Wikibooks:Reading room/Archive 36

From Wikibooks, the open-content textbooks collection

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

Fair Use issue

I uploaded a file to wikibooks that I found on en:wikipedia en:Image:Frangelico.jpg where it had a non-free fair use licence. I read wikibooks policy and non-free fair use is permitted, however, two issues: Firstly, the template {{Non-free fair use in|Frangelico}} doesn't work in wikibooks. Second issue - the artwork on the bottle, which is copyright, may be reproduced in an article about a product but the uploader got it from a japanese site, he didn't make it himself. Seems to me, it is a violation of the site's copyright and therefore in't fair use. Wadda ya think? Mike Hayes 17:47, 10 August 2007 (UTC)

Whiteknight (Page) (Talk) 17:33, 10 August 2007 (UTC) </nowiki>

P.S. And why the ***! don't the four tildes work here? I'm logged in. http://[en.wikibooks.org/wiki/User:Mike_Hayes Mike Hayes

You forgot the < / nowiki > tag so it ignored your tildes. Mattb112885 (talk to me) 17:33, 10 August 2007 (UTC)

The four tildes didnt work because there was an extra <nowiki> tag floating around. I removed it, and now things should work like normal.

As to the image:

If we don't have that particular template, it's because nobody has ever bothered to create/import it. If you feel like it's worthwhile, you could create it yourself, or request it at WB:RFI.
"fair use" isn't a blanket excuse that people can use to violate copyright. For the image to be considered "fair use" it must be accompanied with the original source, and a rationale for why it must be used under that license (no free alternatives available, etc). If the image doesnt have either of these things, it should be deleted.
Apparently, this image is an orphan, and it is not linked to any pages. Orphaned fair use images are typically deleted.

I hope this helps. If you think the image should be deleted, tag it with {{delete}}. --Whiteknight (Page) (Talk) 17:33, 10 August 2007 (UTC)

Thank you. New question; why is it showing as an orphan? It is showing in the wikipedia article on w:Frangelico. Mike Hayes 17:42, 10 August 2007 (UTC)

I'm pretty sure interwiki links aren't counted when the program's checking for orphans. But if it's a fair use image it should be restricted to its own project anyways, since if its fair use in one scenario it may not be in another. This is one reason they don't allow fair use on commons. Mattb112885 (talk to me) 18:25, 10 August 2007 (UTC)

I've considered the matter of copyright infringement again and it seems to me that the website's copyright has not been violated for the following reason. The image is a two dimensional one of a copyright bottle, and its label, with no independant information of any kind. You cannot copyright someone elses copyright object and it's labelling (unless it contains some other information that one can claim copyright to). If the website can claim no copyright to this image, and it cannot under US law because it only contains information belonging to a third party, not the website, that website's copyright has not been violated (in the USA). Mike Hayes 03:52, 11 August 2007 (UTC)

The image file on Wikipedia isn't the same one that's here on Wikibooks, so it would be orphaned if it weren't in use on a page here (images on Commons can appear on any project, but there are tools available there for tracking that).

As far as that site's copyright is concerned, I have no idea because it's in Japanese. The image, however, is probably licenced to them because they apparently sell the product (and they might have gotten it from their supplier, etc.). However, the reason it can't be released under a free licence is that it's really a derivative work of a copyrighted object, so you couldn't, for example, print that image on a T-Shirt and sell it unless you had permission to do so from the company (or is it a monastery?) that makes Frangelico.

But Mike Hayes: what's the question exactly? --SB_Johnny | ^PA! 22:17, 11 August 2007 (UTC)

I've retagged the image with {{fair use}}; please see Category:License tags for available tags on Wikibooks. The image still requires a rationale explaining why this is Fair Use. Webaware ^talk 05:39, 14 August 2007 (UTC)

"How Experts Fail": list of wikibooks on other websites?

I've put my current book project, titled "How Experts Fail: The Patterns and Situations in Which Experts Are Less Intelligent Than Non-Experts," on a new website HowExpertsFail.com, using MediaWiki software (the same software as Wikipedia and Wikibooks). I'm hoping to publish the book someday so I didn't put it on Wikibooks.org. Is there a list of wikibooks that aren't on Wikibooks.org? The only other project I know of is We Are Smarter Than Me. I especially want people to contribute stories in which a non-expert was right when an expert was wrong.--Thomas David Kehoe 19:54, 13 August 2007 (UTC)

If a book is here on Wikibooks.org, it can still be published. If we had more blockbuster books that were ready for that final stage of development we would be moving into that area more aggressively, I think. As to other websites with open-content books, I can't think of any off the top of my head. Wikibooks is pretty much one of the largest open-content book sites so far. However, if there are other sites with similar goals, I would love to hear about them. --Whiteknight (Page) (Talk) 20:12, 13 August 2007 (UTC)

New Fair Use Image Tag

I've been working on a new license tag for Fair Use images. The tag requires the uploader to provide both a source for where the image came from, and a rationale for why the image must be released under fair use and why there are no acceptable free alternatives. The template is located here: {{Fairuse test}}. This template creates two new categories, in addition to the currently existing category for fair use images, one for images which don't have a proper rationale, and one for images which are not properly sourced. It is my intention that images that fall into these two other categories become candidates for speedy deletion after a specified amount of time.

Once this template gets better, I would like to replace {{Fair use}} with this, to keep things standard. What do people think about this? --Whiteknight (Page) (Talk) 14:32, 15 August 2007 (UTC)

I like it, since it's crazy to allow fair use lacking either one of these things. But how would we achieve the conversion from the current standard to the new one if we were to implement this? I don't think it's something that would be easily automated. I do agree, however, that it is a good idea to have a standard way to provide both rationale and source of the image. Mattb112885 (talk to me) 22:11, 15 August 2007 (UTC)

Like I said this is just a concept piece. I agree with you that a wholesale transition to the new template would cause every single fair use image here to be instantly noted as being in trouble. It would either require a herculean effort to fix (or delete) all the old images, or else there would simply be a gigantic work backlog from the very beginning that we might never get on top of. Another option would be to slowly phase in the new template, ie replace the old template with the new one in the upload page, so that all new images were tagged with the new template, but all the old images would stay the same. We could alter the category on the old template to "Category:Fair use images (old)", or something, that wouldnt exactly be a red flag, but would be something we could fix over time.

I'm not in any hurry with this. I think the system we have for fair use needs to be improved eventually, and it's good to think about it now, even if we dont do anything right now. --Whiteknight (Page) (Talk) 00:30, 16 August 2007 (UTC)

I must admit I don't see the point of having two separate fair use categories. How about "Fair Use Images" and "Images with missing information". The later could be useful for more then just fair use images missing needed information. As for transiting, could mention on the current fair use template that its old and should be eventually replaced with whatever name is chosen for the new fair use template and should not be used for new images. --dark lama 00:48, 16 August 2007 (UTC)

I like this idea very much, but I agree with Darklama: a single category for images with missing info should be enough. If the parameters aren't specified, then the image gets put in that category as well as the fair use category. WK's transition plan looks like it's right on the money. – Mike.lifeguard | ^talk 21:16, 3 September 2007 (UTC)

Need for Worksheets

Why can't we post worksheets easily? As an educator, I need worksheets to accompany information. Most textbooks have worksheets that accompany the information, and tests as well. As a music educator (choir), textbooks aren't very helpful when I'm trying to find something to relate to the songs we are singing. For example, I created a worksheet on Gospel music and wrote an excerpt that accompanied the worksheet. I'd like to post that for all educators to use. I'd also like to be able to find a worksheet quickly as opposed to reading the article first with the hopes of finding a worksheet.

