Wikibooks:Staff lounge/Archive 33

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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 34).


Contents

[edit] Reviving "...of the week"?

I'm wondering if maybe we shouldn't revive the "policy of the week" thing, but using a more formal and complicated approach. I think it would be good for us if we had 3 "...of the week" things: Discussion of the Week, Vote of the Week, and Community Project of the Week. I think it would also be good to use the sitenotice feature to bring this to the attention of both new and old Wikibookians... it would also give "jaded Wikipedians" an easy way to find things to do here while they get over writer's block.

Discussion of the Week could be a new policy or guideline, or even something more vague, such as whether we need a policy or guideline.

Vote of the Week would be for proposed policies or guidelines that have evolved to the point where only minor edits are being made. We could also perhaps dedicate the first (second, third, last, whatever) week of the month to RFAs, and only allow voting on RFAs during that one week. Or maybe even have every other week for VfD, with the weeks between alternating between RfA and policy voting. (The point is to have everyone's attention focused on the same page.)

Community Project of the Week could be for just doing maintenance chores. Correcting naming policy, unwikifying silly links, etc. Or even doing chores in one book or another where many hands are needed to make the work light.

Maybe also a Votes for Next Week's Agenda... the discussion, vote, or project that gets the most votes wins!

I know this all might sound silly, but the sitenotice might be a better venue than the Main Page for getting people excited about the project. Writing books is a huge commitment, and giving people a way to constructively contribute to books (and see what books are like) can help them get more comfortable, and see that they can just do what they have time to do, rather than taking on the whole world by themselves. Working on a Wiki-Book can be a lonely experience, but anyone who comes here wanting to do good things should be given an outlet... there are so many "little" things that need doing, and (I suspect) plenty of people willing to do them. The sitenotice can advertise to any and all that there's work to do here, and that they can help, even if they're not sure yet whether they want to take on the responsibility of writing a book. --SB_Johnny | talk 21:14, 15 April 2007 (UTC)

A problem with these types of things is that we just dont have enough interested people who are willing to maintain interest in these projects. I know that I am a terrible offender because I tend to start projects and then lose interest. In my defense I tend to lose interest in things of which I am the only participant, so we can chalk that up to a lack of interest among other community members. It certainly is a great idea, i just dont know that we can support it. --Whiteknight (talk) (projects) 03:16, 16 April 2007 (UTC)
I would like to say that, while I approve of all of those projects, do them sometimes on my own and wish such a set up would work, I am unsure it would work. What I would like to see getting going is the Wikibooks:Community Portal; I currently lack sufficient JavaScript coding skill, but this summer I fully intend to create a script which will scrap the server for a random set of tasks to add to the Template:Opentask, such that users who just feel like doing something can. But then I might encounter the same disinterest. --Iamunknown 10:34, 25 April 2007 (UTC)
I agree with you 100%, the community portal is a great place to focus our efforts. I dont know how effective javascript is going to be at the tasks you are talking about, but it would be easy for a bot to do (and i can write bots). --Whiteknight (talk) (projects) 21:08, 25 April 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Goodbook and Main Page

As many people have probably already seen, the main page has been updated again to include more book advertisements. I would encourage all book authors to prepare a {{Goodbook}} template for your book, especially if your book is a featured book. This template can be rotated onto the main page eventually, but it can also be permanently displayed on the bookshelf, and you can also post it on your book TOC page. Also, if the authors of the books write these blurbs themselves, other people won't have to rewrite them when we try to put them on the main page. --Whiteknight (talk) (projects) 18:52, 18 April 2007 (UTC)

I may be being dense, but I don't understand where to create the goodbook template. --xixtas talk 09:23, 19 April 2007 (UTC)
Me too. Is it like Infobox? If it isn't, that might not be a bad style to emulate. -withinfocus 12:48, 19 April 2007 (UTC)
I propose that Goodbook templates be created as subpages of the {{Goodbook}} template, for example, {{Goodbook/French}} -- Kowey 08:07, 23 April 2007 (UTC)
Another thought: is there any way to have the thumbnail link to the book itself and not to the image page? It's just so tempting when you see one of these showcases to click on the picture, thinking that you will get the book being advertised. It may not be a good practice in general to have such links, but for the purpose of building a goodbook showcase, it seems like it would be really useful -- Kowey 14:16, 25 April 2007 (UTC)
Try {{click}}. The images for the bookshelf list use it. --hagindaz 22:59, 25 April 2007 (UTC)
Thanks for that. I'm having some trouble with non-square images (or rather, wide images), because they get the link underline underneath them, in addition to a blank white space, presumably from the divs that superimpose the link. Ideally, we would have something which calculates the height of the divs in proportion to the width, details details, but maybe this is not the kind of thing we want to implement in the template language. Hmm. Maybe there's a simple way out. -- Kowey 07:38, 26 April 2007 (UTC)
Argh, sorry if I'm making a mess. I'm trying to figure out how to (i) eliminate redundancy in the goodbook templates (ii) keep things transparent so that any wikibookian can edit the blurbs without becoming a mediawiki expert (iii) keep things parameterisable so that you can include goodbook templates on bookshelves and add borders, etc (iv) keep things simple so that writing a template for your book does not involve too many arcane commands. So far I keep running into tradeoffs. Poke at it one way and you lose another aspect. Eliminate redundancy and either lose simplicity or parameterisability.
I guess what I'm looking for now is some kind of inheritance mechanism, where for example, the {{Goodbook/French}} 'passes along' any other parameters to the {{Goodbook}}, such as box, bgcolor, etc. Or barring that, some kind of quoting mechanism, where the goodbook template includes some template text which is not expanded in the template itself but in any other template that uses it. Hmmph! I promise I'm not making things complicated on purpose! -- Kowey 09:49, 28 April 2007 (UTC)
How about making a few things automatic? For example, an automatic PDF link using {{#ifexist)) (see, for example, {{PDF}}) or an automatic cover if Image:{{{title}}} cover.jpg exists, and either require covers and PDFs to follow this format for simplicity or allow other locations as optional parameters. Or perhaps not using the box only if {{PAGENAME}} is Main Page or Wikibooks:Featured books/Templates, or only using it on bookshelf pages? What do you mean by "quoting mechanism?" <includeonly>? Perhaps you might might find something helpful on m:ParserFunctions. --hagindaz 19:09, 28 April 2007 (UTC)
Hey, that might be a nice way to simplify some uses of the template. We could then have the PDFs and the covers working just by convention.
I'm not sure if I really wanted to say "quoting mechanism" or maybe "escaping mechanism", or something else. The basic idea is that you have a template OUTER which includes a template INNER, it might be nice if template INNER had some code that could literally be placed into OUTER and be interpreted as part of OUTER. The idea I had in mind was that the Goodbook/Foo templates should have a edit=1 parameter that enables an 'edit this blurb' link; but that the code for making that work should be handled by the inner (Goodbook) template. Now could you have the inner template check for the 'edit' parameter, but then you would have to do extra work to propagate the parameter from Goodbook/Foo to Goodbook... which makes it harder for authors to write their own Goodbook/Foo templates. Likewise, I would like the Goodbook/Foo templates to have a 'box' parameter, whose code is completely handled by Goodbook. We could pass the parameters down, doing something like {{#if|{{{box}}}|box={{{box}}}}}... but ugh! Does this make any sense? -- Kowey 19:29, 28 April 2007 (UTC)
If I'm understanding you correctly, the simplest way to accomplish that would be to add for example "|param={{{1|}}}" to Goodbook/Foo, which would pass {{Goodbook/Foo|anything here, if anything}} to {{Goodbook}} as "param" for Goodbook to handle using #switch or #if. {{#if|{{{box}}}|box={{{box}}}}} can be simplified to box={{{box|}}} which, while not ideal, is less confusing and more workable syntactically. --hagindaz 20:16, 28 April 2007 (UTC)
Hmm, that's interesting. But isn't setting a parameter to empty string different from leaving it undefined? -- Kowey 04:01, 29 April 2007 (UTC)
Apparently it is for named parameters. As a workaround use #switch to look for a particular string ("1" or "true") on {{Goodbook}}. --hagindaz 04:24, 29 April 2007 (UTC)
You're right! I had not thought about solving it that way. My version of it was to do {{#ifeq:{{foo|}}||desired result}}, that is, only using {{{foo}}} if it was non-blank. So we conflate blank with undefined. I think {{Goodbook/French}} could be an example of how people should make Goodbook templates. The box={{{box|}}} is simple enough, and non-technical users can just copy from the model anyway. Thanks for your help! -- Kowey 05:35, 29 April 2007 (UTC)

