pages: Special:Prefixindex/Wikibooks:Staff lounge. It would also be useful to perform a search restricted to the pages in a category. If this is not already requested in bugzilla, you could add a feature request. ManuelGR 21:21, 11 January 2006 (UTC)

Naming convention bot

Moved to Wikibooks:Requests for adminship#Requests_for_bot_status. --Derbeth talk 11:17, 17 January 2006 (UTC)

Questions from the New Guy

I've recently taken an interest in cleaning up the Astronomy Wikibook and making some contributions. This has been a real learning experience for me as well as a source of frustration. As a Wikibooks newbie, I'm kind of at a loss as to how things run around here

One user has been contributing material that I think is obviously inappropriate for an astronomy textbook. The contributions are very long tables of very obscure astronomical data. The material is the sort of thing you'd find in an astronomical almanac, not a basic astronomy textbook.

While it makes sense for the Astronomy Wikibook to have some basic reference tables as an appendix, I don't see that the tables approach anywhere near this level of complexity or depth. Accordingly, I removed the tables from most of the sections. (The original contributor has now moved the tables to Wikisource and linked to them from the Wikibook. I'm not sure whether this is appropriate.)

There was also material that I haven't deleted. I didn't clean this out because I thought it better to delete the modules entirely, as these modules had no other content on them. Instead, I nominated them for speedy deletion. The articles did seem to qualify for this.

About two weeks have passed since then, and the material is still there. I would assume that the articles in fact didn't qualify for speedy deletion except that other articles that were nominated for speedy deletion at the same time also remain. Should I continue to wait for someone to delete the articles or should I go through the formal process for deletion?

Another concern I have is with the Wikiversity:School of Astronomy. Recently some off-the-wall material has been added. A lot of it makes only vague sense to me. I don't mean any disrespect to the contributor, but I just can't see where he/she is coming from with this. My inclination is to revert the edit, but I'm slow to do that -- the new material doesn't have the flavor of vandalism, after all. In all honesty,

I'm not really so interested in this page, and I'm willing to ignore it. I regard it as an entirely separate project. At the same time, I'd like to see all the material on Wikibooks reflect the highest quality, and I don't feel like the new additions do that. I could use the wisdom of some more experienced users on this. --Brian Brondel 03:54, 12 January 2006 (UTC)

First, you look like you're doing good things here. A lot of books at Wikibooks are in a terrible state and need extensive cleanup. Try looking over policy pages to make sure you've got the right idea of how to edit books, but your listed actions seem valid. Wikibooks is much slower-paced than Wikipedia in most areas. An admin should check the speedy delete category every once in a while but I guess no one has. It'll get done in time. My advice would be to work on one thing for now, then address other problem pages as you get more experience with how people write pages around here. -Matt 05:24, 12 January 2006 (UTC)
I actually put the Astronomy Wikibook up for a VfD because I felt it was in such a bad state that it would be better to simply restart the whole concept from scratch. The VfD was voted down, but it still does need help. In this case, feel free to do some massive editing and rearranging of the contents there. Much of the contents of that Wikibook are copies from other websites, including some NASA content and very stale forks of Wikipedia from almost two years ago. While this is technically legal, it does diminish the value of such content here when it could be so much better. Wikijunior Solar System is put together with much better content, and I would dare say that the content that was culled from Wikijunior due to being too verbose and above grade level (Wikijunior is aiming for grade school aged kids) would be a good candidate for inclusion into the Astronomy Wikibook, for instance. The astronomy articles on Wikipedia are also maturing and often exceeding their 32K article limit, which is one instance where Wikibooks could do a much better job of expanding information about specific astronomical objects like Jupiter or Mars, where quite a bit of information is now available. That is a specific reason for my trying to advertise this Wikibook on the Astronomy Wikiproject, and I hope that other individuals with interest in this area will help contribute to this major branch of science. --Rob Horning 13:22, 12 January 2006 (UTC)

Capitalisation problems with watchlist

It appears that article capitalisation has changed, and that Cookbook:sugar and Cookbook:Sugar both resolve to the same page (without redirects). This is, imho, a Very Good Thing. However, I now have several entries in my watchlist, e.g. Cookbook:sugar, which exist in a kind of limbo. The links go to the capitalised version of the pages, but these pages are not marked as being watched. If I try and remove these items from my watchlist, I get the error Couldn't remove item 'Cookbook:sugar' and the page is not removed. Can this be fixed here, or is it a MediaWiki bug that needs to go into Mediazilla? --HappyDog 22:02, 12 January 2006 (UTC)

Aaaah... I think that's because Cookbook is now it's own namespace (correct me if I'm wrong), so Cookbook:sugar and Cookbook:Sugar are the same page now. Out of curiosity, why does it matter? --LV (Dark Mark) 22:28, 12 January 2006 (UTC)
It's just extra clutter that I can't get rid of. Not a big deal, but it _is_ a bug. Have reported it at bugzilla:4661. --HappyDog 01:34, 19 January 2006 (UTC)

Subproject namespace problem

In the wikibook subproject "Movie Making Manual", there are several articles about scriptwriting, all included in the category Writing movies. Reading this category page is a difficult affair, however: All the articles start with "Movie Making Manual-", so it's difficult to scan through the list. Now we could move all those articles to a title without those words in the beginning, but this is a question of general policy: articles like "Movie Manual-Main page" and "Biology-Main page" would then suddenly collide. Has somebody a solution for this problem - by implementing something else, or by using the available tools creatively? How about if "Movie Making Manual"-articles would be named with "(mmm)" at the end (instead of the beginning, plus shortened)? And how about if we would use this way of naming article generally? Cramer 22:14, 16 January 2006 (UTC)

You might be interested in Wikibooks:Naming policy and its talk page, which explains how we are currently trying to name pages.
The PmWiki software has an interesting feature called WikiGroup, where [[Link]] from Book/Page links to Book/Link. However, we use MediaWiki at Wikibooks, so we must write [[../Link/]] (or the longer version, [[Book/Link|Link]]). --Kernigh 00:59, 17 January 2006 (UTC)

Of Mice, Men, and Annotated Texts

Forgive me if this has been discussed, but I've looked and don't see a lot of guidance just yet.

