Wikibooks:Reading room/Archive 16

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This is an archive of past discussions. Please do not edit the contents of this page.
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Contents

Overhaul of the Bookshelves and Wikibooks:Bookshelves

This is a subject that has been laying around on the back burner for some time, and does get brought up from time to time as well. In trying to fix the Ontology of Wikibooks, I've already made some changes in how you can look up a specific Wikibook.

One of the common practices here on Wikibooks is the grouping of Wikibooks into bookshelves. From a rough count of the total number of independent Wikibooks on this project right now, we have about 700 different books that can be organized. About 200 or so are missing from the current alphabetical listing, from a rough guess based on my preliminary review of the bookshelves I did before starting this post. The current count on the alphabetical list is 564 books. BTW, anybody notice the change on the main page where I listed the total number of Wikibooks?

By any measure this is a huge number and is going to require multiple levels of topical structure just to be able to put all of these books into a systematic organization. And this is something that is desperately needed as I've seen several duplicate modules also come up, and some very good Wikibooks that have been lost in the shuffle, especially noting some of the poor candidates or even winners of the Book of the Month contest, when clearly superior books were available.

Even if you assume about 10-20 books per bookshelf, that is still going to be over 30 different bookshelves on Wikibooks, which is clearly overwhelming. And some topics like computer related books have some perhaps disproportionate represenation compared to what you would normally find in a typical library situation.

To further complicate matters, some books are listed on multiple bookshelves. There may be valid reasons why this is done, but we need to come up with some more clear guidelines on how this is done and when it can occur.

Basically, I consider the current bookshelf organization to simply be broken. I am not suggesting that they be deleted, but a holistic reorganization oriented not just toward a few bookshelves but to how they are all put together should occur. The suggestion of "departments" that have collections of bookshelves is perhaps a good way to form super categories, but subcategories and other organization methods need to be dealt with as well. And to decide on how many levels of organization do we want? Finding a book shouldn't be a process of clicking through a dozen pages just to find the content you want.

We also want to group similar books together. That is the whole point anyway, where you can look up related books that are all together on the same "bookshelf".

There are a number of "wikibooks" that are also bookshelves in disguise. I've recently renamed Biology and Physics because they really were bookshelves to a bunch of independent books and not the main page of a Wikibook. Currently there is no policy, instead I'm just being bold and trying to fix a problem as I perceive it. This is indeed something that needs to be addressed in terms of policies, and something I've run into before with my wikibook Serial Programming that has inadvertantly turned into a bookshelf. (I call it my wikibook because I'm the principle author of most of the modules and I started it). The Serial Programming book has even gone up for VfD because of the way new modules were added when people treated it as a bookshelf.

Based in part on our content, here are some signicant divisions (or departments) to consider for the very top level of organization:

Society
Humanities, History, Arts, Social Sciences, Law, Economics, Business, and Politics (books like Voter's Guide and something about politcal organization)
Science
Mainly "hard" sciences, but thing like Biology, Physics, Chemistry, and those things that have to do with scientific enquiry in general. The distinction with social sciences may at times be tricky, but that is often grouped with humanities anyway even at many major universities. Where to put Mathamatics is an issue to deal with here as well.
Engineering
This is one I'm not entirely sure if this is the way to do it. There are many engineering books and there is a bookshelf just for engineering, but I was thinking of generalizing the category to include even the computer books (aka software engineering). The title of this category is debatable as is even the organization, but basically those books that deal with how to create stuff. Computers could perhaps be the category, but then engineering is kinda left out in the cold by itself or improperly placed.
Games
Game guides are such a major part of Wikibooks that it really deserves its own top level distinction, and they will need to develop their own standards as a community of game guide developers anyway.
How-to
Another top-level distinction if for no other reason than Wikipedia has a specific policy about this topic, as does Wikibooks. There are also enough different How-to books that sub-categories of these books (aka seperate bookshelves) can and should be created as well.
Miscellaneous
No matter how hard we try, some books simply defy any attempt to categorize them. Even the major classification systems like Dewey Decimal and the Library of Congress have general categories to dump in books they really don't know what to do, which BTW is the reason for the 003 and 004 codes for computer books that were totally unanticipated by the Dewey Decimal system except in the general anything goes category.

I know there are many other opinions on this topic, so add to the discussion and let's see if we can come up with a reasonable top level organization for Wikibooks. I'd like to keep the number of top-level categories down to between 5 - 10 significant major subdivisions, as having too many more than that is simply too confusing to people coming to Wikibooks for the first time. --Rob Horning 17:13, 30 March 2006 (UTC)

I'd like to propose combining engineering and science into one shelf- science and technology. After all, engineering is just applied science. Under that we could have subsections- natural sciences, math, engineering (possibly further broken down in the future), computer science, IT, etc. It makes a more logical sense to me, especially as some things in the two have so much overlap (is discrete math under scinece->math or engineering->computer science?). This way they'd all at least have the same top level bookshelf.--Gabe Sechan 21:45, 30 March 2006 (UTC)
There really are enough different technology books that they deserve their own shelf seperate from science books... and enough science books as well to stand on their own. This is one area that Wikibooks is particularly strong in right now. I would like to "reunify" the computer books somehow, as they do seem to be splintering into seemingly infinite groups. --Rob Horning 02:47, 31 March 2006 (UTC)
Agreed. Comp Sci vs Comp (software) Engineering are another two topics that should go on the same bookshelf. On the other-hand, I'd prefer few large bookshelves over a "tree". Yes, we can subdivide and subdivide until we got very specific bookshelves, but there is a point where it just won't work. And given the current content, I think 5 or so bookshelves is all we need right now. Basically, I'd like to avoid books on more than one bookshelf. --Dragontamer 22:19, 30 March 2006 (UTC)
So you are saying that you don't mind having over 200 Wikibooks on one bookshelf? Because that is the resulting number of books that are going to be listed, and precisely why there are so many computer and information technology bookshelfs: So many books were listed that it became a blur about what what was really there. I'm not talking about a category or bookshelf with just one or two books, instead I'm talking perhaps 30-50 as a target size. With this number of Wikibooks, that is still going to be about 20 different bookshelves, and that is the point I was trying to make earlier.... it needs a better organziation. And bookshelves now need groupings, at least if this more moderate goal is to be realized. This is not a theorhetical discussion, but actual content that is so diverse and so deep that it needs to be organized into more than just a small handful of flat categories. --Rob Horning 02:47, 31 March 2006 (UTC)
The books can still be "treed" and kept on one page, by use of sections. Using sections also takes away a disadvantage of large bookshelf pages: Navigation - individual sections get links in the TOC, so one can easily jump to whereever they need to go. I think an easy way to add new books for users unsure where to put them would be useful as well - one of the reasons so many new books go unshelved is because a lot of new users don't know where to put it. Perhaps a notice on the edit page when creating a new page in the main namespace could help with this, i.e. something like "Things to do when creating a new book" that lists some things that need to be done with new books (as well as providing easy links, so users don't have to search for the proper pages):
And so on. This could probably be made into a template and used in a few other places, as well.
As far as organisation of the shelves goes, a single large "Science & Technology" shelf could probably encompass all of the needs in that category, with proper subdivisions.
The Dewey codes were mentioned as well; perhaps we can try to keep each section to a specific number/range and put that in the section header, so people can search by number if they want to, or provide a seperate template with section links, but using the numbers as the link text. --Xerol Oplan 00:43, 31 March 2006 (UTC)

I created a page at Wikibooks:Bookshelves/Generation 2 to store notes. --Kernigh 20:01, 1 April 2006 (UTC)

April 1st Madness

April 1st tends to bring out the best in editors, and candidates generally worthy of the Uncyclopedia.

I noticed that Quantum field theory was just proclaimed as the Wikijunior New Book of the Quarter, and I would venture to guess that other interesting things are happening as well. If you could simplify that topic for 8 year olds, that would indeed be quite an interesting text! BTW, I'll give it a day in the sun before the real winner, Wikijunior Languages is put up instead.

