Wikibooks:Reading room/Archive 6

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This is an archive for historical purposes. When moving threads here, add them to the bottom of the list (or start Archive 7).


Contents

[edit] Speedy Deletion Warning

In the next 24 to 48 hours, I will delete a variety of pages from Wikibooks which are a clear and simple violation of our charter. Jokebook, Getting a date, Naturism are all not textbooks and need to be moved to another site. There may be more.--Jimbo Wales 17:27, 13 November 2005 (UTC)

Shouldn't we give authors of these books a bit more time to move them? Because normal user cannot view deleted book, book authors will be asking administrators to get source of these books again and again. --Derbeth talk 18:22, 13 November 2005 (UTC)

I'm happy to give more time, but these books are already candidates for speedy deletion. The point is that, to give on example which was thankfully already deleted, a racist white-power book is not a textbook, never will be a textbook, and should have been deleted on site and the creator banned for vandalism on site. --Jimbo Wales 21:03, 13 November 2005 (UTC)

I was shocked to find a racist white-power book in Wikibooks, but looking through the definition of what makes a Wikibook, the concept seemed to match our mission of conveying information that some people would find pertinent in the most concise manner possible. Along with the information of what definitions and resources existed, there was some persuasive writing, but no more than other Wikibooks. For me, the only objection to the book was content. I'm sure that many of us would feel uncomfortable being associated with a resource for neo-Nazis. Yet, we have to be honest about our objections. We object to the content, not the format. I strongly suspect that no book on racist white-power will ever be acceptable to Wikibooks regardless of how tightly it conforms to our definition of a textbook. --Zephram Stark 15:16, 14 November 2005 (UTC)
I don't see how that's reasonable at all. A neutral textbook on the white-power movement and its history would be perfectly acceptable—indeed, there are plenty of proprietary textbooks on the subject already available, and there exist many university courses specifically on that subject, since it is an important cultural and historical issue. Now a non-neutral textbook explicitly promoting white power would be another matter. --65.182.51.67 02:16, 19 November 2005 (UTC)
For administrators: help cleaning up Wikibooks and mark pages that do not fit Wikibooks:What is Wikibooks rules. Add notices like in Naturism. --Derbeth talk 19:52, 13 November 2005 (UTC)
Who was responsible for making this decision? Was there ever a discussion or a vote, or did Jimbo Wales just decide to order this today? Guanaco 20:51, 13 November 2005 (UTC)

It isn't an order. It's 100% consistent with policy. These sorts of things are clearly listed as exceptions on what wikibooks is not, and therefore are speedy deletion candidates already. I do think policy needs to be clarified, because Wikibooks is having a problem with excessive off-mission stuff.--Jimbo Wales 21:01, 13 November 2005 (UTC)

All I can find that applies to any of these on Wikibooks:What is Wikibooks is the sentence, "Wikibooks is not a place for users to publish content unrelated to our main objective." I agree that much of this needs to go, but we need to have a clear policy on what is acceptable and what is not. "Wikibooks is a collection of open content textbooks, manuals, and other texts, with supporting book-based texts that are being collaboratively written." (Wikibooks:About) Where do we draw the line? What topics may we have manuals on? What "other texts" are okay? We need to either form extremely clear criteria for speedy deleting these or discuss each of these books individually on Wikibooks:Votes for deletion. Guanaco 21:41, 13 November 2005 (UTC)

"Wikibooks is not a free wiki host or webspace provider" and "Wikibooks is not a place to publish original works" and "Wikibooks is not a soapbox" are all violated. I do agree that the criteria could be made clearer, but these three books aren't difficult cases. Niether was the white power book which someone already deleted. If there are borderline cases, these can be discussed, and policy can be clarified, but we don't need to wait for clarification of difficult cases to say, ok, let's deal with the easy ones promptly.