[edit] 69.112.195.155 ( talk | email | contribs )

Could someone take a look at the pages created by this IP. Nothing wrong with them but they should be part of something rather than standalone & frankly I'm not sure what they should be part of. I'm short of time today - thanks --Herby talk thyme 07:22, 19 April 2007 (UTC)

Maybe Wikijunior Human Body? --xixtas talk 08:32, 19 April 2007 (UTC)
I moved them all under the newly created Human Digestive System and left a note to the contributor. (I also encouraged him/her to choose another name). -- Jomegat 13:46, 19 April 2007 (UTC)
I found this guy last night and sent him a message, but it was late and i went to bed before cleanup. All those pages appear to have been made from red links in the Wikijunior Human Body book, and I went through and simply deleted those red links (looks like a bad transwiki to me). I also sent this user a message, but i dont think he listened. Thanks for finishing the job. --Whiteknight (talk) (projects) 13:59, 19 April 2007 (UTC)
Oops. My bad. -xixtas talk 23:07, 19 April 2007 (UTC)

[edit] More Good Books on the Main Page

I would like to thank Darklama for the technical improvements to the main page. It is certainly much better than it was. Why not reduce the width of the left hand column to 30% and make the "featured books" 2 column to allow more featured books on the main page? I have put an example with a single featured books column at Main Page/test2. There is room for 2 cols on the right and the "Goodbook" template could be less generous with padding. RobinH 08:06, 25 April 2007 (UTC)

I would like to say that I like it to. My suggestion is to reduce the intervals of time by which the books rotate; one second seems a bit aggressive on the server's cache, perhaps rotate once per hour? --Iamunknown 10:29, 25 April 2007 (UTC)
More frequent rotate and more books would do it for me. Five minute rotation might be feasible. RobinH 11:37, 25 April 2007 (UTC)
My concern is if the main page will even re-cache that quickly. --Iamunknown 12:52, 25 April 2007 (UTC)
If it supposedly switches every second, the main page will really be dependent on the cache speed of the server, and the main page will appear to switch randomly. We can certainly reduce the amount of time too, if you think that will balance it out more. --Whiteknight (talk) (projects) 13:57, 25 April 2007 (UTC)
A 30% column or three columns would be too much for some resolutions. How about moving the sister projects links to the left column, for example as on nl:Hoofdpagina? --hagindaz 13:35, 25 April 2007 (UTC)
That's another thing worth considering, not all people have fantasic resolutions. My one computer is only 600×800, and the 2-column thing looks a little messy unless i have the page maximized. unfortunately, mediawiki doesnt supply a {{SCREENRESOLUTION}} magic word, so we can't make the page change for different resolutions. We could provide a "low res" version of the page, but that's just another problem. --Whiteknight (talk) (projects) 13:57, 25 April 2007 (UTC)
I think the best way to deal with the differences in screen resolutions is to simply rearrange the contents, so that the about wikibooks and bookshelf listing are at the top together, followed by the listing of books, so it can take up the entire 2 columns without having to deal with the cap mess that can happen when the featured books list is too long or too short. --darklama 14:45, 25 April 2007 (UTC)
I would be in favour of this. People who want to browse the best books would then get a long listing. Perhaps the intro could have a prominent link to the best books lower down. RobinH 18:00, 25 April 2007 (UTC)
I changed it to update every hour, not every second, that should be better on the server. --Whiteknight (talk) (projects) 21:03, 25 April 2007 (UTC)
The Good Books should be listed above the fold (without scrolling). They add a lot of visual interest to the front page. I think we should do lists of 5-7 books and rotate them frequently. --xixtas talk 02:46, 26 April 2007 (UTC)
Just fill the main page with the good books (no scrolling or minimum scrolling). The boring text about Wikibooks history, blah blah can be removed or linked to by a 'About Wikibooks' link. The good/featured books are the best part about the main page. Xania talk 13:07, 28 April 2007 (UTC)
I'm not sure I agree we should eliminate that entirely but perhaps make it a small banner across the top to conserve space for other things. We SHOULD definitely welcome our new users on the main page I think, since it's the first thing many will see. Im not sure what we'd do with the navigation scheme but a few things in that template seem outdated anyways (example: if someone clicks on dewey decimal they'll get only a small number of the books on the project, same with library of congress) so we should probably update the links in it whether we move things around or not. Mattb112885 (talk) 13:32, 28 April 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Wikibooks statistics

There was a concern a posted a little while ago that wikibooks was in some kind of decline, or that our project was shrinking. These concerns were based on the alexa ratings graph, which showed a general negative trend starting around January of this year. For several reasons the alexa graphs need to be taken with a pinch of salt, but what we can do is look at the statistics that are compiled automatically by the wikimedia toolserver. The last statistics were ocmpiled mid-march, so they are about a month behind, but they show a much more promising picture:

  • http://stats.wikimedia.org/wikibooks/EN/ChartsWikipediaEN.htm
    List of diagrams showing statistics by month. Grey bars indicate projected month-end results. Notice that new user accounts are up by an amount consistent with previous months, new "authors" are up (author = person with 10 or more edits), new "very active authors" are up significantly (very active = 100 edits or more), new pages are up, page size is up, new pages created per day is up significantly.

