Wikibooks:Staff lounge/Archive 27

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[edit] Proposition of a book illustration group.

I would like to propose an idea for book illustrators could have their own group. I don't think Wikibooks currently has a group system to help share information. Please tell me what you think about this and any thoughts of how to implement this. --Herraotic 20:27, 1 December 2006 (UTC)

You could set something up at Wikibooks:Illustrators and try to recruit. I'm not sure there are enough illustrators for such a group. Might Wikimedia Commons be what you are looking for? --Swift 22:12, 1 December 2006 (UTC)
Yeah, you probably want to find groups on commons... they need a lot of help categorizing and such. --SB_Johnny | talk 23:16, 1 December 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Can I Do This?

I was wondering if a book on income tax would be acceptable material on here. Tannersf 03:38, 2 December 2006 (UTC)

Yes, I'd definately think so as it would potentially be very educational and interesting. --Swift 04:29, 2 December 2006 (UTC)
I would note that this is something that other than for the most general information would have to be kept updated on an annual basis and need huge maintainance in order to stay relevant. On the other hand, this is something that is almost ideal as an electronic reference as dead-tree versions of this sort of content is bound to go out of date much faster, and as a wiki can even be updated for changes to the tax code that happened this week. So yes, I would strongly recommend that if you (or others) want to get a book like this going on Wikibooks, please do so. --Rob Horning 05:23, 2 December 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Scrapbooks

I've been thinking for a while about what to do with "abandoned" stubs, book fragments, transwikis, and so on, and I'm wondering if we could maybe start organizing these into "scrapbooks".

I'm thinking the scrapbooks could be organized to follow the top categories first, then subcategories when they get too big. Once the scrapbooks are together, we could have some sort of templates to use to alert new book authors to the existence of these scrapbooks, so they can sift through them and potentially save a lot of work for themselves, as well as cleaning out the scrapbooks.

Any thoughts? --SB_Johnny | talk 17:29, 3 December 2006 (UTC)

In principle - very good idea. I am a deletionist (slightly) but at least that way they would be collected together. Drawing new authors attention to this is great (see Wikibooks:Wikiproject on Help Pages) for more on that. That said I think a discussion is required about categories. I pointed an editor here Category talk:Main page yesterday and think we should all have a look at how cats are being used (I won't mention alpha cat'ing honest). --Herby talk thyme 17:44, 3 December 2006 (UTC)
I agree with this point completely. I had suggested something like this a long time ago, but that suggestion was lost in the midst of a bigger conversation. Books that are stubs, but which do have some valuable content should definately be saved rather then deleted. At least, we should save the content, and not the lousy stub-book structure. Each bookshelf could get a scrapbook, and we could simply dump content into the scrap book that isn't a book, but which really doesnt need to be deleted. --Whiteknight (talk) (projects) 02:30, 4 December 2006 (UTC)
Yeah, that's the goal... organise the "abandoned" stuff into a useful form. I'll try to make some headway on that in the how-tos category, which definitely needs it. Someone else will have to do the programming stuff though :).
But should it be in an actual book, or more like a category? --SB_Johnny | talk 21:27, 5 December 2006 (UTC)
On a little more thought, I think this might be a good use of the colon convention, because it can make a pseudonamespace that will be easily identifiable yet not make the top link go back to the main scrapbook page. E.g.: Scrapbook:Foo/Bar rather than Scrapbook/Foo/Bar. That way Scrapbook:Foo would be the bookname, rather than "Foo" being rendered as a scrapbook chapter. Any objections? --SB_Johnny | talk 13:46, 6 December 2006 (UTC)
How about using categorizes instead? Something like Category:Scrapbook and a template to go with it. --darkYin yang.svglama 23:47, 6 December 2006 (UTC)
I like that idea a lot, Darklama. I get the sense that we don't need more pages to maintain right now. If we have categories, then we can't have page histories, but then all the scrapbooks will be easily accessible, and easy to add and remove. --Iamunknown 23:51, 6 December 2006 (UTC)
[edit] Scrapbooks continued

Well, the category should be wherever the content belongs, e.g. a programming scrapbook would go in the programming category. Categorizing them in a special cat would more or less just end up hiding them in an even less-travelled corner. Template's definitely a good idea though.

Iamunknown: hrm? --SB_Johnny | talk 15:46, 8 December 2006 (UTC)

Iamunknow: hrm? what? I'm confused. :S And I tend to disagree with my previous statement that we only have cats. I just fear that the list will not be judiciously maintained enough. If we had a couple of dedicated librarians like was going to happen at WB:CCO, I would be less reluctant to have lists. It makes sense tho. Maybe if we use a Template:Scrapbook template, there can be conspicuous text imploring the user who decides to become an active contributor to please remove the title from the scrapbook list. Or maybe we can ask them to not remove the scrapbook, but instead to let someone else do it, or to request at a certain page that the scrapbook be removed. I don't know. Again, my only reluctance is that these lists would become outdated and useless. --Iamunknown 17:45, 10 December 2006 (UTC)

[edit] BOTM and COTM, January

I wasn't here at the beginning of the month, and it seems that somebody has already updated the BOTM and COTM listings for December. I'm not going to change that now, even though we had agreed here that we would suspend both these projects for the month of december. I have therefore erased the content of the BOTM and COTM voting pages for january, and posted a message that we would not be having BOTM or COTM winners for that month. In the time between now and January, I want to suggest we discuss a few things:

  1. I would like to replace the BOTM and COTM projects entirely with a continuous method for listing books that are (a) "good books" (previously BOTM candidates), and (b) "books needing collaboration" (previously COTM candidates). These books could then be listed en masse on the main page (which is better then only having two books on the main page, i think).
  2. Cleanup the help pages to make them more "helpful".
  3. Fix any loose ends we have with policy
  4. Work to increase wikibooks membership/contributors.

I think these are much better uses of our time. --Whiteknight (talk) (projects) 02:51, 4 December 2006 (UTC)

I'm not sure if completely removing the BOTM and COTM is a good idea. As for me, when more books are marked on the main page as "good" or "needing collaboration", they do not seem as special as when only one book is given a certain title. We should make a clear distinction between "normal" books and "special" books, so that the "special" books gather more attention. Similarly, people get more attracted to presidential ellections rather than parliamentary ones, because there is one, discrete candidate. --Derbeth talk 14:43, 4 December 2006 (UTC)
That's true, but from the pool of "good books", we could easily select a particular book to spotlight. This would be similar to the way that en.wikipedia handles it's "Today's Featured Article" on the main page: A list of "Good articles" are compiled, and from that list, a random entry is selected to be displayed on the main page. Depending on the popularity of the project, we could rotate out books monthly, weekly, or even daily, so that a number of books received a large spotlight on the main page.
Basically I am trying to make two points:
  1. BOTM and COTM winners are typically decided with very few votes, and they also draw very little special attention to themselves. We need to make it easier for books to get recognized, and we need to get more support for projects like this.
  2. The time that is spent prepating the BOTM and COTM templates and voting and lists, etc, along with the space that they take up on the main page could be better put to use for other projects, at least for 1 month. We can start BOTM and COTM back up in February, if we decide to.
I'm just trying to find ways to get more people involved here at wikibooks. The current BOTM and COTM projects aren't doing a good job of that, and so I am looking for alternatives. If we can't find good alternatives, we can bring BOTM and COTM back. --Whiteknight (talk) (projects) 15:43, 4 December 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Book Creation Program

I have started laying the groundwork for a new program, an "Automatic Book Creator". This program will be used to create new books according to established norms and style guidelines. My plan for this program is to include the aility to create a new book from an outline. This would mean that the program will:

  1. Create a table of contents for the new book
  2. Create a TOC template for the book, to be optionally included on every page.
  3. Create a navigation template for the book, to be optionally included on the top and bottom of every page, with optional "next", and "previous" links.
  4. Create a printable version of the book, transcluding all the pages from the TOC
  5. Create all subpages for the book (no red links), with each page containing the navigation and TOC templates, if desired. Also, subheadings in the page could be specified from the outline.
  6. Create all necessary categories for the book, including a category for related images, stub pages, etc. Also, creating a stub template for the book.
  7. Place the new book on an approprate bookshelf, add it to the alphabetical list of books, and add it to the new book template on the main page.