I'm hoping we can work together to make this easy for everyone. It could be organized by subject, grade level, and topic. Teachers could easily upload and download worksheets for all to use! It would make the unit more complete! Also students could download the worksheets from home, do them, and email the completed work to the teacher. I might be getting ahead of myself with that idea but it is a possibility one day! We'd have to make sure we don't post the answers though...

Just a thought! —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Griffcb (talk • contribs) .

Worksheets I think are more in Wikiversity's scope. Wikibooks and Wikiversity can be used together to provide for a more complete course curriculum. --dark lama 14:11, 18 August 2007 (UTC)

Wikibooks really is just a textbook resource, even though there is some pretty obvious desire for other types of materials. Fortunately, there is another project, Wikiversity, which aims to be a more generalized instructional resource. Wikibooks contains textbooks, while Wikiversity contains other course materials such as syllabi, homework, tests, quizzes, and worksheets. The two projects can often be used together quite effectively to make a comprehensive course plan. --Whiteknight (Page) (Talk) 14:11, 20 August 2007 (UTC)

Quantifying pages

Is it possible to quantify the number of pages or words in a particular wikibook? I'm interested in tracking how a wikibook changes over time. Thanks --PaulWLepp 21:04, 22 August 2007 (UTC)

I think this can be done easily with a parsing bot and probably someone already has something similar. Take a look into http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Toolserver and http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Toolserver/Projects hope it help. --Panic 22:33, 22 August 2007 (UTC)

I have a javascript that can count a lot of statistics about a page (number of characters, number of words, number of links, categories, templates, etc). let me know what you need. --Whiteknight (Page) (Talk) 23:26, 22 August 2007 (UTC)

Username impersonators and usurpations

For those who don't know, a usurpation is when one person receives control of a username from another person. To usurp a username means for a bureaucrat to rename to current account to some non-name, and to create a new account with the desired account name. En.wikipedia has a very strict process for username usurpations, we currently don't have any.

I bring this up because today we received a complaint from a user on wikipedia. Another person created an account with the same name on wikibooks, as a bad-faith impersonator. After this user proved she was who she said she was, Herbythyme blocked the account, and I usurped it for the rightful owner.

What do people think about this? should we have some kind of rules or policy or whatever to govern this kind of thing, or should we not bother and leave it up to the best judgement of the bureaucrats? In the case of vandals it's more straightforward, but what about a case where a person simply wants to assume control over an already-existing username? On en.wp, you can only usurp an account if the account has zero edits, zero log entries, and is a certain period of time old (ie you can't take a newly-created account before the owner has time to edit). Are those guidelines that we should take for use here? --Whiteknight (Page) (Talk) 16:36, 23 August 2007 (UTC)

That would be a good idea. I could create Wikibooks:Requests for usurpation and the appropriate templates if you want. --SunStar Net 17:03, 23 August 2007 (UTC)

My opinion is that a policy should be initiated for each administrative action (whatever the "level") as a way to standardize it and provide security no only to the target(s) of the action but also for the implementor(s). This will reduce errors and avoid the use of "best judgment" by involving the community to define what is or is not acceptable. --Panic 17:34, 23 August 2007 (UTC)

Sorry Whiteknight I don't entirely understand your explanation. What exactly is a usurp? Is it the same as renaming an account?? Xania

^talk 21:46, 23 August 2007 (UTC)

It's okay, I wasn't entirely clear. A usurpation is similar to a user renaming. It's when one person wants to take a username that is already registered by another person. For instance, if I decided that I wanted to be called "Xania", I could usurp your account: A bureaucrat could rename you to "Xania_OLD" or something like that, and then rename my account to "Xania". In effect, I would become "User:Xania", even if that account name was already registered by somebody else. Now, that exact situation would never happen because no bureaucrat would ever steal an active account name from one person and give it to another. On en.wp, the only accounts that can be usurped are those that were created but never used (no edits, etc). I'm willing to say that usurpations can be done on accounts that have never been used and that don't have a valid email address, and also vandalism/impersonator accounts that have only been used for bad-faith edits. --Whiteknight (Page) (Talk) 14:32, 24 August 2007 (UTC)

Let the bureaucrats deal with it. Mention that we can do it in the developing admin policy and that's it. This is not the first occurrence of this situation by the way. -withinfocus 03:03, 24 August 2007 (UTC)

That's basically my opinion on the matter, although i still think it would be good to lay down a few guidelines, even informal ones, among the bureaucrats so that when this does happen it happens in a standardized kind of way. The issue comes up so infrequently that we might not even need this. --Whiteknight (Page) (Talk) 14:36, 24 August 2007 (UTC)

My only real concern is renames with large amounts of edits which shouldn't really happen. For instance in your above example to Xania I would have reservations about renaming a large editor like that since it becomes somewhat deceptive. Your example wouldn't truly be a full usurp because all Xania's contributions would re-link to Xania_OLD and only new ones would work with your impersonation of Xania. This situation is why I think en.wikipedia only allows usurps for zero contributions, although I think we shouldn't mind here if it's only a handful. I know I've usurped vandal accounts when the original user comes over here to complain and wants their username (confirmed of course). -withinfocus 17:10, 24 August 2007 (UTC)

Something should be written up for the future; the above comments look like they're on-target. – Mike.lifeguard | ^talk 02:56, 25 August 2007 (UTC)

If there are good-faith edits the username should not be usurped. --xixtas ^talk 13:06, 25 August 2007 (UTC)

I agree with that entirely. Frequently editors from other projects (notably wikipedia) will create an account here to protect against impersonators without ever intending to use those accounts. In such cases, accounts have few edits, often just one or two linking their talk and user pages to their wikipedia pages, etc. These kinds of accounts we do not want to be stealing. For vandals, it's a different story, as a vandal will likely be blocked infinitely anyway and will be unable to make use of the account. A vandal who has been blocked infinitely typically has their user pages deleted, and most traces of them are wiped away. In these cases, we certainly can usurp the account, especially if it's an impersonator account. --Whiteknight (Page) (Talk) 23:47, 26 August 2007 (UTC)

This apparently won't be an issue for long... SUL is apparently up, but not yet running.--SB_Johnny | ^PA! 07:45, 25 August 2007 (UTC)

Once the SUL does get going, it will be a painful transition and cause at least a few problems. I should note here that one of the reasons why my Meta account has a different name is in part because I screwed up the password for meta:User:Robert Horning and couldn't log back in. I just created another account and kept plugging along, realizing that it didn't really matter in the long run. It hasn't been that big of a deal either, other than the fact that with SUL I may have to merge this account (or would like to, at least). --Rob Horning 16:48, 26 August 2007 (UTC)

Don't know what this is but

I don't think it is a Wikibook? The Father speaks to his children - I'm reluctant to delete it speedily but I think it is out of scope (& copy and paste from somewhere?). Thanks --Herby ^{talk thyme} 14:38, 30 August 2007 (UTC)