If you see anything else that is worthy of a chuckle, please post it here, and then this will be archived to Wikibooks:Bad Jokes and Other Deleted Nonsense at some point in the near future. --Rob Horning 12:23, 1 April 2006 (UTC)

Ok, this was my idea :) I was updating BOTM, COTM and Wikijunior book of the quarter and I noticed that book called "Languages" won the vote, although it was not linked to the voting page and I could not find it using Wikibooks search. I came into idea that if I can't find any of books from the voting page, I would play a joke and make something funny. Of course, this is just for April 1st, but Wikijunior people should learn a lesson from this case and 1) give normal links at voting page 2) make all Wikijunior books easily available from Wikijunior main page and perhaps 3) instroduce a rational naming convention. I and Kernigh also noticed that this vote is not protected from sockpuppets as anyone can vote. There were cases of people having one edit - the vote. --Derbeth talk 15:50, 1 April 2006 (UTC)
Yeah, the standards perhaps should be improved to at least the 20 edit minimum. I think I'll make that change for the next round of voting that finishes in July. The reason why the book isn't linked to the page is because it hasn't been created yet! This is a vote to decide what the next book should be, not what the next one is that we are working on. A few Wikijunior books have been started outside of this process, but how they are going to be linked is currently up for debate at the moment. In the past, Wikijunior books created out of process were speedy deleted, which I felt was inappropriate as it was not really policy.
As far as a rational naming convention, they are independent Wikibooks, so according to WB:NP there should be a title of a book, which has always been Wikijunior xxx for the current set of books either under development or proposed if they have been created early. Are you suggesting something else? Wikijunior is not the name of the book, but rather the bookshelf. In this case I might support a move of Wikijunior to Wikibooks:Wikijunior, but I wouldn't make that move yet. Wikijunior is also being used as a project namespace, and there may be as valid if not more so reasons to start a formal Wikijunior namespace than was used for the Cookbook namespace. --Rob Horning 19:27, 1 April 2006 (UTC)
There was a rush earlier today to update the Main Page for April. If I recall, I was on IRC with Derbeth and Jguk. We managed to update BOTM and COTM, but I suddently had to disconnect from the Internet before anyone changed the Wikijunior new book. I would not have supported using Quantum field theory as the new book, but it might be a sign that Wikijunior is becoming more popular and successful. --Kernigh 19:57, 1 April 2006 (UTC)

Policy about books dealing with illegal activity

So far, the response from the Wikibooks community has been to attack individual Wikibooks, but no very consistant project-wide policy has yet been adopted. In almost every case when illegal activity is documented in a Wikibooks, it has come up on the VfD forum and has been eventually deleted as well. Another couple of Wikibook just came up today that brought this to my attention: AIM Password Cracking and Rip a karaoke cd

Together with the Manual of Crime, Drugs:Fact and Fiction, and Computer Hacking, this shows that content of this nature is going to be added to Wikibooks anyway, so we need to try and have some solid guidelines over what is acceptable and what is not. I don't think a simple disclaimer saying "don't try this at home if you don't want to be arrested" is going to be sufficient, or any similar statement. This has been discussed in other forums before, but it does need to be made clear. See also w:Hit Man: A Technical Manual for Independent Contractors for some other insight to content of this nature.

I don't support a general no reverse engineering policy, nor do I support a blanket ban on books that might be shown to encourage illegal activity. That is a policy that if used agressively can remove half of the books on this project and can be abused by rogue administrators. That is perhaps why this hasn't been covered or dealt with in the past.

How do you get rid of books that are a criminal's how-to book but keep books that are genuinely useful for security advise and protection? What role to disclaimers have in books like the AIM Password book have, and is that sufficient or should it be stronger? Do we want to have, even in a small corner of Wikibooks, an equivalant of Paladin Press? If not, why not, and what policies should be in place to make sure that doesn't happen? If we should have a "bookshelf" of this sort of content, how do we keep it under control and avoid liability problems for Wikibooks contributors? --Rob Horning 13:21, 4 April 2006 (UTC)

Please explain to me why it it is appropriate to "get rid of books that are a criminal's how-to book but keep books that are genuinely useful." This cannot be done while maintaining a neutral point of view. Why not have a Manual of Crime? Any information can be misused. The censorship of information should not be the answer to the problem of misuse. Who's law does wikibooks follow? This is very serious problem... I believe I have the answer to all our concerns. I propose a Ministry of Truth (Minitrue for short) to set legal standards and to oversee the production of wikibooks so that they may always be harmonious and neutral, this should prove to be a doubleplusgood thing.--Hapa 20:44, 4 April 2006 (UTC)

As far as the Manual of Crime is concerned, it was a Wikibook that had many people participating in its development and was brought up on both the Votes for deletion page and the Votes for undeletion page. All told the main module had over 167 different edits and at least 4 different attempts to recreate the content and 15 sub-modules involved, so this has been a rather contentious issue here on Wikibooks. Along the way even Jimbo himself was brought into the discussion (he discouraged the content, but was not going to personally get involved) and the eventual decision was to remove the content. Surprisingly I stayed quite on this issue myself. I bring this book up precisely because of the fact it was a large Wikibook and involved multiple contributors, and it didn't die easily here on Wikibooks either.
This issue is a far cry from the Ministry of Truth, like the Foreign Minister of Iraq claiming that the Iraqis were invading New York City (in 2002) only to discover a U.S. Soldier walking into his studio in the heart of Bagdad, and how his credibility was shot to pieces. Yes, I've read 1984, but that is not what we are talking about here. This is discussing how to break laws of varying degrees, and a strong concern that the main focus of Wikibooks is about writing textbooks for educational purposes. Having Wikibooks famous for being a modern alternative to Palidin Press is going to, at the moment, seriously detract from our ultimate goal of providing serious textbooks to educational institutions. I have long been an advocate for the idea that Wikibooks is more than just textbooks, and there are a number of books here that are not strictly about teaching a class at a formal educational institution. Still, I am suggesting that there is potentially a place for some of this content, and that a line needs to be drawn from the blatant advocation of illegal activity.
Mind you, I didn't delete Rip a karaoke cd either, but brought up some strong concerns in the discussion page and even brought up some issues on your user page. Thank you for addressing some of those issues, and I think we can come to a compromise on what you have written. Other participants at Wikibooks are going to be reviewing what you wrote as well, and they will come to their own conclusion. This whole discussion is about the general policy and perhaps even where that policy change should take place. Another discussion about this issue (I had to do some serious digging to find it) took place here: Wikibooks talk:Policy/Vote/Archive 1#A directly enumerated WikiBooks policy Other subsequent discussion also covered some of these issues.
When this issue was brought up earlier, it really didn't come to a conclusion, and the issue has been swept under the rug. I'm hoping here that perhaps some other contributors to Wikibooks might be interested in resolving this issue and helping to come up with some sort of policy statement about this sort of content. Or at least to get the current mindset of contributors to Wikibooks about this topic. --Rob Horning 00:12, 5 April 2006 (UTC)

Currently, it seems that a "how to rape" guide is out-of-scope for Wikibooks, but a "how to prevent rape" guide is in scope. (For those of you who recall the now-deleted Wikibooks Manual Of Crime, I refer to a generic "how to rape" guide, not the particular guide from the MOC.)

My problem with "how to rape" is that I would perceive as a soapbox for the promotion of crime. Then certainly "how to prevent rape" is a soapbox for the prevention of crime, and Guide to X11 is a soapbox for the usage of the X Window System. This is a reference not to the policy of neutrality of point of view, but to Wikibooks:What is Wikibooks.

In particular, this policy contains too much Enwikipediathink, because it is among our earliest policies, and most of the Wikibookians at that time came from Wikipedia. The policy is actually a derivative work of w:Wikipedia:Wikipedia is not. It does not work well on Wikibooks, because Wikibooks is not an encyclopedia. Rules like "Wikibooks is not for developing new Wikimedia projects" and "Wikibooks is not a general repository for nonfiction works" do not ban anything specifically. "Wikibooks is not a free wiki host or webspace provider" is misleading because Wikibooks is a free wiki host and webspace provider, even though this provision is not for personal pages. "Wikibooks is not a place to publish original works" is an unfortunate contraction of "original works of fiction or literature", because in fact each Wikibook is an original work, though it is not an original work of fiction. In fact each Wikibook is an original work of literature, so that is another problem. "Wikibooks is not censored for the protection of minors" was hastily copied from Wikipedia (in late 2005, I think) and has its own bias because it assumes that older persons do not require any protection from offensive content.