My idea is that this program could help to standardize the book creation process, and reinforce some of the known "best practices" when creating new books. I'm going to start working on this today, does anybody have any suggestions? --Whiteknight (talk) (projects) 16:16, 4 December 2006 (UTC)

Sounds great! --xixtas 20:23, 4 December 2006 (UTC)
How far has this progressed, Whiteknight? --Herraotic 23:53, 22 December 2006 (UTC)
We're abut to start a new book at Wikijunior and this would sure come in handy. Anything to report Whiteknight? --xixtas 13:40, 23 December 2006 (UTC)
Sorry about the long delay, I dont tend to check the messages at the top of the staff lounge with any regularity. I had a basic prototype version of this program done, but it doesnt work as well as I would like it to, and I have more features to add to it. I had basically given up on working on it recently in favor of other projects. Since there is still some interest in it, however, I will pick it up again once I get back home (after christmas). The way it is now (in case anybody wants to start writing up outlines of it in anticipation is as follows:
text of main page TOC

=Page 1=
text on page 1

=Page 2=
text on page 2

{Template 1}
text of template 1

...
All the first level-headings are converted into pages, and the text directly under the first level headings will be moved onto that page. Templates are defined using a single set of curly brackets (to avoid confusion with templates included in the page text). There are also a few special characters that are denoted with a forward slash and capital letters. For instance, to create a basic book, we would write:
 == Table of contents ==
 {{MyBookPage}}
 \TOC
 [[Category:My Book|{{PAGENAME}}]]
 = Page 1 =
 {{MyBookPage}}
 This is page 1
 = Page 2 = 
 {{MyBookPage}}
 This is page 2
 {MyBookPage}
 {| style="whatever"
 |-
 |\TOC
 |}
I am working on a way to create categories as well, but that's going to take some time. --Whiteknight (talk) (projects) 16:01, 23 December 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Books on Chemical Engineering

As a newcomer I briefly looked at the set of books in the Engineering group. Although there is a section called Chemical Engineering, it looks like there are actually no books or even segments contributed under this heading. Did I just not find them, or are there really no entries in this part of the library? Many of the subjects taught in Chemical Engineering programs at the University are treated in the section called Mechanical Engineering, and this is consistent taxonomy. However, as a Chemical Engineer, I would like to see some content in the Chemical Engineering area.

One unique feature of the Chemical Engineering approach to study of the engineering sciences is the organization of principles into "Unit Operations". This structure is a hallmark of Chemical Engineering and the focal point of the Chemical Engineering curriculum in most colleges. I was really surprised to find that clicking on that keyword in the Chemical Engineering section outline produced the blank page response.

For some time I have had thoughts about writing a book and did actually prepare outlines and some selected partial texts in the past. However, nothing was ever completed or advanced beyond the scrap notes in my files. With this new-found system of Wikibooks the opportunity to create a book seems more realizable. I have an idea to create a book in the Wikibooks library appropriate to the Chemical Engineering profession.

The book I have in mind would treat the history of Chemical Engineering and its impact on commerce, not the technological and engineering principles. I think this could be made very readable and could provide insight to the place of Chemical Engineering in the evolution of modern industry and consumer product developments. Some books have been published on this topic, but I think the subject has not been presented comprehensively.

If there are others that would like to join in this effort I would like to see your comments and ideas for the book. Joconco22 17:24, 5 December 2006 (UTC)joconco22

The sad fact is that there aren't many engineers on wikibooks. Before I joined, the Electrical Engineering section was almost completely empty, except for a few stubs and outlines. I don't want to sound arrogant, but if I hadn't written alot of material on the subject myself, the EE section would still likely be very empty. None of the other engineering disciplines have any good material yet. The ME department has some material, but it's deceptive, because there are many books, but they are all poor. The CE department is in a similar boat (CE = Civil). If you have the time/drive/energy to write a book on ChemEng, that would be a fantastic help for our project. I would be more then happy to help you in this project, but I don't know much about ChemEng, so I can't really add any substantive content. --Whiteknight (talk) (projects) 22:07, 5 December 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Time question regarding each textbook

Dear Wiki... Gods:

I was looking over the United Nations WikiTextBook on this website and realized that there is a UN Today section. I find it a bit unfeasible to have a current events section, as textbooks are not supposed to cover current events. However, if WikiTextBooks is based on "yearly" editions, I would be more than willing to add to that particular section. Please let me know what is allowed and what isn't.

Current events and news typically belong on Wikinews, not wikibooks. However, the classical definition of "textbook" doesnt exactly apply to wiki software. Keep in mind that wiki isn't paper, and our "textbooks" are not limited by the constraints of classical textbooks. In otherwords, our content can change on a daily basis, if needed, to state at the forefront of any particular field. To answer your question more directly, wikibooks do not have "editions" like regular textbooks, they are constantly evolving. To that end, you can make any changes you want, at any time, without having to worry about meeting an arbitrary publication deadline. --Whiteknight (talk) (projects) 23:53, 5 December 2006 (UTC)

[edit] FHSST using obsolete naming convention

Yet another post. I tend to post several messages in a short amount of time. Make sure to read the ones prior to this as well! Anyways...I just noticed that practially all of the FHSST Physics books and some of the FHSST Biology book use the obsolete colon naming convention. There are sooo many pages in the FHSST Physics book. They need to be changed. Does anyone have AWB? Make sure they're done properly (obviously). Some of the pages aren't really properly named...e.g. FHSST Physics Newtonian Gravitation:Newtonian Gravitation should be FHSST Physics/Newtonian Gravitation and FHSST Physics Newtonian Gravitation:Normal Forces should be FHSST Physics/Newtonian Gravitation/Normal Forces. Nearly all of them are like that. *sigh* Thanks for checking this out. Cheers, Iamunknown 08:56, 6 December 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Thanks

I just wanted to say thanks (on behalf of all of us I'm sure) to Darklama and Johnny for their work in blocking open proxies. The reduction in vandalism I'm seeing is remarkable - it will hopefully give us all more time to focus on constructive issues --Herby talk thyme 13:01, 6 December 2006 (UTC)

Yer most welcome... there's a lot more left to block though, I think (unless darklama did a lot more... I've been too sick to even play on the computer last few days). The lists are at
We might want to start a project here as well, since the meta one isn't well updated (and worse, the blacklist page is actually locked, so you can't check things off). --SB_Johnny | talk 13:10, 6 December 2006 (UTC)
I think DL has done a fairly substantial job - I looked yesterday but couldn't find any obvious ones tho I will look again --Herby talk thyme 13:16, 6 December 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Admin, Bcrat votes

Three users are up for voting on requests for adminship. Xania ( talk | email | contribs ) has been nominated for adminship. Withinfocus ( talk | email | contribs ) is a long-time admin, and has been nominated for bureaucratship. Both users are hardworking, active members of the wikibooks community, and I would like to urge all readers who have not yet voted to check out these users, and cast a vote for them. --Whiteknight (talk) (projects) 15:16, 6 December 2006 (UTC) wikiwarrior ( talk | email | contribs )

[edit] Important technical enhancements: WikiTeX and syntax highlighting

Would it not be nice to get our Wiki to highlight the different elements of computer program code? (See an example on another site running on MediaWiki with the highlighting extension). A request for extension of our wiki's software has already been lodged, but our technicians are renowned for procrastinating even the simplest of tasks. All we can do is register in Wikimedia's bug-reporting service and vote for the aforementioned request for improvement. Ramir 07:22, 7 December 2006 (UTC)

There is another great extension that has not yet been installed on Wikimedia's websites: WikiTeX. Again, please voice your opinion about the proposed enhancement. (Information on WikiTeX: [1], [[:en:Wikipedia:WikiTeX]], meta:WikiTeX). Ramir 07:22, 7 December 2006 (UTC)
Great idea! But is it really acceptable and productive to put votes on bugzilla? Shouldn't it be for discussing the issue and solutions? I suppose we could also put up a page here, get editors' signatures and post the link to bugzilla to show Wikibookian support without flooding the bugzilla. --Swift 07:08, 9 December 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Updating Wikibooks:Deletion policy

The deletion policy included a line that the concensus process was not "sorted out", and was a bit vague about how decisions on VfD are made. I think that this matter has already been sorted out by Wikibooks:Decision making. Even though the later is a guideline, not a policy (something that I would like to change, if i had my druthers), It still does answer the question of how, generally, a decision should be made on VfD. I have therefore deleted the offending sentences on WB:DP, and posted a link instead to WB:DM. If anybody feels this was inappropriate, please let me know. --Whiteknight (talk) (projects) 19:05, 7 December 2006 (UTC)

As another point worth making, the current text of WB:DP states that the only acceptable votes on a VfD are keep or delete votes. In practice, there are plenty of other options that are invoked regularly, such as "strong" keep or delete votes (whether we differentiate between them and their weaker siblings is a matter for some debate under WB:DM), "transwiki" votes, "merge votes", and neutral "comments". I propose we update the text of WB:DP to mirror the way VfDs actually happen, and explicitly mention these other options. --Whiteknight (talk) (projects) 14:14, 8 December 2006 (UTC)

Well, the wording on the policy is "should consist of", which, according to Wikibooks:Policies and guidelines#Definition of terms is a recommendation, not a requirement. This is, however, contained in a policy, which is supposed to list requirements. This is partly the reason for my recent suggestions.
I don't mind changing the wording to something more open, but think the recommendation should be to keep it standard; newcomers will learn the nuances very quickly. --Swift 16:45, 10 December 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Advice for conducting (an) elementary science textbook(s).

