Wikibooks talk:Collaboration of the Month

From Wikibooks, the open-content textbooks collection

Note that this page is only a proposal-- feel free to add comments here. I'll get the ball rolling: What do you think of the current criteria for selecting a nomination and what should be added or removed?--Naryathegreat|(talk) 01:33, 17 Apr 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Vandalism

The image for "How to build a computer" seems to have been vandalised, though when clicking on it the large image is legit - any clues on what is causing this?

[edit] Needs some rework

Hi Naryathegreat! I welcome your initiative for focussing collaborative work on wikibooks. This will add a new aspect to the existing projects Book of the month (which singles out an excellent presentable wikibook on the Main Page) and Wikibooks:Top active (which shows at a glance on which books wikibookians are actually mostly working). If you want to jump into the crowd and have some fun, choose one of the top ten active wikibooks by contributors. Your project "Collaboration of the month" then aims at bringing a currently not so active wikibook to the attention of writers (hopefully pushing it into the top-10 list for the following month).

Looking at Wikibooks:Top active/Listing March 2005 users, there are at least 35 books on which more people have been working on than on General Biology. Almost half of those books are related to computers (3D software, programming, user guides), then physics/mathematics, and languages (Japanese, German, Spanish, French), and of course the attractors Cook- and Jokebook. Within those 35 books I don't see any book related at all to Biology. With the same number of contributors (2 logged in users, 6 anonymous users) I see Basic Ecology, Organic Chemistry, and Wikijunior Big Cats which might be the people possibly interested in working on "General Biology". So, just looking at this list, one is tempted to say that the user base for the project might be limited.

So there is not much hope to focus content contributors to a book. What could be focussed though is the work on style and presentation of a book. General Biology is one of the few old books that still uses the bracket "()" delimiters which are clearly outdated and should be replaced by namespace ":" or subpage "/". Which of those? This question is still open to discussion.

Now some technical comments on your implementation:

I think the procedure to nominate a book is overly complicated and even implemented wrongly: The template Template:CoMcandidate contains {{CURRENTMONTHNAME}}_{{CURRENTYEAR}} and will thus point every month to a different position. Should people on the talk page re-enter their reasoning every month again?
Where should I sign my vote? In the template or directly on the Wikibooks:Collaboration of the Month page? In case I have to sign in the template, what is the easy way to get there? Why do I have to write "Support", if "# ~~~~" could be enough?
Why am I limited to vote for only 1 candidate at a time? How long is this limit valid - until the book I voted for gets finally voted?
How long are candidates supposed to stay on the page? Until they are voted? Or is there a mechanism to have books "drop out" of the nomination mechanism again?

I would suggest to get rid of the intermediate template, and ask people to insert their nominations directly on the Wikibooks:Collaboration of the Month page. (entries for nominated books can then be moved to an archive page).

I also would suggest that if you want to have a serious vote (where people have some choice), you should nominate at least 2 or 3 more books by yourself, to give an impression what kind of books this is thought for.

I also added Help:Development stages to your list of resources, since assigning them first (before actually editing the book) makes easily visible which chapters are comprehensive and which still deserve work. This focusses both, readers' and writers' attention, to their respective chapters of interest.

Having brought up a lot of critics, let me point out that I indeed welcome this initiative and hope I can contribute in improving this service by constructive criticism. --Andreas 09:06, 17 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Follow-up: Nice changes, Narya! I still think the nomination rules are slightly restrictive. I am sure you have in mind that only those people sign who really intend to contribute in the end, but a few points to think about:

Put the rules into a template - they will appear on each monthly voting page.
"You may not vote for an article you nominate." I think this rule is unnecessary. If everybody votes for the book they nominate, each book will have 1 vote more, so the result will not change. Furthermore, the first vote sets an example how and where to vote. (This I miss so far, I would not know where to put my vote: Under the title, or under the comment?)
"we ask that you vote only once under a single nomination": I like the idea of being able to vote for several books. On Wikibooks:Book of the month really few people vote for more than a book, even if it is allowed there, but what if I could really think of working on two books? Or if I want to give my second vote just to ensure that another book that will not win can at least be nominated for the next month?
Renomination with 4 or more votes: Looking at Wikibooks:Book of the month this is a unrealistically high number! :-) Even if one is allowed to vote for its own book there, books barely reach the 3 vote limit on "Book of the month" - and the vote there is without any commitment for everybody, and everybody is allowed to vote for as many books as they like.

To attract people I would set up as few rules as necessary at the beginning and try to attract as many voters by simple, easy rules. Once the voters are there and like "Collaboration of the month" you can still start to increase the number, or choose a different system (e.g. "apart from the winner, the three books with most votes will be nominated for the next month"..). But the 3 voter [including nominator!] rule on Wikibooks turned out to be more than sufficient (at least for now). Don't compare with Wikipedia participation (yet).. --Andreas 20:27, 17 Apr 2005 (UTC)

[edit] My support

This sounds like a great idea, and I will be happy if we can organize people to get behind one book at a time. Working on these books is a lot more fun and satisfying when done by a team. --Karl Wick 06:40, 28 Apr 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Additional requirements needed

Here for August 2005, we have a nomination for COTM (1911 wikipedia) that is also at WB:VFD. Perhaps we need to require that the page must actually clear VFD beforehand. KelvSYC 4 July 2005 07:50 (UTC)