It is a little strange, i'll give you that. Even if it is instructional, it's suffering from an obvious POV bias. Talking about this or that is the truth, or this or that person is holy and learned. I would say that we should VfD it (although I suspect strongly the consensus will be to delete), but we should try and get the authors to move it elsewhere. --Whiteknight (Page) (Talk) 14:45, 30 August 2007 (UTC)

I think it's been published. The page starts off with

Imprimatur:
+ Petrus Canisius van Lierde, Vic. Generalis e Vic. Civit. Vaticanae, Roma, die 13 Martii 1989

I think "Imprimatur" means "printer" as in "publisher" which is followed by a name and title, then Vatican, Rome, 13 March 1989. Seems like an attribution to me. Also, if it was published by the Vatican, it isn't likely to appear on Google Books or in any bookstore, and I don't know if they give their works an ISBN. – Mike.lifeguard | ^talk 22:22, 30 August 2007 (UTC)

If it's previously published and released under a free license, it is likely a better candidate for Wikisource then Wikibooks. If it's owned by the Vatican, I can't imagine that it is released under a suitably free license anyway. --Whiteknight (Page) (Talk) 23:14, 3 September 2007 (UTC)

GFDL vs. Creative Commons

I am working to convince friends of mine to place their books out as part of Wikibooks. Their content is currently licensed under Creative Commons. Wikibooks policy would need it to be shifted to GFDL. Is there some URL that would help me to understand the contrasts between these two licenses? How would it affect the book publishers? What's the advantage of the GFDL. Any responses would be appreciated. --Fredericknoronha 17:16, 30 August 2007 (UTC)

There are a few places you can go in terms of this debate. Perhaps the best conceise descriptions of some different free software/documentation licenses (with an admittedly pro-GFDL POV) can be found at: http://www.gnu.org/licenses/

If you are willing to read something quite a bit more spirited and lengthy in terms of comparing the various free document licenses, you can also check out w:Wikipedia talk:Copyrights. Be warned, it is several megabytes of raw text to plow through here in over 10 different archives, but it includes some of the best experience on the part of people who actually use both the Creative Commons licenses and the GFDL on a day to day basis, and are intimately familiar with both licenses. And many practical examples on how issues about these licenses apply in real content... mainly on Wikipedia however.

The largest problem about most of the Creative Commons licenses (besides trying to decide which CC license you are talking about) is that for the most part it is incompatible with the GFDL. In other words, something licensed under the GFDL generally can't be used under any Creative Commons license and vice versa. Relicensing content... even when it is available under "free" licenses, can be a real pain in the behind. Once some content is available under a particular license, you must stick with that license if anonymous contributors are also adding to that content.

From a personal perspective... and take this with a gain of salt noting you should form your own opinion on the topic.... I actually prefer the GFDL over the Creative Commons suite. I think the Creative Commons licenses are overly simplistic in terms of protecting against people who would publish CC content without attribution, and doesn't deal with the machine readable issues that the GFDL does try to cope with. On the other hand, the license republication issue (aka you need to publish the complete GFDL any time you redistribute GFDL'd content) can be a major issue when reprinting small extracts or something which is only a page or two long. For a 200 page book, adding an extra 3-4 pages for a license isn't as big of a deal. This last issue is one of the reasons why Wikinews does not use the GFDL. Both licenses have their place, and deciding which one is best depends largely on what you want to accomplish and a big degree of what those involved with establishing the original bit of content are looking for.

One thing you can also do....and is reasonable to consider for an individual Wikibook, is to dual license the content. This means that when you add the content, it is licensed for use under both the GFDL and a specific Creative Commons license. Make sure that when others are contributing to that Wikibook, they are completely aware that the content is dual licensed and that their contributions should be dual licensed as well. For some further information about this, see also w:Dual-licensing --Rob Horning 00:16, 31 August 2007 (UTC)

Adding import sources

I think it would be nice to add some additional sources in which we can import pages from for use as material in books. I would like to see English Wikiversity, English Wikisource and Simple English Wikibooks added to the import list.

Wikiversity contains lessons that may be useful to begin or expand books with that may not require as much effort as Wikipedia articles to use.
Wikisource contains public domain books and from what I understand are intended to remain more or less static, but which may be useful here for creating updated versions of cooperatively and for annotated texts.
Simple English Wikibooks may contain books that may be useful here or contain pages that can be used in existing books.
By allowing materials from these projects to be imported, we could save useful materials that may come up for deletion as has been done for Wikipedia material thats out of project scope there, but is within scope here.

A bug report has been filed to request it now, since clearly there is support for this. --dark lama 14:07, 7 September 2007 (UTC)

Its been done. we actually got two more import sources then we asked for. Wikinews and Wikiquotes. --dark lama 15:04, 16 September 2007 (UTC)

Comments

Vote

Support I've wanted to have more import sources for a long time now. The projects that you've listed are good candidates. Wikiversity and Simple.Wikibooks have import enabled from us, it's inconceivable that content can't travel in both directions. --Whiteknight (Page) (Talk) 17:39, 5 September 2007 (UTC)

Support - I've often wondered why Wikipedia is the only option. These are a good start. In principle, I'd like to see all of our sister wikis in the import from box - I don't know if that's really practical though. Stick with these for now. – Mike.lifeguard | ^talk 18:14, 5 September 2007 (UTC)

Support - Unfortunately for WB-de this is not allowed due to licence issues (e.g. WV-de to WB-de). But definitely a good idea. You have my vote. --Erkan Yilmaz 19:38, 5 September 2007 (UTC)

Support - Sometimes projects get started at Wikiversity and they naturally evolve towards a book format. It should be a simple matter to send such book content to Wikibooks. --JWSurf 19:45, 5 September 2007 (UTC)

Support - Can only see advantages... --Panic 21:44, 5 September 2007 (UTC)

Support - bigtime. I'll happily snowball this vote with wikiversitans too, because we really want our textbooky stuff to be here where it belongs. --SB_Johnny | ^PA! 23:47, 5 September 2007 (UTC)

Support Webaware ^talk 02:45, 6 September 2007 (UTC)

Support I would also like to see wiktionary added to the list for use in glossaries. xixtas ^talk 03:00, 6 September 2007 (UTC)

Support A really good idea. Urbane (Talk) (Contributions) 21:21, 10 September 2007 (UTC)

RSS to track changes

Hi, Is it possible to create an rss feed for wikibooks so that we can keep track of changes made in the book we are very much interested?

It already exists. you can get the RSS feed here:

http://en.wikibooks.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Recentchanges&feed=rss

Also, you can get the ATOM feed here, if you are interested in that too:

http://en.wikibooks.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Recentchanges&feed=atom

Hope this is what you are looking for. --Whiteknight (Page) (Talk) 15:54, 10 September 2007 (UTC)

lol help

Hey how do u use this thing

See Using Wikibooks. It's still under construction, but it is a very good resource even now. --Jomegat 12:45, 10 September 2007 (UTC)

PDF request : This quantum world

Hi. I'd like to request a PDF file for This quantum world It seems to be very interesting, and having a PDF would ease things up. Thanks. Peteturtle 21:28, 10 September 2007 (UTC)

Breadcrumbs?

When one names and references pages properly with "/" between the name parts, WikiBook automatically generates a "breadcrumb" trail at the top of the page, showing the path of pages that leads to the current page.