I need some of advice to help develop a science textbook; it may be an easy question to some so please comment. It is whether to make a book with all of the elementary science aimed at ages 8 - 11 or to separate them as in beginner chemistry and so on? --Herraotic 20:35, 7 December 2006 (UTC)

That's a difficult question. I am inclined to say that you could combine all the various subjects into a single book if you could construct a central narrative to make them all cohesive. Remember, a book is not a collection of unrelated or loosely-related articles. On the other hand, school students of that age typically do have all those subjects (biology, physics, chemistry, etc) thrown together into a vague amalgamation called "science class". Also, if you look at the tables set up on Wikistudy (not that the tables there are an authority), there is a section only for "General Science", which sounds like an excellent place to shelve your new book. --Whiteknight (talk) (projects) 23:35, 7 December 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Steward elections

There are just eight days left for voting in the Steward elections. (Voting closes on the 15th of December) There are fifteen great candidates running (including myself :)) from a number of projects. In order to vote you must have a valid account on Meta with a link to at least one account on a project where the user has participated at least three month. If you are interested in reading more or to vote visit m:Stewards/elections_2006-2. --Cspurrier 00:29, 8 December 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Merging policy and guideline sections ... and the concepts as well.

For maximum exposure, I'd like to alert the community of a couple of suggestions I've made on Wikibooks talk:Policies and guidelines.

Merging Policies and guidelines sections is a minor content reorganization suggestion. Merging policies and guidelines into one category, however, is a more radical suggestion and shouldn't be done without careful consideration and debate over pros and contras. Basically this latter suggestion is about getting rid of the policy versus guideline distinction since we have the requirement versus recommendation distinction which could (and, I believe, does) exist on the same official policy or guideline page.

Please have a look, request for clarification if I've been unclear and comment if you have any comments on the matter. --Swift 02:44, 8 December 2006 (UTC)

Are you proposing a new category (that will merge the other two) or the removal of the existing two and substitute them by the new one ? I prefer having the existing ones as a quick method to get the intended content (policies OR guidelines) if you are proposing creating a new one then I'll support the change if you are proposing the removal of the existing please extend a bit more on the benefits of it. --Panic 04:13, 5 January 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Vandalism & protection

Sort of thinking out loud. In the past few days there has been some outbreaks of vandalism from named users (the IP vandalism is much lower due to blocks on open proxies I guess). After the past two, as the only admin on, I've semi protected some templates/help page type stuff [2]. I really don't feel strongly about this but was it worth it and should we do more or indeed less? thanks --Herby talk thyme 18:17, 9 December 2006 (UTC)

Wikibooks:Protected page states that one of the intentions for temporary protection is to combat "a recent target of persistent vandalism". I think it is a worthy goal to keep the number of protected pages down to a minimum so temporary protections are definately the way to go.
One thing to have in mind, though, is that if the vandal is out to disrupt regardless of the content, then protecting one page will just mean another will get hit. --Swift 06:35, 10 December 2006 (UTC)
that said, I can't see any downside to semi-protecting pages against page moves. Especially high-profile pages that have no reason to be moved (Policy pages, guideline pages, bookshelves, etc). We don't need to protect these pages from being edited, but there is absolutely no reason why such pages should be able to be moved by users who aren't qualified to move them. --Whiteknight (talk) (projects) 19:58, 11 December 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Request for comment

Please see Wikibooks:Project Ideas and comment on User:WietsE's idea about a wikibook on creative activism. Thank you. Iamunknown 06:58, 10 December 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Wikibooks v. wikiversity and textbooks v. educational materials

How is the statement on the main page any different than wikiversity's main page? Isn't "textbooks" an obvious subset of "free learning materials," or am I missing something? I wasn't around for the Wikiversity split, but it is frustrating thinking about it. I'm sure we lost many good editors. Why did we split? And why are we limited to textbooks? For one thing, we aren't really...it is kind of a stretch to call the Cookbook or the World Stamp Catalogue a textbook. But this is where the ambiguity of the word "textbook" comes in, because those books could certainly be used in a classroom at any level, and in that context would qualify as a textbook! So therefore the word by its standard denotation is inherently subjective. Hmm...maybe a new scope that eliminates the ambiguity, like "free-content educational, reference, and how-to materials." That just kind of accepts the ambiguity, and subjectivity for that matter, with open arms. At least then we wouldn't have to split at the seams to wikiversity, strategywiki, et al. Cheers, Iamunknown 08:30, 10 December 2006 (UTC)

I understand your frustration about the abiguous overlap with Wikiversity. I arrived after the split as well and have never really understood it. Perhaps a more knowledgeble editor can enlighten us (at WB:VFD I mentioned that it would be very interesting to have something like a project history page — an essay, perhaps). I bet this is going to be brought up regularly so a reference page would come in handy.
As for the textbooks. I've on several occations argued that we should not use "textbook" as a definition of what belongs here. Rather just use "wikibook" and define that at WB:WIW.
I don't mind using "textbook" on the main page for brevity in the initial introduction, but perhaps something like "free content educational material" ... but then it's pretty much identical to Wikiversity's. *sigh* Since a merger of the two is probably out of the question, I guess this overlap is just something we'll have to live with. --Swift 11:42, 10 December 2006 (UTC)
I'm an administrator on both projects, so I'll try to take a stab at this. Wikiversity's mission is to develop classroom materials, and to be a classroom for learning. There are tutors and tutorials, research projects (Original research), and even NPOV is somewhat flexible. Many of the "courses" involve simply collecting materials for use under a syllabus, and in many cases wikibooks textbooks are among those collected materials (as are wikisource documents, wikipedia articles, and so on). Above all else it's an experiment in how to use wikis as an alternative form of education. WV is still a very young project, and the foundation has given it unusual latitude in creating itself. We're still working on the what it is and what it isn't.
We (the wikiversity administrators) do keep an eye out for material that is moving towards textbooks, and part of the plan is to have import from wikiversity enabled on wikibooks for cases where the wikiversity material is an improvement on the wb textbook materials. However, if you click v:Special:Random a few times, you'll see that most of it is not textbook material, but rather organizational material... in fact the entire project is in some sense an experimant in organisation... look at the namespaces and you'll see it.
As for why the split was made: my understanding is that it was in part that wikiversity was initially proposed around the same time as wikibooks, and was hosted here for a while because they didn't have anywhere else to go. It was also in part because the wikiversitans ended up at loggerheads with the wikibookians on too many occaisions (such as on VFD). There was some resistance against their being here in the first place, then later resistance against the split.
I see the projects as complimentary, though at this point wikibooks has more to offer wikiversity than the other way around. As they evolve, the relationship will evolve, and we'll see where it goes. No hurry. --SB_Johnny | talk 12:14, 10 December 2006 (UTC)
I think that the ultimate goal of wikibooks is to produce textbooks that can be used in real classes, in the place of dead-tree textbooks. The benefits to this would include additional noteriety and publicity for our project, and also the alleviation of expensive textbook bills for students (especially university students). Another important point is that places where there are no textbooks (think poor, third world, etc) can dowload and print copies of our books for a fraction of the cost of importing a real published textbook.
That said (and hopefully no new information was to be found in that last paragraph), Once we have textbooks, we still need to use those texts in the setting of a classroom environment. A textbook without necessarily supporting instruction is worthless. Imagine also a poor place with no access to traditional textbooks, and no access to trained teachers? It's not hard to imagine such a place. People who are untrained or poorly trained can still be "teachers" if they have access to a good textbook, a good syllabus, and other good learning resources. If wikibooks provides the textbooks, and wikiveristy supplies the class, then suddenly people who were never able to learn before suddenly have access to a classroom environment. Sounds a little grandiose I suppose, but it's still a noble goal. --Whiteknight (talk) (projects) 19:55, 11 December 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Easier Navigation of Books

I notice that when I look through books, if I want to go on to the next chapter, I have to scroll to the top of the page. This does not seem efficient. --Remi0o 08:52, 10 December 2006 (UTC)

It is up to the specific book authors to agree on a navigation aid that they think is best. If easy access to the top of the page is all you need, then this is probably the task of your user agent (e.g. browser). Try hitting the "Home" button on your keyboard (if you have it, I can't remember what it is on the English variants ... my keyboard speaks German). On my browser, Opera, this takes me to the top of the page. w:Mozilla Firefox does the same, but I'm not running Windows, so I can't say about w:MSIE ... but then again, you really shouldn't be running that! ;-) --Swift 11:56, 10 December 2006 (UTC)
There are templates available to add navigational links to the bottom of a page. You are free to add such links yourself, where you think they are needed. --Whiteknight (talk) (projects) 19:48, 11 December 2006 (UTC)

[edit] A little confused

Rob's comments here Wikibooks:Votes for deletion#Isle of Arran made me stop and reflect. When I read Isle of Arran:Contents I understood it to mean that the book being transwiki'd away from Wikibooks. However I now realise thinking thro Rob's comments that this is not the case. Equally yesterday I was looking at Wikiversity:Department of Buddhist Studies/Philosophy of Mahayana Buddhist Schools. To me both this notice and the one on Arran may indicate to the reader that these are not really Wikibooks or of value to us (& by implication them). If simplistically it had that effect on me it may well do on others. Surely (within guidelines) books that are transiki'd can exist on Wikibooks as well (we do after all have a tag that says "more info on WP" or similar). I was working on Fencing here - there is more on WP - I know as I have contributed to that too but I do not see that it means that WB page is not worthwhile.