I'm working on the Of Mice and Men module and notice that it is categorized under Category:Annotated Texts. The problem is that Of Mice and Men is still protected by copyright, and this study guide (for that's what it will be) will never really be an annotated text until the copyright expires. If we want people who need this module (and granted, nobody needs it in its current state, but I have high hopes for it) to be able to find it, should it not be categorized differently? The same can be asked about Lord of the Flies and Angels and Demons, if anyone ever finishes that. --Mitchell K Dwyer 01:17, 17 January 2006 (UTC)

These books should probably not be in Category:Annotated texts or Wikibooks:Annotated texts bookshelf. If someone finds a suitable category and bookshelf, I suggest moving them. --Kernigh 03:16, 17 January 2006 (UTC)

BOTM voting rules

I suggest changing BOTM voting rules - it's odd that COTM rules require at least 20 edits and BOTM rules don't require any. This leave space for voting from multiple accounts. Please see discussion and sign your opinion at Template talk:BOTM/Voting rules. --Derbeth talk 22:18, 17 January 2006 (UTC)

The management of book publishing - a policy suggestion

Whilst Wikibooks textbooks are being written they are actually "manuscripts". A textbook that is a manuscript is a rather dubious source. I would like to propose the following policy for publishing these manuscripts:

1. That the Wikibooks main page begins with substantially finished books.

These would be books that a final editorial board for each book has read, reviewed and checked and preferrably where external comment has been sought.
The substantially finished books would be in PDF or printable format.
The editorial board for each book would be composed of those contributors who make themselves available for the board plus a subject area chairman who is also an administrator to mediate and arbitrate.

2. The existing editing framework is left in place for manuscript development.

This would also be linkable from each substantially finished book.

3. Substantially finished books would be updated at a maximum rate of monthly but preferrably no more than twice a year. If the edition frequency is kept low the books will be more stable and become more highly rated as reference sources. It would also limit the work load on the final editorial board. Each update would be given an "edition" number that can be used as a reference in other publications and the world at large. These controls might raise the status of the books and make them into reliable sources for academic work.

The main page for Wikibooks would need to be amended to contain new general headings. I have provided a crude conceptual mockup at: (now removed - clogged up my talk page).

The following books are probably ready for an all-out effort to get them into a fit state to be published:

Natural Science

http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Botany

http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Consciousness_studies

http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/FHSST_Physics

http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Special_relativity

Programming languages

http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Main_Page (Ada)

Languages

http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/English

Social science

http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Introduction_to_Paleoanthropology

http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Introduction_to_Sociology

Education

http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Instructional_Technology

Law

The following if they were combined into a single textbook called US trademark, copyright and patent law:

http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/US_Copyright_Law

http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/US_Patent_Law

http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/US_Trademark_Law

Miscellaneous

http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Lucid_Dreaming

http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Teaching_Assistant_in_France_Survival_Guide

http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Cookbook

There are also several completed pamphlets and game guides that could be included in a separate section.

RobinH 10:39, 19 January 2006 (UTC)

My own thoughts on this matter:

We already have a crude beginning of something at Wikibooks:Wikibook Press that was started about the same time this whole project was started and IMHO is substantially underused for what it could be in theory. In terms of bringing books up in quality and not content quantity, such as what is happening right now at Wikijunior Solar System, you indeed need to get an editorial group going and doing fact checking and other forms of verification.

One thing we need to stay away from is a hardcore formalism such as killed Nupedia (and is creeping back into Wikipedia in some forms). One of the problems with Nupedia was forgetting that it was a volunteer project and insisting on not quality standards but arbitrary standards of formalism that normally would only be met by a paid professional staff... and that only because they are willing to slug it out with the bureaucracy because it is just another day, another paycheck. Volunteers will drop like flies in heat if this sort of expectation occurs.

This is not to suggest that quality can't be achieved. A very successful on-line volunteer editorial project can be found with Distributed Proofreaders, and I would suggest that if we want to be serious about processing Wikibooks in terms of editorial content, it would be preferable to follow this sort of model to some extent at least. This would, however, take on a unique Wikibooks quality and perhaps be even less formal.

As far as the front page of Wikibooks is concerned, I would encourage the work to be performed on a bookshelf basis and perhaps some standards of content to be applied in terms of what appears. Up until now it has been encouraged to put brand-new Wikibooks on the front page as a sort of mission statement to show what kinds of content ought to be on Wikibooks. We are now beyond the stage of doing a demonstration project to show what Wikibooks (at least on the en.wikibooks side) could be capable of, and the front page lists a huge variety of potential content, but for the most part that is all it is. That can and must change simply due to the fact that Wikibooks is becomming an major player in the e-text market and people are now coming to Wikibooks to see finished content.

I would propose that some formal standards be established for the stages icons, with perhaps a slight expansion of the concept to include beyond the 0% to 100% icon range, but include editorial icons as well to document manuscript proofing and "publication" such as a PDF file. There would be several stages of editorial review as well. In addition, only those manuscripts (read individual Wikibooks here) that are near the "best" stage of review should be listed on each bookshelf that appears on the front page. Obviously some bookshelves are going to be weaker than others, and on the Bookshelf pages themselves you can still list all of the books, including brand-new Wikibooks that are a mere stub. This would likely result in about 80% of the current listings of Wikibooks to be culled from the front page.