Is there a template that can be used to display this breadcrumb trail at other places in a page? At the bottom, for example? It often can be awkward to scroll up to the top to find out where one is in a WikiBook. ...Selden 12:11, 11 September 2007 (UTC)

That's not a bad idea, certainly something i'm sure we could create. We have templates that can give partial results, such as {{BOOKNAME}} or {{CHAPTERNAME}}, but nothing that is completely general for multiple levels of recursion. Let me see if i can throw something together for you. --Whiteknight (Page) (Talk) 13:55, 11 September 2007 (UTC)

There are other means of achieving this than templates. For example adding javascript to your monobook.js file that clones the subpages header and adds the clone to the end of the page. --dark lama 15:10, 11 September 2007 (UTC)

True, but that method doesnt really provide the flexibility that an author could want, such as the ability to embed those links into a larger navigation template. It also doesnt really give us the ability to custom modify the formatting to suit individual needs. If you want to play with the javascript that's fine, but I would like to try and make a template for this anyway. --Whiteknight (Page) (Talk) 17:09, 11 September 2007 (UTC)

LPI Project

The existing project LPI_Linux_Certification seems to be in need of some care, looking at the history minor updates appear to continue but as far as i can tell major work seems to have stalled. I have just today requested an update on the project, on the main discussion page. However i have since wondered what the etiquette was on existing wikibook projects were? If a maintainer was not available how does one go about starting work on a project like that? Things like whom should be the first point of contact? What sort of edits can be made without maintainer input? Can anyone just go in and push a project like that forward if it turns out that it has stalled? I guess in other words How BOLD can one really be :)? —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Barry Sharpe (talk • contribs) .

You don't need to get in contact with anyone or need anyone's permission to make any sort of changes. If you want to discussion changes before you make them, thats fine too. You don't have to wait, just go for it and push the project forward! The only time you need to discuss changes is when a disagreement arises and than thats to try to work out a compromise that can be agreed to. You don't have to be bold, but you can be as bold as you want to be. :) --dark lama 15:24, 14 September 2007 (UTC)

Darklama is exactly right. You don't need anybody's permission. The book doesnt have a single "maintainer" that you need to get in touch with. If nobody else is working on it, then you are the "maintainer" yourself. Never hesitate to make improvements to a book, any book at any time. If you need any help or have any questions, let us know. --Whiteknight (Page) (Talk) 15:26, 14 September 2007 (UTC)

Thanks For the reply's i have placed up a Plan page here just to start organising my thoughts. As this is my first go at this any input will be appreciated. Mistakes will be made obviously, i think the most important things for me is too add value to the project. So how i go about implementing the structure without losing any original work until new pages can be written and to also keep in mind the administration of the whole thing are priorities. I see two possible ways forward, live changes obviously advantage is that other contributors may get involved quickly. The danger is that the whole thing gets messy. I could use my user space but thats likely to indicate a solo project and the LPI covers a heck of a lot of ground. For the next week or two i am going to let things settle just add content to the Plan itself. and start to firm up on ways forward this should also give other existing contributors chance to express opinions. Barry

How is "textbook" defined for this project?

How is "textbook" being defined for purposes of Wikibooks? Specifically, do the books here have to be "graduated", in the sense that they start with an easy introduction to the topic, give exercises, and gradually progress to more complex material? I'm contemplating (someday) starting a reference grammar of Irish here, but it would not be the sort of book that someone wanting to learn Irish would start reading at the beginning and then progress to the end. Rather, it would be the sort of book that someone learning Irish from other material would refer to in order to find out what they were looking for, which might be anywhere in the book at all. Do reference grammars like that fall into Wikibooks' scope? Angr 18:02, 7 July 2007 (UTC)

This is explained in detail in What is Wikibooks?. As long as your book isn't just reference material (I'm thinking of a Bescherelle), it sounds good to me. If you still have questions, don't hesitate to ask. – Mike.lifeguard | ^talk 19:25, 7 July 2007 (UTC)

Well, actually it isn't explained in detail at WB:WIW, which I had already read. Reference grammars are not specifically listed under "What Wikibooks Is Not", but the wording of "What is Wikibooks" is vague enough that it isn't clear whether they're included or not. I'm also not sure what you mean by "just reference material (I'm thinking of a Bescherelle)"; what is a Bescherelle lacking (I've never seen one, by the way) that a Wikibook should have? Paragraphs of prose discussion? A reference grammar would have those. Exercises for the learner? A reference grammar would not have those. Angr 19:45, 7 July 2007 (UTC)

We like to keep the policy a little bit vague, because we can be very lenient when it comes to what precisely is a "textbook". We allow many things that are not traditional textbooks. Basically, we run this project on a 'I know it when I see it' kind of mentality. If you have an idea for a new book, announce it at WB:SLN and get some feedback from the community. --Whiteknight (Page) (Talk) 19:57, 7 July 2007 (UTC)

Okay, thanks. Probably won't be any time soon, but I'll keep it in mind for the future. Angr 20:37, 7 July 2007 (UTC)

"See Also" classification categories

I just got through classifying Mathematical Logic, and by doing a book search of similar titles in major university libraries, I came up with a classification code that instead of what would be logically a mathematical subcat, it is in fact a philosophy classification code. (Dewey 160/LOC BC135) There are historical reasons for this, as syllogistic logic originated in the philosophical discliplines going back to Bede or even St. Augistine. Or if you want to go back even futher, to Socrates and Plato.

I am also going to move the business software books to where it is also commonly found in many library catalogs... in the business section instead of the computer software section.

Both of these have caused me to think about how we are going to add a "see also" into the current classification system, and asking for some suggestions on how to make it look much nicer than my preliminary attempt as can be seen here:

Category:Library of Congress/QA1

In this case, this "see also" just looks ugly as anything can be, and I want to get rid of it post haste just because of how bad it looks. Still, I want to somehow convey this information. Certainly I want to instead come up with a template that we can use in these situations to cross-link categories for people who are searching for certain kinds of books. Any suggestions?

BTW, the reason I'm using this section of the staff lounge is due to an earlier conversation about using this section for ontological discussions and other questions about the classification schema. And I want to get this type of thing off of the project discussion areas. --Rob Horning

Note: I moved this from WB:SLN to here, since it's not really a new user's topic, and wasn't getting any replies there. --SB_Johnny | ^talk 15:05, 9 July 2007 (UTC)

This is the kind of issue that has me thinking that we could use another namespace for independant subjects. Instead of having two DDC categories with a link between them, we could have a single page for "Subject:Logic", and then transclude the category lists from both categories into this subject page. You are right that trying to create logical links between all the various organizational categories is both difficult and ugly. I'll try to set up a test page for what I am talking about, and see if you like it. --Whiteknight (Page) (Talk) 15:12, 9 July 2007 (UTC)

For the example page of what I am talking about, check out my sandbox. --Whiteknight (Page) (Talk) 15:15, 9 July 2007 (UTC)

The tough aspect of that is it may not be easy to do this for a "topic" that only contains a single book. Yes, the Logic topic is well covered in a number of different aspects (I don't think these Wikibooks should even be merged together because they are all slightly different in approaching the topic) but quite often it will be only a single WIkibook. This is something we were trying to avoid in the first place, by having the plethora of topics piled on top of each other.