One very simple thing we can do is ask ourselves: is this a textbook? If it is, if we can easily point to a course which uses this sort of textbook, then fine. If not, then some kind of extraordinary rationale has to be there in order to keep it. Take a look at the VfD debates -- many people seem to be confused about the purpose of the site. I think getting rid of this stuff is a major positive step in the right direction. --Jimbo Wales 23:44, 13 November 2005 (UTC)

We have to change our guidelines for new pages. To see what is valid, check Wikibooks:What is Wikibooks#What Wikibooks includes - this is Jimbo's opinion on our mission. I understand that this will cause major changes to Wikibooks - it is possible, that we will have to move away all computer games bookshelf (but not through speedy deletion as much of this material shows high quality). Now we should be more careful about new pages and discuss future changes. --Derbeth talk 21:50, 13 November 2005 (UTC)
Unless we can define objective measures of what will be allowed at Wikibooks, I think we should have a concept submittal process for new books. Nobody wants to spend a lot of time writing a book for it to later be deleted. Wikibooks would get a lot more action if speedy deletion were not always hanging over author's heads. --Zephram Stark 22:09, 13 November 2005 (UTC)
I think the soulution will be increasing number of admins. If admin sees a page that is not suitable for Wikibooks, he will notify the author instantly. As I wrote before, we have problem with too little number of admins and admins not watching recent changes. --Derbeth talk 22:13, 13 November 2005 (UTC)
I agree. I am thinking of creating a book, but I'm not sure if it is an acceptable book for Wikibooks.
I am sure more admins would help. But I just want to point out that anybody can watch the recent changes and at least suggest pages for speedy deletion. Juliusross 02:14, 14 November 2005 (UTC)
I have a lot of time tomorrow where i can help with a cleanup effort of this scale. Maybe we should have a single list of changes that need to be made, so all the sysops can work together. --Whiteknight TCE 22:03, 13 November 2005 (UTC)
I think we should prioritize tasks. Firstly we should tag for deletion books that are not-NPOV or are completely non-educatonal. I wouldn't delete them instantly, authors should receive some time (1-2 days) to move them. IMO computer game tutorials and serious how-to's can wait for our decision on what to delete and what to keep. We can also use Special:Shortpages to delete some nonsense pages now. --Derbeth talk 22:13, 13 November 2005 (UTC)
Jimbo, you should have a look at Wikibooks talk:Policy/Vote if you haven't already. We've already discussed this issue to death there, and it is a major point of contention between the two camps--especially the videogame guides, which no doubt fit within what you're saying. I have no idea what will have to be done, but entire shelves are going to be emptied in this transition! On the plus side it will give us a good excuse to do some Wikibooks:Naming policy-related housecleaning... but I think that regardless of your status and officialness all that razz you may have some opposition. GarrettTalk 02:36, 14 November 2005 (UTC)

This is an important discussion. This could affect almost all of Wikibooks. So under this new enforcement of policy, what are we to do with Wikibooks:How-tos bookshelf, for example. They are not really textbooks. This needs to have more attention. Can we have this discussion on it's own page, and have some sort of notice at the top of every page, sort of like when we are doing fundraising, etc.? This affects all of Wikibooks and more attention needs to be paid to this. --LV (Dark Mark) 15:55, 14 November 2005 (UTC)

Important Comment - I would strongly suggest that Jimbo try to trust the Wikibooks community a little bit. We did delete the White Power Wikibook, and most other patent nonsense does need to go as well. We do tend to be a little more lax on some things, and perhaps some of these non-books need to go as well. Several other Wikibooks have been deleted recently, so it is important to note that we have been doing some policing of content here as it is. I also want to thank Jimbo for coming into Wikibooks, and if he wants to "clean house" he is certainly welcome. My own philosophy is to encourage new Wikibooks and give them plenty of time to prove themselves. Most of the time books like the White Power Wikibook cut their own throat through multiple policy violations, which in that case was most obvious a copyright violation that had nothing to do with content at all otherwise. It was also a Wikipedia entry that was also out of place. If we can find a good reason to remove content that avoids dealing with the controvercial issues that the book module may raise, it makes it much easier to remove it in the first place. I'm sorry if you feel I'm being too lax in my administrator duties and letting people like the books you've mentioned slide by. --Rob Horning 18:14, 14 November 2005 (UTC)

Developing A Universal Religion This book was written to be used as a textbook (that is, all of the parts together were written with this in mind, see the Introduction section, or see below). But, if it should not be in Wikibooks, please remove it. Since the earlier parts refer to it, and since this part rounds out what they are suggesting, is there another place that Developing A Universal Religion could go? Or, could a PDF copy of this part be offered? Alternatively, I could send anyone a PDF copy, if it was permissible to offer to do so within Wikibooks. Please advise me what to do. Thanks. David H 20:49, 14 November 2005 (UTC)

