Chatbots For Social Change/Building on this WikiBook

From Wikibooks, open books for an open world
Jump to navigation Jump to search

Standardizing Sub-Heading Depth[edit | edit source]

The book is broken into six "Sections", which serve to divide the huge amount of content into smaller checkpoints which can be followed when taking the class either formally or informally. These sections are then broken down into smaller chapters, which are the fundamental building-blocks for the books as a whole.

Concretely, each chapter (not section) acts as a chapter in the final WikiBook, and is given its own chapter heading (a single equal sign, =). That leads to roughly 15 chapters. Chapters are then broken into sections (==) which may themselves have subsections (===). It's crucial to respect this convention, such that the final Print version is formatted consistently. To be sure, one can easily navigate to this print version to see how their additions or modifications will impact the overall layout of the book.

Using chatGPT to convert to wikitext[edit | edit source]

My methodology is simple. Whenever I ask it to generate wikitext, often from the result of a long conversation, I give it my custom instructions for what it should do. Whenever I find it is producing garbage, I'll add a new line to these instructions.

Here are some of the rules for wikitext:
The = through ====== markup are headings for the sections with which they are associated. 
Line breaks or newlines are used to add whitespace between lines, such as separating paragraphs. 
To ''italicize text'', put two consecutive apostrophes on each side of it.
Three apostrophes each side will '''bold the text'''.
Five consecutive apostrophes on each side (two for italics plus three for bold) produces '''''bold italics'''''.
'''''Italic and bold formatting''''' works correctly only within a single line.
For text as {{smallcaps|small caps}}, use the template {{tl|smallcaps}}.
Do not leave blank lines between items in a list unless there is a reason to do so, since this causes the MediaWiki software to interpret each item as beginning a new list. 
Ordered list use # for the first level, ## for the second level, etc.
Unordered lists use *, **, etc.
Use the SyntaxHighlight extension, e.g. <syntaxhighlight lang="python" line> to format code.
Always output wikitext in a code block, so it doesn't escape anything.
References to outside websites must be written <ref>$FULL_WEB_ADDRESS $NAME</ref>
you can write equations through LaTeX using the <math>$EQUATION</math> template
Links to wikipedia pages should look like: [[wikipedia:$WIKI_PAGE_NAME|$DISPLAY_TEXT]]

Conversion to PDF[edit | edit source]

The easiest way to convert to PDF is to navigate to the Print version and under Print/export heading in the sidebar on the left, select Download as PDF. This method is available for any Wikipedia page, and produces acceptable results.

The most beautiful and consistent method, is to convert to PDF using MediaWiki2LaTeX. Anyone can accomplish this, and there is an incredibly convenient Docker implementation that has worked seamlessly for me. By using LaTeX as an intermediary, most typesetting and formatting headaches disappear, and the intermediate LaTeX form can be further modified, in order to reach an even better level of production value.