This is only a small fraction of the data available on the stats server, i suggest people go look around and see all the information available. I hope this eases some fears that people are having. --Whiteknight (talk) (projects) 16:12, 25 April 2007 (UTC)

Unfortunately those aren't completely accurate either, I'm afraid. http://stats.wikimedia.org/wikibooks/EN/TablesWikipediaEN.htm shows some very skewed statistics for A Wikimanual of Gardening because of my excessive use of the import tool :). However, it might not have any effect on the "trends", since the tool they are using apparently readjusts to include historical wikipedia edits too (for example, we have logs of edits to A Wikimanual of Gardening/Digitalis in July 2001, and as far as I know we didn't even have Wikibooks in July 2001), so my guess is that as far as the trends are concerned it's logging those contributions in the past as well as the present, so any "trend" is more likely a local phenomenon. Import is a great tool, but it does screw up the stats... for example, A Wikimanual of Gardening/Digitalis had 169 revisions when I imported it. --SB_Johnny | talk 17:07, 25 April 2007 (UTC)
Well, no other book has made as large a use of the import tool as the gardening book has, and i would say that compared to the project at large, the additional edits accured by importing those pages does not have a gigantic effect on the overall picture. I did think it was a little odd that WMOG was listed as having over 2400 distinct "authors"... --Whiteknight (talk) (projects) 17:11, 25 April 2007 (UTC)
lol... I make from 3-10 imports a week, sometimes with over 1k previous edits. The funny thing is that (depending on how you look at it) there are over 2400 distinct contributors to that book, it's just that most of the edits were made on wikipedia, not on wikibooks.
A question about that though (sorry to hijack): have you found anything there that lists the top contributors for a particular book (on all subpages)? I'd like to start a talkpagespam campaign on wikipedia, especially now that I can help with account renaming if necessary. --SB_Johnny | talk 17:19, 25 April 2007 (UTC)
These stats are good. The good news is that the red line is nicely exponential - english Wikibooks is on the up qnd is in a sustained growth phase like Wikipedia achieved (unlike some of the other languages). It is a shame that we have no readership figures. Does anyone read our books or is this an authors club? RobinH 17:58, 25 April 2007 (UTC)
You are right about the readership question, there really is no way to determine who is reading what, or if anybody is reading anything at all. Unfortunately for us, that alexa graph is the only indication at all, and I dont consider it to be too accurate. The developers have been dead-set against installing hit counters, so i guess we will never know.
On the flip side, i think it's a safe bet that people don't create an account here unless they are on the site reading things in the first place. Since our numbers of new accounts continues to get bigger, i think we can take that as an indirect measure of the number of readers we have. Even if we take that, and see that readership is up, that doesnt mean we get to rest on our laurels. We always need to be improving things, and attracting more and more people. A little pride in our progress is not unjustified, i think. --Whiteknight (talk) (projects) 18:25, 25 April 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Historical pages

Wikibooks has accumulated a number of pages that haven't been updated for ages still linked to from Wikibooks:Community Portal, Help and project pages, such as Wikibooks:Wikibook Press, collaborations of the month, and Help:Textbook planning, among many others. Perhaps we should delink and add these pages to a new Category:Historical project pages? Does this seem like a good idea? --hagindaz 09:43, 29 April 2007 (UTC)

Sounds like a good idea. We really need to go through some of those "dusty corners" in any case, since a lot of stuff in the Help namespace in particular was copied from old Wikipedia pages ages ago, and never really "altered to fit". --SB_Johnny | talk 09:48, 29 April 2007 (UTC)
I would tend to agree. There is some feeling amoung a few editors that i've spoken to that some of this old material might even need to be deleted, but on the grounds of historical value, i think that they should be kept and properly categorized as obsolete. --Whiteknight (talk) (projects) 23:06, 29 April 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Goodbook double rotation

I was just thinking that

  1. We should keep the number of featured books per slot pretty low. 6 is quite good. Any more and the books get drowned among themselves
  2. But... we have a lot of books to feature
  3. Anything like 6, 12 or 24 slots might be bad, because it might cause books to only be featured in certain timezones. We should probably stick to < 5 slots
  4. But... we have a lot of books to feature...

So, how about having sets of slots? It would be like a clock, we would have a double rotation, featuring a different set of books every day, and within each day, a different set of books every hour. If we do 6 books a slot, 5 slots a day, 30 days in a month, we could feature up to 900 books -- Kowey 18:17, 30 April 2007 (UTC)

Mathematically, it is the most fair to have a number of slots that is a factor of 24, so that the slots rotate an even integer number of times per day. I just upgraded the rotation to have 4 slots from 3 previously. After 4, we can have 6, 12, or 24. If we get up to 24, some books will only show up at 3am, which is never good for advertisement. Multiple slots is a good idea, but we have to find a way to do it that is easily extensible, and we want to try and avoid deeply-nested template calls because then we will see a lag because of server performance. What might be the best idea is to have about 6 slots total, and then refactor those slots every month, although the exact mechanism for doing that would need to be decided. It looks to me like the featured books nominations page has slowed down significantly from what it was when we first started, so hopefully we don't have any more huge influxes of books to contend with and we can extend the system slowly. --Whiteknight (talk) 18:40, 30 April 2007 (UTC)
PS, another thing that we might consider is to display books on different pages, not just the main page. For instance we can have books rotating in and out on the main page, the community portal, the staff lounge, etc. The featured wikijunior books can be displayed at Wikijunior in addition to regular rotations elsewhere, for instance. We can post the templates on the bookshelves (many are already on the bookshelves). My point being that even if books arent regularly rotated on the main page, they will get plenty of exposure in other places too. --Whiteknight (talk) 18:42, 30 April 2007 (UTC)
Ah yes, you're right that it should be a factor of 24. I guess I was just saying that it should be one of the smaller factors. So 4 is probably good. On the other hand, if we used, say, the number of hours passed since 1970 (i.e. unix time) instead of since midnight, perhaps then it would be advantageous to use something which is not a factor of 24, as this would cause the books to rotate: some days it would be 3am, then 4am, etc. Well, I might be confusing myself with the math anyway, just a rough intuition :-)
Speaking of rotating books onto more than the front page (which I support), I wonder how obnoxious it would be of us to advertise a random featured book on the side bar?
And finally, a technical question, would embedded #switch calls (how I was thinking of implementing this) be harmful, performance-wise? -- Kowey 06:38, 2 May 2007 (UTC)

[reset tabs] Anyway, I've gone ahead and added more slots, randomly putting in all currently featured books. To support a number of slots which is not a factor of 24, i'm using (dayOfMonth * 24) + currentHour mod N. One simple rotation -- Kowey 20:13, 3 May 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Outreach project

One of the greatest things about Wikibooks is that our textbooks can contain the sorts of thing you "can't learn from a textbook". I think this could be especially true about "trades", as opposed to the more academic fields. So I'm interested in what people think about constructing invitation letters that Wikibookians could hand off to people they encounter in day-to-day living. There's a right way and a wrong way to do just about everything, including: trash collection, rebuilding a transmission, fixing a leaky roof, repairing guard rails, sexing chickens, dredging ports, etc.