N.B. Other Parts are:

Part One Thinking And Moral Problems. This part includes Chapter One Thinking, Chapter Two Solving Problems and Chapter Three Making Decisions.
Part Two Religions And Their Source. This part includes Chapter Four Religions' Origins, Chapter Five Revelations And Conversions and Chapter Six Present Day Religions.
Part Three Purpose. This part includes Chapter Seven The Universe, Chapter Eight Life, Chapter Nine Looking For A Purpose and Chapter Ten Life And Exploiting. David Hockey
More Commentary - This does seem like an arbitrary decision here on some of this content. One of the problems here is that books like Jokebook have been allowed to persist on Wikibooks for some time. Going through the history of this Wikibook you can see that the first edit was November 2004. That means it has been on here for some time and until now never challenged. There were also early edits by people who were admins here, so obviously there is some question as to if it really belongs. Generally, Wikibooks that predated my active involvement here I've left alone unless it was an obvious policy violation, particularly if it was an individual soapbox, of which this wasn't.
There were several problems with Wikibooks, of which a few have been resolved somewhat recently. One of the largest of them was the fact that bureaucrats running this project "fell asleep" and didn't approve any new admins for a considerable length of time. Thanks to Aya, that logjam has been broken, but now we are facing a situation where there are a bunch of brand new admins who are still trying to get used to Wikimedia policies in general, and as a matter of fact trying to even establish consistant policies here on Wikibooks where essentially none have existed until recently. There were some general ones, but they were very confusing. The current set of policies for this project are a huge improvement over what was here earlier and a bunch of work has gone into trying to write those policies. I don't see the huge need for new admins compared to what was the problem earlier, although I will be the first to admit that we could use a little more help in general. At this point, IMHO, we need to develop some more users who are contributing to Wikibooks in general and help them get the skills needed to become admins. Or more importantly, we need to recruit more general participation in Wikibooks so we have a user base to draw upon to get more admins.
At the same time, a general housecleaning has been needed as well. The problem that we have been facing as admins is that projects like Jokebook and others have such a huge established development community that no single admin has been willing to take the arrows needed to remove such content. The best tool we have, the VfD discussions, would be quickly overwhelmed and have so many votes to keep that it would be hard to remove content like this, even if it doesn't belong. Brand-new Wikibooks don't have this problem as it is usually just one author trying to get started and the rest of the active community who participates in VfD discussions generally form more rational arguments for or against this new Wikibook. There are still some issues like the Muggles' Guide to Harry Potter where a large community comes from another project, especially Wikipedia in this case, and not only are well versed with Wikimedia policies and the use of MediaWiki software, but have a unified voice even though they are not necessarily sock puppets in the traditional sense of the term. BTW, nothing against the Muggles' Guide in particular, but other projects can come over like that and have in the past. The problem is most pronounced with a VfD discussion happens on Wikipedia and the supporters of an article try to refocus and do things here on Wikibooks when they are told to go away from Wikipedia, often with the support of Wikipedia admins.
Things like Colonising Mars are another example of an outside group that tries to write a Wikibook as a group where an individual admin can feel brow-beaten to aquiesce and allow a Wikibook to develop even if it shouldn't be here. In this case I've stuck to my guns and tried instead to mentor the contributors to keep it from becoming a political soapbox, which I think may be a better solution anyway. This isn't as big of a problem because the contributors are still new to Wikibooks and Wikimedia projects. On the other hand, we should be encouraging groups like this to author legitimate textbook material.
I guess what we really need to have here is a good review of the "project charter" for Wikibooks as opposed to the goals and aims of Wikimedia projects in general. What should the future of Wikibooks be? Should it be confined strictly to textbook materials that could be found in a formal educational setting? Should we even go so far as to require that a Wikibook meet specific curriculum objectives and be academically focused? Would the "charter" of a Wikibook require specific application to a specific educational setting such as a university course or something on Wikiversity? In this regard, that would be a huge change for Wikibooks and a significant narrowing of the scope of this project. The other extreme is to allow any non-fiction material on here that can't be relocated onto one of the other Wikimedia projects. This opposite extreme is more or less what has happened here on Wikibooks and apparently something Jimbo isn't happy about. I think scholarly publications that you can cite references and in general document the source of the ideas you are presenting should be allowed to remain on Wikibooks, but even that has its limits. What should we do as a project? --Rob Horning 05:59, 15 November 2005 (UTC)
I was suprised when someone showed me Wikibooks talk:Policy/Vote#A directly enumerated WikiBooks policy, because I saw it for the first time. In my opinion, it's fairy good attempt to clearly state what content is and what is not suitable for Wikibooks and covers most of types of books I would like to see on Wikibooks as well as books I think shouldn't be here. In needs some work (there's open discussion there) but I think with small tweaks it will be very useful. Wikibooks has tendency to make endless discussions (like about Wikibooks:Naming policy) and as a result we have great mess. Maybe we should move on with this proposal. Having this compact set of rules, we can easier discuss future of Wikibooks with Jimbo. I think this discussion should move to that page. --Derbeth [[User talk:Derbeth|<sup>talk</sup>]] 09:43, 15 November 2005 (UTC)