I will note that for now I've kept the LOC cataloging system to at most a shallow depth of only 3 levels deep.... and that for mathematics-related books (including Computer Science!) mainly because of the huge number of similar kinds of books. I made a "mistake" with the "H" category, as I thought it was going to be populated with a large number of humanities and social sciences books, only to discover that most of the books in that category were "mis-filed" under that category and actually belonged elsewhere. For now, I'm leaving the H subcats in place as it may eventually fill up anyway over time.

One thing I do really like about this system (and which doesn't exist on Wikipedia at all!) is that it allows "lateral" movement through the stack of books rapidly. By transcluding the navigation template for related topics on each category, you can move very quickly from programming languages to calculus in just one click... something that would require useless category including on the current Wikipedia system. Or just one or two more clicks to nearly any other classified Wikibook for that matter. I dare you to be able to find every Wikipedia page in just under 3-4 clicks, just to give a comparison. And that could be done too!

There are several ontological topics about organizing Wikibooks I would like to cover, but I think it would simply overwhelm the discussions here if I threw everything up at once. Still, we are talking about how the content is organized and how people can find and access the information contained on this project. I'm not entirely sure where this sort of discussion ought to be taking place, and unfortunately it is a complex enough topic which requires learning in depth a topic that even most librarians (from what I'm discovering!) don't even understand all too well. And they are the ones who have supposed professional degrees on the topic. --Rob Horning 19:50, 9 July 2007 (UTC)

Bookshelf templates

I would like to propose what may seem like a radical change: deleting the bookshelf templates. These templates, all of which are visible on the Wikibooks:Departments page, are generally useless and could be replaced with better alternatives. These templates are difficult to maintain, and there is very little rationale, if any, about which books should be listed in these templates. If it is the intention that the template should contain all the books from the bookshelf, then it seems a waste to me, because the books are already listed on the bookshelf pages themselves. If instead it is the intention that the templates should contain a representative sample of books from that shelf, or that they should contain a few of the "best and brightest" book from the shelf, then they have failed as well: Many templates contain links to poor books, stub books, and books that have been nominated for deletion. On a regular basis I patrol these templates looking for red links that need to be removed.

Maybe we don't need to delete them, but I think we should certainly reformat them. I would like to remove the book lists from these templates, and perhaps replace them with a collage of related images, or something similarly aesthetic. We could have short banner images that say "Art Bookshelf", and there would be pictures of art behind it, etc. If these templates were being well-maintained, it would be different, but since they are not, it's more trouble then they are worth. --Whiteknight (Page) (Talk) 18:38, 12 July 2007 (UTC)

I would support a deletion of the templates. Like you said, they don't really provide much and are often either poor representations of the bookshelf or largely out of date. -withinfocus 19:34, 12 July 2007 (UTC)

So what is the alternative here? Keep in mind that once upon a time, this was a very well maintained section of Wikibooks, in part because all of these templates (well, most of them anyway) appeared on the Main Page. This was the most visible face of Wikibooks, and demonstrated the best and most active Wikibooks. This certainly is something that ought to be maintained if for nothing more than as historical pages of Wikibooks.... as they do show up when looking at pages in the history of the Main Page. Wanton deletion of these templates I believe to be something simply not appropriate nor really needed.

I do strongly suggest that perhaps some very heavily improved standards be applied to what is listed here. Certainly current books which are featured books, as well as those who have somebody working on them actively (aka a very ambitious wikibook by a new user) deserve to be listed here. The problem is trying to figure out when things should be culled from this list. Perhaps this is something that we could redesign using the Dynamic Page List extension to list all of the book meeting the qualifications of being in a a given bookshelf category, are a featured book or are something under active development. Adding a new category "active" would be something perhaps we could create that could also be (in this instance) something generated by a bot or added and removed by individual users. I'm defining active as a book which has more than "X" edits in a 3 month period of time, where the threshold can also be adjusted as necessary. I'm thinking something more than 10 edits but less than 100 as rough orders of magnitude to think about here.

The idea here is to maintain the bookshelf concept (out right elimination of these templates may kill the idea completely), still provide a place to list books on these subjects, and to promote some of the newer Wikibooks that are just starting out. I think putting a tag on a Wikibook that it is under active development (or even a markup tag that it is inactive!) would have value even beyond just this bookshelf template area.

We do lose the idea of listing pages by percent completion status, although this may be something we could look into in terms of a Wikibooks-specific modification of the DPL extension itself. One of my complaints about the category system is that we can't add these sort of percent markups next to books, note feature status, or do other sorts of distinguishing notes. Perhaps we could come up with something else here instead to work on that aspect and shortcoming of the system. --Rob Horning 23:16, 12 July 2007 (UTC)

Well, what if we just delete the lists of books, but leave a large fancy link to the bookshelf? I mean, if we use DPL some of the bookshelves such as the programming languages bookshelf will absolutely overflow and become gigantic. Even if it used to be a fantastic thing, as wikibooks grows larger and more diverse, any attempt to maintain a manual list of links is destined to fail.

Now, the idea of DPL is a decent one, but it suffers from the fact that some of our bookshelves are giganticlly large already, and i expect the general quantities of books to continue to increase in a regular way. In short, if we dont deal with this issue now, then we will just have to deal with it later.

I agree that maybe deletion might not be the best idea, but maybe we could try just removing the book lists from the templates? Without the book lists there to clutter things up, we would be free to make some really cool-looking templates instead. --Whiteknight (Page) (Talk) 23:26, 12 July 2007 (UTC)

The DPL does allow a "not" rule on determining status of a page in the listing. For most of the books you are complaining about here, they are most definitely in the inactive status here, and should properly be marked as such. It would also be very useful to mark some of these books as inactive with a nice and friendly message "Please help Wikibooks by adopting this abandoned (or inactive) book and helping us to develop up to date content on this topic". Frankly, I don't think these lists of books would be all that large if we stuck to that basic rule of: Bookshelf name and (featured book or not inactive).

I hope I'm wrong here that the list of Wikibooks would be huge on these lists when applying this rule, but I got a feeling it wouldn't be all that many. If we do this, we should still maintain these as independent templates so they can be transcluded both on this list of all books (aka the "Departments") and on the top of each bookshelf.... although a simple copy and paste of the DPL code wouldn't be that complicated either. --Rob Horning 00:15, 13 July 2007 (UTC)

As a follow up thought here, I should point out that one of the things these templates have performed in terms of listing books in a prominent place where you can look at all of the "active" Wikibooks at once, is they also suggested ideas on how to reorganize the bookshelves in the past and break up very large bookshelves into smaller but more numerous bookshelves. This is an aspect of organizing knowledge that simply must be dealt with in some manner, and a part of Wikibooks which has been very dynamic in the past. I'm actually impressed at the general stability of the classification system of bookshelves in this aspect, as it has been remarkably steady for the past iteration and doesn't see any huge area of weakness in terms of huge groups of under recognized Wikibooks. At least at the moment. Of course the concept of a "departent" was something added to Wikibooks quite late in the game and was an afterthought, although the bookshelf idea goes back to 2003 by none other than Karl Wick himself. --Rob Horning 00:25, 13 July 2007 (UTC)

I just hope that "inactive" wouldn't be a death sentence to a book that could still potentially be useful. However, it could be the opposite, serving to let contributors know, this book hasn't been touched in a while (and by a while I mean half a year or more) so there's even less reason to fear reprisal if you go in and make changes. I DO agree though that the templates as they are are rather useless for several reasons:

Out of date "completion criteria" which will possibly never be updated, and are probably too general to describe the state of a whole book anyways.
No real criteria for determining what gets into a bookshelf template and what doesn't.
As mentioned, they're no longer used except as part of a linking system to the bookshelves.