On our part, we'd need to make some efforts at making the bookshelves user-friendly, and perhaps even have a separate "entry page" for these contributors (this might also help the Main Page debacle too). I'd also strongly argue that the "How-tos" category and bookshelf be abolished, and replaced with "Trades and Vocations", "Hobbies and Avocations", and "Life Skills and Self-Help". As a tradesman myself, I think I might speak for more than a few who would feel that classifying trades and vocations with "how-tos" (side by side with "Shaving" and "How to Tie a Tie") is rather insulting and dismissive of our fields of specialty.

User:Bastique (one of our faithful stewards) has been "talking us up" on both IRC and various lists and projects as well, and is particularly interested in "recruiting" retirees through a partnership with the AARP. Regardless of whether this is successful, it does make me think about perhaps getting in touch with labor unions and trade associations, government agencies such as agricultural extension services, museums and schools, and even web forums, mailing lists, religious institutions, or local clubs.

For AARP contributors in particular, we might even set up a new css "skin", based on monobook but with larger fonts for the edit window in particular (I personally wouldn't mind a larger font either... as much as I like the "unix-terminal" quality of the edit window, it's really not very user friendly for those with older eyes!), but also for image captions and even the main text of modules. Coming up with a more helpful "Help:" namespace would go very far too.

Within Wikimedia, 2 of our "sisters" are quite interested in us. Wikiversity's experimental style has in at least a couple cases led to the creation of very good book stubs, and their learning projects should ideally use our textbooks for reading material. Commons of course serves all projects, but the difference between the needs of Wikibooks projects and those of the Wikipedias has been a topic of many discussions lately.

As far as our relations with en.Wikiversity goes, I think we only need to ask for import to be enabled, so that we can copy over textbook-like learning projects and hope that the Wikibooks versions will continue to grow. For the commoners (commonists, commonsians, etc.), organizing "illustration projects" could both generate more interest and give image contributors a better idea of what kinds of images we need (Wikijunior, in particular, needs very different genres than does Wikipedia).

Last but not least, we need to attract Wikipedians. They know how to edit, and we might be able to identify those who are experts. Wikipedia is spotty and patchy, but there are subjects where it's very well developed because people with expertise have contributed. The problem is, no-one is an expert on everything, and the expert eventually runs out of new things to write and/or gets frustrated with the wikipedian problems of vandals, spammers, POV-pushers, and trolls.

On that, I think we've got a strong "selling point". Over the past 6 months or so, vandalism and spamming has been rather tightly controlled here thanks in large part to two of our most active administrators. We're not as strong on POV-pushing and trolling, but an influx of "angry Wikipedians" might tip the balance there. For the Wikipedians we also need to provide clear guidelines on "maintenance tasks" such as categorizing, RC patrolling, orphan pages, etc.--SB_Johnny | talk 23:53, 30 April 2007 (UTC)

This is all a great idea, and a logical extension of our drive to make this place bigger and better. Before we can really start attracting new people to become contributors, we really need to ramp up our support infrastructure. We have done alot of good work, the staff lounge looks better, the main page is better, the featured books thing is working wonderfully. All of these aspects is going to help attract contributors. What we don't have here though is the support infrastructure to manage all those people.
The most important thing we can do right now is fix up the community portal, and (forgive me for even saying this) cleanup the help namespace. A massive community effort is needed to set these two things up for an influx of new (and possibly inexperienced) editors. I'll start to focus on that problem after my last final, tomorrow. --Whiteknight (talk) 00:28, 1 May 2007 (UTC)
Actually I think we could easily write a Wikibooks:New Contributor's Guide. The basics are very simple (two or three apostrophies here or there, brackets and slashes, tildes, etc.). I think we can do away with the "Template:New" stuff now that we have some good RC patrollers in the house. Categorizing and bookshelving can be done by more experienced Wikibookians (or the aforementioned frustrated Wikipedians looking for somewhere to be constructive without being yelled at al the time). We could also have a Staff Lounge/New Contributors page for people to just introduce themselves and say what their interests are, so that thouse more familiar with what (and who) is here can point them in the right direction. --SB_Johnny | talk 23:08, 1 May 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Wikibooks could use a better logo

Wikibook's logo is probably my least favorite out of the main Wikimedia sites. I think someone should try to make a better one. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 69.182.67.27 (talk • contribs) 23:35, 2 May 2007 (UTC)

Unfortunately I believe that choosing a new logo is out of the hands of Wikibooks English because the Foundation want all Wikibooks logos to be the same across the different language versions. So they decided to choose one themselves, voted on it amongst themselves without direct consultation from the individual Wikibooks communities. As a result their vote and discussion has now stagnated and we seem to be left with this logo. I, and probably many others here, would like a new logo but we would like to make the decision ourselves and for it to be the choice of THIS community. Xania talk 20:00, 3 May 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Spotting vandalism

Watching some interchanges on RC (specifically about Muggles but it applies to all). I've discovered that Meta have "patrolled" edits - unreviewed edits have "!" beside them on RC - those that are allowed can "review" those edits which removes the "!". May be worth discussion/investigation - cheers --Herby talk thyme 15:54, 5 May 2007 (UTC)