[edit] what it means to be a text

Getting a date is not based on a random idea for a book; the subject is repesented by courses in many continuing/community education programs, in courses on dating - sometimes specifically for a narrow audience (specific gender or age). I happen to live in Boston, and am most familiar with courses available at unis there; at any given moment there are a few about dating skills, often withslightly provocative names.

Some random googlable examples : The whole "Skills with Dating" course set at (Fondation Course, Intro workshop, 'for Teens and their Parents') at Strathfield CC in Oz, semanticist Steve Stockdale's "lucid dating" classes at SMU, ... in Boston: Boston Center for Adult Education, and the Cambridge Center.

Not to mention all of the self-help and life-improvement courses one can take outside of universities, complete with dozens of sessions and texts and audiotapes... I don't know if these count as 'courses', or if the assigned texts (often authored by the person leading the course; though this happens in academia as well) count as texts.

Is the opposition to Getting a date a naming issue? A lingering issue based on the crudeness of some of the original content? Bad content should not bar an entire class of books from the project forever. Would people opposed to that wikibook (or set of books) feel better if it were renamed to "Dating skills", or became a section of longer books with titles such as "Developing healthy relationships"?

Most of the dating courses I found in a quick google search just used syllabi or a set of notes... or a motivational book, with little other content. Of course having access to a good free textbook with accumulated information might change that.

--Sj 12:02, 15 November 2005 (UTC)

The opposition is mainly on the part of Jimbo coming in and trying to clean house. Wikibooks has strayed from the "original focus" of being a space for collaboratively written textbooks. This has nothing to do with any particular Wikibook, but the focus of Wikibooks as a whole. In this case, he is using Getting a date to give an example of how Wikibooks has gone too far, and perhaps we need to retrench and think about how we can get more into traditional textbooks like Calculus and World History. More particularly, how can we recruit people to help us with these more traditional books instead of off the wall books like Useless Information. Just where do we draw the line on books like this? --Rob Horning 16:08, 15 November 2005 (UTC)
I'm not sure if this is really a good idea for wikibooks long term. One of the things brought up in the wikiversity vote was that it overlapped too much with wikibooks. If wikibook takes a straight college textbook only line, they'd be right- wikibooks would become a subset of wikiversity. --Gabe Sechan 18:35, 15 November 2005 (UTC)
I put Getting a date on votes for deletion. Discuss it there. --Kernigh 23:38, 16 November 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Pages needing attention

I think we need to pay more attention to controversial and inaccurate books. I don't think that current structure with Wikibooks:Pages needing attention, Wikibooks:List of controversial issues and some similar pages helps tracking problems. Someone should re-organize these pages and provide proper links to them from Community portal and from other articles. --Derbeth talk 19:52, 13 November 2005 (UTC)

I created Wikibooks:Wikibooks maintenance page to gather all maintenance tasks in one place. I hope this will help cleaning up Wikibooks. BTW, I think that Wikibooks:Accuracy dispute should be marged to Wikibooks:Pages needing attention and Wikibooks:List of controversial issues should be merged to Wikibooks:NPOV dispute - it's hard to watch all these pages (and they are blank now). What do you think about it? --Derbeth 11:56, 15 November 2005 (UTC)

[edit] is there an online catalog?

