Wikibooks:Reading room/Archive 4

From Wikibooks, the open-content textbooks collection

Jump to: navigation, search
Replacement filing cabinet.svg

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


Contents

Table of Contents

Is it possible to have a section heading which does not appear in the table of contents. If not then I guess I have to maintain the TOC manually?

I ask because in the calculus book there are a lot of examples, and the TOC gets too long.

Thanks Juliusross 15:09, 22 October 2005 (UTC)

There's no way to exclude headers from the TOC as yet, so you'll have to turn it off completely and make your own. Just type __NOTOC__ somewhere on the page to remove it. GarrettTalk 00:57, 26 October 2005 (UTC)

No no no, for god sake just use HTML. Bold the header, and make it header 4 or header 3 "< h4 >" "< b >" after the header write "< /b >" (by the way, write all of those without the spaces i put in) - it won't appear in the table of contents, and it WILL be bold and larger. Turning the table of contents off makes your books very hard to use. Fresheneesz

Request for comment

I've posted this request here as I haven't located a Wikibooks RfC page. Apologies if I've managed to miss it somehow.

I have for a while now been engaged in a discussion - well, it feels more like an exchange - with Metric1000 as regards the nature of the About gravity, mass, and weight module in the Wikijunior Solar System book. I think the time has been ripe for comments, suggestions and advice from other people, so would appreciate it if people would pay it and our discussion a visit to help resolve what I fear may become an impasse. Thank you.

David Kernow 01:55, 23 October 2005 (UTC)

Missing article

Ok -- I'm new here.

To practice, I put comments into a Travel Guide about Costa Rica. I forgot to sign in before I did that, so I can't check my history. Now I can't find any travel guide on Costa Rica. I'm 61 years old and maybe I'm getting senile but I'm not hallucinating. Maybe this was in a different wiki project, but I can't find it there, either. I checked deletions to see if someone tossed it, but no luck.

Ok you experienced people please tell me what I am missing here. I hope it is not my brain.

Thanks

--Frog One 02:56, 25 October 2005 (UTC)

COuld you possibly have been editing wikitravel? They have one for Costa Rica at http://wikitravel.org/en/Costa_Rica --Gabe Sechan 16:33, 25 October 2005 (UTC)
No, you are not going senile. There is a group of editors here that feel it is inappropriate for travel guides to be on Wikibooks. I am of a different opinion on the subject, but that is something that should be debated elsewhere for now. If you can remember the name of the section or travel guide that was deleted, you can put up a request with the Wikibooks:Votes for undeletion section. The text you wrote is still in the database, but has been removed due to some cleanup. I can even undelete it if necessary.
Please, continue to contribute to Wikibooks, and I'm glad that you have gone the extra effort to try and find out what happened. We are all mere mortals and sometimes get carried away deleting stuff that perhaps should be kept. There are quite a few pages here on Wikibooks that havn't seen activity in years, and sometimes those get deleted when they don't seem to be "important" or don't seem to have much content. In order to delete content, you must be an "administrator" here, which really only implies that it is somebody who has made some significant contributions over some time and can be trusted to help out the community. Otherwise, it is just opinion over what should be kept and what is removed.
As I said, we do make mistakes, and I apologize on behalf of this community if you feel this content was deleted by mistake. If you are pretty certain that it was on Wikibooks, I'll try to dig around and see if I can find the content. --Rob Horning 17:32, 25 October 2005 (UTC)

Book Count for Wikibooks

I have increasingly seen a number of newspaper/magazine/blog articles about Wikibooks that seem to have mistaken the module count for the number of Wikibooks that we have here. Numbers like 12,000 Wikibooks are thrown around when in fact I think we would be hard pressed to count more than about 100 books that are more than stubs. And only a couple dozen books are even close to a "publishable" state.