The whole point here is that we need to make especially the front page more user-friendly to those who are not necessarily here to edit and contribute, but simply want to take a glance at what we've written. By doing this, Wikibooks will have a larger impact in the electronic publishing world and may begin to have a real impact doing what the founders of this project intended: To provide an alternative publishing forum for textbooks. --Rob Horning 12:12, 19 January 2006 (UTC)

Your mention of Wikibook press is very relevant. What I am suggesting is an effort to get the 10 or so nearly complete books into a print format such as Wikibooks press offers and to put these prominently on the main page. Perhaps the contributors for the nearly complete books could be contacted and asked to get these ready for publishing.
Staying "away from hard core formalism" is indeed essential. This is a good point and might be answered by always forming the final editorial board from the contributors plus one admin person to resolve disputes etc..
I agree that we need to keep the active bookshelves in a prominent position. To avoid "about 80% of the current listings of Wikibooks to be culled from the front page" we would need to have a small table of "published books" at the top of the main page and keep the rest of the main page as it is. The issue of crowding out the manuscripts with published works would only occur when, say, 30 or 40 published books are available. The published books would remain on the bookshelves so that their manuscripts can be improved for the next edition.
The current bookshelves would certainly need at least one more icon to indicate "published".
I agree entirely with your last paragraph: "The whole point here is that we need to make especially the front page more user-friendly to those who are not necessarily here to edit and contribute, but simply want to take a glance at what we've written". RobinH 12:50, 19 January 2006 (UTC)

It has just occurred to me that the change in the main page so that it lists published books "up front" would be an interim solution. Once 30 books have been published the density of published books in the bookshelves would be high enough for the bookshelves to be sufficient. Books that have been published could be listed in a different colour on the bookshelf.

By publishing the books in definitive editions we will also forestall the problems of vandalism and anonymous IPs found on Wikipedia. RobinH 13:29, 19 January 2006 (UTC)

Nice idea, in theory, but most books suffer from a lack of content and a lack of active contributors. Of course if someone wants to take on the job of 'publishing' a book to Wikibooks:Wikibook Press then they should be encouraged. I also agree that the front page needs to be made more reader friendly but let's not forget that Wikibooks is not paper so hand in hand with layout improvements we really, desperately, need tools to assist in the searching and indexing of books. Remember that you don't know who the reader is or what he or she wants to find. --kwhitefoot 08:12, 20 January 2006 (UTC)

BTW, I don't think that you need to completely rule out the potential of a paper version of Wikibooks either. While I would agree that not all Wikibooks have to be written with the intention that they eventually be published on paper, there is a reason why physical books are still being used and published... even by and for computer users themselves. Not all knowledge can be obtained easily through a computer terminal, and books have a number of other advantages as well, not the least of which is that you never lose power and for archival purposes it can last thousands of years with no need to provide decryption services directly or is at least easily obtained. You can't say the same thing about 9-inch Floppy disks or Hollerith punch cards at the moment. I would dare you to easily find a Zip-disc reader if you want an example of a slightly more recent storage technology that has become obsolete. Paper books are here to stay, and we certainly need to be able to translate some of these Wikibooks we are working on to physcial paper books if this project is going to be something more than Wikipedia articles in depth. --Rob Horning 12:10, 20 January 2006 (UTC)
I didn't intend to give the impression that I think that paper copies have no potential, sorry if it looked like that. After all my personal library contains over 2000 of them (no I'm not boasting, I'm sure lots of you can easily trump that). Also I absolutely agree that for longevity and future accessibility there is nothing to beat paper. I do think though that what most books need is more content rather than more rules. Some indication as to which books are alive and which are dying from neglect might be useful so that readers could avoid looking at books that consist just of stubs. The front page as it stands is pretty much useless because most of the books it lists are barely started never mind completed and thus of interest only to prospective contributors not readers. By the way do we actually have any readers, or is Wikibooks just the worlds best vanity publisher? :-)) --kwhitefoot 19:24, 20 January 2006 (UTC)
As far as Wikibooks readership, we are listed in the Alexa rankings as one of the largest e-text websites in terms of a place that people go to actually download an e-text. I would suspect that Gutenberg is more active, but there is a lot of interwiki links between Wikipedia and Wikibooks. A developer for the Wikimedia Foundation has suggested that Wikipedia has something like over 50 page reads for each edit. The numbers are not quite as good for Wikibooks, but I do see some of the projects I'm working on that only get a brief comment from a reader, usually a thanks or a minor question about the book. --Rob Horning 00:59, 21 January 2006 (UTC)
So,

1. If I were to contact editors of the books singled out above and ask them to get them into a final draft.

2. If an admin could volunteer to be editor in chief for each book.

3. I and other volunteers(?) were to get the text into PDF format.

4. The main page were to have an extra table listing 12 substantially complete books.

Would everyone agree? RobinH 11:15, 21 January 2006 (UTC)

If you can do all that go for it. --kwhitefoot 14:27, 21 January 2006 (UTC)
I don't see any reason for having a person with MediaWiki Sysop privileges to be required in order to be "editor in chief" of each book. It just takes an individual who is willing to take on a leadership role to help pull things together, and try to deal with organizational tasks like page formatting, setting up a table of contents, working on templates to "pretty up" the Wikibook dealing with navigation issues as well, and to search commons for some images that may relate to the book content. None of those tasks require any special privileges.

As far as volunteering to help get text into a basic PDF format, I am willing to also help accomplish that task, and have done so on a number of Wikibooks already. A forum does need to be established to help coordinate that effort, especially as making the PDF file is not a completely trivial task at the moment and does take some reformatting of the content to make it work better as a PDF takes some artistic flair.

Where an admin is going to be needed is to help do the actual work on the main page. This is currently protected... for a good reason. I support changing over the look of the front page, with perhaps the current full list of book titles being moved to another page and only a few select books being displayed on the main page. For now, I would say to restrict this only to Book of the Month winners... including Wikijunior. Are there any other metrics that can be used to help decide what would go on the front page? --Rob Horning 21:39, 22 January 2006 (UTC)

I have just had a go at print versions of Botany and Special relativity. Botany turned out to be difficult and a bit empty SR looks good though see:

http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Special_relativity/Print_version

http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Botany/Print_version

On the subject of Wikipedia content, both books have some content "snaffled" from Wikipedia - a note to this effect will be added.