I like Rob's idea of saying "active OR featured" books, because at least then the featured ones wouldn't be completely buried, but authors who prefer working on an actively-developing project know where to go. I'd say that the templates should ideally end up significantly smaller than they are now, because there's just too many links to different things in a small space on the bookshelf page, it gets overwhelming. And I'd even not be against losing the completeness indicators, and instead just saying "this one is featured, anything not featured is probably not complete". They're always out of date anyways and unlike the activity factor it can't be automatically refreshed as needed. Mattb112885 (talk to me) 00:46, 13 July 2007 (UTC)

I highly doubt that an "inactive wikibook" template would last too long on the "main page" of a wikibook that has somebody doing more than just a couple of minor edits to the contents. Particularly if in the template itself there was some encouragement to remove the thing and get working on developing the content. So in this regard I think it would be an encouraging sign to look and see what kinds of books would pop up as active but not quite as polished as the featured candidates. Inactive books (that are genuinely inactive) wouldn't have anybody left to really complain. And it isn't too hard to at least find a few good examples of books that have fallen into the background of Wikibooks. This isn't to say that these kind of inactive books shouldn't be cataloged and have other links, but they shouldn't be something so prominent as a list of books like this page (Wikibooks:Departments) is showing. New users in particular should be encouraged to at least join into some wikibook that has some active users who are able to "take them under their wing" and help them with the general wiki editing process, and learn about concepts like NPOV and original research. Featured books are likely to be on the watch list of several people that any edits on them would get at least some attention real quick if anything starts to change. --Rob Horning 06:09, 13 July 2007 (UTC)

Yesterday while people were busy discussing the idea of an inactive template, I boldly went ahead and created one under {{inactive}}. --dark lama 15:53, 13 July 2007 (UTC)

Prototype Template Replacement

I've created a prototype replacement template for the engineering bookshelf. The template is visible HERE. You can see the usage of the template on the Engineering bookshelf. This kind of template is easier to maintain (we dont need to worry about adding or removing links from it), it's more aesthetic, it would look better on the All bookshelves page, and the various department pages, etc. What do people think of this kind of idea? --Whiteknight (Page) (Talk) 22:03, 6 August 2007 (UTC)

I'm a little confused about your idea, I like the look of the template but how does it make it so that you don't need to add/remove links? Maybe I'm missing something obvious, is there an associated category or something? I DO agree that the bookshelf templates need a revamp though. Regards. Mattb112885 (talk to me) 23:05, 6 August 2007 (UTC)

This is an alternative to Template:Engineering bookshelf. In the older template, there is a long list of books, manually updated. The newer version of the template, Template:Engineering bookshelf new doesnt have these lists of books. --Whiteknight (Page) (Talk) 00:01, 7 August 2007 (UTC)

Ohh I was confused, I thought it was meant as a replacement for the bookshelf itself. I'd go for that sort of thing, less maintenance = less stuff becoming obsolete. Though it may be nice to have some way of highlighting the FBs within the bookshelves, maybe just with the little star next to their entries or something like that (or even a category to link to like Category:Engineering featured books as a subcategory to "featured books"). Maybe they don't need more highlighting since they have a prominent place on the main page anyway; what do you all think? Mattb112885 (talk to me) 00:51, 7 August 2007 (UTC)

A little star icon would be nice, but if you look at the engineering bookshelf as a model, the same featured book templates that show up on the main page are included on the bookshelf as well. --Whiteknight (Page) (Talk) 02:04, 7 August 2007 (UTC)

Learning How To Be A Real Estate Agent

G'day, I just stumbled upon this mess on RC: Category:Estate agency. I'm guessing that this is two books, but there are three book prefixes, and no first pages. I don't have time to address this, so I'm noting it here in case someone else would like to take a crack at it. At a bare minimum, two main pages need creating (or pages moved to main page), some page moves for naming convention, and potentially a book merge. Webaware ^talk 23:57, 16 July 2007 (UTC)

Yes, this area is what brought me to Wikibooks today. And I noticed that the Real Estate section was sparse... and after having giving it some consideration, I decided that I might have the time in the next week or two to concentrate on this project... since I also have a keen personal interest in the topic. Whew! That was my long-winded way of saying I'll take up the challenge... Let me see what I can do... please give me feedback... as this is my first experience on a shared wiki. I have tried to read as much as I can so that I may ensure that I remain within the boundaries and parameters envisioned by this project. MacHershell 06:04, 17 July 2007 (UTC)

Excellent, thanks for taking this on! I see that Whiteknight has taken you under his wing, which is a good thing. Check out Wikibooks:Naming policy for how things are, ideally, named in Wikibooks. If you want to change the name of a module (page), click on the "Move" link at the top. If you decide to merge two or more pages into one, copy across the text you want, then tag the redundant source pages with {{now merged}}, to let an admin know that the edit histories can be merged. Never be afraid to sing out for help! Webaware ^talk 09:34, 17 July 2007 (UTC)

Dressmaking

Hi, this module could do with being expanded, anyone able to assist? ShakespeareFan00 12:21, 21 July 2007 (UTC)

I can help with some copyediting, formatting, and organizing, but as to content—I'm useless. --Whiteknight (Page) (Talk) 00:39, 23 July 2007 (UTC)

Dichotomous key

The book Dichotomous Key seems to be inactive. I think the book could be very useful if improved, so is there anybody here who would like to work on it? Eyu100 22:42, 25 July 2007 (UTC)

I have an interest in it too, but I am busy with some other things. I am also interested in the Field Guides, to which I have contributed. There's a lot of work to be done there as well. --Jomegat 23:58, 25 July 2007 (UTC)

I've been considering whether the Bloom Clock pages on Wikiversity might eventually be imported for use in the Dichotomous Key book, since there are primitive dichotomous keys being developed there using DPL (which we could use here as well). The only problem is that the time indices (i.e., what month something flowers in a particular region) are unmistakeably Original Research, and probably a bit too much OR for this project until it gets some academic reviews (which won't be happening for at least a couple years as data is collected). Using DPL in that way would certainly make it earier to build up the DK though. --SB_Johnny | ^PA! 08:32, 26 July 2007 (UTC)

I think alot of interest in that subject area has been redirected to Wikispecies. Although, there has been enough idle chat floating around about closing that project to instill a sense of caution among new contributors. --Whiteknight (Page) (Talk) 21:19, 26 July 2007 (UTC)

So... Anyone interested that can work on it? Eyu100 03:42, 3 August 2007 (UTC)

I made a template for navigation, but I am still trying to get it to work (Template:Dichkeynav). Eyu100 21:19, 3 August 2007 (UTC)

... Eyu100 17:02, 8 August 2007 (UTC)

Middle School Extension

Is it just me or is this a misunderstanding of Wikibooks? AuroraBooks, the person behind it, seems to be trying to create a new project similar to Wikijunior, but requiring there permission before new titles can be added, has created guideline and policy templates specific to it, and has even created a stub guideline pages Wikibooks:What is MSE? with a status of having been accepted by the MSE community without any actual text to it. All pages have been created today, AFAICT. Seems bizarre to me. --dark lama 19:44, 14 August 2007 (UTC)