I am writing a freeware plugin for Media PCs running Meedio (see here : http://www.meedio.com/maid/detail.php?mode=detail&plugin_id={A6FD6A4A-1BCD-4D7F-ADE7-C84C6E2F43F8} ) which allows people to read and browse for books in Project Gutenberg from their media PC. I currently also link into Google print, amd am working on a new version which brings in information from Project Gutenberg's MARC records file and ties in (where possible) to the Library of Congress' web site.

I'd like to also tie in to wikibooks. the end effect would be that the user has a list of available works on his machine, browses for what they want, and, on selecting a work of interest, goes to the wikibooks site.

But, to make this happen, I need an XML document, a MARC record file, an RSS feed -- something. Anything which points to all the works currently on the wikibooks site. Spidering the site is possible, but impractical. it would be a *lot* of hits on the site, would be slow, etc.

So, does anything resembling what I would need exist?

BTW, my plugin is freeware. I'm doing this because I can and because I'm having fun. I'm not affiliated with Meedio.

We have the Wikibooks:Card Catalog Office where we are trying to organize a cataloging effort, but I have been side tracked into other areas to really push this effort forward like it deserves. The big problem we would face with Wikibooks is trying to actually classify each of the existing Wikibooks, and try to organize the effort to classify the new Wikibooks as well. There are some neat ideas on the talk page of the CCO, but they need to be actually implemented.
If you have an idea for a file format that we could use for this classification effort, that would be appreciated as well. Establishing an XML Doctype or other similar protocol would be useful as well. Adding RSS feeds, however, is something you need to take up with the MediaWiki developers. I think it is a neat idea, and it would be fun to have some sort of RSS record get sent whenever we create a new Wikibook.
Basically, you have caught us at a bad time for this idea, and we need to build the tools that you are asking for. If you want to help do this for us, it would be very much appreciated. This is something that we need somebody to take leadership and make it happen. Right now most of the participants on this project are so busy simply adding content to the books that usually they don't get involved in the larger organizational issues here, and that is unfortunate in some ways. --Rob Horning 18:26, 14 November 2005 (UTC)

[edit] New CSD criteria proposal

I recently added a comment at Wikibooks talk:Deletion policy#New Speedy Criteria Proposal and am seeking comment. I am a little unsure how many people will see it there, so I figured I'd note it here as well. --LV (Dark Mark) 17:50, 14 November 2005 (UTC)

  • I'm going to bring up a slightly larger issue here. The page Wikibooks:Redirect has some policy/guideline issues on it, and I'm suggesting that perhaps this page needs to be rewritten to become a policy on Wikibooks. It is both a policy page and a tutorial, and I'm suggesting that the two concepts need to be seperated. Lord Voldemort's suggestion of dealing with double redirects could be added or adapted from this page. If you want to tackle that issue LV, you are welcome to start the new policy page as well. --Rob Horning 18:46, 14 November 2005 (UTC)
    • Actually, it's a simple evolution of the old help page for redirects, forked back in 2003. The most up-to-date version of the help page on redirects can be found at Help:Redirect. Anything in Wikibooks:Redirect that duplicates the actual help page can be discarded, and I have done so. Uncle G 01:34, 16 November 2005 (UTC)

[edit] VfD

VfD is getting rather large, and in particular, I have an issue with one of the sections. How to crack a Widows XP password has a lot of anon votes. I have a list of the IPs and how they voted if someone wants them. And how long do things need to stay in VfD??? Let's move things along over there. --LV (Dark Mark) 16:36, 15 November 2005 (UTC)

Have some patience here. Things just take a little bit longer on Wikibooks. I'm going take a look right now at the discussion. Often a VfD discussion, particularly if there is mixed opinion on the topic, will go on for a month or more. The anon votes in particular add confusion, but I think their opinion is still relevant as long as they are giving coherant and rational justifications to the argument to keep or delete a Wikibook or module. The other aspect is that I prefer to let a neutral admin try to resolve a VfD discussion if I have a personal stake in the argument and have advocated a clear position, in an attempt to try and be fair to the discussion as opposed to appearing arbitrary in my decision to end the discussion. --Rob Horning 17:26, 15 November 2005 (UTC)