RobinH 20:59, 24 January 2006 (UTC)

GNU Free Documentation License

I noticed that some of the books suggested for publication copied content from Wikipedia. As you make the published versions, you should remember to credit "Wikipedia" as an author of such books. See GFDL, section 4, letters I and J.

Consider English... its English:Grammar page took material from Wikipedia:English grammar. The user who first created that page at Wikibooks included an obligatory credit to Wikipedia. However, on 15 September 2004, a user removed this credit. I (23 January 2006) recently restored it. I had previously edited some credits to Wikipedia to Introduction to Sociology. --Kernigh 05:04, 23 January 2006 (UTC)

This is a mistaken notion. Wikipedia is not the "author" of the book, nor is Wikibooks here. Correctly you can say Wikipedia contributors or Wikibooks contributors if you want to do it at all. Or simply name the principle authors by looking into the history, such as I've done with some of the PDF versions of Wikibooks. As for citing sources of the text, especially if it is modified GFDL text, you should credit the source and potentially include the full edit history if it is available and put that into the talk page of the module. This is precisely what should be done on a transwiki, such as what you are describing for the English Grammar Wikibook module. That way the actual authors can be cited as appropriate.
In theory MediaWiki software could go through and determine percentage of content that an individual author has contributed, which would be a better metric for determining authorship. This would be done through a page diff and you could even assign authorship to each individual word in that manner. If through this you could say that you must list all authors that have contributed more than 1% of the module or book, that might be a reasonable way to describe authorship. The same is done for collaboratively written scientific papers, where you see sometimes a list of over 50 authors for a single publication. Often the citation is simply something like "Jones, D.E.; Franklin, J.R.; et. al", and sometimes some politicking for whom gets the lead citation. The same can and should be done for Wikipedia articles and IMHO should be done for Wikibooks as well. The U.S. Copyright and Trademark Office suggests you list the three or four principle authors when registering trademark, to use a benchmark. The MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America) will only let you list two people for credits like authorship or production of a screenplay, or under some exceptional circumstances four people. If more that that are involved, the group submitting the credits to the MPAA must simply decide who are the principle authors.
Also note that the Wikimedia Foundation nor any of the projects claim copyright on anything produced in these projects. If copyright isn't even being claimed, why should it be even listed as an author? --Rob Horning 15:47, 23 January 2006 (UTC)

How to label and number figures, tables, etc. for citation?

Most paper text books number their figures, tables, etc. How does one do the equivalent for wikibooks? In particular, I'd like to have the figures numbered uniquely in a book, and the tables labeled, so that I could refer to them symbolically in wiki markup. Is there a preferred way to do this with templates (or perhaps with a Special: page) so that I can cite a figure by its name and MediaWiki insert a link that works even if the figure is moved from one page to another? If I do this with templates, is there a convention to follow so that I can define templates in a book-specific manner so that I don't step on someone else's template names? I.e. something like namespaces, but within the Template: namespace. --djb 03:47, 20 January 2006 (UTC)

Take a look at w:Wikipedia:Citing sources and w:Wikipedia:Footnotes, you're bound to find a method you like. If the template in question doesn't exist here yet just copy it over. I'm assuming you're wanting something for referencing between pages rather than within the same page; therefore you should find a template you like that allows a custom label to be defined (e.g. "venusorbit"), which then allows you to link to it from elsewhere using that same tag (e.g. Astronomy/The Planets/Venus#venusorbit). However this linking technique won't track the target to any page other than that specified, so any time it gets moved all links to it will have to be manually fixed.
If you think a particular figure is going to be moving relatively frequently you could always put it on a "hidden" page that doesn't appear on the Table of Contents (e.g. Astronomy/venusorbit) and then transclude it in like a template (using {{ }} instead of [[ ]], like this: {{Astronomy/venusorbit}}). That way you could link straight to it (Astronomy/venusorbit) but this would mean that it would be seen out of context of any pages it has appeared on.
As you can see there's no perfect solution. GarrettTalk 21:10, 20 January 2006 (UTC)

New article notice

I changed MediaWiki:Newarticletext displayed when user starts an article to remind about adding book to a bookshelf and using proper naming convention. --Derbeth talk 09:00, 21 January 2006 (UTC)

Thanks for the change. It gives some much needed links for new contributors to Wikibooks, and gives you a pause to think when starting a new page. I like it. --Rob Horning 15:23, 22 January 2006 (UTC)
You might want to add a break "<br/>" (some such fix) so that the text box does not nestle directly against the editing icons. Otherwise, looks good and useful. --JMRyan 19:27, 23 January 2006 (UTC)
Done. --Derbeth talk 19:42, 23 January 2006 (UTC)
  • This is a major change on Wikibooks, and the change was already made before this notice was posted. Please don't make major changes without observing Wikibooks etiquette (advance notice, discussion, consensus). See my comment below at Wikibooks:Staff lounge#Request for Bureaucrat etiquette. Thank you for volunteering and contributing your excellent computer skills for Wikibooks; I just hope you'll use those skills in the good and fair spirit of Wikibooks, to help the book editors. -- KHatcher 19:13, 28 January 2006 (UTC)
  • This auto message box on all new pages is premature, because the naming policy has not been accepted as policy, and the box refers users over to the proposal page which is not clearly written. This does not give a good impression for new users. Recommend removing the new page notice (message box on new pages) until the use of a message for this purpose has been discussed and until the naming policy has been actually approved (it appears to have lost an earlier vote, so more reason not to force books to adopt it before another vote). -- KHatcher 20:37, 28 January 2006 (UTC)
    • While WB:NP may not be formal policy, it is a good guideline and new Wikibooks ought to follow this suggestion closely. One of the problems we are facing right now on Wikibooks is a little timidity to actually set policy down, and the lack of a good forum to ratify new policies. The naming policy has been worked on for many months, and represents the best of current conventions that have worked out well for many Wikibooks. While not a reason to delete content, it is still a good suggestion to try and link all of the modules for a particular Wikibook together through some sort of standardized naming convention within that collection of documents. The arguments are over formalizing what sort of standard or standards should be considered acceptable here on Wikibooks, not that you shouldn't have a consistant naming pattern. --Rob Horning 16:26, 31 January 2006 (UTC)

WikiProjects

Shouldn't we implement WikiProjects here? I work on two wikibooks, Mac OS X Tiger and iLife 06, and am thinking about starting iWork 06. It would be great to bring these together under one roof and have them organized by a Macintosh "Wikiproject". There are other Mac books that could be added as well.