I motion to move this discussion to Talk:Middle School Extension, but am curious myself as to what people think about it. Also, Darklama brings up a good point... I couldn't find a page on how to start subprojects in WB via either the wiki search or Google, so in the interests of being bold, I made a stub here... please redirect if I'm out of line. Mchua 20:42, 14 August 2007 (UTC)

A few points:

Wikibooks doesnt allow subprojects, that's why there are no guidelines on how to create them. The WB:WIW policy states "Wikibooks is not the place to develop new Wikimedia projects". Wikijunior is not a sub-project, it's more like a bookshelf devoted to children's books.
We should not move this discussion to Talk:Middle School Extension, it won't get any attention on that page.
This MSE thing really can't be what it says it is. It can't restrict people from creating new books or whatever. No person or group can really exercise such restrictions. Even on Wikijunior the "New Book of the Quarter" isn't a restrictive system, people are welcome to create new Wikijunior books at any time without permission. It also shouldn't have it's own policy pages, anything of that sort should be in a local page, such as Middle School Extensions/For Contributors or even Middle School Extensions/LMOS (LMOS = "Local Manual of Style"). I'm going to tag those "policy" pages for deletion now.

--Whiteknight (Page) (Talk) 20:31, 15 August 2007 (UTC)

A few additional points:

Wikijunior was established and scoped on Meta and it was decided that it should be set up here. Since then, Wikibooks has decided it does not want to be a foundry for other independent projects, and Wikijunior has become more or less a Wikibooks bookshelf with a few idiosynchracies.
It is entirely innappropriate for a single individual to act as dictator of any space in Wikibooks, unilaterally deciding what people can and cannot contribute.
This is the most appropriate place for this discussion. Rather than on the talk page of a newly created module that most active editors do not have on their watchlists.

This represents my understanding of the situation. Question: If subprojects aren't allowed, why do we have a Project Chat page? I think that a Middle School Bookshelf isn't a bad idea but as one of our non-US editors will soon come along and remind us it's a pretty US-centric title. If we're going to launch such a project it needs to be scoped a lot better than this one is, IMO. -- xixtas ^talk 22:11, 15 August 2007 (UTC)

Wikijunior seems to me to serve the purpose of being a middle school bookshelf of sorts, with a non US-centric title. The scopes are basically identical from what I saw, except for the dictator bit. --dark lama 22:53, 15 August 2007 (UTC)

To Xixtas: The "Project Chat" was intended with a different sense of the word "project" from what we are talking about here. On the staff lounge we can chat about things that people work together on, while in this conversation we are talking about "projects" as things that differ in purpose and policy from the rest of wikibooks. For instance, In terms of the staff lounge, I would consider a book a "project", or a bookshelf, or a template, or whatever: things that people work together on. What this MSE thing is, is some kind of "subproject", people trying to do something different from the rest of the community on our servers. --Whiteknight (Page) (Talk) 00:17, 16 August 2007 (UTC)

Eh? Why is that comment to xania? I haven't even said anything about this issue yet. Xania

^talk 16:37, 16 August 2007 (UTC)

Oh my mistake. It was late and I misread "Xixtas" for "Xania". --Whiteknight (Page) (Talk) 16:43, 16 August 2007 (UTC)

Thanks for the clarification (still learning my way around). Marked the Help:Starting_a_new_subproject page for deletion, since a howto for something that doesn't exist is useless, and simply made Wikibooks:Subprojects say "there are no such things." Mchua 08:50, 16 August 2007 (UTC)

Where do Psychology books go?

I've been going through some of our uncategorized books and trying to properly categorize and shelve them. However, i've run into a bit of a roadblock: Where do psychology books go? LOC classifies them as being in a similar subject area as philosophy and religion, but some of our psychiatry books and neural science books are better located on the medicine shelf. Does it belong on the health science shelf, or the humanities shelf?

For that matter, I have a second question: Where does geography go? There are geography sections on both the natural science shelf and the humanities shelf. I think it would be prudent if all geography books went on one or the other, not both. --Whiteknight (Page) (Talk) 21:52, 16 August 2007 (UTC)

And Agriculture. At the moment, agriculture books, such as A Wikimanual of Gardening, Goats, Raising Cattle, and Raising Chickens are hosted on the How-tos shelf. I feel like we can probably do better then that. --Whiteknight (Page) (Talk) 22:04, 16 August 2007 (UTC)

The field of psychology can definitely be placed in a very academic and research area or in a field-study and hands-on type area. In fact, the two often mix together. Psychology really is a science however and I think its rightful place here would be with health science or another related science. Humanities starts bringing in philosophy which is often associated at times but not really true to psychology.

I don't really see how geography could be humanities and it's really a straight science. When you start bringing in discussions of culture and societies I think it needs to be dual-listed since those are humanities topics.

Agriculture is a science too, but if the book is written like a how-to then that sounds like the appropriate place. Are we big into the business of dual listings? -withinfocus 15:27, 19 August 2007 (UTC)

I really like the idea of crosslisting. If a book fits on more than one shelf, then put it on more than one shelf; that's one of the advantages of our books not using paper. My main contributions have been to First Aid, which is a prime example of difficulty in finding a single "best" place to put it. Health sciences? Well yes, but it's not for doctors, which is the audience for most/all of the rest of that bookshelf. How-to? I guess, but first aid isn't that simple. Sports & Rec? Sure - we cover injuries that commonly happen in sports, and folks in PE often are involved in first aid. And we can go on. The solution is to list First Aid in all these places, so that it would be found by any of those audiences. – Mike.lifeguard | ^talk 21:39, 3 September 2007 (UTC)

Book Donations Policy Proposal

In response to a couple comments i've received, both recently and in the past, on wiki and off, I've drafted a quick policy proposal for book donations. The proposal is here: Wikibooks:Book donations. My purpose for this is both to explain the process, but also to explain the licensing. I want to make it obvious, painfully so in fact, that books must be released under the GFDL, that other people are going to edit books, and that a donated book really can't be given any special treatment. I tried to highlight Wikisource as a possible alternative in some cases. I also wanted to really highlight some points from the GFDL, so that nobody has any misconceptions. While I realize that some of the stern wording of this proposal will probably dampen some of our book donations, I also want to make sure that authors don't jump into it without proper consideration.

Anyway, it's just an early draft, I want to get a lot of people to look it over and see if we need to add anything, maybe remove anything, etc. In the future when we get a message like "hey I have a book I want to donate" we can point them to this page and hopefully answer a lot of questions quickly. --Whiteknight (Page) (Talk) 18:29, 17 August 2007 (UTC)

Why make it a policy? The text as it is seems to start by restricting donation to authors. One can be an author but have no rights to the work or the maybe the owner/donor is not the author, and what about works that have a "compatible" license... The text could be more generic (some parts do cover some of the points but the start of the text makes it very author oriented). --Panic 22:11, 17 August 2007 (UTC)

It really shouldn't be a policy, only a guideline. I'm thinking of this as being a type of resource similar to Wikibooks:Guidelines for class projects. You're also correct that it should be more generalized, and focus on all copyrights holders instead of just authors. I would argue, perhaps, that authors are the group of people who are most likely to donate work, where a publisher or other copyright-holding entity would be more likely to restrict the work and make it for-profit. I'll see what I can do about it. --Whiteknight (Page) (Talk) 19:19, 20 August 2007 (UTC)

Using Wikibooks

I've taken this great idea from User:Urbane and started running with it. My intention here is to create a comprehensive "users guide" to wikibooks, encompassing all facets of what we do here. In the short term, I would like this book to become a suitable replacement for the current help pages, so that we can tell new users to "read this book" instead of telling them that they should "read the help pages", which is a daunting task.