Yeah, there was some talk on IRC about that last night. Seems a good idea to me (and certainly does no harm).--SB_Johnny | talk 16:03, 5 May 2007 (UTC)
That would be pretty hot. I'd love to have a review team for my book so that when the final product gets going we can make sure we're delivering quality and don't have comments about Nazis [...comment censored by SB_J...] (a recent addition to some of our pages here). -withinfocus 16:17, 5 May 2007 (UTC)
No need to repeat that please... we have children and parents of children around here. The NAZI vandals are one of the reasons I'd like to see oversight used. Speaking of which, see topic below. --SB_Johnny | talk 16:50, 5 May 2007 (UTC)
BTW for those who did not know and might be interested that vandal hit almost all main wikis --Herby talk thyme 17:39, 5 May 2007 (UTC)
I also think that'd be a good idea. I'd also like to have seen a permanent block for that vandal (rather than 1 week). We should not tolerate nazism, racism and any uses of such language should result in an immediate permanent block. Xania talk 17:42, 5 May 2007 (UTC)
IIRC one Wiki has but it is an IP - we do not know whether someone "owns" it. I assure you I shall be far harsher on wikis where I have the buttons if it were to re-occur (I did extend the original block here). I have a deep objection to such things --Herby talk thyme 17:57, 5 May 2007 (UTC)

OK, the recent vote on a blocking policy didn't go through, but maybe a more specific policy should be put in place to help "catch up" returning admins like Hagendaz, who aren't familiar with the de facto policies we've established over the past year or so. I invite everyone to please vote in support of Wikibooks:Blatant Vandal Blocking Policy. I don't think there's anything objectionable about it, and since some of our "long lost admins" have been returning to the project lately, a policy specifying indefinite blocks might ease their worries about the use of indef blocks. --SB_Johnny | talk 19:50, 5 May 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Bugzilla request for "select all/unselect" option on restorepage dialog

I've been thinking about this for a while... in order to hide particularly offensive vandal edits from a page history, we are currently required to delete the page, and then manually select to restore all of the versions we want to keep, rather than being able to "select all" and then just "unselect" the revision we want to make disappear. It seems to me that we could really make good use of a select all/unselect feature for both very offensive edits and for edits that have offensive edit comments. I'm not sure if the oversight tool works that way (if it does, let's just get it and make it available to as many active admins as we can), but it seems to me that such a feature wouldn't be hard to provide, and since AFAIK we don't have any very young admins, having them viewable to us wouldn't be a big deal anyway. This could also help with our attribution issues, since as Panic has pointed out, any "bot or js created" attribution is going to end up counting vandals somehow.

Could we just vote on this request here, or should there be a separate page? --SB_Johnny | talk 16:50, 5 May 2007 (UTC)

I'd vote for that - hard work to just select the ones you want back - look at WikiJunior main page! --Herby talk thyme 17:32, 5 May 2007 (UTC)
I added some javascript to add a Select All button to do just this to MediaWiki:Common.js, the reset button already clears them all. --darklama 00:15, 6 May 2007 (UTC)
I didn't notice any difference, but actually it's the opposite that I meant, I think. Basically make it so that all the boxes for restoring are pre-checked, so you can just "uncheck" the versions you want to get rid of. An even easier version (that would definitely need bugzilla) would just allow us to delete particular revisions when we're viewing the history of the page, since that would save us the trouble of having modules disappearing during the cleanup process. --SB_Johnny | talk 13:38, 6 May 2007 (UTC)
Right now, it doesn't pre-check them all, it adds a button for selecting them all. --darklama 13:54, 6 May 2007 (UTC)
Yeah, working now... I had to clear my browser's cache :). --SB_Johnny | talk 14:20, 6 May 2007 (UTC)
I added a pre-check script to Common.js, hopefully it'll help. --Az1568 (Talk) 14:51, 7 May 2007 (UTC)
I combined it with the UndeleteAll function so it would run a little quicker. I got another idea, I might look into. --darklama 15:55, 7 May 2007 (UTC)
/me bows and worships our local tech geniuses :). TimStarling (on #tech) apparently developed a script for allowing delete of particular versions (as opposed to deleting all then selectively restoring). Probably not something we could implement locally, but eventually that might be a better option :). --SB_Johnny | talk 16:43, 7 May 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Transwiki policy

We had discussed this some time ago, but I thought I'd bring it up again. Now that we have Special:Import enabled from WP, I think it would be a good policy to use that exclusively, at least as much as possible. I see three major advantages.

  1. Using import preserves all contributions fro wikipedia accounts, and so if/when we figure out some way to use bots or js code to make attribution, this will work much better than a link to the wikipedia history or a copy of the wp article's history.
  2. By attributing those edits here, "Wikipedian refugees" who want to work on the things they've contributed to there as parts of textbooks will at least have a "foothold" of edit counts, which for some may be more satisfying than starting from zero.
  3. Since Import is an administrator's tool, articles copied using Import are more likely to be included on an administrator's watchlist, so if some of the difficulties of Wikipedia end up following the contributors to Wikibooks, we'll be more aware of it.

The only problem is that there is a bug in Import, in that it falls apart if there are too many revisions of an article. The bug is apparently fixable, so hopefully we'll be able to fix that soon enough. For the time being, we could just categorize the talk page as "needing import after the bug is fixed", or perhaps request a bot action from Uncle G. --SB_Johnny | talk 17:04, 7 May 2007 (UTC)

A bigger problem with import is that you have to be an admin to do it. It is very tempting to just cut and paste when you're faced with having to wait for an admin to do the import for you. And once that's done, there's still a lot of work to be done to incorporate the text into an existing chapter, and you have to be an admin to do that as well (delete, import, move, delete, undelete, re-edit). Because of this, I think it's going to be very difficult to talk the non-admin community into going this route. It's very much like building an invisible fence across a heavily-trafficked sidewalk and then yelling when people don't go around. What would be really nice is to be able to subst: from Wikipedia (et al). I know I'm asking for a lot here, but until this is made a lot easier, people are just going to ignore the fence.
Perhaps instead of expecting users to do this, we should develop a script that would import, edit the existing chapter (so it has the latest rev), delete the original article, move the imported article on top of it, delete it, and restore the just-edited version. Then the users could do a cut and paste and request that an admin run the script to merge the histories. -- Jomegat 17:42, 7 May 2007 (UTC)
Well, requests at WB:RFI are filled pretty quickly, but yes, one can also just copy-paste the article and work on it while waiting for the import to be performed. I've done those types of imports before, and they work fine (just takes a few more steps... you have to import, delete/move, undelete, and restore). We're not so understaffed as we were a year ago, so I don't see any major problems with backlogs. Eventually the "large history" bug will be fixed as well, so we'll be able to just go back and re-import those articles that have too many edits (e.g., I was looking at w:Sun for import, but it has almost 3,000 edits!) If we're going to come up with a way of determining attribution, it will be a lot easier if we can always just look in the same place (the history), rather than notes on talkpages, history pages on wikipedia itself, etc. --SB_Johnny | talk 11:17, 11 May 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Project Work

Good evening, i am actually an under graduate student of the Abubakar Tafawa Balewa University Bauchi in Nigeria,. and i am working on a project. Actually i am finding it a bit difficult to get enough material to beef up my literature review section, so i want help. The topic is COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS OF PREPAID AND POSTPAID BILLING SYSTEMS (A CASE STUDY OF ROWER HOLDING COMPANY OF NIGERIA) Please i need help —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 196.207.13.130 (talk • contribs) 19:13, 7 May 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Some info for Meta maybe?