I'd be happy to do this myself, but I thought everyone should vote on it or something first. Hyperpasta 20:57, 23 January 2006 (UTC)

We already do have Wikibooks themselves, which is a sort of Wikiproject unto itself in many ways. There is also the potential to work together under a common interest through the Bookshelf system, and I for one would like to see that utilized more for organizational purposes in a manner similar to how Wikiprojects are run on Wikipedia. Keep in mind that there aren't nearly as many people here on Wikibooks as there are on Wikipedia, and it may be harder to find a group of like minded people working toward the same goals... especially for collaborative writing purposes.
At the same time, there is nothing really stopping you from starting anything like a Wikiproject group or even forming them here. It just hasn't been done before mainly because of the numbers of people involved. There have been some things like Wikiversity and Wikijunior that are run kinda like a Wikiproject as well, mainly due to the huge scale of the goals for what they want to accomplish. Wikiversity is a big enough idea that the people involved with that are now seeking full sister-project status with the Wikimedia Foundation. I don't think you want something that ambitious, but you can try to put something together. If you want to put something about Wikiproject groups or something like that on Wikibooks:Community Portal, all you really need to do is contact an admin to help make the changes on that page. I would however suggest that you start by trying to put something into the Information Technology Bookshelf first with a Macintosh-specific equipment subsection, or perhaps into Wikibooks:Computer software bookshelf where these books current are listed under. I don't even see a seperate Macintosh software section on that bookshelf right now. --Rob Horning 22:50, 23 January 2006 (UTC)
Thanks for the input. I think I'll start a Macintosh bookshelf instead. Hyperpasta 00:36, 24 January 2006 (UTC)
I believe Rob Horning suggested that you file under already-existing bookshelves. Macintosh is not really an acceptable bookshelf on its own. It can be filed under what Rob Horning listed above. -Matt 02:24, 24 January 2006 (UTC)

Top Active

Does anyone know how to or who maintains this page? It has a lot of cool information but is quite old. -Matt 05:42, 24 January 2006 (UTC)

Andreas Ipp ran a script calculating top active books, but as you can see, now the page is completely outdated. There's an instruction how to prepare this script, maybe someone would take care of this list. --Derbeth talk 08:17, 24 January 2006 (UTC)
I wish I could do it. I have a MySQL database and the programming skills necessary to get the task done even in an automated fashion, but I lack the bandwidth necessary to get a Wikibooks dump now. And it is getting worse every day with the growth of Wikibooks. Oh, I could do a single dump just for the heck of it, but doing a regular update is far too much for my current connection. That seems to be the major sticking point for most people as well, and the Wikimedia servers seem to be overloaded at the moment to do this as well, even though I think this is something that can and should be done on some sort of script that could be started by an admin every once in awhile. Make sure you check out The Wikibook Stat page that is updated periodically. --Rob Horning 00:07, 25 January 2006 (UTC)
I should be able to handle this I think. I too have MySQL skills and will try to run the commands on the database once it finally gets dumped (en.wiki has been going for a day or two). -Matt 05:26, 26 January 2006 (UTC)

in praise of the snippit

I have looked around here and I am a little worried that this site could be a little too book orientated. There seems to be a tendency towards devaluing the snippit the small piece of information that sits alone waiting to be retrieved and added to. Technical references are very much like a big collection of snippits really usually you need some specific information and the rest of the information isn't needed at that time. I've just contributed to a book that last saw an entry in 2003 its a very small book now and may never be complete but its holding useful snippits of information. what has been written is useful and self contained and accessable. maybe this is all thats needed.

Second point does there need to be one book for a subject I know some information gets duplicated especially foundation material but surely thats good too different approaches to the same subject help greatly, one explanation may not click and the other illuminates.

it shouldnt be a problem for a started project to be abandoned and then retrieved years later. unless theres a chronic shortage of space. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Blackest knight (talk • contribs) .

BimBot

See WB:RFA. --Derbeth talk 11:49, 28 January 2006 (UTC)