The book is separated into sections by job: Editing, Reading, Writing, and Administering. The idea here is that different people can quickly find the information that they want to find, based on what goal they have in mind. For instance, if the question is "How do i start a new book", you would read the section "The Wikibooks Writer".

In the short term, I do not intend this book to replace the help pages. I have not moved, nor merged any help pages into this book (mostly because most help pages are such low quality), and I have also not deleted nor redirected any help pages. Once this book, and hopefully others like it, become more useful, we can talk about replacing one with the other.

Also, I have created a new bookshelf for this and other types of wiki-related material: Wikibooks:Help bookshelf. If people would like to write other books related to MediaWiki, or Wikibooks specifically, we can write them there.

It is my hope that all Wikibookians can contribute at least a little bit of information to this project, based on your individual specialties. If we have the expert vandal fighters, the expert authors, the expert copyeditors, etc all writing about their specialities, we will have a wonderful learning resource for future wikibookians. --Whiteknight (Page) (Talk) 14:41, 30 August 2007 (UTC)

images w/o license info

When deleting these, we're supposed to "check if their authors have other images without proper copyright information - if yes, these images should be also deleted and their authors blocked temporarily."

Is that correct?
What constitutes 'temporarily'?

– Mike.lifeguard | ^talk 22:44, 30 August 2007 (UTC)

There have been a few users over the lifetime of Wikibooks that have uploaded images in complete disregard to copyright. In some cases we have even caught them "red handed" where the original source of the image is known and known to be under classic proprietary copyright terms (meaning no rights to reuse them at all... except as fair-use). In a few situations, some of these individuals even go so far as to "randomly" pick one of the license tag templates just to get admins to leave them alone. As a result, all of their contributions have been suspected.

In a few cases, some of these users have gone on to perform acts of vandalism and do other things to make life miserable for administrators. When this happens, our user block policy is the governing how administrators should react. Keep in mind that intentionally uploading copyrighted images can be damaging for Wikibooks as well, particularly if misleading copyright tags are applied. A single case of uploading a copyrighted image is not the issue, but those who continue to upload many images that are illegal for us to have on Wikibooks, in spite of repeated warnings by administrators.

Basically, this is another type of problematic user to watch for as an administrator. --Rob Horning 23:27, 30 August 2007 (UTC)

Mike, what are you quoting from above? For me, it's a question of whether they've been repeatedly uploading after repeated warnings, and not responding to those warnings. If the user is blocked, the only thing they can edit is their own talk page, which can at least force them to discuss the issue. Just make sure to check the contribs and see if they've actualy been around to see the warnings after the warnings were left. --SB_Johnny | ^PA! 23:43, 30 August 2007 (UTC)

That was from the infobox at the top of Category:Images with unknown copyright status. – Mike.lifeguard | ^talk 21:33, 3 September 2007 (UTC)

I would say that you really shouldnt block a person without warning them first. If a person uploades a large number of "inappropriate" images (inappropriateness here defined as not properly licensed or sourced) without having been warned, we can't assume that they knowingly did anything wrong. If you warn the person about the issue and they continue to upload inappropriate images, you should definitely block them. "Temporarliy" in this case means: "block them until they understand". If they don't understand the problem, there is no hope that they are going to stop uploading problem images. Some people will go to their talk pages and dispute it, and these people are likely to learn from the mistakes. Some people will leave it at that, in which case it's no matter to me if they never get unblocked. --Whiteknight (Page) (Talk) 01:41, 31 August 2007 (UTC)

I figured it applied mainly to cases of deliberately uploading inappropriate images and/or extremely large numbers of inappropriate image contributions. – Mike.lifeguard | ^talk 21:33, 3 September 2007 (UTC)

Help:Archiving a talk page

FYI: I imported this from WP and started modifying it for use here. – Mike.lifeguard | ^talk 15:33, 5 September 2007 (UTC)

Wikiversity

This has been something that has been bugging me for some time now, why are there so many wikiversity pages archived here when live versions are being edited at wikiversity? Users are prohibited from editing the wikibooks versions of wikiversity modules through the use of the MovedToWikiversity template. If you look here you can see a large number of these articles, though i suspect that these are not all of them. Should these pages be deleted? Or maybe just turned into soft redirects? I feel that it is a little counter-productive to keep non-live versions of pages lying around, and then prohibiting users from editing them.

A previous VFD for the Wikiversity project can be found here though i don't think that it is of any relevance as it is from a time when wikiversity was no it's own project.

P.S. Please don't read this and assume that i have anything against the wikiversity project, that is not my aim here, nor is it the case. Urbane (Talk) (Contributions) 20:59, 10 September 2007 (UTC)

There was another VfD for it a bit ago. The decision was basically:

keep anything that might be useful to Wikibooks
notify the Wikiversian custodians of any Wikiversity pages which may have failed to be imported as indicated by {{MovedToWikiversity}} or any related templates missing from the page.
delete everything else and delete the other Wikiversity pages once they've been imported.

I've been deleted Wikiversity pages slowly which have been marked as having been moved to Wikiversity, if its a stub and Wikibooks already has more information in one of its books, or pages which seem to be related to the organizing and operation of Wikiversity. --dark lama 22:51, 10 September 2007 (UTC)

Comment It's been my personal policy for a while now to sort through these pages as I find them. I merge the ones that contain useful content, and tag for deletion those that do not. Important pages would do better as soft redirects, on the off chance that outside links will still point to them. Non-important pages, sub-pages, or stub-pages really can be deleted now. I don't think we even really need a policy on this, we can really just start phasing these pages out in the way that we best see fit. --Whiteknight (Page) (Talk) 23:29, 10 September 2007 (UTC)

Comment - I see no reason to keep them. If there's useful content, let's merge into a wikibook, then delete. If it's not useful content or if it's Wikiversity meta-content, then delete outright. I suppose some pages might have historical value. I can't think of what that might be offhand, but I don't rule out the possibility. I'd also suggest letting folks there know that we're not going to be holding onto their stuff any longer - they'd better make sure they have whatever they want if we're going to cull the pages. – Mike.lifeguard | ^talk 00:33, 11 September 2007 (UTC)

Comment Again keep in mind that these pages aren't doing any harm, so there's no urgency in deleting. There's not enough support staff available on wikiversity to go through all these pages now, so perhaps patrollers would consider using {{wv-doomed}} to mark any unwanted pages so that custodians can just go through the pages in that category from time to time. --SB_Johnny | ^PA! 08:04, 12 September 2007 (UTC)

(Oh by the way: these pages can be deleted, renamed, or merged without any interproject issues).--SB_Johnny | ^PA! 08:07, 12 September 2007 (UTC)

Comment I've gone through all those pages and deleted a lot of them. All other pages looked like they could possibly be useful as part of a book, to start a book or to begin page in the subject namespace. --dark lama 15:52, 12 September 2007 (UTC)