It's the tags I think I am really getting at - do they send the wrong signal to people? Should they be reviewed/removed? --Herby talk thyme 12:45, 10 December 2006 (UTC)

Well, they're two separate issues. Transwikiing to another project is not, in and of itself, a reason to delete material on wikibooks (likewise most articles imported from wikipedia don't need to be deleted there just because they were copied to wikibooks). However, the Isle of Arran book probably does need to be reworked a bit to become more of a "textbook about the island", just as many of the wp articles we copy need to be altered to remove how-to sections, etc.
The use of the "moved to wikiversity" template was originally designed to steer wikiversitans to the wikiversity project. Wikiversity had been hosted on wikibooks for 2+ years, and a lot of the scattered diaspora needed to be informed. It was also a way for us to keep track of what had and had not been already imported to wikiversity. We were originally thinking that the content on wikibooks would just end up being deleted, but it was decided to just leave them here. If the wikiversity pages can be incorporated into textbooks, then they should be. If they're useless for wikibooks, they should just be deleted (as long as they've been safely imported first). --SB_Johnny | talk 12:57, 10 December 2006 (UTC)
I just think leaving the tag (either TW or Wikiversity) devalues the page anyway --Herby talk thyme 13:01, 10 December 2006 (UTC)
Lemme talk to the wikiversitans about the wv tags... I agree, it might be time to take them off, but we should move the pages out of the wv namespace first to avoid confusion. --SB_Johnny | talk 13:05, 10 December 2006 (UTC)
Comment started here, moved to vfd. --Iamunknown 17:52, 10 December 2006 (UTC)
Rob's comments on this issue brought up a good point, and one that is sufficiently different from the VfD discussion to warrant a place here. Historically, it has been de facto policy here at wikibooks that we don't transwiki material outside of WMF projects, and we also didn't transwiki material to/from non-GFDL wikis. The purposes of these restrictions were as follows:
  1. To ensure that the WMF projects continued to increase it's content, and not simply export content to other communities
  2. To ensure that there was sufficient material licensed under the GFDL to facilitate our own projects
  3. To keep with the intentions of the original authors of the content, who released their works under a particular license, to a particular project.
Recently the videogame guides have been moving to Strategy Wiki, which is not a WMF project, and seems to violate these principles. However, I would disagree with that, in general, because the videogame manuals have been moving themselves out of their own accord (in response to threats, of course, but not in response to policy). The Isle of Arran book is a perfect example, where people are taking a book that has been submitted to wikibooks under the GFDL, and trying to transwiki it to travelwiki that isn't GFDL (I dont think so anyway). I'm pretty sure such a move, without express consent of the authors, is a violation of copyright anyway. --Whiteknight (talk) (projects) 00:34, 11 December 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Citing sources, etc.

I'm hoping to enlist some help in cleaning up policies and templates involved in citing sources. This has come to my attention in part because a lot of the wp articles I've transwikied have sources cited using some templates they have (see w:Category:Citation_templates), and a lot of them end up not working here because (a) we don't have most of them, and (b) when they're imported, they often don't seem to work correctly.

I'd also like to get a bit more done on WB:OR, as well get some sort of general policy started (WB:CITE, similar to how w:WP:CITE is configured).

Any takers? --SB_Johnny | talk 15:37, 10 December 2006 (UTC)

The problem I see is that textbooks typically cite sources differently from encyclopedia articles. In a given textbook, the individual "facts" don't generally need to be referenced, so long as a "list of resources" is published at the end of the book. I own many textbooks, and I've never seen one that goes to such lengths to cite sources in the body of the text like wikipedia does (or other encyclopedias, for that matter). I think it might almost be best for each individual book to have it's own citation templates, pointing to a separate page with the sources listed. --Whiteknight (talk) (projects) 00:38, 11 December 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Desparate Teacher

I want to create a Wiki Boook with my high school English class titles Novels to Film. It's a great subject, but I can't figure out step one of actually getting the book to exist with proper safety for school students. If you are doing this sort of thing with your class would you please teach me or refer me to a directory...Peace, Tamara Tamara@artlover.com

"With proper safety"... what do you mean by that exactly? --SB_Johnny | talk 17:41, 10 December 2006 (UTC)
Have a look at the guidelines for Class Projects: Wikibooks:Guidelines_for_class_projects - WietsE 22:33, 10 December 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Open initiative.

I have recently been pondering on the idea if people could persuade copyright authors into 'freeing' their text. For instance The Math Page has valuable material that could be used but the author has not released his text to the public domain or under a copyleft licence yet he gives it for free over the Internet. If someone could persuade him to copyleft his information it would be very helpful to the Wikibook community. His email address is themathpage@nyc.rr.com --Herraotic 20:06, 10 December 2006 (UTC)

I had recently sent an email to The Mathworks requesting permission to use screenshots of MATLAB-generated charts and graphs in some of our books. We've also had projects in the past where people have donated entire books to our project. These things do happen. However, generally it is the purpose of wikibooks to generate new content then simply to combine old content onto a new server. --Whiteknight (talk) (projects) 00:25, 11 December 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Help!

Can someone help me by making a print and PDF version for SA NCS:Business Studies? Thanks. Tannersf 20:15, 10 December 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Proposals of the Week: Wikibooks:Be bold, Wikibooks:Original research

The ideas of "being bold", and "No original research" are fundamental to wikibooks, but neither of these ideas are discussed specifically in policy. WB:WIW does mention that wikibooks is not a place for original research, but doesnt explain the term to any degree of satisfaction. As WB:WIW is supposed to be more of an overview of policy, and cannot go into sufficient detail, We need to formalize an original research policy to hammer out the details. For this week, I would like to increase both of these proposals, and:

Comments, questins, and suggestions are all appreciated. --Whiteknight (talk) (projects) 01:54, 11 December 2006 (UTC)

I'd like to say that we should approach the prospect of allowing some forms of original research with great caution. I agree that the kinds of writing this proposed policy was designed to permit are clearly a good thing, but I also worry about what else we might be letting in the door. NOR is one of most fundamental policies of Wikimedia projects, and is the key distinction of Wikimedia from other, similar projects -- we do not act in our capacity as experts, but merely as scholars who report on the state of a field of inquiry, without bias or personal agenda. I do support the spirit of WB:OR, but we should go forward with this very carefully. --Brian Brondel 03:25, 11 December 2006 (UTC)
So long as we keep the "allowed exceptions" vaguely defined, we can always excercise some judgement in what counts, and what does not. --Whiteknight (talk) (projects) 03:34, 11 December 2006 (UTC)
Nor is one of the most fundamental policies of WIkimedia projects even at Wikinews? :) --Iamunknown 18:36, 12 December 2006 (UTC)
I see you're right. I mistakenly remembered NOR as one of the five pillars. I think my earlier comments still apply, but I do feel much better about this proposal now. --Brian Brondel 04:45, 13 December 2006 (UTC)
While I did point out an exception to NOR, I still feel uncomfortable about OR being permitted here at Wikibooks. I personally think it should outrightly be forbidden. What exactly "it" is that is being forbidden, however, needs definition; it should include at least "laboratory notes, engineering tests, and interesting but new concepts like Neo" (User:Robert Horning/New Policies). I know that Rob's page is very debatable, but I consider his definition of original research at least a good starting point. As the policy stands I disagree. I'll discuss more later this week. --Iamunknown 06:06, 13 December 2006 (UTC)
Additionally, NOR is part of the first pillar of the Five Pillars — at Wikipedia. --Iamunknown 05:07, 14 December 2006 (UTC)
Well, I think the allowed OR schemas in the policy are actually fairly narrow (as they should be). OR is permitted on two of our sister projects, namely wikinews and wikiversity, and that freedom has been a great benefit.
The wikipedia issue is completely different from ours: their MoS forbids not only Original Research but also Primary Sources of any kind. It would be absolutely insane to require all books to follow that sort of thing: books like encyclopedias (including wikipedia) have very srtict guidelines about inclusion that simply aren't appropriate for textbooks and references of other kinds.
Fortunately, we have only occaisionally had to deal with "OR witch-hunting" on wikibooks. It's occasionally used as a deletion reason on VfDs, but almost always these deletion proposals are offered by wikipedians, rather than experienced wikibookians. The policy as written now is more a statement of our handling of the issue as an established fact, rather than a proposal for change. The goal is simply to codify the rules as we already apply them. If it were much narrower, a lot of books would need to go (Including the Cookbook, the Wikimanual of Gardening, the Muggle's Guide, and the Movie Making Manual... all of these books include original research and interpretations of primary sources). If it were much broader, we might also have problems with things like unverifiable OR, which is somewhere we shouldn't be going. If you feel there are gaping loopholes through which trash might come in, I'd have no problems with closing them, but not if it makes the policy into a long list of what's not permitted... the more specific a policy gets, the more loopholes there are. --SB_Johnny | talk 15:21, 14 December 2006 (UTC)
One point that is worth making here is that Original Research is already forbidden by policy, namely WB:WIW. This new proposal would probably be better instituted as a set of guidelines for enforcing that policy. Even with the staunch definition "Original Research is not allowed", there is still alot of grey area as to what qualifies as OR, and what doesnt. --Whiteknight (talk) (projects) 15:26, 14 December 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Original research