Actually, Wikibooks:What is Wikibooks remains the doubleplusgood policy at Wikibooks. It is a good attempt at describing the scope of the existing contents at Wikibooks. However, users keep adding irrelevant pages like The Storyteller by Martha Whittington. The ultimate effect is that Wikibooks is good for new users who join to work on existing books, but bad for new users who join to start new books. In my case, I worked on Guide to Unix before starting a similar Guide to X11. Thus, I propose to overhual Wikibooks:What is Wikibooks. --Kernigh 00:19, 5 April 2006 (UTC)

We need a "top shelf"! Books with adult content should be permissible except where they violate a legal concept of incitement.
If I were to write "a U235 bomb is much easier to construct than a plutonium device because it can be made from a sphere with a hole drilled that can receive a large cylindrical plug of uranium that can simply be dropped into place" I have merely disseminated neutral information. If, after the above, I write "the uranium storage facility at Alma Ata is isolated, patrolled by two guards and currently has a faulty telephone connection to the local police station" I am inciting terrorist behaviour.
Perhaps the simplest way out of this problem is to create an "Adult Wikibooks" that activates child protection on Firewalls etc. and which can contain any book that would be permissible in the European Union - the EU being literate, secular and liberal and yet not a global superpower. RobinH 09:11, 5 April 2006 (UTC)
This is something that may have some very strong merit. The Open Directory Project has precisely this sort of "walled off" area that is not linked to the main page and has an explict policy that other areas of the project can't link into the adult section (although it is considered acceptable to go the other way). For the not so faint of heart and those that can handle genuine adult web content, here is the link: http://dmoz.org/Adult
Don't say I didn't warn you. That is genuine adult-only content there. Although it is not explictly stated anywhere on any Wikimedia project, pornography has long been forbidden from Wikimedia projects and was one of the motivations to remove the Naturism Wikibook. It really takes a special kind of editor to wade through most of the raw garbage that ends up being called "adult-only" and to try to come to terms with enforcing policies and having some basic content standards but yet permit this sort of content. We have been lucky in many ways because writing a Wikibook really is very hard work, and most adult-only content is usually excluded from Wikibooks simply because it violates other Wikibooks policies, such as being a copyright violation, being a work of fiction, original research, or NPOV issues. The Naturism book was unusual because it passed all of those restrictions but it failed the Jimbo test... Jimbo didn't like it. It also had problems because some of the photos depicted what could be arguably child pornography.
We certainly don't want to allow anybody being able to go from Wikijunior to some adult-only content with just a few easy steps. I'm also questioning the need for this sort of seperation, but it at least is a reasonable and rational proposal. In this regard, I would almost prefer a seperate Wikicity (Wikia project now?) to allow people to set up their own policies in an adult-only content environment. I highly doubt you will get board approval for an adult-only Wikimedia project. --Rob Horning 13:53, 5 April 2006 (UTC)
Why not create an "Mature Minds Only" sort of tag, <MMO> which could be used to mark controversial content. Some sort of firewall could be setup to protect those who would not, or should not see such content. it would be of like putting the Playboys behind the counter instead of in the candy aisle. User:RobinH said "EU being literate, secular and liberal and yet not a global superpower." That doesn't seem to be very NPoV. Don't underestimate the illiterate, religious, conservative super powers. The fact that the EU may be (arguably) literate, secular, liberal, and a minor global power, does not automatically give their censors superior judgment. I don't think that our personal biases should be used for the basis of creating policy.--Hapa 20:09, 5 April 2006 (UTC)
I don't see how banning the advocation of illegal activity is necessarily a major point of contention. I guess it is for some people who feel that you should be free to say anything and everything. As mentioned on the WB:WIN talk page, the How to Rape book is discouraged because of the fact it does encourage breaking a law that is usually described as a felony in most legal juristictions around the world. Some kinds of activities are permitted in some countries and not in others, like some of the illicit drug usage, but even here if you are writing on how to evade law enforcement when doing that activity in places where it is illegal, it should be put on the list of banned types of content. This shouldn't be something difficult to understand, nor something that can easily be abused by an administrator, and is a clear line that IMHO is something that people should not cross on this project. That in many cases all that is needed is to clean up the content to avoid the out right advocacy of breaking laws, there can be some content that is so blatant on this issue that it would simply have to be deleted. We live in a society of laws, and those laws are necessary for us to even have this project at all.
As for other content that is meant for mature audiences, creating the firewall is going to be harder than you might think. If you have a link on mature content that goes to a Wikijunior module, it is really only two clicks away for a younger child to get there via "What links here". The only real way I can see you doing a proper firewall is to put it on a completely different domain and project. And that brings up the whole issue all over again over what sorts of content would be put onto the "mature" domain and what would be kept here. A seperate bookshelf for mature content is not going to be sufficient.
I want to seperate the discussion, however, between allowing mature content and those books that advocate breaking laws. Deciding wheither to allow adult-only content on Wikibooks is something that can be decided seperately and independently, as you can have some content that is not intended for use by children but is not advocating illegal activity, and there is some content that doesn't matter if children see it other than the fact that it encourages you to break various laws. Like ripping CD-ROMs in violation of the DCMA and how to avoid getting caught sharing the music on P2P networks. --Rob Horning 02:21, 6 April 2006 (UTC)
To follow your lead, limiting the discussion to illegal activity with pornography excluded, the real problem is "who's laws". I mentioned the EU earlier because it is a loose liason of states so, for instance, anti-terrorist laws are not universal within the EU. But as a contributor pointed out, people from other places might take offence at EU laws being the benchmark. So where is the body of law that defines the content of a book as illegal? Many Wikibooks are probably already illegal in the context of Chinese or Byelorussian law. There are UN guides to what is generally acceptable (ie: what violates fundamental rights etc.) but we would need a full legal apparatus to interpret these.
Incidently, as a European, I find sex less offensive than violence so Jimbo's imposition of North American mores seems a little strange.
This whole issue seems appallingly difficult. It seems wrong to ban a book just because it irritates a particular culture (but is a book on cartoons of Mohammed wrong?). The best we can do is create somewhere where we can put things that are genuinely doubtful, whether it is Naturism or terrorism. But where can we put these items? RobinH 14:20, 8 April 2006 (UTC)
I found the cartoons about Mohammed to be incredibly funny. But on to other matters... Yeah, this is a difficult issue, and a veiled critique of my admin skills was made on Foundation-l when I brought this issue up there. I was just trying to get some input from other admins about how they dealt with this kind of content on their own projects outside of Wikibooks. Instead, they came here to Wikibooks, marked up various books for VfDs or speedy deletes, and have chosen to help do the culling themselves. That is not going to deal with this issue in the future, which was exactly my point. Jimbo should __**NOT**__ have to come here to Wikibooks and help decide each and every case. With over 700 Wikibooks and a rate of growth of about 2 realistic new Wikibooks every day, there is no way a single individual can possibly keep up with this and do the other things Jimbo has to do. Indeed I can't even keep up with the growth of Wikibooks by myself, nor should any individual be expected to.
As far as what laws to follow, I think it is more what I said on the A guide to cheating during tests and examinations VfD that should apply: If you feel compelled to need a disclaimer suggesting that the content is for research purposes only, you might as well have considered that you just put a NPOV tag on the page instead. Indeed, I'm going to do exactly that from now on when I see disclaimers like this, but that is a personal policy and not a general project policy. If you can't write a book in a way that you would be safe from prosecution or a lawsuit without the disclaimer, then it really shouldn't be in Wikibooks in the first place. How about this as a general policy? --Rob Horning 15:50, 8 April 2006 (UTC)

Proposal for an Editorial Board

I have put forward a policy proposal for an Editorial Board for Wikibooks to oversee policies, guidelines and dispute resolution. See:

Editorial board

RobinH 11:32, 5 April 2006 (UTC)