For the sake of accuracy for media articles of this nature, as well as an indicator of the effectiveness of this project, I would like to see some "metric" that could be developed to count the number of actual Wikibooks we have on this project. Counting the number of books on Main Page is one way to do it, but even that seems to not be accurate. Another issue to consider is how would we be able to automate that calculation? That certainly would be an interesting statistic to keep updated on the main page as well. I'm not proposing MediaWiki software changes here, although that could also be a possibility. --Rob Horning 07:23, 26 October 2005 (UTC)

Well, if people are using those % finished images, you could have a perl script read the bookshelves, and count the number with each image after them. That would give you a rough count of how many and what stage. Pseudocode looks like this:
read list of bookshelves from a config file
foreach bookshelf
  read in the bookshelf text from cur table
  foreach line in text
    check if there is a link to a wikibooks book
    if so, check if there is an image link after it.
    record book name and image in a hash table.  For quick counts, add it to some running totals
we now have a list of all books and their image percent.  Script needs to report this somehow-  mail an admin or post it on the front page maybe?

That might be good enough for a rough estimate.--Gabe Sechan 09:10, 26 October 2005 (UTC)

Well, if people were using the Wikibooks:Naming policy, the statistics would show a correct list. Currently, there are over 290 Books larger than 10 Kb and more than one chapter, but it is clear there are false books in the list and other books are not been counted because they don't follow any naming convention, e.g. Linux Guide (I regard this book as broken) or followed the bookshelf convention, e.g. Programming:C Plus Plus and consequently were counted as pages, not books. ManuelGR 01:45, 5 November 2005 (UTC)
True - the stats will find any book which follows the naming convention and if you don't follow: tuff luck. I too would say that the stats are the way to go --Krischik T 15:14, 5 November 2005 (UTC)

Dump request

We want to move the Blender Noob to Pro book to a Blender dedicated wiki, as per request of Spiderworm, the person who originally created the book. I have looked into the possibilities of doing this with respect to the GFDL, and I understand that makes it necessairy to export with history. I see the importance of making the contributors aware of the fact that we are moving (or at least mirroring) the book in time. I already made a template to put on top of the pages that are to be moved: Template:Blenderwiki.

Now comes the question: I looked at the latest db dump, which is from october 29. We prefer the latest dump before 'lockup' (putting up a sign). Is it possible to get a dump that has a special select query, so that we can just get everything below Blender 3D: Noob to Pro? (or maybe even everything below Blender 3D)?

Another question is regarding the images, I don't see an easy way yet to transfer these aswell (apart from getting the upload dump, which contains a lot of files of course).

Thanks in advance!

--1983 15:48, 27 October 2005 (UTC)