I think it would be far easier to agree on what is allowed here then trying to define what original research is and making a bunch of confusing exceptions to the rules. A clear definition of what is allowed I think is far more productive and useful to the community then trying to figure out ways to patch up holes with inconsistent policies and guidelines. Lets try to learn from the mistakes of Wikipedia with all its policies. Clearity benifits everyone. --darkYin yang.svglama 19:35, 14 December 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Attitude about Original Research

I will say that my experience with Wikiversity has significantly tempered my attitude towards original research. Keep in mind that the primary justification for having the original original research prohibitions on Wikipedia is really a more pragmatic justification: They wanted to say (politely) to UFO and para-normal authors that their content is not really welcome on Wikipedia. Original research is also something that is usually not found in an encyclopedic setting.

We have had some issues in the past that have resulted in VfDs, including most notably the Wikimania proceedings that were for a time hosted here on Wikibooks. I argued quite strongly (with surpringly some wheel warring between myself, Brion Vibber, Anthere, and Kernigh) that the contents needed to be removed from Wikibooks precisely because of original research restrictions. And if Wikimania articles didn't qualify as original research, I don't know what does. The major headaches grew from the fact that many of the contributors were using references to Wikibooks to support other academic articles, precisely because it was original research.

How much original ideas like those found in some Wikibooks qualify as original research certainly something that can be debated. I also believe strongly that there is an appropriate place that some very legitimate original research can take place with Wikimedia projects, with a strong suggestion that Wikiversity be the place that "pure original research" ought to be located at. That some strong guidelines and "community approval" needs to take place to make sure the quacks don't run the asylum should also be a part of any such effort. --Rob Horning 17:55, 31 December 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Reproducing UK legislation

I intend to return shortly to work on the Taxation in the United Kingdom book. With that in mind, may I ask whether it will be ok to reproduce UK legislation. I know there have been issues regarding Crown Copyright generally. However, insofar as Crown Copyright pertains to UK legislation, there is a general waiver (reproduced here), which is subject only to a few caveats (see paragraph 12). As long as I comply with those caveats, which do not appear to me to contradict the GFDL (we cite the sources anyway), I personally see no difficulty. But I'd welcome the others' views. Jguk 12:05, 11 December 2006 (UTC)

12 (d): "the Material should not be used in a derogatory or misleading manner, nor should it be used for the purposes of advertising or promoting a particular product or service or for promoting particular personal interests or views;" -- that might be a problem for the GFDL (it's esentially like a non-com CC licence). --SB_Johnny | talk 13:33, 11 December 2006 (UTC)
What bit of the GFDL causes the problem? And why is it different (if it is) for fair use images? Jguk 17:01, 11 December 2006 (UTC)
I think the potential compatibility problem with GFDL is that copyrighted content licensed for use under the GFDL (aka Wikibooks) is thus licensed to allow any derivative downstream works. Therefore, someone with a vested interest might consider using the UK legislation reproduced here in "a derogator or misleading manner...[or for] advertising...promoting a particular product or service or...personal interests or views." Or, it could be construed that, if this text were published, that the UK legislation used therein would be promoting our particular product, namely Wikibook: Taxation in the United Kingdom. I'm not sure the validity of these arguments, but they're potential issues I thought up on the spot. Cheers, Iamunknown 16:02, 12 December 2006 (UTC)
First off, I would like to say "welcome back!" It will be good to have you around here again Jguk. Second, I think the reproduction of the material should be okay, so long as you properly cite your sources, and perhaps provide a link to that website above in your book. If your worries are about the reproduction of source materials, perhaps you could ask the people at wikisource what their opinions are on the matter (they should have more experiance with this kind of stuff, I would think). Worst comes to worst, You could simply post links to the legislation text, and write the annotations here. --Whiteknight (talk) (projects) 17:18, 11 December 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Sidebox

I've updated the sidebox as per some comments that were made previously. I have removed links that weren't needed, and added a link to the bulletin board. User:Darklama has suggested merging the "Tools" box with the "Toolbox" box, but I dont know if there is a way to do that without manually adding the links with Javascript. What do people think of the new change? --Whiteknight (talk) (projects) 04:28, 12 December 2006 (UTC)]

I think that recent changes and donations, and featured books and bookshelves, should switch places, like so:
  • Main Page
  • Help
  • Donations
  • Wikijunior
  • Featured Books
  • Bookshelves
  • Recent changes
I think that recent changes is important, and I often am on RC patrol, but I don't think it is as important to the visitor. Also, its always nice to have donations go first. :) And finally, my reason for switching the book links is that featured books are exactly that, featured, which I would assume means that we want visitors to look at them first, because they're well-done and look good. A comparison might be a local library, where they have "featured books" at the front on a display table, for everyone to ooh and ahh at, and then have lots of bookshelves a little ways further.
Cheers, Iamunknown 15:57, 12 December 2006 (UTC)
Darklama and I have been making changes in the ordering of the links, and I think there is still alot of compromise yet to be made. Let's see what other people think about it before we make more changes. --Whiteknight (talk) (projects) 18:33, 12 December 2006 (UTC)
I'd love to see the Cookbook linked to from the sidebar. Cookbook is one of the biggest projects in wikibooks and it's a good showcase for new visitors. Xania 21:12, 12 December 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Featured Books, Revamp

See earlier related discussion: Wikibooks:Staff lounge/Archive 27#BOTM and COTM.2C January --Iamunknown 18:30, 12 December 2006 (UTC)

I would like to propose some basic changes to the Featured Book process, some of which are sweeping and are worth serious consideration. It is my opinion that the BOTM and COTM projects, while nice originally, have failed on a number of fronts. I won't list my perceived failures of those projects here, but I have listed them previously on staff lounge discussions.

  1. I would like to completely abandon the BOTM and COTM initiatives. After this month, I don't think we should have any more BOTM or COTM voting, no more winners for either project, etc.
  2. I would like to see instead, an improvement of the Wikibooks:Featured books page. Books can become featured books at any time, without a vote, by satisfying a few basic criteria.
  3. The featured books could be separated into "Featured Books" and "Featured Collaborations", as rough analogs to the current BOTM and COTM projects. Featured books should be good books, that statisfy strict criteria (must have a print version, must have consistant formatting and/or an LMOS, must be properly organized, properly categorized, must have inter-page navigation, etc). "Featured collaborations" should be books that satisfy less-stringent criteria (defined organizational structure, proper scope and definition, properly bookshelved and categorized, etc).
  4. The mainpage could be updated to randomly display (or display in a particular order) books from the featured books and featured collaborations lists. These could be cycled more often then once a month, but less often then once per day (like wikipedia's "article of the day").
  5. Links to "Featured Books", and "Featured Collaborations" could be installed into the sidebar, so they are more visible then simply being on the main page.