Request for Bureaucrat etiquette

  • Etiquette. Most of you are kind and helpful, and do use etiquette. For a few who don't: in future, please provide some advance notice, allow time for discussion and consensus, before implementing automatic message boxes on hundredss of pages, especially if the message boxes are potentially embarassing to book editors. The discussion and consensus should include book editors, not just primarily computer experts, to improve understanding. That means the notice of the proposed widespread change on Wikibooks pages should be posted where book editors look (Staff Lounge, for example), not just on pages viewed by mainly computer experts. -- KHatcher 18:51, 28 January 2006 (UTC)
  • Don't bite book editors. Please remove widespread message boxes, which were applied unilaterally without observing etiquette or prior discussion or consensus. The message boxes could be put back after they have observed Wikibooks etiquette. For example, the Wikibooks:Staff lounge#New article notice here had already implemented the widespread message box before posting the notice, before discussion and consensus. The widespread and automatic message box, which has suddenly appeared on existing books' talk pages, is potentially embarassing to book editors.
As an example of how to embarass a book editor, suppose that the main editor of this book, Wikiversity:School of Law has invited his colleagues to contribute articles for the book, and then an accusing message box appears on the book pages, along with a category box marking the page as a problem.
The message box here is misleading and it could have been improved by discussion. It trys to force book editors to conform to a proposed policy WB:NP which has not been approved, and which appears to have lost a previous vote, and which is presently unclear and not well written even as a proposal.
The spirit of Wikibooks is that many minds working together with goodwill make a better result. We need that spirit in policy making as well. Bureaucrats should be helpful and courteous, and not use their powers to obtain their own preferences. -- KHatcher 18:51, 28 January 2006 (UTC)
  • I'm afraid I don't fully understand the your complaint. As far as I know, the message box you refer to, namely MediaWiki:Newarticletext, appears on edit pages only. It does not appear on the module itself or on the talk page. I can't see how the notice counts as an accusation or an embarassment to any author or editor. (I do understand that you disagree with the content and with the lack of notice before the change was made—but that is a separate issue) in particular, I am unaware of any other messages automatically being placed on on hundreds of pages. Could you give a few (maybe 2 or 3) examples where an automatic message was placed on a module page or a talk page so I can get a better idea of what you are talking about? Thank you. --JMRyan 22:16, 28 January 2006 (UTC)
  • The example of a way to embarrass an author was given as Wikiversity:School of Law. The current message box at MediaWiki:Newarticletext is not embarrassing but is only cluttering for books which do not need any reminder about page naming. It was also put on without discussion, and with a POV purpose. However, last week the message box on edit page for my book module had a different message which was not only embarassing, it was also incorrect. The message from Wikibooks said that the page needed cleanup because it was in violation of the Wikibooks naming policy. That incorrect message is now gone without leaving trace in the page history. Wikibooks does not presently have an accepted page naming policy, so not possible to be in violation. Anyway, I don't like the message box clutter on my book edit pages or the intention of the message box to induce newbie editors to change the page naming scheme because they have been mislead into believing that the naming scheme is incorrect (the message box points readers to page naming polciy which was, before last night, written in a misleading way to imply that only one type of page naming scheme is permitted). I think that the message box at MediaWiki:Newarticletext was just a more subtle attempt to implement the bureaucrat writer's policy POV, without discussion, than the cleanup message that appeared last week. I don't like this sneaky method and would like to know that such things won't happen again. Also see Wikibooks talk:Naming policy#Bad tactics -- KHatcher 12:10, 30 January 2006 (UTC)
  • Fair Treatment of book editors. Please let book editors have as much freedom of choice as possible about how to set up the books. Please do not create an enforceable policy (law) which unnecessarily limits other people's freedom of choice just to please your preference. Sometimes consistency and standards are needed, but since these limit freedom of choice (and sometimes these limitations are justified), please do have a discussion first about the real need for the proposed limitation. Why is the consistency needed? Diversity is often a good thing; it allows creativity and new methods to evolve. -- KHatcher 18:51, 28 January 2006 (UTC)
I think we should talk about concrete problems. I suppose that when you write about "bureaucrats" you mean generally all the people having sysop/bureaucrat permissions. Nonetheless, most of your objections seem to be addressed to myself, so I will try to explain few things.
You write about "bureaucrat etiquette" - does it mean that my behaviour was rude or aggressive?
Most of your objections concentrate on naming policy and actions connected with it. We can make philosophical discussions about spirit of Wikibooks, but the fact is that this project faces big problems with maintaining quality. We (I mean people doing maintenance tasks generally) are understaffed and can't take care of everything. Lots of new modules get orphaned because their author haven't linked them properly. There are plenty of pages that got lost because someone changed TOC of parent book. Modules which are not linked properly are less likely to be corrected by users and are good target for vandals. Reality is that Wikibooks has lots of rubbish in the database: pages in other languages (already transwikied in most cases), simply vandalism, gibberish, unused files, ultra-stubs, orphaned pages etc. Risk of such problems is reduced if a module is properly named (so you can reach its parent book), book is placed in a bookshelf and new books appear on list on main page. Unfortunately, most of our contributors either forget or don't know about these simply rules. We cannot correct every editor manually. Small box appearing in new pages reminding about neccessary actions will hopefully make contributors take care about their work without our assistance.
Now naming convention notice. Many books are written in way that makes reading them hard (because of lack of navigation). Sometimes parts of books are orphaned and not linked to main TOC. And there is a plenty of such modules, we can't cope with everything. That's why special template was created, it's fast in use. If I read discussion page of every book needing cleanup I see, checked if it is active or dead, I wouldn't have time to do anything. I can give my full attention to only a few books when I do cleanup.
You write about fair treatment of contributors. Firstly, you are exaggerating size of naming convention cleanup action. Look at the page list - there are only a few books, it's completely microscopic scope. There were not bot actions, no massive template inserting you are suggesting here. We leave contributors freedom but contributors don't seem to be interested with the project standards. In many cases it's not contributors' fault that a book does not conform our polices - hence the book might be older than the policy. But there are some books that have illogical structure or contain serious meritorical or markup errors. Cleanup messages are not ment to "punish" book authors, yet they show what needs to be corrected clearly and invite other contributors to help.
Later, you write that decisions should be made after discussion and consensus. In my opinion, this is a wiki and philosophy of wiki is to be bold. There aren't many active contributors here and every discussion is usually quite long. When it comes to serious decisions, yes, we ought to sit and talk and we do it. I haven't invented things I have done. New article notice idea is taken from English Wikinews and naming policy isn't something new, I haven't written it and I even haven't worked on it at all. Similar cleanup messages are common at Wikipedia and noone screams that they are vandalisms or violate his/her freedom as an author there.
Finally: "Bureaucrats should be helpful and courteous, and not use their powers to obtain their own preferences." It's not pleasant to hear such words after everyday peace of work. I'm not using my powers to force naming convention or other standards, because I haven't blocked or reverted anyone for such reasons. I always answer if someone asks me for help and I help newcomers if only I have enough time. I admit I can sometimes loose faith in "Assume Good Faith" rule after recent changes patrol, but why do you assume bad faith on "bureaucrats"? --Derbeth talk 20:41, 28 January 2006 (UTC)

I would like to point out that generally I support most of Derbeth's actions here on Wikibooks. We do need to be a little bit more casual with the cleanup notices, but the point being made here is that there are some (unfortunately few) people that are monitoring what is happening on Wikibooks. Most of this effort is to raise the standards for content here, and turn Wikibooks into something more than just a random collection of textual thoughts. There is a mission to Wikibooks, and I hope that new contributors cna take a look at what we've done here and the intentions of where we are going.