Came across this while looking around and wondered if anyone here would have the time/inclination to add some more detail about the project (bit think as it stands and I don't have the knowledge that some long term users have)? Cheers --Herby talk thyme 12:00, 8 May 2007 (UTC)

That's a good idea, and I'll take a look at it while i have some time this morning. --Whiteknight (talk) 12:50, 8 May 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Longevity of Wikibooks?

Is it safe to use a wikibook as a resource for a course? Are there any policies or other means for a teacher to be assured that the material will one day not just disappear and they are left stranded

Your average book, so long as it isn't spam or in terrible condition, will not be deleted without plenty of advanced warning. Unlike traditional textbooks, wikibooks can be in a constant state of improvement, so it can be difficult to use a single stable version of a book for a course. However, the course instructor can make permanent links to particular revisions of a page, and those will remain constant (although permanent links could point to older and out-of-date revisions). If you are planning to use a book for a class, please let us know and we can help you keep the book stable. --Whiteknight (talk) 17:00, 8 May 2007 (UTC)
This brings us back to the problem of stable editions. See Wikibooks:Editorial_board_guidelines. RobinH 08:14, 14 May 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Bookshelves

The bookshelves policy hasn't been updated in a while. I propose redirecting bookshelf requests to the Staff Lounge and changing "bookshelves should only contain wikibooks which are either complete or have active contributors" to "bookshelves should contain all books" to reflect practice.

Secondly, how about limiting bookshelf templates to good books or completed books? Bookshelf templates, such as Template:Mathematics bookshelf, largely duplicate the information found on the bookshelves themselves. Moreover, new books are often added only to the templates, reducing the value of the bookshelves themselves. Limiting templates to good books should resolve this. --hagindaz 19:56, 12 May 2007 (UTC)

I agree the bookshelves are a mess and putting only good books on the bookshelf page would help tighten them up. And yes it doesn't seem like every book on the shelf is complete/has active contributors, I'll take a look later at the policy to see what else jumps out at me as obsolete. 76.200.210.142 20:10, 12 May 2007 (UTC)
Agreed. Another mention of common practice is that bookshelves should not contain red links, and neither should the associated bookshelf templates. The contents of the bookshelf templates should be left to the discretion of the community of authors on that bookshelf, although some general guidelines should be enforced: no red links, no "bad" books, and a certain size limit (to limit the amount of space wasted on pages such as Wikibooks:All bookshelves, etc). --Whiteknight (talk) 19:28, 14 May 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Question on Rewriting Content in Wikipedia versus Copy and Paste

I was adding to wikibooks chess and the last section was chess variants. A chess variant that I recently told someone about who liked the idea is Bughouse, so I went on to add it to the chess variants section. I then saw that there is a very good article on Bughouse in wikipedia that has photos, well organized and covered different topics such as notation. I think it would be foolish to have to redo all that stuff one at a time as different people visit the wikibooks chess variants section, and I think it has a place in the wikibooks for completeness sake, so what are people's thoughts on copying and pasting the wikipedia article into that seciton of wikibooks? Tprev 05:08, 14 May 2007 (UTC)

Small sections might be included under "fair use" with acknowledement in the text. Large sections need to be treated differently. Wikipedia has open content so, provided the section is acknowledged as sourced from Wikipedia, including major author names in your author list, it should be OK to include it (as a "modified version" under GFDL http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html ). RobinH 08:11, 14 May 2007 (UTC)
You could transwiki the page into Wikibooks and then modify it to keep in the style of the book you are merging it into. You can request the page transwikied at WB:RFI. Transwiking in this way keeps the edit history and thus contributors information --AdRiley 11:44, 14 May 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Featured books

After a magnificent flurry of enthusiastic voting we have now got a good list of Wikibooks:Featured_books. The group of about 10 users who voted initially have done their bit. Users who have not yet voted can take a look at Wikibooks:Featured_books/Nominations and help the list to be cleared so that it will only host new nominations. RobinH 09:48, 15 May 2007 (UTC)

[edit] New user contribs

Could someone take a look at User:Lutonia's contributions. They may well end up being textbooks however it looks to me as tho they are using Wikibooks in order to find people to help write them when they will then be on Lutonia's website (license apparently). Just one of those "not sure" ones - cheers --Herby talk thyme 13:34, 18 May 2007 (UTC)

Lutonia's contributions look like advertisements for help to me. I think its probably just a case of a new user not knowing the proper way to ask for help. Lutonia should of probably asked for help on this page for example, rather then creating new pages. The website indicates the material is licensed under the GFDL and there seems to be some indication that its planned to include that material on this website, once its been properly formatted, since its currently in Rich Text Format, and is nearly completed. The once completed bit does seem to be a bit questionable to me. I wonder if Lutonia intends for anything added here to remain static or be a stable mirror for the contents on their website. --darklama 15:38, 18 May 2007 (UTC)
Folks, please have a look at Wikibooks_talk:Languages_bookshelf#Questionable_links_added. Lutonia seems to have a physical handicap which prevents him or her from using a keyboard. We should try to find a way to negotiate about this, having it so that people can edit it the wikiway and s/he can continue to work on the book in comfort -- Kowey 11:12, 11 June 2007 (UTC)

[edit] help with new book

As someone who has learned a second language (italian) later in life. I enjoy using it in order to keep my knowledge in trim. To this end, having found the interesting book on Fermat's last theorem on wikibooks.it, and not finding its equivalent in english I have produced an english translation in full. How do I go about adding it to the english section of wikibooks? Adriano 19:57, 19 May 2007 (UTC)

You have a full english translation? that's awesome. What do you want your new book to be titled? If you need help with this, I am available to help you if you need any assistance. --Whiteknight (talk) 22:45, 20 May 2007 (UTC)

Thanks for the offer Whiteknight, it's gratefully accepted. The title is "Fermat's Last Theorem" and it needs to go under the corresponding section to that of the original on Wikibooks.it. I have all the text as a word document with all the graphics except the pictures of the people concerned. These will need adding in and the various links establishing. This is where I come unstuck as I haven't the faintest idea how to do it. As you can see I'm a complete novice at Wikibooks.Adriano 22:18, 22 May 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Game guides

Ooops - I used those words - but you could do with getting it sorted Counter-Strike: Source just started --Herby talk thyme 10:57, 20 May 2007 (UTC)

I posted a message to the author advising him to move it all to StrategyWiki. I've also added a speedy delete tag on the first page but let's give him some time before we delete it. Xania talk 17:00, 20 May 2007 (UTC)

[edit] New Book Advertisement

One traditional feature that has been removed from the Main Page that used to be a common tool for new contributors was the {{New}} template. It seems as though those that are active and aggressive in working on the main page don't want to have this template used any more for the purpose that it has been used in the past.