These are my ideas on the topic, and I think the general premise of updating the BOTM and COTM projects with more fluid versions of them is a good idea. What do people think of making these kinds of changes? --Whiteknight (talk) (projects) 16:56, 12 December 2006 (UTC)

I like your ideas but I think the 'Book of the Month' should be continued. To be honest though I have no idea what the difference is between botm and cotm. Xania 21:14, 12 December 2006 (UTC)
I personally like both the book of the month and the collaboration of the month, and think that should still be continued. I dislike the idea that wikipedia:featured books should move from voting to a set of criteria. Thus I am opposed to changes 1 and 2. I do see, however, the need for change. I think that
  1. A set of criteria should define what we call a "good book"
  2. A voting process should remain in place for featured book candidates, but should be more like Wikipedia's process. Specifically, a book can come up for vote at any time, and if it is approved, it is in a queue to be featured [this is a change] for a full week. No more month-long feautures.
  3. I also dislike the liberal use of the adjective "featured." I think we should continue collaborations, but continue to call them "collaboration of the month."
  4. I agree that the main page should cycle through the good books.
  5. And I tentatively agree with the sidebar idea. I may rescind my support depending on how it turns out.
Those are my thoughts. --Iamunknown 02:14, 14 December 2006 (UTC)
A BotM implies that we are chugging out a good book once every month. Clearly, that is NOT the case here on Wikibooks. Maybe in a year if this place gets more popular. I agree with Whiteknight here. The specifics need to be worked out (maybe a community consensus on what constitutes a good book, maybe a vote will still work). --Dragontamer 02:47, 14 December 2006 (UTC)
I agree with most of what User:Iamunknown said, except that I think the collaborations (whatever they are called) should be handled in the same way as the "good books" (a set of criteria, a vote, put in a queue, displayed for a week at a time). We should bring focus to as many new books as possible, to try and drum up support. --Whiteknight (talk) (projects) 02:50, 14 December 2006 (UTC)
Whats the point in getting rid of BOTM and COTM, if all thats going to happen is Featured Books is split into two like BOTM and COTM? I agree that BOTM and COTM should be discontinued, but not if Featured Books is going be turned into its substitute for them. I think Feature Books, should just be updated with some criteria thats, half way or a mix between what BOTM and COTM were, and as was suggested have a list of books that are cycled through during the time period. Keep it simple and see how it works out, if in the future there is more activity, then discuss making furthor changes. --darkYin yang.svglama 19:49, 14 December 2006 (UTC)
That probably makes the most sense, the COTM thing really acted more like a cleanup task then anything. We could lower the bar a little bit, and make it easier for a book to become "featured", we could then take books that need to be cleaned up into a category "Books needing collaborative help". or something like that. --Whiteknight (talk) (projects) 19:51, 14 December 2006 (UTC)
I have to agree with Whiteknight because it has become obvious books worthy of the BOTM award are not being produced, rather we are forced to adhere to a rule that makes us produce mediocre books to satisfy the front page. If we were to implement 'featured article' categorisation as our main structure of allowing users to clearly identify high quality books we would only see a difference if we were to place a strict criteria to filter those that should improve to pass their next ‘test’ thought this criteria would have to be aggred upon by the majority of administrators and editors. --Herraotic 18:17, 15 December 2006 (UTC)

(reset) I also do not agree that we should rescind the vote, because if there is no vote, who would choose when and what books should go up? I do agree that COTM has not worked out, I know I myself often have been unable to contribute to them because I know little to nothing about the topics in the books, so I could do little more than check grammar and spelling. I think this is the case with the general public as well. BOTM, I think it is a good idea to replace with "featured books", we'll have to carefully and individually decide which books should go on and which books don't go; don't just go by the current list, because it probably will change a lot with the new criteria. I have a question as well: does this mean we'll get rid of the "completed books" and/or the "hot picks" page as well? If we're going to have a featured books page it should, in my opinion, be at the most three categories, somewhat like the ones that are up now but with more explicit criteria and a more explicit method of listing and unlisting books there. Oh yes, I didn't notice the featured books on the sidebar before but I think it would be useful to have the link there, especially since the list on the main page doesn't (and can't really) list ALL of them. Regards, Mattb112885 04:53, 4 January 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Short policy summaries

On my user page I have written up 4 short summary essays that attempt to distill wikibooks policy down to the bare essentials. These essays can be found at User:Whiteknight/Philosophy#Nutshell_Essays. It is my hope that people will be able to read these, and similar documents, in lieu of having to read pages and pages of formal policy. I think having short summaries like this will encourage people to be more familiar with policy. --Whiteknight (talk) (projects) 18:16, 12 December 2006 (UTC)

I don't know how I like this idea. It seems like POV could easily slip in even under the utmost good faith. It would be nice if we could tighten the prose and consolidate the clauses of our policy pages. Furthermore, I am beginning to consider the need for a Wikibooks history page. As I am uncovering interesting tidbits, I find I can more readily participate in discussion, especially since I know precedents and processes better. I intend to write a draft over the holidays as I learn more. Also, consider seeing my related suggestion on the protection policy talk page. Cheers, Iamunknown 18:35, 12 December 2006 (UTC)
Pops in, comments, User:Herbythyme/poss el policy, ducks and runs (will look at the rest when I have time) --Herby talk thyme 18:42, 12 December 2006 (UTC)

[edit]

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikibooks/logo Can someone make this more easily accessible? Perhaps on the front page?--Remi0o 20:07, 12 December 2006 (UTC)

Sounds like a good idea. I'll see what I can do. --Dragontamer 02:51, 14 December 2006 (UTC)
Lol; that was a lot harder than I thought. I'll leave my tiny notice on the front page... hopefully someone with better web-editing skills will be able to do the notice some justice. Sorry, but... its hard to do something without messing up the whole dynamic of the front page. --Dragontamer 03:01, 14 December 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Math: would be great....

Hi,

I'm studyng math analysis II in italy. What would be great is to have a book with all kind of exercise, we could find in an Analysis's test (or whatever subjectT).

Find a good book with exercise is very hard and they cost a lot.

Ika

Question: What is the syllabus? Is it an analysis course as in a generalisation of Calculus? Or real analysis or complex analysis? More info would be appreciated. Cheers, Iamunknown 20:56, 12 December 2006 (UTC)
  • graphing fuction in in 2 or more variables, max min point, differentation, Integral in more variables, SEries in more varibles ecc.

ika

Can any one please give me a copy of a Treasury Manual used in Commercial Banks. This document shall detail the process flows of transactions that take place in a bank's dealing room.

Sounds like alot of the material that is covered in the second half of the Calculus book. I dont know how many examples Calculus has, but I do know that examples can be long and hard to write up. --Whiteknight (talk) (projects) 14:00, 13 December 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Recent MUMFUM vandalism

There have been more incidences of this type of vandalism in the past few days. It seems to be a distributed attack so there's no use blocking IP addresses. We can, of course, combat the problems when they happen but as most of these attacks consist of moving help pages, templates and other wiki pages would it be a good idea to protect all of these kinds of pages from moves by all users except sysop? I know that protection should only be used as a last resort but when do people really need to move such pages anyway? Does anyone have any ideas? Xania 12:14, 13 December 2006 (UTC)

In principle I am against protection (including my own pages). I fully agree with the frustration tho. The one that was just moved I protected against moving (I'm guessing you saw that one). One issue is the lack from time to time of RC patrollers. I'd welcome input on ways to deal with it. The pattern (about 4/5 hours before this time) has changed some maybe some of the checkuser based action has had an effect? --Herby talk thyme 12:22, 13 December 2006 (UTC)
PS googling Mumfum is interesting tho I'm not sure that is how we want WB to come up! --Herby talk thyme 12:23, 13 December 2006 (UTC)
I sent an email about this problem to the checkuser-l mailing list, in hopes that those other users will be able to give us some suggestions on dealing with this problem. In response to Xania, I do agree that high-profile pages (policy, guidelines, bookshelves, high-traffic pages) should be semi-protected against page moves. These pages have no reason to be moved, they should not be moved (barring agreement from the community at large), and if they are going to be moved, non-sysop users probably shouldn't be doing it. However, these pages should not be protected against editing, because this is a wiki after all, and people should be free to change the content of pages without requiring special permissions. If a vandal sees that he can continue to do the same thing over and over again (page move vandalism against the same high-profile pages, for instance), they are going to keep coming back to our project. I think we need to take a harder stance on these guys, semi-protect the pages that they are targeting, block the usernames and IP addresses of any new user who writes the word "Mumfum", or creates a page with "Mumfum" in the title. They are playing a game with us, and by not taking our response to the next level, we are essentially playing the game with them. --Whiteknight (talk) (projects) 14:08, 13 December 2006 (UTC)
I agree. Protect important pages from moves but don't prevent editing as this is wiki. I will block any mumfum vandalism on sight before they start moving pages (unless someone disagrees with this). Xania 19:49, 13 December 2006 (UTC)
Bit "me too" but me too <g> --Herby talk thyme 19:51, 13 December 2006 (UTC)
Personally, I don't see how you guys can stand cleaning up after this stuff. If someone wants to move a template, they can request an admin do it. It's a non-trivial thing to do and should involve discussion anway, IMO. --22:51, 13 December 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Looking for contributors to the Holocaust wikibook

Hiya, I have created a wikibook on the events of the Holocaust. So far ideas have been that: The book will look at the situation in which the Holocaust was able to take place. It will look into those involved and where and when important events took place, to try and establish a clear picture of the extend of what has happened. What happened after the war and what ongoing impact will the events of the Holocaust have now? I have set up a basic structure and now looking for people to start discussing, writing and shaping the book. If you're interested, you can contact me: User_talk:WietsE or leave a message on the books talk page: Talk:The_Holocaust/Content. O yeah, and have a look at the book itself: The_Holocaust. Cheers, WietsE 19:09, 13 December 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Vandalism In Progress

I can't find the page to report vandalism in progress... Perhaps someone can point me to it, or even make it easier to find on the site?