The most important thing anybody who is new to Wikibooks can do is to understand that one person's opinion on something is just that: One single opinion. There are places you can complain if you need to bring others into the discussion, and most changes on Wikibooks are generally reversable as well, including page deletion and user blocks. If you disagree with a page markup tag, you can make a comment on the discussion page for that module and perhaps even remove the tag if you strongly disagree. Try to find out why it was put there in the first place and understand we are mostly trying to help you as an author out with the content of Wikibooks. --Rob Horning 23:23, 29 January 2006 (UTC)

Presentation material

Working on a Presentation about Wiki posting & editing; access, and uses..... The Class is in U Texas, Austin.....This 2006 Spring. Would you have a summary of such, or should the Group down load the info....and provide reference to Wiki services?


CVG is Dewey 794

Computer and video game books were filed under Dewey 794 in every library I've been any in. Hence I think Wikibooks:Computer and video games bookshelf should be placed under Dewey 700. (It would get cluttered if we put each individual title there — one of the big differences between Wikibooks and a traditional library, IMO — unless we managed to break it down into further decimal places.) —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Seahen (talk • contribs) 00:00, 29 January 2006 (UTC)

Feedback sought: Building a book TOC, sections, and navigational aid

I would like some comments about the way I've structures the Java Programming book. My goals were to create a book table of contents which you see on the main page and also have a navigational aid which we can include via a template on all pages in the book. That nav aid will appear at the bottom of each page. It links to the each of the main sections of the book, as well as to the book's main table of contents and the Category:Java Programming.

To implement this, I created templates for each of the sections, such as Template:Java Programming/Getting Started and Template:Java Programming/Language Fundamentals. The template includes the outline for the section and perhaps a very brief introduction. I then include the template in the main TOC and also include the template in the pages I created for each of the main sections. For example, see Java Programming/Getting Started and Java Programming/Language Fundamentals which includes the aforementioned templates. Finally, I also created a template Template:Java Programming to put at the bottom of each page; it puts the page in the Category:Java Programming and also includes the book's navigational aid: Template:Java Programming Nav.

What do you all think? Is there a better way?

Well, you need to fix Template:Java Programming/Overview. It has red links to blue-link pages. (The main TOC gets it right.) One other detail. According to WB:NP, templates are susposed to follow the false namespace (colon) convention. The book pages are supposed to follow the slash convention (as you have done), but the book-specific templates are supposed to use the colon convention. - unsigned
Thanks for noticing the broken links; I've fixed them. I'll try to migrate to the WB:NP recommendation (I had followed the pattern of the Ada book's templates) --djb 23:18, 29 January 2006 (UTC)
Most people put there navigational templates at the top or floating to the side—so I suppose they think that works better. Your navigational template sees too large for that, so maybe bottom is best for you. Otherwise, looks fine. - unsigned
There seems to no consensus on whether to use colon-slash (Template:Java Programming/Overview) or colon-colon (Template:Java Programming:Overview) convention. I used colon-colon in the past, but am switching to colon slash because {{Java Programming:Overview}} looks like the namespace is "Java Programming:" instead of "Template:". --Kernigh 01:45, 30 January 2006 (UTC)

Wrong interwiki on main page

Hi, I'm an italian WB contributor, by clicking italiano on the left column in the main page will not open our main page but the list of all books, can you fix it? The Doc 11:15, 29 January 2006 (UTC)

Fixed. It was the result of BimBot adding the list of books to Template:Bookshelves (all). --JMRyan 15:28, 29 January 2006 (UTC)
I tried to create an account at it (it:Utente:Kernigh) and change the offending link at it:Lista di tutti i libri. --Kernigh 01:51, 30 January 2006 (UTC)

How do I add a downloadable file?

My wikibook is a programming guide, and I'd like to include the source code as a download. I uploaded the file as a .zip, which seemed to work, but I can't find out how to make a link to it. GRAHAMUK 23:32, 29 January 2006 (UTC)

Use [[Media:]] link, works like Image:. --Derbeth talk 23:44, 29 January 2006 (UTC)
I can't find any sign that you've uploaded it (see Special:Contributions/GRAHAMUK for all your contributions thus far). What filename did you give it, and are you sure you didn't get an error message? One of our other programming projects (C Plus Plus I think) set up a Sourceforge project for their source code. I'm not sure if zips can be uploaded here, but if not then that might be a good solution. GarrettTalk 00:01, 30 January 2006 (UTC)
I get a warning ".zip is not a recommended image format". Well, duh. I assumed that was just a warning and it had uploaded the file, but it appears as though it hasn't. Is there a a special upload for files other than images? GRAHAMUK 23:05, 30 January 2006 (UTC)
Yeah, I thought as much. Unfortunately file types are determined via PHP changes, which requires asking the devs, who in turn say they're too busy and/or it's too dangerous a filetype to enable. Hmpf. I guess Sourceforge is still the most probable option. GarrettTalk 00:41, 31 January 2006 (UTC)
I will look into that, though I haven't a clue about it right now, so a simpler option would be ideal. I could use another archive format - .tar, .gz, etc... is there a list somewhere of what IS supported? GRAHAMUK 00:48, 31 January 2006 (UTC)

Wikiversity/Wikibooks in the News

See this news article for more information

In short, Wikiversity is an intersting experiment, but remains to be seen if it will actually develop into a seperate project. I am curious about some of the quotes, especially as to Jimbo's attitude about the whole thing. Still, it is interesting that Wikibooks is starting to make some major ripples to become international news. --Rob Horning 02:38, 31 January 2006 (UTC)