We really don't need this yet... if ever. One of the key things about Wikimedia projects is that we are free from the traditional heirarchy of things like this, and we do have of sorts a de-facto "Editorial Board" anyway in terms of a group of "moderators" that have been elected to help smooth things over try to keep the peace. Or a group of people who are interested in working with policies and help to make changes to those policies when things aren't working out, such as what has been said frequently here on Wikibooks.
One of the problems that happens when you get into a strong heirarchy situation is that you also get into the situation where a small select handful of people start to make huge changes, and there is no avenue for appeal. It also drives large groups away and if you are not careful it can collapse the whole project.
Wikibooks and other Wikimedia projects are experiments in pure democracy, where your influence is directly proportional to your involvement. In addition, there really is no restriction as to who can achieve that "status" in terms of who can work on the policies and help set the tone and direction of Wikibooks. Any active contributor can get involved and help out.
There might be a point about setting up an "arbitration committee" that can help to independently resolve disputes. I would prefer the term "moderation committee" that seeks to find a resolution between parties and not necessarily impose a verdict or ruling, such as the common law AbCom that is currently on Wikipedia. The big concern I would have about setting something like this up is to make it large enough so you don't have a cult of personality controlling the whole project. The Wikipedia committee in this regard was setup more as a delegation of authority from Jimbo so he wouldn't have to deal with the day to day affairs of Wikipedia. Jimbo has come into Wikibooks on occasion to resolve problems here, but he can't possibly keep up with all of the policy changes that have occured on not just on Wikibooks but all of the other projects as well. Or the "legislative history" over why each of the policies were established. My fear would be that if you set up a larger arbitration board, the first major dispute that would have to be resolved would be between members of that committee, since it is made up of active Wikibookians.
There are avenues to help police and work out most areas of conflict on Wikibooks. None of them are perfect and all of them have been questioned regarding their effectiveness. The current most active dispute resolution forum is Wikibooks:Votes for deletion. An arbitration board would be completely useless in this situation as anybody who really has an opinion on the matter usually raises their voice anyway. There have been some very tough situations where there are clearly two different schools of philosophy to keep or remove content. An ArbCom action on the VfD forum would be strong arm tactics and simply not appropriate behavior for anybody on such a committee. And again it would likly involve members of the committee anyway in terms of who would have started the VfD and other members having a different opinion on what to do with the content.
The other significant role for an arbitration board is over editorial conflict on actual content. Wikibooks tends to take things at a slightly slower pace than the other Wikimedia projects, in part because of how difficult it is to simply write a book. The number of participants on any given Wikibook is also low enough (usually) that any disagreement over content can usually be resolved through the discussion pages alone. Far more often books are simply abandoned and all you have is somebody coming in and perhaps giving the book a new direction, but nobody really cares because the original contributors are long gone.
One other huge thing on this proposed Editorial board that may be from a misunderstanding of the role of Administrators here on Wikibooks. Yeah, administrators seem to have some "stripes" on their shoulder in the sense that they can do a few more things than other users. But an admin is just another contributor and their opinion should not really hold any more weight than any other Wikibookian, other than they may be slightly more familiar with the already codified set of policies. To explictly codify an arrangement that gives extra privileges to administrators when none are needed is going to cause additional problems. On the other hand, if you set up such an editorial board that restricts membership so that no more than one or two administrators can serve on it, with the potential that all of the members of this committee could be non-administrators... that may be something to look into. On the other hand, we need more admins here on Wikibooks to help with the project cleanup and to help moderate each of us here who are admins. I'm not prepared to block somebody from becoming an admin simply because they are serving on an editorial board. --Rob Horning 13:34, 5 April 2006 (UTC)
I can see that you have thought carefully about this issue and perhaps, in the light of your comments, my proposal is too broad. I started the proposal after looking at Wikibooks:Dispute resolution. It worried me that there seems to be no official process for dispute resolution. In Wikibooks there must be a system for saving people from bullying, either personal or through disruption of their creative work. You wrote:
"There might be a point about setting up an "arbitration committee" that can help to independently resolve disputes. I would prefer the term "moderation committee" that seeks to find a resolution between parties and not necessarily impose a verdict or ruling, such as the common law ArbCom that is currently on Wikipedia."
by late post user:fabartus adds: recommend you keep same names, your 'moderation committee' sounds like wikipedia's mediation committees, and are a step below and before the arbitration committee.
We both seem to agree that there should be a moderation committee or editorial board. Where we differ is in powers of sanction. If we take some quotes from recent arbitrations at Wikipedia it can be seen that reason alone might fail:
"I have said I believe he suffers from a mental disorder because I think his behavior is only explained with that."
"I would like to ask the Committee to review the conduct of Messhermit. He seems to bear a personal grudge against me, wikistalking mi edits & accusing me of being an Ecuadorian POV-pusher bent on selling biased Ecuadorian propaganda"
This level of trouble does not seem to have hit Wikibooks as yet but I think we should have a process in place to deal with it before it happens. My concern is that a problem will arise (such as those at Wikipedia) that requires arbitration. It will then become apparent that we need a moderation committee or editorial board but the election will then be about the case in hand and will be heavily influenced by those who are involved in the case and whose behaviour is dubious.
I have changed the policy proposal to take account of some of your concerns about it being too broad and have removed any reference to promoting Wikibooks or to admin/user composition - see: Wikibooks:Editorial board. As you have pointed out, the frequency of problems at Wikibooks is fortunately quite low so a single Board could provide the place of final appeal for decisions under any policy. RobinH 10:49, 6 April 2006 (UTC)
In this regard I wish the stewards would take on a larger role in helping to resolve project disputes as a sort of "circuit court" of moderators/arbitrators for various Wikimedia projects. In the "old west" of the USA during the frontier days, a judge would travel from town to town on a "circuit", and come by only every three months to hear what local issues needed to be resolved. The town couldn't afford to keep a full-time judge, so sometimes as many as 30-40 towns would all share the same judge, generally a retired senator or somebody that was respected in that part of the country. Something like this can and should be available for all Wikimedia projects, as certainly a forum for dispute resolution where a 3rd party can review what is going on and impose sanctions if necessary. And stewards do have access to all administrator functions including user blocks, page deletions/undeletions, and desysoping abilities. In short, they in theory could act and give teeth to their decisions as well, as a judge should be able to. Having a general Wikimedia group to do this would remove the necessity of having to go through the politics of setting up a committee like this locally until there is enough activity going to the general arbitrators that an additional level of appeals would be useful. I just don't want to "sit" on an arbitration committe and not been used for a couple of years but still have to campaign for getting the seat. --Rob Horning 13:50, 6 April 2006 (UTC)
I haven't heard of Wikibooks stewards. Do you have any links? Certainly an ad hoc combination of stewards could substitute for an editorial board. I like this idea, it would be less formal. Stewards could be appointed permanently and only be removed for extended absence or misbehaviour. But we do need something vaguely formal, such as an ad hoc committe of stewards, if policies are to be enforceable. I am particularly concerned about bullying and edit wars, these will happen as Wikibooks expands and we need something in place now. RobinH 11:16, 7 April 2006 (UTC)
The Stewards are not just for Wikibooks, but for all Wikimedia projects. They are elected by Wikimedia users at large, and are to be general guardians over all Wikimedia projects. They mainly perform tasks like grant checkuser privileges and creating administrators and bureaucrats on projects that have smaller communities. It is encouraged for stewards to also be multi-lingual, but not all of them are. Certainly speaking English is not a critical requirement, although it appears as though all current stewards currently do. Current steward policies are not directed toward being a global arbitration committee, but rather to help projects create their own communities instead. Some of this is just a vision of what they really might be all about, but this is a group of people to draw from that are highly respected Wikimedia user. --Rob Horning 13:19, 7 April 2006 (UTC)
The stewards are quite general. What about allowing administrators in wikibooks to form the ad hoc committee discussed above? (ie: the committee would be any 3 or 5 administrators who are available). This would provide a formal enforcement apparatus for policies which could be modified later, for instance when Wikibooks becomes much larger or problems arise. My concern is that there is no formal apparatus for resolving problems at present. Our books represent a substantial effort and it is easy to foresee wrecking disputes in areas such as evolutionary biology, national histories etc. in the near future, as Wikibooks becomes better known. RobinH 15:04, 7 April 2006 (UTC)

One key problem with a formal policy on resolving disputes is that it encourages people to use it to escalate minor disputes to the highest level possible. That's a key problem WP has faced - and it usually involves coming to conclusions that most favour those who like to engage in disputes and argue their cases rather than make good positive contributions to WP. At present the highest level anyone can bring a dispute to is the Staff Lounge to allow there to be wider discussion. Ultimately, I suppose one of the admins could choose to ban a disruptive user, but I doubt that would happen unless there was clear community consensus for it. In essence, this is not a problem that has happened in WB, and it does not seem worthwhile instituting a whole new bureaucracy to deal with a non-existent problem. Admittedly we could go for a small-scale addition to our approach to state that in the event of a dispute, a steward may be asked to intervene in a dispute that has not been resolved after community discussion to propose a way forward (with possibly the threat of blocks for parties not following the approach suggested by the steward), but that would be dependent on getting agreement on meta to use stewards that way, Jguk 05:57, 8 April 2006 (UTC)

OK, I am vaguely persuaded that all that is needed is a fall-back, ad hoc committee that can intervene if policies are not respected (see below). RobinH 10:57, 8 April 2006 (UTC)

A Quasi-Veteren Perspective (from WikiP)

Interjection by newly signed up user:fabartus: I don't know yet whether I'll be a contributor over here in WikiBooks, but I have been directly involved in a number of the wild west shootouts (ahem) over at wikipedia as an unofficial mediator, and want to put forth a few points starting with noting that some of the above commentary is somewhat naive and ill-informed.