Does it really make sense to do this? Obviously you can, but it seems to me like it might be easier just to link here. If you make a copy, then we'll end up with some people editing here, some editing there. The result is two versions of the book, each missing some of the information of the other. --Gabe Sechan 16:48, 27 October 2005 (UTC)
I was actually talking about a move, I said that mirroring was an option, but we prefer not to do it and just move the thing.--1983 18:39, 27 October 2005 (UTC)
Is there somewhere to read more about this (like other page, or external forum/ML thread, irc logs..)? I only found the big notice which pointed me here.. but no mention of any reason as to why this would be done. --Allefant 22:20, 31 October 2005 (UTC)
Unfortunately we do not have any IRC-logs on this, but I will ask Spiderworm to state this here himself. Apart from that, the main important reason is to centralise all the blender documentation. First there was just the English manual that was on the official site, but now we have french, german, spanish, italian translations being done in the same place! Before, all these things happened at different places (the german translation came from de.wikibooks!). Now these are 'official' manuals, but there's a tutorial section in the works aswell: it is becoming a huge Blender information centre. The Noob to Pro wikibook would fit perfectly in there and is most likely to be found and contributed to much quicker by all the users. It 'deserves' it, in my opionin. I hope you understand our reasons & that you agree! --1983 09:14, 2 November 2005 (UTC)
Another thing; unlike wikibooks, the blenderwiki has the possibility of uploading blends, something that has been asked for a lot of times here on wikibooks, but apparently is not gonna be possible anytime soon... --1983 17:27, 2 November 2005 (UTC)
Ah, yes, thanks. Makes all sense. If a link to wikibooks is out of the question, the best thing to do would indeed be to delete the book here then, and just have something like "This book has moved to ...". Also, right now, the sign to not edit is up now for some days already - I would suggest to remove the sentence "do not edit", and only add it back 1 or 2 days before the actual move is done. (I remember, about half a year ago when outdated statistics were displayed on the front page, it took wikibooks admins several months to react to requests to remove them.. so I wouldn't count on that export thing being available again soon.) --Allefant 19:54, 4 November 2005 (UTC)
Hi :) I indeed would be interested in moving the Noob to Pro book and possibly other Blender books over to the blender mediawiki, for all the reasons mentioned here. Does the Wikimedia Foundation have a policy on handling requests like this? I understand that the foundation is interested in always bringing more and more good content and of course bringing more visitors to wikibooks.org ... I can understand that moving a book FROM wikibooks.org does not help in this regard. I can understand that the purpose of wikibooks.org is to develop an impressive library of quality books; I understand that the last thing the Wikimedia Foundation would like to develop is a reputation as a place for budding book projects until they find a more permanent home. However, we do feel the need to have a bit more control over the editing processes, would like to centralize the Blender documentation, and most especially need a place where we can provide blends along with the tutorials. Moving to our own wiki would make sense for us for all these reasons. I can see pros and cons of having two versions of the book, one here and one there... one major con would be that, were there two Noob to Pro projects, the major authors would abandon the wikibooks.org one and focus on developing the one at the new wiki site. The Blender documentation here might become stagnated and ignored completely. An alternative that would make sense to me would be to find a way to get the content of the Blender books here to mirror the content in the new wiki. This way, you still have the books in your library, you are still getting that traffic and interest, and the documentation is still constantly being updated and improved. I would like to hear other possible solutions. I am familiar with the Special:Export page, however, with it being disabled at the moment, what other possibilities are there for exporting content, history, and images? --Spiderworm 16:42, 3 November 2005 (UTC)
Own BlenderWiki is as logical evolution as was WikiBooks from Wikipedia. There was need for expanded Wikipedia articles. Here we have the same case. Again, we need dedicated Blender wiki site with official documentation writers, blend files, scripts, LaTeX modules, ...etc. included. All this will raise quality level of Blender documentation. Here are still some quirks in this books, not only because of writers knowledge, but also because of amazing Blender programers speed. Here we can make nice Blender WikiBook portal with highlights from Official BlenderWiki. Well, I am happy and proud that all this with Blender MediaWiki actually started here. So cheers guys! As we said: from Noob to Pro. It's time for Pro! :) --Popski 20:58, 3 November 2005 (UTC)

Just go to Special:Export and enter the page names you want. Never mind, that's disabled at the moment. Keep checking back there though, I assume the disabling is short-term like when our search is replaced with Google's. As for images, I'm fairly certain this can do that too. Since I doubt the images have any history you can just dump them right away. GarrettTalk 12:56, 28 October 2005 (UTC)

It is not legally permissible for you to take Wikibooks content and add it to your wiki. This is because you have chosen the restrictive and non-free Open Content Licence as your licence. Wikibooks content is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation Licence, which the Open Content License is not compatible with because of the restrictions on freedom that the OCL imposes. If your wiki had been licensed under the GFDL, like Wikibooks, then it would have been a simple matter to transwiki a copy of the wikibook over. But your wiki is non-free, so that is not an option. Uncle G 20:34, 3 November 2005 (UTC)

Ahhhh where did you get this info from?!? We did not state anything about the license! Whatever you read on our wiki applies to the manual, nothing else! So no problems there :o) --1983 21:06, 3 November 2005 (UTC)
The main page of your wiki has a link to a page on licences, which explicitly says that you use the Open Content Licence. Uncle G 11:46, 4 November 2005 (UTC)
I can see the confusion here, and the need to state it more clearly (since it doesn't say anything about the non-manual things), however, to quote from that page: "Blender itself is released under the GNU General Public License. Blender Documentation is released under the Open Content License". This doesn't say anything about the Noob to Pro wikibook since that is not official Blender Documentation. I will make sure we make it clear that anything non-official is released under the GFDL. Thanks for the heads up! --1983 13:33, 4 November 2005 (UTC)
Well, since they have some of the authors making the switch, those authors can choose to dual license the parts they wrote. But only exactly what they wrote- any changes, additions, or content by other authors would need to be relicensed by their respective authors. Which trust me, is a nightmare to try and do. --Gabe Sechan 20:52, 3 November 2005 (UTC)
We don't need to anybody license anything if we use the GFDL, do we? As long as we give the authors credit, which will happen automatically when we import the complete history, AFAIK everything is OK --1983 21:06, 3 November 2005 (UTC)
No, if you keep it under the GFDL there is no need to dual license, and all content is then transferable. I was going by the above comment that you were going to put it up under a different license. --Gabe Sechan 23:12, 4 November 2005 (UTC)