Please, remember to add such news to Wikibooks:About#Wikibooks in the News (maybe we should create separate page?).
I'm a bit embarrased by Wikiversity, because it seems to aim to split from Wikibooks and become its competitor. If Jimbo Wales managed to remove all "non-textbook" content from Wikibooks, we would become actually a copy of Wikiversity. --Derbeth talk 17:22, 31 January 2006 (UTC)
I beg to differ on that point about Wikiversity, but that is a point of disagreement I can live with. While textbooks are a primary focus, I think Wikibooks can be more than that. I also think that Wikiversity could be doing somethings as a seperate project that are completely outside of the scope of Wikibooks, such as the original research proposals and critical review of Wikimedia projects, that could potentially compliment the rest of the Wikimedia projects as well. I will admit that the current organization of schools vs. Wikibooks bookshelves is almost identical and is in some ways a duplication of effort. Schools could potentially be much more than what we envision for bookshelves, however. --Rob Horning 13:31, 1 February 2006 (UTC)

Wikibook Structure

I want to create a wikibook on Chinese Tractor Maintenance. It seems to me that I need at least six levels of hierarchy to keep the individual pages from getting too long. For example:

Manufacturer

    Model
         System
              Subsystem
                    Component
                          Task

An instance of the hierarchy would be: Manufacturer: Kama Model Number: 554 System: Engine Subsystem: Head Component: Valve Task1: Adjust Valve Lash Task 2: Adjust Decompression Link Task 3: Remove and Replace Valve

Is a Wikibook a realistic approach for this kind of manual? —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 63.165.62.3 (talk • contribs) 18:15, 31 January 2006 (UTC)

You would probably have page titles like [[Chinese Tractor Maintenance/Kama/554/Engine/Head/Valve/Adjust Valve Lash]]. This is a realistic approach for Wikibooks. Wikibooks will automatically make upward links to [[Chinese Tractor Maintenance/Kama/554/Engine/Head/Valve]], [[Chinese Tractor Maintenance/Kama/554/Engine/Head]], ..., [[Chinese Tractor Maintenance]]. On the [[Chinese Tractor Maintenance/Kama/554/Engine/Head/Valve]] page, you would have subpage links like [[/Adjust Valve Lash/]], [[/Adjust Decompression Link/]], [[/Remove and Replace Valve/]] to all valve tasks.
I suggest that you start with only one page. Pick a bookshelf (like How-tos bookshelf or Miscellaneous bookshelf) and add a link like [[Chinese Tractor Maintenance]]. Use that red link to start your book. Then, when ready, make subpage links like [[/Kama/]] and move everything to manufacturer pages. Repeat the process whenever you want to add a new level. --Kernigh 17:06, 1 February 2006 (UTC)

Make Textbooks Affordable

My name is Hannah Nguyen and I coordinate the Make Textbooks Affordable national student campaign for the Student PIRGs. I am currently researching open-source textbooks for a forthcoming report, and would like to speak with someone from Wikibooks and potentially feature Wikibooks in the report. I'm on a tight deadline, so I would appreciate a quick reply. Thank you! txtbooks 22:36, 31 January 2006 (UTC)hannah@maketextbooksaffordable.com

http://www.MakeTextbooksAffordable.com

Cookbook talk pages

Uncle G's major work 'bot, a 'bot which is used to moving mountains (It renamed more than 20,000 VFD discussion pages when VFD was renamed to AFD on Wikipedia.), has a list of all 132 of the existing Talk:Cookbook: pages (a mere 132!) that need to be renamed to the Cookbook talk: namespace, and will be starting work soon. Uncle G 01:00, 1 February 2006 (UTC)

Serious?

How can Wikibooks expect to be taken seriously with stuff like Wikiversity:School_of_Magic around? 84.69.5.63 14:02, 2 February 2006 (UTC)

Apart from the fact that Wikiversity is not Wikibooks and Wikiversity in general are messing things up here at Wikibooks by adding dozends of empty books and/or adding articles more suitable for Wikipedia I also belive that Wikiversity:School_of_Magic has the same right to exist as Christianity or Islam. But then my idea of religious freedom goes further then that of most other people. If you now wonder what religion has to do with magic you might want to read w:Shamanism. --Krischik T 14:27, 2 February 2006 (UTC)
I guess this is responding to a troll (not you, Krischik), but I don't see any harm from this in the least. There are professionally accredited Schools of Magic in many places, although you are never likely see them in Ivy League type schools, I would admit. As for the appropriateness of Wikiversity on Wikibooks, that is an argument that needs to be made with this VfD that has yet to be fully dealt with or meta:Wikiversity and its related discussion pages. The Wikimedia Foundation board has the opinion in substantial detail for what the general attitudes regarding Wikiversity and can make up their own minds from that information. --Rob Horning 16:42, 2 February 2006 (UTC)
I did not know about Wikibooks:Votes for deletion/Wikiversity. So I am not the only one upset with Wikiversity messing up Wikibooks. Good to know. --Krischik T 07:32, 3 February 2006 (UTC)
Because Wikibooks:Votes for deletion/Wikiversity is linked from Wikibooks:Votes for deletion/Archive 1, I thought that the VFD for Wikiversity was archived. --Kernigh 16:28, 3 February 2006 (UTC)
The whole issue is really in the hands of the Wikimedia Foundation Board at the moment, because a formal request was presented, with proper notification and Wikimedia-wide voting as well, to create Wikiversity as a totally seperate multi-lingual Wikimedia sister project. There is some give and take going on between those who want to get the project started and some of the policies that the board wants to see implemented before Wikiversity gets the green light. The Status-quo is to simply let Wikiversity remain here temporarily until the seperate domain is established. What will happen if the board simply says a resounding "NO" is speculative at best, but I think it might get ugly. Most Wikiversity participants are wanting to say simply "to hell with Wikimedia" and try to start their own project on an independent server with their own seperate fundraising and server farm. What to do with Wikiversity content if that happens is going to be certainly a subject of a huge debate. I would prefer that the board simply approve the proposal, which would make life easier for just about everybody involved. --Rob Horning 21:14, 3 February 2006 (UTC)
Retrieved from "http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Wikibooks:Reading_room/Archive_11"