  1. If the wildwest scenario had any large credence, we'd never get anything done over there. With a million plus topics, and thousands of editors there is just simply statistically more likelihood that strong willed individuals will clash in any number of ways.
  2. Now that I've issued that caveat, and framed the larger context, let me add that I've also been dismayed at times like this matter which sucked up endless Man-hours at the uncheckable behaviour of (mostly just) one unqualified and inordinately stubborn editor (There were a few others on the other Nationalistic side as well).
    1. Edit wars over there are usually POV oriented, not factual disputations.
    2. IMHO, they most often typically involve individuals who are not yet graduates of anything much, generally immature (juveniles) or excessively strong willed to other causes (dementia?), and I don't see such people as being likely to even try to contribute here, except as vandals <G>. I'll assume your admins can nip that! (In the second link following, an admin of long experience places his interpretation on a different causal factor rebutting me in the July 7th link following. Apologies for waxing literary in the introduction, but that page still contains good food for thought, as the intro goes in particular to address problematic (causal) foundation philosophies.)
    3. Mature persons in erudite disputes tend to also be politically POV, s.a disputes over whether this or that heinous alleged event can be documented (var. genocides) or carry overs from differing academic battles in fuzzy subjects like the humanities s.a. Democratic Peace Theory (note the disputation template is still there 8 months since I was asked in to look at it!) This is your more likely danger over here, I would think. You'll never get the gross numbers of contributors here, but are probably particularly susceptible to academics pushing a pet viewpoint rather than the commonly held view in the field.
    4. Consequently, I've given the matter a lot of thought. I'd suggested (informally through some back channel posting) at one point (July 7th, 2005, in fact) that the hot disputes be team mediated by 7 to 10 admins geographically dispersed in time zones.
    5. These would be more concrete and official than the Ad Hoc idea being kicked around here. In concept the idea was that any three (or four) can act as a Summary court in hot (usually nationalistically or philosophically driven) POV Flame wars to either allow an proposed edit or disallow an edit while locking down the article to any edits not so authorized. (I don't know enough about your typical article evolution to know, but suspect that the characteristic one or two disputed sentence or phrase revert-revert-revert-revert battles over there are far less likely here.)
    6. The arbitrary 'pool' number of seven to ten (or better perhaps eleven) is to give geographic dispersal so that a quorum could be reached around the clock so as to allow the articles to evolve. I'd stick with the odd numbers to allow a supermajority vote on matters splitting particularly fine hairs, such as one subgroup of the mediation team is polarized against another subgroups actions or stance. The super-committee can then act decisively if all members are required to cast a definitive binary vote, which would set the editorial content standard on that disputed point thereafter. Such anointed findings, could always review and revote on the matter and reverse themselves. Alternatively, another layer of appeal can be added within the teams system.
    7. In sum, in practice the team of admins (Fire Brigades <G>) would make up just one of many combined editorial boards (moderators) and First level mediation committee, without the danger of a cult of personality of an overall editorial board setting all policy (btw- That's in part, the job delegated to the ArbCom by user:Jimbo over there.)
    8. To point out the obvious extension, on topical matters of expertise, the concept could be adapted to have content teams as the editorial board of such and such a topic, all of whom must have acceptable credentials to some hypothetical credentials committee and process. This would of course be against foundation issues, which I believe must eventually be made more pragmatic and allow such authoritarian influences to maintain credibility with the public at large, and in particular with academia. (My teens are forbidden to use Wikipedia as a source because of the casual open edit policy and notorious vandalisms, inaccuracies, et. al. This will improve some as the new cite and footnoting measures gain greater implementation, but in my personal viewpoint, the locking of mature articles there should be the de facto standard, one that is long overdue.

Hope this helps your needs. 'scuse the signature, some of the processing over here is different. Fabartus//[[<font color="green">User talk:Fabartus</font>]] 20:38, 8 April 2006 (UTC)

I refactored these next two sections up and made them subsections to keep the thread together. I'd also like to direct the attention of all to Some suggestions by user:Karmafist on wikipedia reform, as they should be considered here as well. Fabartus//[[<font color="green">User talk:Fabartus</font>]] 21:55, 8 April 2006 (UTC)

One thing that does need to be noted about a difference between Wikibooks and Wikipedia is that the user base is quite a bit smaller here. And much more so here than on Wikipedia, the users tend to fracture into even smaller groups of what are essentially independent projects in their own right. Most of the policy discussions lately have been over what new Wikibooks or new projects would be permitted or not, and otherwise with few exceptions there hasn't been a drag-out fight over content (yet). That is actually one of the major appeals that I have about working on Wikibooks as opposed to Wikipedia... where one person's opinion is not only valued, but even critical to the project, particularly people who actually do things here.
In terms of scale, Wikibooks is more like the very small town where we are still trying to flip a coin to determine who is going to be on the "town council", mainly chosen by those who simply show up and are willing to serve in that position at all. Big project solutions are going to simply overwhelm the users here, and add needless bureaucracy when it really isn't needed. This is precisely why I think that a more global approach to an arbitration committee that is organized on the Wikimedia Foundation level (multiple projects) would work much better, because you would get both the expertise as well as be able to help many smaller projects at the same time. Only when a particular Wikimedia projects gets to the size that you have many able volunteers to help serve on a formal policy board or to do other function do I think that a more formal organization is even needed.
I've heard the rule of 150 given as perhaps a good thing to point out here. This is the assumption that when you have a group of individuals that is less than 150 people that you are able to deal with one another on a personal level, and that just about everybody knows just about everybody else. When the count of individuals exceed that number, it becomes far too complex to keep track of everybody and to get to know all of the individuals involved. I would dare say that of even moderately active users here on Wikibooks, we are still less than 150 active individual users for the whole project. Some come in and others leave, but it is not really more than a few dozen. That does allow some informality that Wikipedia simply can't afford right now. Wikipedia has more than 150 active administrators alone.
It is interesting to note how governmental systems seem to grow from the grass roots on up, and seem to evolve as the number of individuals increase. In this regard it is useful to have a roadmap for what you eventually want to have the social organization look like when you get to these larger numbers. Indeed a successful organization of individuals is largely how they handle the transition phases when they start to outgrow one level of organization to deal with a bigger group of individuals. The other possible outcome is to splinter off and start independent groups. Indeed, Wikibooks is exactly what happened there, where a bunch of Wikipedia users were "kicked out" of the main Wikipedia projects to form a much smaller independent project. And for good or ill, that is now happening with Wikiversity as well. In a way, this is a good safeguard to help maintain a community spirt, as it keeps the number of active individuals low enough for communication to occur. Wikibooks doesn't need something like the Signpost just to keep track of what is going on within the project, for instance.
I find it facinating how Wikipedia is dealing with the growth in the number of active users, and at some point in the future I think this is going to be something that will be of some significant importance. Mark my words here though, until the number of active users go above about 200 there really won't be the need to have all of these seperate committees and arbitration boards. When the number of active users gets to that point, it will not only be useful, but absolutely needed. I appreciate the discussion for that future date, but please don't try to impose anything on Wikibooks that this project isn't really prepared to deal with, or really needs right now. --Rob Horning 05:33, 9 April 2006 (UTC)
The "small town" model is very apposite. I have been persuaded that, for the moment, all we need is something ad hoc. If anything goes wrong, such as policies being ignored, rampant bullying etc. there should be something in place that can deal with it in a fair and open manner. I am very keen that the apparatus for dealing with problems should be in place before the problems arise (otherwise the trouble makers could specify and get control of the apparatus in a small community such as Wikibooks). RobinH 16:19, 9 April 2006 (UTC)