Well obviously a neutral Admin should be the one closing the votes, but some of those sections have been sitting around for weeks upon weeks now. And I don't think anon votes should be counted. That's how we stop sockpuppets and proxies from imposing their will. --LV (Dark Mark) 17:38, 15 November 2005 (UTC)

The opinion of anyone who makes a civil and rational argument based upon our policies should be counted, anonymous or pseudonymous. I repeat two things that I've stated at Wikipedia more than once: Anonymity is not by itself a sign of bad faith; and it is about the discussion not about the votes. Uncle G 00:37, 16 November 2005 (UTC)

I get that it is about discussion, not votes, but one of the advantages of having a user name is the privilege of voting on things. The comments should not be removed (they might influence logged in users to their position), but they cannot possibly be regarded as part of consensus. We don't want someone just stopping by for the first time to determine the content here. Trusted members of the community simply carry more weight. --LV (Dark Mark) 15:32, 16 November 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Book v. Image Deletions

When a book is deleted, do the images that link to nothing but that book also get deleted? The reason I ask has to do with Naturism. One of the images used by that book may have legal difficulties with child porn laws. I was going to raise the issue here, but I saw that it had been nominated for speedy deletion and didn't worry about it. But it occurs to me that the images might not get deleted with the book. If the images do not get deleted with the book, then we need to decide whether one of its pictures has the potential to get us in trouble. (I don't remember offhand which image is the possible problem. I am checking while writing this, but the images are taking intollerably long to load.) --JMRyan 22:16, 15 November 2005 (UTC)

No, when you delete page, only its content is removed. If you have a multi-chapter book you have to delete every single chapter and every single image used. --Derbeth talk 22:18, 15 November 2005 (UTC)

Then the problem of the possibly illegal image is still live. Most of the images on this book with under-age subjects are so completely non-sexual, that I would assume them to be legally innocuous. However, one image shows what appears to be a partially erect teen-age boy sitting at a table (using a laptop computer, IIRC). It's taking long enough for the images to load that I'll have to check back latter for the image name. --JMRyan 22:35, 15 November 2005 (UTC)

This book according to Wikibooks:What is Wikibooks#Wikibooks is not a soapbox should be speedy deleted. unsigned comment by unknown user
We can do it even now, the question is - should we leave some time for book author for copy it's contents? --Derbeth talk 22:46, 15 November 2005 (UTC)
The image I was concerned about is Image:Privatenaturism.jpg. I understand that the book will be speedily deleted for other reasons. I just wanted to make sure that whoever deleted the book was aware that there was separate issue beyond the reason for book's speedy deletion concerning this image (it may count as child porn). Either the image should go with the rest of the book or the legality issue should be taken up separately. unsigned comment by unknown user
I'm hoping that most new media content for Wikibooks is added to commons instead. You can then deal with the policy on that project who are much better equiped to deal with those issues indepently. IMHO, if the one and only place that an image links to is a Wikibook that is being deleted, there is generally no reason to keep the image either. I think it would be a good change to deletion policy to remove all media files associated with that Wikibook as well. The one issue that may come up is the undeletion issues. Once you have deleted an image, it is a permanent deletion, unlike deletion of text. Admins can "undelete" text that has been killed earlier. If a Wikibook was removed and then undeleted, it would be nice to get the images back that were there in the first place.
In this case, because of Jimbo's fiat demand that the book be deleted, there is no way it will be undeleted. The images might as well go with it. --Rob Horning 14:01, 16 November 2005 (UTC)
I displayed two images (the Hong Kong and Macao flags) at WB:VFD. I did not request deletion, I only commented that they are unused. Maybe they should be speedy-delete candidates. --Kernigh 23:05, 16 November 2005 (UTC)
I don't see much sense in listing images in VFD. They are subject of speedy deletion. Flags can be deleted safely, because Commons has such images. BTW, link to images like that: [[:Image:animage]], not [[Image:animage]] --Derbeth talk 23:15, 16 November 2005 (UTC)
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