I understand the desire to have all the blender related material in one place. And I'm not saying that I'm against it. But just remember, it's not always good to have all your resources in one place. What if something happens to the blender wiki? People could still come here. But not if it's been moved. I'm not taking a position here, just playing devil's adovacte. --205.174.143.2 21:43, 9 November 2005 (UTC)

I personally strongly disagree with the idea to actually move (i.e. delete here) the wikibook. The editing process on blenderwiki has certain restrictions, which may be good for an official manual, but will slow the editing process. I think it's a better idea to leave the Wikibook where it is. --Soylentgreen 19:55, 10 November 2005 (UTC)

Need to include some example C++ implementations to PADsynth article

Hi. I am Paul and I wrote the PADsynth_synthesis_algorithm article. I would like to include some source code (at least a complete class) into wikibooks. Now, I posted a link to sourceforge ( http://zynaddsubfx.sourceforge.net/doc/PADsynth/implementation/PADsynth_implementation.zip ) but I would like to be everything here: to avoid need of external source. I have seen that I cannot upload the .zip file and I need help (at least to post PADsynth.cpp and PADsynth.h) from that .zip arhive and link to the article (book). I consider that is a very good thing to show that example implementation into the article/book. Should I try to wikify the source code? (PADsynth.cpp+h) Thanks. Paulnasca 19:54, 27 October 2005 (UTC)

  • I found the answer to my problem and I post here in case if another user has the same problem: you need to put the source between a < pre > and < /pre > tags. Paulnasca 21:53, 1 November 2005 (UTC)

Internet Server Directory and Wikibooks of lists

I was thinking of making this a VfD discussion, and it may end up becoming that shortly, but I wanted to put this into a forum that was less threatening to start with. This Wikibook, Internet Server Directory, is a list of links to servers for various resources on the internet. This Wikibook is making me eat my words I wrote on Wikibooks talk:What is Wikibooks#Wikibooks is not a repository of links but I'm willing to suggest I spoke in haste.

The real question I'm placing before Wikibooks contributors and the community at large is this: Is it appropriate to have a repository of links or a bunch of lists on Wikibooks?

I think a module that has a bunch of links at the end for "further reading" is very useful. For example, Wikijunior Solar System has a bunch of links at the end of the main page for gathering content and to use for bibliographic references. Where I have a problem with this is when the sole purpose of the Wikibook is just to make a collection of links or a list of topics. I know Wikipedia has been kicking those type of articles off of Wikipedia and they have been going elsewhere on the Wikimedia projects, so I guess Wikibooks is the next target to try.

Should Wikibooks:What is Wikibooks be changed to stop lists and Wikibooks that are just links to other places? This Wikibook about Internet servers is now forcing the issue and will require us to decide one way or the other. --Rob Horning 23:05, 27 October 2005 (UTC)

There is, of course, a fine line to be drawn here. For instance the book on free software (which looks quite good) is based around a collection of links. The value of the book, of course, is the organisation. In the case of the server directory it seems the organisation is sparse but then again the book is quite new. Just my 2 cents Juliusross 03:24, 28 October 2005 (UTC)
This is not a book, nor does it appear to aspire to become one. Unless the author can explain that its purpose is something other than as a web directory, we will have to delete it. GarrettTalk 13:29, 28 October 2005 (UTC)

Is this legal?