Three important policies - act now

Wikibooks is a pleasant and creative environment but I have peered into Wikipedia and feel strongly that we should prevent the sort of behaviour that occurs over there from happening here. Just look at the requests for arbitration page, its the Wild West out there! I believe that three simple policies will stop this sort of thing from happening here:

  • If edit wars are immediately taken off-line onto a special administration page until resolved the heat of the situation would be dissipated immediately. No one would win by edit warring, the only way forward would be discussion and compromise. See Editing disputes policy and add a comment.
  • We should stop personal attacks at an early stage so that the situation will never arise where two contributors go to war or seriously offend each other. See No personal attacks policy and cast a vote.
  • Policies on their own are not enforceable without some form of apparatus. After the discussions above I would like to propose that any 3 administrators can form an ad hoc enforcement committee that can deal with any policy enforcement issue. See Ad hoc administration committee

RobinH 10:55, 8 April 2006 (UTC)

No personal attacks policy The vote seems to be overwhelmingly in favour of this policy being an enforced policy.


This is in response to the entire section of SL, but breaking this comment across multiple subsections would put it in danger of not being seen. It does seem like a lot of the policy is "borrowed" from Wikipedia with the eventual intent to adopt the policies to WB, but this second part never went through. Rather than forming committees and boards and other stuff, the effort would be much more useful if it were directed into solidifying concrete policies on certain issues, which would solve 90% of the problems a board would otherwise have to discuss anyway.
To address a number of other points in arbitrary order:
  1. Rob Horning brings up some good points about the size and scope of Wikibooks currently - even with significant growth WB will still be a relatively small project and fairly self-managable. A committee at a Wikimedia-wide level to oversee disputes on several smaller projects would almost certainly be useful at this point, but I do see a downside in that such a board may not be familiar enough with the subtleties and "culture" of the individual projects, so the board should probably be made up of people from all of the projects (perhaps 2 or 3 from each project the board oversees).
  2. The idea of WB currently being a collection of little "projects" is fairly fitting, but it's a model that works - users get comfortable working within a project they have knowledge in, and then once familiar with the software and policy, expand their scope to other areas. This being said, the most likely locations for edit-wars and POV disputes would be WITHIN these projects, and quite possibly resolvable also within that scope. The most POV things I've seen on WB in my short history here have all been on discussion pages like VFD and Staff Lounge - which is exactly what you'd expect to see there anyway.
  3. This small project mentality could also work out to be beneficial in the future as the project grows - while site-wide contributors and moderators would not be able to keep track of and stay on a "personal" basis with all contributors, the mini-communities formed by people working on individual books or groups of books will serve to keep such an environment - which, as I've mentioned above, appears to be working well in "growing" useful contributors.
  4. As the site grows, inevitably so will vandalism and bot attacks. As discussed below, blocking certain vandal-popular proxies will help, but you'll also get some "bad apple" registered users, and keeping on top of this may increase in difficulty as the project grows. Scaling the staff with the size of the project becomes important here. Right now I feel that a few areas of the site are being neglected, especially in policy discussion. There wasn't even any talk on what defines a "stub" until I started a discussion during some cleanup efforts. (Starting to drift off-topic here, but I'll get to the main point soon.) Indeed, it seems that even the cleanup pages need cleanup, and IMO, there needs to be a policy drive of sorts to clearly define and update policy. This would not only include some of the proposed or incomplete official policies, but also include developing concrete definitions for certain terms (such as the Stub policy mentioned above), solid procedures for common tasks (merging/moving modules), and generally bringing some outdated prominent pages in line with the direction WB is currently going. --Xerol Oplan 09:51, 9 April 2006 (UTC)
I agree with the idea of a policy drive because the current set of policies is still in draft format. I also feel that the points that have been made about the small size of the Wikibooks community by Rob and others are valid - the Staff Lounge can deal with many issues. Perhaps we should collapse all the discussions here into another section on "Policy development". See Wikibooks:Policies and guidelines. RobinH 18:15, 9 April 2006 (UTC)
I would like to point out that there are some Wikimedia projects that seem to have a few overzealous administrators, especially when there is but one or two active admins on the project. Perhaps there are good intentions, but administrators can run amok with little room for review. This is especially difficult in situations that involve other cultural aspects like another language. I've recently seen somebody complain about the Hebrew Wikipedia, which is BTW a language Jimbo doesn't read or speak, so he can't go into that project to try and resolve these issues directly. i.e. Jimbo says.... doesn't apply really. People who are used to the Wikipedia culture on en.wikipedia try out these smaller projects and discover some very different policies, perhaps even "contrary" to what they thought were standards for Wikimedia projects in general. I would say that it is for these much smaller projects that the Wikimedia wide oversight committee ought to be in place, to perhaps give an avenue of appeal when the issue can't be resolved for whatever reason locally. If we can get this put together to help us out, it would have a general benefit for many other projects as well. --Rob Horning 15:25, 9 April 2006 (UTC)
The small scale of the project at present is leading to the question of whether enforcement should be applied through the Staff lounge or a committee. My own view is that some policies, such as No personal attacks policy should be obvious and need not bother the staff lounge. If a personal attack occurs the person under attack should ask the perpetrator to desist. If this does not work then the person attacked should contact an admin who should warn that "no personal attacks" is an enforced policy and warn that the policy will be enforced. If this fails then the admin should contact two other admins and they should vote on whether to enforce ie: suspend the offending user. Personal attacks are easily avoided and just plain nasty, if a person refuses to desist they deserve this type of rapid response.
It would be the same with Wikibooks:Editing_disputes policy. If there is a policy to take editing disputes on to a separate page that is not referenced in the book then it will be clear as daylight that the policy is being violated when someone reverts the actual book. Again, a no nonsense rapid response could occur and would be justified - why would someone revert the actual book if it were policy to take serious disputes to another page and they had been warned at least twice? RobinH 16:38, 9 April 2006 (UTC)

Partial Protection Policy

This issue was brought up earlier, but I'm suggesting that perhaps some basic guidelines over partial edit protection might be useful.

I'm suggesting that in areas where voting occurs, such as on the VfD page or the various "Book of the...." voting pages, that they be protected from anonymous edits. There is no need to have anonymous users (IMHO) to be able to edit this content, and they are more likely to mess things up than they are going to be able to fix them. The VfD page is debateable, but often users are commenting when they don't understand Wikibooks policies.

This is just a thought, and perhaps even premature. Still, any other comments would be appreciated if this might be a good idea. --Rob Horning 15:21, 8 April 2006 (UTC)

Seems a sensible measure to me. RobinH 15:35, 8 April 2006 (UTC)

Converting completed book to wikibook

I have a completed book in MS Word. It has images and tables. It is about 230 pages. I am in the process of converting it into HTML so that chapters and page numbers are linked and each page has pagination with a chapter. When I complete the HTML version, how do I convert the entire book in HTML to a wikibook? I did find a few HTML to Wiki converters. But they convert only one page at a time and it would be a tedious job to do it that way. I am planning to publish the book through wiki publishing too. Any help is appreciated.