The point I'm trying to make is that there is a need to have a place that new contributors can comfortably "advertise" their new Wikibooks in a way that doesn't get drowned out by the sea of other book projects on this site, and can solicit ideas for starting their books. In addition, I've used this list as an administrator in the past to keep an eye out for what crazy ideas that people are adding to Wikibooks, and perhaps redirect efforts that don't belong here well before they blow up and start to seriously offend people because we are deleting weeks or months of effort. Sometimes you can catch these with a recent changes patrol, but this is another tool to see what new users have added or what kinds of interesting ideas are also being developed by somebody with a little more time on their hands.

The point I'm trying to make here is that if this feature is being depreciated, I would like to encourage a discussion of perhaps some replacement method of being able to encourage new users to have a forum for requesting help on their new book ideas. Perhaps a separate page that would be a new user resource page that also lists some new books and projects requesting some assistance. I liked the idea that you could throw up a book title, and after awhile the "advertisement" would eventually be deleted, allowing fresh book ideas to come up.

Certainly a page that covers How to participate with Wikibooks and listing some options may be a good place to do this, perhaps even using this older "new book" template on this new page.

I'm hoping some other ideas can be expressed here, and I'm not interested in fighting those who are maintaining the main page in order to put this older template back, which for the most part is looking pretty good as well. I'm also trying to avoid "feature creep" (w:WP:CREEP) on the main page here as well. --Rob Horning 01:21, 22 May 2007 (UTC)

You're certainly not the only person who has noticed the lack of the {{new}} template from the main page. I've noticed it as well, although there are so many issues at play with it that it has been difficult for me to form an opinion one way or the other. Of some note, before I talk any further, is that new authors are still adding books to that template even though it isnt on the main page any more. I assume new authors are finding it from one of our old messages, or the help pages, or the community portal, or whatever. If you look at the history, the new book template
One thing that I want to mention here is that the new book listing, especially when it was on the main page, was a target for vandals. Combine a book with high visibility, and authors which typically are new to the project or are inexperienced (as old authors tend to already have "their book"), and you end up with a vandalism problem that can become larger then needed.
Also, new books tend to be the worst of the worst, and most new books sputter out as little more then a stub outline. When creating a new book is as quick and easy as adding a link to a template, you end up with lots of people making books without any intent of following through with their development. At least as it is now, with the process of creating a new book being at least partially obscured, we know that the authors who take the effort to find the new template and add a book there are more likely to follow through with book development. Also, we've reached a point, I think, where adding to existing books is almost always preferable to the creation of a new book. We do have lots of books on lots of subjects, and most authors would do well if they looked before they created anything new.
I personally have advertised more then a dozen books on the new book template, and I can't say that the extra advertisement was beneficial in terms of attracting new readers or contributors to them. When the book is listed on the main page it is in a terrible state, and by the time it improves it's already been shuffled off to a bookshelf.
Also, as a final issue, Creating a book on the {{new}} template raises the problem of books that aren't properly linked on a bookshelf. If books are created instead on the bookshelf directly, we don't have that problem at all.
Like I said, I am conflicted about this, and I've purposefully omitted any positive arguments for the new template on the main page. --Whiteknight (talk) 01:48, 22 May 2007 (UTC)
Vandalism is concerning, and I had not previously considered it, but I do agree that advertising these books is a good thing. I know that I liked maintaining the template on the Main Page, and am somewhat dismayed that it is now lacking; a "How to participate with Wikibooks" page would certainly be a good idea and, if well advertised, could be a reasonable alternative to the {{New}} template. --Iamunknown 06:12, 22 May 2007 (UTC)
I have added the {{new}} template to the top of this page, and to the top of the Project Chat page, and to the top of the bulletin board. I figure those are some appropriate places to put it first. We can find other places to advertise it as well. I've also taken the liberty of making the template more compact, so maybe we can post it in the featured books page, or something like that. I still have reservations about putting it on the main page, but we can talk about that more later. --Whiteknight (talk) 01:52, 23 May 2007 (UTC)
Personally I think using a template to announce new books isn't as nice as a more personal welcome. Any reason we can't just have yet another Staff Lounge page specifically for new projects and contributors? Talk's cheap, and encouragement is priceless: having somewhere to get feedback and advice seems to me a better way to go than just affing to Template:New and having cleanup tags slapped on the new book :). --SB_Johnny | talk 23:05, 1 June 2007 (UTC)
We've got a new page: WB:SLN. Since {{new}} and most of the bookshelf templates are protected, this might be a bit easier to keep up with. Does anyone know the mediawiki page for new page creation? It would be good to list it there. --SB_Johnny | talk 19:44, 7 June 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Favicons

When did we finally get a favicon? I like it!  :-) --Iamunknown 06:08, 22 May 2007 (UTC)

I was hoping that the logo issue was going to be resolved first before this was updated, but I'm glad that somebody got a bug under the skin of the Wikimedia developers to make this change. Whoever made the push for this change, thanks! --Rob Horning
What favicons?--SB_Johnny | talk 18:28, 22 May 2007 (UTC)
I'm with johnny, the favicon hasn't changed, from what I can see. --Whiteknight (talk) 19:15, 22 May 2007 (UTC)
Definitately changed. It's changed since Sunday night (CEST) when I was last online. You guys probably need to refresh your cache if you can't see the new icon. I think FireFox sometimes has problems updating favicons - I presume you're using FF? The new favicon looks ok to me but I use Opera web browser and there is a lot of white in the favicon image which doesn't look good against the blue background of Opera. So who DID change the icon? Xania talk 22:03, 22 May 2007 (UTC)
Yup, changed. Before it was the "W" from Wikipedia, and a general annoyance of mine for some time. And this has even been discussed here on the Staff Lounge in the past. While it is just the stack of Wikibooks, it is nice to have one more point of distinction between Wikibooks and Wikipedia. --Rob Horning 18:39, 26 May 2007 (UTC)
OK, can someone please clue me in here? I see no difference. --SB_Johnny | talk 22:46, 26 May 2007 (UTC)
Must be being cached somewhere along the way. Clear your browser's cache, then close it and start it up afresh. If it still shows the old "W" favicon, then it's a caching proxy server. It'll get there, eventually. Webaware talk 01:16, 27 May 2007 (UTC)
Or he's using a web browser that simply doesn't support favicons. A favicon is a little picture thats associated with a page. In my browser of choice, its shown just before the website address in the address bar. --darklama 01:35, 27 May 2007 (UTC)
Okay, i see the new favicon when i cleared the cache in IE7, but i still don't see it in firefox.no worries, at least now i know what people are talking about. --Whiteknight (Page) (Talk) 23:37, 28 May 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Traditional Indonesian???