Here is some vandalism; I fixed it: http://en.wikibooks.org/w/index.php?title=The_Holocaust/Victims&oldid=684369 http://en.wikibooks.org/w/index.php?title=Feminism/History&diff=prev&oldid=684372

Here is his or her page: http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Special:Contributions/208.123.149.134 --Remi0o 21:08, 13 December 2006 (UTC)

blocked for 2 hours - thanks --Herby talk thyme 21:17, 13 December 2006 (UTC)
For future reference, the page to report vandalism is located at Wikibooks:Vandalism in progress. --Whiteknight (talk) (projects) 22:49, 13 December 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Wikibooks newsletter

User:Herbythyme and I, along with a few other editors here and there have kicked up the idea to have a wikibooks newletter. The idea behind the newsletter is to get into contact with some of the active contributors to wikibooks who aren't quite part of the community yet. We would like to send out news and information to various contributors, at least once (if not on a regular basis). These newsletters could be "delivered" via bot to the user talk pages. To do this, we will need a few things:

  1. Important information to include in the first newsletter. If there is only one newsletter, we need to say everything important in one shot. If we send them out on a regular basis (monthly?), we would need new content on a regular basis.
  2. A list of recipients. I am creating Wikibooks:Active wikibookians as a place to list users who should get the newsletter. People can feel free to add themselves, and add the names of any users who are active on the project. Keep in mind, most people who contribute to wikibooks don't check staff lounge or the bulletin board, and won't see this message here. If you know of another user who is active, please list their names. If a person wants to opt out of this newsletter, they can remove their name from the list.

I would like to send out the first newsletter by the new year, at the latest. Help is greatly appreciated. --Whiteknight (talk) (projects) 23:56, 13 December 2006 (UTC)

Three questions and a suggestion:
  1. Will we name it?
  2. Is there a centralised page for suggestions, help, collaboration, etc.?
  3. Will we archive it like w:Wikipedia:Signpost?
  4. News tidbit: we are getting a new logo soon.
Iamunknown 02:20, 14 December 2006 (UTC)
Good questions (and comment!).
  1. User:Herbythyme has suggested the name "Wikibooks Gazette", but I would be perfectly content just calling it "newsletter". Depends how fancy we would like to get, but I would prefer not to get too pretentious.
  2. There isn't a centralized page yet, but there very well could be. All I have envisioned is a short(ish) message, delivered to the usertalk pages of active wikibookians. This can be used to highlight certain news items (probably from posts here on staff lounge, or news items on the bulletin board), and to remind wikibookians to become more active in the community. However much discussion we need to make this happen probably needs a place to live, but again, we don't need to go crazy about it.
  3. I don't think that we should archive it. The bulletin board and the staff lounge are both already archived, and the newsletter will likely be a distilled version of those pages. No sense archiving everything twice.
  4. The logo thing can go in the first newsletter!
I'm going to start the page Wikibooks:Newsletter with a draft text of the first newsletter. We can begin discussions on the talk page of that. --Whiteknight (talk) (projects) 02:32, 14 December 2006 (UTC)
I take that back, Wikibooks:Newsletter already exists, and represents an earlier effort to distribute news to wikibookians. We'll keep that page is (for historical reasons), and instead create the page Wikibooks:Wikibooks gazette. --Whiteknight (talk) (projects) 02:35, 14 December 2006 (UTC)
This is just nit-picky suggestions, but would be opposed to moving to Wikibooks:Wikibooks Gazette? That seems to me like a more proper title. --Iamunknown 02:57, 14 December 2006 (UTC) I renamed it. Revert if you like. --Iamunknown 05:36, 14 December 2006 (UTC)
I still strongly am in favour of an archival schema. Trying to understand what has happened here at Wikibooks is awful. It would be very useful for future editors to be able to search through the archived gazeteers. If they are simply deleted, then they it would become very tedious to manually investigate the history. A suggestion would be: [[Wikibooks:Wikibooks Gazette/Archive/YYYY/MM/DD/]]. That way, you could look at it by day, month, and year. I know we won't have tons of gazeteers, but it could still be very useful. --Iamunknown 05:44, 14 December 2006 (UTC)
I'm not going to oppose an archival schema, it sounds like more busy work to me (and I hate busywork), but If you want to do it you are more then welcome to. I would recommend against a heavily nested archive (/YYYY/MM/DD/) because they won't be distributed on a daily basis In fact, I would vote against having set delivery times (every week, every other week, every month, etc), and would instead suggest that this newsletter should only go out when there is enough news to report. We don't want to spam people's user talk pages with this. I would recommend yearly archives, with 1 archive page per year, all the gazettes from that year would be separated by headings telling on what date the newsletter was distributed. That would make it easiest, in my opinion. --Whiteknight (talk) (projects) 14:17, 14 December 2006 (UTC)
What do you think of a flattened naming scheme? It could be [[Wikibooks:Wikibooks Gazette/Archive/YYYY-MM-DD/]] which would be included in a YYYY section of [[Wikibooks:Wikibooks Gazette/Archive/]]. I agree that a heavily nested scheme is inappropriate given the amount of content. It was the first thing that came to mind. --Iamunknown 20:29, 14 December 2006 (UTC)
[edit] Gazette continued

I'd say just archive to something like Wikibooks:Gazette/Number 1 (December, 2006). This avoids the nesting problems, and has an informative title. Wikibooks:Staff lounge/Archive could just be the listing page for all the archival editions. --SB_Johnny | talk 11:26, 15 December 2006 (UTC)

Works for me, simple, effective --Herby talk thyme 11:34, 15 December 2006 (UTC)
The exact method that we use to archive these pages is irrelevant in the short term. I would like to send out this newsletter by tomorrow evening (barring serious objections), or sometime early this week. We can all ship out the text to all sorts of different archives after it is actually sent. Barring discussions that arent immediately relevant, is there anything else that needs to be decided/changed/formalized before this happens or not? --Whiteknight (talk) (projects) 00:53, 18 December 2006 (UTC)
I sent the first newsletter out tonight. I did a quick count, and I think about 60 people got the newsletter. I recommend we move this discussion to either Wikibooks talk:Wikibooks gazette, or else we start a new page entirely at Wikibooks:Wikiproject newsletter. --Whiteknight (talk) (projects) 04:21, 19 December 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Discussion backlog

The staff lounge has a backlog of unresolved issues. Because questions and issues are asked and discussed here, the issues seem to regularly get lost up the page. Thus I propose that the staff lounge remain as a general place to ask questions and a new page be created to be the center for discussion. It would have links to subpages where they are housed. A notice could be placed here when a new topic was brought up. Comments? --Iamunknown 02:17, 14 December 2006 (UTC)

I know what you are talking about, discussions frequently do get lost as new issues are brought up. However, this is not a new problem, and I would argue that wikibooks has been working just fine without fixing it. Also, I think that breaking things up into multiple subpages defeats the purpose of having a centralized discussion area. If people have to go searching for the correct place to ask a question, I think they are less likely to ask it in the first place. As a final point, I would say that keeping all those pages organized would be additional busywork, and i can't see introducing any new busywork for our already overworked staff members.
As we all know, wikibooks is a concensus-based community, where decisions are made through community concensus. To that end, it typically is much harder to change the status quo then it is to keep things going the way they are. Discussions here that stagnate, or which are simply forgotten or ignored can be considered to have failed to change the status quo, which is in itself an implicit decision on the matter. I would like to try and warn against ensuring that every single issue is explicitly "Closed" with some sort of a decision: sometime just letting a conversation die out is the answer. --Whiteknight (talk) (projects) 02:27, 14 December 2006 (UTC)
I agree that it is difficult to change to status quo. But I'm in disbelief that you recognise this and simultaneously insist upon changing it with weekly policy updates. You are explicitly creating a deadline. It is also outlandish to expect a proposed policy to be approved with significant improvements and appropriate consensus within a week. On Wikipedia, guidelines don't get approved within months, unless by divine — or administrative — intervention. --Iamunknown 05:12, 14 December 2006 (UTC)
Your criticism is acknowledged, but I think you are misinterpreting the "Proposal of the Week" thing. I guess it was heavily explained before you became active here, and I take for granted that everybody knows what I am talking about. The PotW (as I will informally call it) is not an attempt to force a decision on a policy proposal in the span of one week. That's absurd, in most cases. PotW was originally created to spotlight old policy proposals that have stagnated for some time, and needed to be reevaluated. Some of these old proposals were either (a) already being followed even though they werent official, or (b) already basically decided upon, but nobody had ever finalized the discussion. To that end, we were looking at these proposals, and if they could be quickly enacted without changing the wikibooks status quo, we did so, but if they couldn't (which is the case far more often), at least the proposal got some much needed publicity, and the discussions were allowed to continue beyond the designated week. In many of these cases, (such as the Wikibooks:Be bold, and Wikibooks:Original research policies that i've mentioned above), the text of the proposal already reflects the status quo, and it should be an easy transition to enact a policy that fits the way we do business around here already, as opposed to making a new policy that changes the way we do business (a change to the status quo, which would be by definition a harder thing to do). I hope that clears things up. --Whiteknight (talk) (projects) 14:26, 14 December 2006 (UTC)
One thing that I could suggest (so as not to blow off the problem entirely) is that discussions could be moved to their own subpages off the staff lounge, such as "Staff lounge/DISCUSSION TOPIC". I don't propose all discussions get separated out this way, just discussions that are becoming very long, or which are old but unresolved. (when such a discussion is over, the discussion could then be properly archived, and the page deleted so it could be recycled for future discussions with the same name). Sound like a compromise? --Whiteknight (talk) (projects) 14:05, 15 December 2006 (UTC)
Excellent idea tho I do think selective archiving as practised by Darklama and others works quite well. Some topics (for better or worse) fade --Herby talk thyme 14:18, 15 December 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Discussion which was moved here from Template talk:Main Page introduction