I have used Word macros in the past - make a macro to put == or '' at the beginning and end of a line, click on a heading and press the macro keys. You could also try saving as HTML in Word then doing global changes of H1, /H1 tags etc. to Wiki markup in "view", "HTML source" then viewing the file and copying and pasting into Wikibooks. The Word document is an excellent starting position for using PDFCreator to make a PDF. 81.98.73.236 22:36, 5 April 2006 (UTC)
Do understand that all wikis are not the same. Wikibooks uses MediaWiki, so we have syntax like "== this ==" and "'''this'''", whereas some wikis use "!! this" and "**this**". MediaWiki grew from UseModWiki, which has an ancestor at very first WikiWikiWeb. WikiWikiWeb was intended for collaboration, not for high-end documenting publishing, which helps explain why Wikibooks lacks automatic converts. Thus, expect to do a lot of manual conversion.
That is bad, because I would like to export books from Wikibooks to something like Docbook or LaTeX. --Kernigh 03:34, 6 April 2006 (UTC)

Swedish wikibooks

Swedish Wikibook now no. 10 in the statistic. Please change the Wikibooks portal .
10 Swedish Svenska sv 512 2358 7150 13 231 2006-04-05 00:10:12 --81.234.119.136 18:17, 7 April 2006 (UTC)

By my reckoning, Swedish is 11th and Hebrew is 10th. I unilaterally increased the number of languages to 12, and added Swedish and Hebrew, which currently have more modules than Hungarian. However, I need messages translated into Swedish and Hebrew. See my post to textbook-l. --Kernigh 05:09, 8 April 2006 (UTC) (sysop)

Meta:WikiProject on open proxies

Comment from Kernigh: Recently, I flooded Special:Log/block by blocking several open proxies from the blacklist of the interwiki Meta:WikiProject on open proxies. These are IP addresses already blocked at Wikipedia, Wikisource, and Wiktionary from a blacklist at Meta.

An open proxy allows users to edit from a different IP address, thus evading bans; blocked vandals simply switch to a different proxy. Currently, open proxies are used mostly for vandalism, for example 192.165.166.4 and 200.122.153.250. I am told that recently, open proxies hit our sister project Wiktionary with large amounts of vandalism. Cspurrier took the lead and started blocking a few proxies from the long list. Recently, after chatting with Tawker in the #vandalism-en-wb IRC channel, I blocked some. (Unlike Cspurrier, I cannot block IPs on Wikinews or Meta.)

I want comments from Wikibookians concerning these three situations:

  • The current procedure is to have a page containing users who can verify proxies – eventually to be maintained as a protected page by a Meta sysop. These "verified users" will put open proxies on the blacklist, but will not provide details (such as whether it was a HTTP proxy, SOCKS proxy, service such as http://anonymous.org, or Tor exit node). Thus I wonder if there are any Wikibookians here who would prefer administrators to not use this blacklist.
  • Some of you might want to allow Tor users to edit Wikibooks. (Tor defends against "traffic analysis", so it is more useful than plain proxies that only hide your IP address, as anyone here can already create an account and hide their IP address.) I started trying Tor in April and have been able to edit both Wikibooks and Meta, but I plan to block Tor exit nodes if they appear on the blacklist. The reason for this is because Tor users have attacked Freenode IRC network, and have the potential to attack English Wikibooks. Unlike Freenode, we have no method of applying quick temporary bans to Tor users.
  • Most of the proxies on the blacklist remain unblocked, because the list is too long. Tawker is planning to obtain a bot that would block everything on the blacklist. I suggest that Tawker have a sysop bot account for this purpose. This would require a vote on WB:RFA. It would technically give Tawker, who has few edits, access to sysop functions, but I trust Tawker not to misuse them: Tawker is already a sysop at en.wiktionary and is doing well in an open RFA on en.wikipedia. Further, Tawker provides the tawkbot3 to #vandalism-en-wb. We could instead arrange to have a Wikibooks sysop to operate the bot, but I think it would be easier to have Tawker operate it.

--Kernigh 06:40, 8 April 2006 (UTC)

I will support every effort aimed at blocking open proxies and networks like Tor. --Derbeth talk 11:25, 8 April 2006 (UTC)
I support this idea as well, and am even willing to make it "official, enforced" policy. From what I understand, the IP blocks for editing don't stop you from creating a "registered user" account, so in theory you can still edit content with a blocked IP, just that you need to log in as a user. It has been debated on Foundation-l and other forums that anon users could be blocked entirely, or have some additional restrictions put on them that would help slow down some vandalism, such as blocking new page creation for anon users.
I have seen some positive contributions to Wikibooks by anon users, however, and I don't want to block them completely. --Rob Horning 14:25, 8 April 2006 (UTC)

No, that is not right. It should be documented better, but yes, IP blocks also block registered users at that IP. The block is against the user, not the IP. (I meant to write that "The block is against the IP, not the user." --Kernigh 04:17, 10 April 2006 (UTC)) For example, meta.wikimedia.org blocks some, but not all, Tor exit nodes. If I, as m:User:Kernigh, try to edit Meta from a blocked Tor exit node, then I am blocked. However, if I switch off Tor, or if Tor moves me to an unblocked Tor exit node, then I can immediately edit again. Thus these blocks will effect both anonymous and registered users.

In contrast, when a blocked user reads the wiki, that IP becomes blocked. I tested this by creating and blocking a User:Kernigh sockpuppet for two hours. --Kernigh 05:21, 9 April 2006 (UTC)

This is completely contrary to discussion that took place on Foundation-l, where there were some users who leveled some major complaints because they were being blocked due to their IP address falling onto dynamic IP addresses. They were clearly trusted users... even administrators. I think Anthere even got blocked once because of this (I need to check this to make sure). The developers apologized and the concensus of the discussion threads were to permit registered users to log in even if the IP addresses themselves were blocked, just because of this issue. If this has changed, this is a huge deal, and something that will even affect my own account. I use dynamic IP addresses myself right now from a public ISP, and potentially a vandal could be blocked and I subsequently get that IP address. Either that or something that needs to be brought up again on Bugzilla as something to fix. --Rob Horning 06:56, 9 April 2006 (UTC)

Here is a link to Bugzilla:550, and to a foundation-l thread that mentions it. --Kernigh 04:40, 10 April 2006 (UTC)

Developing A Universal Religion

I think this book should be transwiki'ed to wikisource (I shan't explain why here, as I'd like to let you make your own mind up). However, before doing this, I'd welcome comments for others, Jguk 21:32, 8 April 2006 (UTC)

This book was donated to Wikibooks by its author, User:David Hockey, with the intention that other users would edit it. The problem with putting this on Wikisource is the rule, Wikisource:What is Wikisource?, against material written by contributors to Wikisource. However, a proposed policy, Wikisource:What Wikisource includes might allow that in certain cases, but it still prohibits contributions where later content edits (not formatting edits are expected).
In the archived VFD, David H wrote, I sent the book to Wikibooks because I thought that it contained enough facts to be useful to those searching religions, and maybe interesting to those trying to understand why we have religions. (I am also sure that the book could be improved by edits!) Thus I believe that this book is outside the scope of the Wikisource project, and should not be transwikied to Wikisource. Still, the VFD did not yield consensus (and was distracted by allegations that there was a copyright violation), so there might be reasons to not have this book (and the three related books) at Wikibooks.
Jguk has recently done a lot of work to remove out-of-scope material from Wikibooks, and I hope that this user continues to identify things that need to be moved elsewhere. --Kernigh 05:13, 9 April 2006 (UTC) (also s:User:Kernigh)
Keep in mind that self-contributions to Wikisource are not permitted... of course this wouldn't necessrily be a self-contribution, would it? In this situation, you ought to get some Wikisource individuals to agree to help take it if it comes their way. BTW, this book was the subject of a VfD that ended inconclusively, although there were both delete and keep votes and some valid points for both points of view. This is a philosophy book, and the author is willing to let Wikibooks contributors help to change the content/merge/reorganize to improve what is here.
One other problem to keep in mind is that this book is actually broken up into several titles. I personally think they should be merged together into one single "volume", but that doesn't require a full VfD. See Thinking And Moral Problems, Religions And Their Source, and Purpose that really all go together with Developing A Universal Religion. There was a purpose for them being seperate volumes.
This book does bring up the issue about what to do with substantial contributions of material that is added to Wikibooks. Generally we try to generate content on the fly, and books that have "grown up" on Wikibooks are not considered for being transwikied to another projects with just a few exceptions. Content consisting of dozens or hundreds of pages that was already created and edited elsewhere before its inclusion into Wikibooks is obviously going to present some challenges. Should contributions this large be allowed on Wikibooks at all? Why or why not?
I think substantial contributions can be added to Wikibooks, provided GFDL licensing clearance is obtained, maintains NPOV guidelines, and the author is willing to let Wikibooks users have at it and rework the content to perhaps unrecognizable from the original material or even a very different (hopefully NPOV) viewpoint. Perhaps some guidelines on what major contributions like this can be added to Wikibooks should be made, and what an author using Wikibooks for publication of textbook-like material should be informed of for large contributions. --Rob Horning 06:44, 9 April 2006 (UTC)
I had the impression that Wikisource was intended for copies of material that existed with exactly the same content outside the Wiki (except for translations, source code, statistics and similar data) and that the point was to provide an easily accessible copy for reference purposes. Developing A Universal Religion no longer falls into that category because it has already been edited on Wikibooks so the hardcopy version that was or is available as a printed work is out of sync with the Wikibooks version. If this isn't what Wikisource is for then how does it differ from Wikibooks? Here is a quote from Wikisource: "New collaborative creations of fiction or non-fiction ("self-contributions") do not belong at Wikisource. This project is primarily for previously published works that have normally undergone some sort of peer-review, ..." (http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Wikisource:What_Wikisource_includes#Original_contributions). The proposal to transwiki Developing A Universal Religion seems to me to be one step toward proposing that any book that counts as complete should be transwikied there so that Wikibooks only contains work in progress. --kwhitefoot 12:28, 10 April 2006 (UTC)