Emulation:All_Mame_Roms is it? 81.218.224.11 14:36, 28 October 2005 (UTC)

I'm having some strong doubts on this. Discussing how to burn ROMs for games is not strictly illegal, nor is talking about bit torrent archives. Where it crosses the line is to provide a list of commercial software that is under propritary licenses and suggesting that you can copy that software freely as well. That is where this turns into advocacy that commits a crime that can land you in prison. I would not personally want to be the "author" of this Wikibook, nor touch it so far as that goes as it could result in legal liability, particularly if it can be proven that somebody followed these steps.

I'm moving this to a VfD discussion right now. --Rob Horning 16:15, 28 October 2005 (UTC)

How do I ...?

How do I put an inset or a box with show/hide options onto a new page?

Tom Croke Frog One 21:43, 29 October 2005 (UTC)

You mean you want to create something that can be opened and closed like the Table of Contents? That's Javascript-powered so it might not be possible to make your own, but I can look into it if you like. GarrettTalk 00:13, 30 October 2005 (UTC)

licking elbows

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

"It is impossible to lick your elbow." i can! and i know someone else that also can.

Elad

Download books as PDF

Hi there.

I (that's Manuel Strehl from the German WB) proposed in the German WB a possibility for allowing people to download complete books in PDF format and wanted it to come up to discussion in a broader scope.

Proposal

Use XSL-FO and Apache's Open Source FOP to produce PDFs out of Wikibook's raw data. Provide a link for visitors to allow them to download the complete book they're currently reading.

Following procedure:

  • Read the MySQL data of the current page, add the data of all pages of the same book.
  • parse it into a XSL-FO file (this isn't very different from parsing into XHTML) in the order they appear online
  • create a PDF out of the XSL-FO using Apache's FOP ([1])
  • this is achievable by clicking on a link provided on each page of the current book.

Disadvantages:

  • one-time effort to create the PHP file and a standard XSL-FO file
  • server strain

Advantages:

  • create the PDF automatically out of the raw MySQL data
  • complete wikibooks for download

If you want to contact me, please visit my German Wikipedia discussion page

--Manuel, 22:18, 30 October 2005 (UTC)

Looks like a good idea. Certainly something like it needs to be done. How do you get the pages in the right order? Some of the books are not structured as linear narratives and many (most?) have three or more hierarchical levels of sections and sub-sections. In the Programming:Visual Basic Classic book I have tried to add a navigation template to each page which links them all in printed page order but it is only a local convention. I would discuss this on your German talk page but my German is next to non-existent so it would be a rather painful process for all concerned. --kwhitefoot 12:03, 31 October 2005 (UTC)

Herewith thou get thy special permission to write english text to my german discussion page ;-) To the problems: Actually I have no idea. There are some books in linear order that would be easily transformed. Others won't, that's true. There could be a user interface to allow one to sort them himself, but this is no really good solution. Actually, this is one of the points that must be discussed.

Other Question: Is there any other page where a similar discussion is open? At the German WB I just initialized a page for this purpose, for the discussion was led on three different pages. --Manuel, 20:32, 31 October 2005 (UTC)

We have a Wikibooks:Textbook planning page, but few users are now there.
Apparently FOP uses Java, but I have no idea whether this server runs Java. Wikibooks might be Linux-Apache-MySQL-PHP, but I am not sure. Any placement of Java on any non-x86 Linux or BSD machine is difficult; I know not what this server is.
Assuming server can run FOP, a problem is the determination of whether a module belongs to a book. For example, Guide to UNIX links to several parts of itself, but it also has several links to other Wikibooks. A solution is to always use slash convention (Guide to UNIX/Introduction) or colon convention (de:Linux-Kompendium) as recommended in the proposed naming policy, but many books (Linux Guide) use neither. Also, what is the order of the chapters? The Guide to UNIX page suggests that Guide to UNIX/Explanations is before Guide to UNIX/Commands, but the software might follow the Commands link in the first paragraph, or the one in the introduction, and put Commands early instead of the back of the book! --Kernigh 22:05, 31 October 2005 (UTC)
Retrieved from "http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Wikibooks:Reading_room/Archive_4"