Hi all,

Template:Main Page introduction currently looks like this:

Welcome to Wikibooks, a collection of free content textbooks that you can edit.
We have 38,252 book modules in over 1000 books.
Other Languages
Other languages
FAQ | Table-free

I propose we change it to look as follows:

This is Wikibooks, the free library you can add to.
Write, edit, or illustrate books and publish them here for free.
[Other languages link image]
Other languages
FAQ | Accessible version

What do you think? Cheers, Unforgettableid 01:12, 8 December 2006 (UTC)

Ok, but I think that you forgot about readers, for whom this whole business was made for. Your proposal concentrates only on editors. For casual visitors another things are important, like how many texts do we have. --Derbeth talk 09:55, 8 December 2006 (UTC)
I agree with Derbeth but I like the new description ('the free library you can add to'). The current description sounds so dull. Xania 14:47, 8 December 2006 (UTC)
Ok, so let's edit the template and make it look like this?

Welcome to Wikibooks, the free library you can add to.
We have 38,252 book modules in over 1000 books.
Other Languages
Other languages
FAQ | Table-free
Cheers, Unforgettableid 23:43, 14 December 2006 (UTC)
Looks great. Not sure how many users watch this page though so I guess not many users have seen this discussion. Xania 23:51, 14 December 2006 (UTC)
So let's ask on the Staff lounge if it's ok? Unforgettableid 00:03, 15 December 2006 (UTC)
Good idea. Xania 00:05, 15 December 2006 (UTC)
All, what do you think? I think the new version sounds better. Try reading it out loud. It just reads more smoothly. See also arguments against my full redesign above, but I feel I have addressed those by repointing the links in my proposed version. Cheers, Unforgettableid 00:17, 15 December 2006 (UTC)
I have to admit, I just like the old version better. The original introduction, "Welcome to Wikibooks, a collection of free content textbooks that you can edit" is just superior, in my mind, to any of the proposed rewrites. --Whiteknight (talk) (projects) 01:00, 15 December 2006 (UTC)
How about instead this? --darkYin yang.svglama 01:07, 15 December 2006 (UTC)
Welcome to Wikibooks, the open library you can help create.
Read, write and publish textbooks here for free.
We have 38,252 pages in over 1000 textbooks.
 [Other languages link image]
Other languages
FAQ | Table-free
I still take issue with it, wikibooks doesn't let you "publish" books. It's also more verbose, and less straightforward then the original. I don't see why there is such a rush to change it. --Whiteknight (talk) (projects) 01:39, 15 December 2006 (UTC)
I encourage this discussion as well as others to help the main page seem more approachable whether it is the content or table structure. My combination of what I thought was best from the previous tables is the following:
Welcome to Wikibooks, the free library anyone can edit.
We have 38,252 pages in over 1000 textbooks.

--Herraotic 00:17, 23 December 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Auto-archive

A suggestion: Perhaps we should have the Staff lounge autoarchived by Werdnabot or such? At 184 kilobytes, the page is long, slow to load, and a bit unwieldy to browse through. Cheers, Unforgettableid 00:23, 15 December 2006 (UTC)

I think that something's got to be done. I don't like the idea of creating sub-pages like seems to have happened over at vfd. An auto archive might be an idea. At the moment I rarely visit this section because the page is just so big and it's impossible to find anything. I'd favour an auto-archive option unless someone here has a better option? Xania 00:30, 15 December 2006 (UTC)

discussions are already archived when they are about 1 month old (give or take). If we shuffle things out of here too much faster then that, we risk losing discussions before they are over. --Whiteknight (talk) (projects) 00:57, 15 December 2006 (UTC)
Actually, I take that back, I would be fine with archiving after 2 weeks. Either way, this page is going to have a substantial amount of material on it. --Whiteknight (talk) (projects) 01:05, 15 December 2006 (UTC)
While I have no problem with 2 weeks as a guide, doing it selectively on "closed" topics as Darklama just did seems quite appropriate here --Herby talk thyme 11:37, 15 December 2006 (UTC)
I agree, 2 weeks is probably enough. --Whiteknight (talk) (projects) 00:49, 18 December 2006 (UTC)
Disagree, with non human intervention, archiving could reduce the display time of a debate to 14 days, this is to low, a default archiving of 30 days with human intervention on closed and non important posts should suffice. --Panic 21:03, 30 December 2006 (UTC)

reset

I have archived this page before by hand and was informed that a bot would also do it, at the time I have noticed that it wasn't archiving messages with more than 30 days, reducing discussion time will probably cause more troubles that it solves, some questions get a response in a few days and should not be archived in less 16 days, people could miss important discussions.

I hadn't noticed that the time frame for auto-archiving was being discussed here, and ask that it given more visibility.

This is a High impact decision a change to the general state of things, that has a general community impact or calls for the establishment of a sequence or set of task with undefined time duration. Even if we all agree a subsequent measurement of consensus with a straw poll (if needed) and more importantly at least there is need to publicize what is being proposed , there should also be a place to keep the reason given and the result of the vote to serve as a bases for future discussions for the same problem (or similar problems) that is, for historic reasons. --Panic 21:03, 30 December 2006 (UTC)

I would hardly call this a "high impact" decision, it deals with the content of only a single module, and the method and rate in which the text of the page is archived doesnt affect the community at large. The fact that the text is archived, and not deleted outright shows that no major changes are happening, and people who wish to continue a particular discussion can find it in the archives. I have a semi-automated bot that can archive the page, but it requires me to actually look at the timestamps, and read the text of the thread, to determine whether to archive or not. I dont think any hard and fast rules should really be applied here, somethings can get archived in only a few days, and other things should not be archived for a long time. --Whiteknight (talk) (projects) 03:30, 3 January 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Getting better all the time - Alexa ranking

See: Alexa rank for Wikibooks and select 3 yr view.

Wikibooks is still in a growth phase and doing well. We all deserve a pat on the back! RobinH 11:11, 15 December 2006 (UTC)

Awesome link Robin! It really does demonstrate that we are still moving in the upward direction. I doubt we will ever have numbers like wikipedia, but still, we aren't doing that bad! --Whiteknight (talk) (projects) 14:02, 15 December 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Sand Dune Croboys

This one concerns me - also the "editor". At the least I think it is a hoax - I have placed a note on the editor's page to that effect). Partly heads up as I will be off line shortly, partly for comments - cheers --Herby talk thyme 19:10, 15 December 2006 (UTC)

+ this one Aye Laddy. - hoax, vandalism, offensive user name. Whatever - I have blocked for a day - got a feeling for any of those reasons it should be longer & I won't be offended (<g>) if the ban is extended --Herby talk thyme 19:22, 15 December 2006 (UTC)
Ho hum - why didn't I log out - User:Kiggar edited the 2nd page - two hour block to allow someone else (I hope) to review it. I say sorry if I'm wrong honest! Checkuser I guess too - thanks --Herby talk thyme 19:25, 15 December 2006 (UTC)
Pretty sure these are deletable rubbish but would prefer a 2nd opinion - equally on the time of block for both users - thanks --Herby talk thyme 19:35, 15 December 2006 (UTC)
Yes, this is deletable rubbish. On wikipedia we might argue whether it's "notable", but on wikibooks we can without doubt say it's "not a textbook". Feel free to speedy them, I'm off to the farmer's market. --SB_Johnny | talk 22:37, 15 December 2006 (UTC)
  • reset

If and when anyone else makes it in! I've deleted the pages (I agree with Johnny) I guess I would appreciate views on the blocks. The first indef for user name (I have now done that)? But what about the associated names (& checkuser still needed on them). Anyone who wants more info let me know. To anyone passing please look at the checkuser request at WB:RFA as this should be considered by anyone in the "community </advert> --Herby talk thyme 11:59, 16 December 2006 (UTC)

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