CheckUser vote dead

After taking a look at Wikibooks:Vandalism in progress I came into opinion that we really need users with CheckUsers rights. There are regular cases of registered vandals. Unfortunately, voting at RFA has been inactive for a long time and we still lack about 10 votes to finish it. I ask all users who haven't seen it to take a look at explanations provided there and think about adding their vote. Please remember that only if both candidates get support the vote ends with acceptation. --Derbeth talk 10:44, 9 April 2006 (UTC)

It is notable that some stewards are suggesting that you don't need the total number of affirmative votes if you have a smaller project. The minimum number of votes was for larger projects to put some sort of threshold on who could get the "privilege" of doing a check user scan.
From my viewpoint, I think this is over-paranoia at what should have been from the start a power given either directly to bureaucrats or admins. Either administrators are trusted users and therefore should be able to be trusted with this apparently sensitive information, or they are not and the whole concept of administrators is dead in the water, with all admins being desysoped effectively.
And what is really revealed if you do a checkuser scan of an account? You get the IP address. Big deal! Really, I think this much ado over nothing. If you were worried about government action against you, they can get your IP address without the assistance of the Wikimedia Foundation if necessary. And your IP address is logged in on every website that you visit, including google, amazon.com, or anything else that you use on the internet. It is not like this is a national ID number that can be used to mess over your credit rating or get you enlisted in the military service of some country.
The whole point about having this is to deal with the occasional sock puppet problems when doing a vote, and to perhaps take additional measures against vandals who seem to do persistant damage. In both of these cases, you have a powerful tool to help combat this sort of damage but it is being denied from those who really need to use it. And the contrary issue of abuse is comparatively insignificant.
The worst abuse I can see happening with this is outright publication of IP addresses of all users on the project where somebody has checkuser privileges, with a trace or reverse DNS to reveal exactly what ISP you are using and perhaps where you made the edit from. It still reveals absolutely no personal information of any sort at all that can be traced to an individual without many additional records, most of which you would have to go through government procedures like getting a supenoa or search warrent to obtain that information. Again, if you are paranoid about the government knowing what you are doing on-line, you simply shouldn't be using a private connection from your home or someplace that links the computer usage directly to you. Disclosing or not disclosing this information is not going to make a bit of difference. --Rob Horning 15:02, 9 April 2006 (UTC)
I need to add that I have made a formal request on meta for having a Steward to make a pronoucement over this issue. I admit that this is forcing the hands of the Stewards to make a political statement, as clearly the attitude seems to be right now that only Wikipedia can have anybody with Check User rights. This is really silly, and IMHO is something that needs to change. The problem is, how do you make the policy change? There is no procedure to even bring up a policy change for things like this, and the stewards don't seem to give any respect to local policy procedures regarding Check User right granting. --Rob Horning 16:49, 10 April 2006 (UTC)

Speedy deletion of Stubs

This is an issue that has to be decided soon, or there will be no stubs to discuss. User:Jguk is deleting a whole bunch of Wikibooks that are stubs. Perhaps this is a good idea, but this is not a part of Wikibooks:Deletion policy#Speedy deletions and I'm raising a stink right now to complain about this. Far too much has been deleted lately and IMHO if this keeps up we might as well just nuke the whole project like has happened to the French Wikiquote. OK, I'm pissed, and I've warned this user on his talk page.

Deletion is something that is reserved for trusted users, and I would agree with many of the decisions that Jguk has been making are pretty good, especially the recent addition to this policy of deleting "A redirect where it is unlikely that anyone will inadventently search for a page under that name." I think a few too many of these have even been deleted, but those are easy to restore if you think they really do belong. BTW, this policy was added to the deletion policy without vote or really any conclusive discussion, and huge amounts of content on Wikibooks has been deleted due to this "new" policy. For so much activity based on a self-written policy, that is quite dangerous.

As far as deleting "permanent stubs", I refer to Wikibooks talk:Stub#Stub Deletion Policy of which there are only two comments at all about the idea. This should not be the basis for a policy change here on Wikibooks. There are some postive things that can come from having stubs... even ones that are seemingly hopeless to languish forever. See Wikibooks:Stub for the current philosophy (not policy) on the subject. The policy is to keep them here on Wikibooks, and edit them if you don't like it. Very trivial stubs that are just a few sentances may be deleted, but still assume good faith where possible.

I think it is reasonable to have a debate over what to do about larger stubs that still don't seem to show any progress to becoming a substantial Wikibook. If you think these need to be deleted at the moment, nominate them for a VfD where they can be decided individually. Perhaps a change of policy can be enacted to clean out some of the additional cruft that has been building up over the past few years, but that should be done through community concensus, not just the actions of a single user and his own opinion. --Rob Horning 15:55, 10 April 2006 (UTC)

Under no circumstance should a stub be put up for a speedy deletion. A VFD, if there is very little to build off of and no activity, is perfectly fine. But making them speedy is a mistake. Bringing up a VFD publicizes these books. Quite frequently, the end result is not a deletion but 3 or 4 people see the VFD and take over the book. I've put several stubs up for VFD, and later reversed my decision as people started contributing to it again due to the new publicity. I think this is a far better method- give those books a last chance. --Gabe Sechan 16:35, 10 April 2006 (UTC)

I do take deletion seriously, and consider carefully what merits there are in retaining the text versus the benefits of tidying WB up that little bit more - and I do consider using the {{delete}} tag, and VfD where I am not sure. On occasions, no doubt others may come to different conclusions, but that's no problem - it's all logged and I'm happy to restore articles on request and move them to VfD if I am not persuaded they will grow.

Many of the permastubs I have removed are mere outlines of books put together by users who only edited the site on one day many months, or in many cases, years ago. Often these are about arcane issues, and quite frankly (1) they will never be books; (2) in the (unlikely) circumstance that someone now wanted to develop a book on that subject, the value in starting from what was already there is negligible. To my mind, for these entries, there is negligible chance of them avoiding VfD. However, if I find more, let me assure you I will add them to VfD - it may mean that VfD gets much larger, but it will allow for more discussion.

There are many orphaned incomplete one-pagers that I have deliberately left for now - including all those that could be developed into sections for a general "how-to" book, as well as those that have subject areas similar to existing books and may (although more likely may not) prove to be worth merging. The larger permastubs (except those unambiguously falling outside WB's remit - eg should be on and already on wikisource), I have left untouched.

Looking at the broader picture - I think it is important that Wikibooks encourages complete books rather than short stubs. It takes a lot of work to complete a book, and most people are not willing to put in that level of effort - there are many "false starts". Some of the larger stubs can, I believe, usefully be grouped together to give a coherent book - the Cookbook is one example of this, Bartending (once fully tidied up) will be another such example. The "How-to" bookshelf could, and should, be transferred in format so that it is a coherent Book in its own right, to which little pieces of information can easily be added. Many of the stubs do share certain themes, and grouping them thematically into several wholes will be beneficial - it will also set a good example to other (future) editors. Jguk 17:12, 10 April 2006 (UTC)

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