(this header was added by Slinkyfrog)

What about it? There is a book on Indonesian if you are interested -- Kowey 12:34, 26 May 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Looking towards Single Login (hopefully)

This will not be relevant to those who are really on one wiki or to those who know about the tools already but I came across this for checking crosswiki usernames. Might be useful to someone. Cheers --Herby talk thyme 10:51, 31 May 2007 (UTC)

I've read various proposals about what may happen with conflicts but nothing concrete. Any ideas? My Wikipedia account in this name was blocked a long time ago after it was hacked so would this mean that I'd be blocked from all projects? Also I see that someone is using my username on another language version of Wikipedia (lb.wikipedia whatever that is) although with no contributions? Would it be possible to change my username to Xanucia which is used on Wiktionary and Wikipedia by myself? Xania talk 20:16, 31 May 2007 (UTC)

I don't think blocks will be cross-project, just usernames. If those other accounts have fewer edits than your account, you'll get the account. OTOH, if you're using different names on other projects, it's better to use the same one on each project (so you won't have to keep logging in every time you switch projects). I can rename you if you like, it just depends which name you want. --SB_Johnny | talk 20:38, 2 June 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Wikibooks:List of Wikibookians by number of edits

Although this list pales in comparison to wikipedia's (where the 663 most prolific editor made 14577 edits, as opposed to 100 in wikibooks), I thought that the few wikibook addicts that exist would find this list interesting. Hoogli 15:28, 31 May 2007 (UTC)

Useful thanks Hoogli - of course I am not at all interested in my position in the list <g> --Herby talk thyme 16:05, 31 May 2007 (UTC)
I am gunning for first place, although if Jguk returns to edit the way he used to, I won't stand a chance. And I wouldn't say i'm an "addict", more like a "connoisseur". --Whiteknight (Page) (Talk) 20:46, 31 May 2007 (UTC)
Geez, Herby's ahead of me and he hardly ever writes! :) --SB_Johnny | talk 22:58, 1 June 2007 (UTC)
41st... not bad, though more than half of those are NC or double redirect fixes, or posts like this ;). Mattb112885 (talk) 01:54, 8 June 2007 (UTC)
It really does put things into perspective. It almost makes you wonder what else I could accomplish in my life if i wasn't spending every available minute in this place. Of course, I really feel like we are accomplishing a lot here, so it's a good trade off. --Whiteknight (Page) (Talk) 01:58, 8 June 2007 (UTC)
The way I see it, every second I spend here is one less I would spend playing video games, so this is a little more productive. Mattb112885 (talk) 02:00, 8 June 2007 (UTC)
With my gameboy, i can actually play videogames and edit wikibooks at the same time. --Whiteknight (Page) (Talk) 02:01, 8 June 2007 (UTC)
Unfortunately my GB broke long ago, so now if I want to play games I basically use my PC. I guess I COULD attempt to use tiled windowing but let's not go there, it'd have to be a pretty boring game for that to be effective.
I'm afraid my pace might drop off a bit. We just adopted a Border Collie and she is promising to consume a great deal of our time. --Jomegat 02:11, 8 June 2007 (UTC)

[edit] help with navigation system

And also moving stuff around. I want a box on each page of my book that has the chapters listed in order, with the current chapter "blown up" so you can see the sections within that chapter. Just a little box in the top right corner. Also, I made.. basically a new table of contents but it links to its own copy of the pages. Since I'm the only person editing the book and I agree with myself that this is a good idea. (but i don't know how to do it)... I basically want to delete the old book and replace it with the reorganized copy. Its here: First_Aid/Table_of_Contents. Also, I don't think I followed the naming conventions properly, so if you feel like correcting it, that's awesome too. I fell kinda guilty asking for people to do my work for me, but I don't really know how to do it myself. I'd probably make your servers explode or something if I tried. Thanks to anyone who helps!! Mike.lifeguard 02:12, 20 April 2007 (UTC)

We've installed the servers with explosion protection, so you are fine! A navigation scheme like what you are talking about might be a little complicated (if not impossible) to make, but there are some options. For example, check out the navigation on the Human Physiology book, which lists all the chapters at the top. Other books do it in different ways too, so browse around and see what you like. When you find something that you like, it will be easy to copy. If you can't find anything that you like, then we can try to make something custom. --Whiteknight (talk) (projects) 02:16, 20 April 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Wikibooks:Blocking policy Vote

The new proposal for Wikibooks:Blocking policy is up for a vote.

The vote is occuring at: Wikibooks:Policies and guidelines/Vote/Blocking policy

All wikibookians are encouraged to read the new proposal and vote on it. -withinfocus 15:34, 20 April 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Wikibooks:Good books

I have been bold and turned this page from a proposal into a guideline. this page basically just reflects the way we currently operate the Wikibooks:Featured books system, and doesnt really introduce anything new besides what the community is already doing.

I view this guideline as being no big deal, and it should be a small matter for us to modify or update this guideline as needed to reflect the status of the featured books initiative. The selection and advertisement of our better books should be an undemanding, positive, and enjoyable affair, without the need to specify the minutia, or the consequences, etc. --Whiteknight (talk) 14:13, 3 May 2007 (UTC)

I've tried to clean it up a little more, there were a few things that were bugging me, but nothing that I think changes the meaning of the text. --darklama 15:10, 3 May 2007 (UTC)
Changes and improvements are good. Like i said, this shouldnt be a big deal, and we shouldnt hesitate to update this guideline as needed. --Whiteknight (talk) 15:48, 3 May 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Removal of Videogame Guides

This is certainly a sore subject, and one that was accounted for in the WIW proposal. I would like to create policy to remove videogame guides from Wikibooks permanently although I do not feel that there should be a rush to remove these guides, and that the removal should not be done with any animosity. Some of the previous objections to the removal of these guides centered around the fact that many were removed without obtaining community consensus on the matter. This, in effect, is an attempt to gather consensus, so that we can move forward on this issue as a unified whole.

What I want here, in a general sense, is a display of people's feelings towards the videogame guides. This is not a vote. When we have a general idea of what the community wants to do, we can then take the time to figure out precisely how we want to do it. If I may borrow an idea from User:Xixtas, I want to use the following templates to gauge people's feelings:

Image:Advocate card.png Advocate -