Wikibooks:Reading room/General

Welcome to the General reading room. On this page, Wikibookians are free to talk about the Wikibooks project in general. For proposals for improving Wikibooks, see the Proposals reading room.

Technical Wishes: FileExporter and FileImporter become default features on all Wikis

The FileExporter and FileImporter will become a default features on all wikis until August 7, 2020. They are planned to help you to move files from your local wiki to Wikimedia Commons easier while keeping all original file information (Description, Source, Date, Author, View History) intact. Additionally, the move is documented in the files view history. How does it work?

Step 1: If you are an auto-confirmed user, you will see a link "Move file to Wikimedia Commons" on the local file page.

Step 2: When you click on this link, the FileImporter checks if the file can in fact be moved to Wikimedia Commons. These checks are performed based on the wiki's configuration file which is created and maintained by each local wiki community.

Step 3: If the file is compatible with Wikimedia Commons, you will be taken to an import page, at which you can update or add information regarding the file, such as the description. You can also add the 'Now Commons' template to the file on the local wiki by clicking the corresponding check box in the import form. Admins can delete the file from the local wiki by enabling the corresponding checkbox. By clicking on the 'Import' button at the end of the page, the file is imported to Wikimedia Commons.

If you want to know more about the FileImporter extension or the Technical Wishes Project, follow the links. --For the Technical Wishes Team:

Max Klemm (WMDE) 09:13, 6 August 2020 (UTC)

Important: maintenance operation on September 1st

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The Wikimedia Foundation will be testing its secondary data centre. This will make sure that Wikipedia and the other Wikimedia wikis can stay online even after a disaster. To make sure everything is working, the Wikimedia Technology department needs to do a planned test. This test will show if they can reliably switch from one data centre to the other. It requires many teams to prepare for the test and to be available to fix any unexpected problems.

They will switch all traffic to the secondary data centre on Tuesday, September 1st 2020.

Unfortunately, because of some limitations in MediaWiki, all editing must stop while the switch is made. We apologize for this disruption, and we are working to minimize it in the future.

You will be able to read, but not edit, all wikis for a short period of time.

• You will not be able to edit for up to an hour on Tuesday, September 1st. The test will start at 14:00 UTC (15:00 BST, 16:00 CEST, 10:00 EDT, 19:30 IST, 07:00 PDT, 23:00 JST, and in New Zealand at 02:00 NZST on Wednesday September 2).
• If you try to edit or save during these times, you will see an error message. We hope that no edits will be lost during these minutes, but we can't guarantee it. If you see the error message, then please wait until everything is back to normal. Then you should be able to save your edit. But, we recommend that you make a copy of your changes first, just in case.

Other effects:

• Background jobs will be slower and some may be dropped. Red links might not be updated as quickly as normal. If you create an article that is already linked somewhere else, the link will stay red longer than usual. Some long-running scripts will have to be stopped.
• There will be code freezes for the week of September 1st, 2020. Non-essential code deployments will not happen.

This project may be postponed if necessary. You can read the schedule at wikitech.wikimedia.org. Any changes will be announced in the schedule. There will be more notifications about this. Please share this information with your community.

Trizek (WMF) (talk) 13:48, 26 August 2020 (UTC)

Cucumber

Wikibooks has, for example, Cookbook:Cucumber and Horticulture/Cucumber. The former is matched to the Wikidata item on Cucumbers, d:Q2735883, and thus to Wikipedia articles, Commons, and so on; the latter is not, as there can only be a 1:1 link. the linked Wikidata, Wikipedia and Commons pages are about all aspects of cucumbers, including horticulture, not just cooking with them.

Why match to the cookbook page, and not the horticulture page? Should there not be a higher level page, which is paired with sister projects? Pigsonthewing (discuss • contribs) 08:35, 7 September 2020 (UTC)

The Cookbook is considered to be a single book, organised as a namespace due to its size. Each book is considered independent with the only higher level structure being analogous to a bookshelf or subject area. Unless someone chooses to write a book on cucumbers, encapsulating both the horticulture and cooking, there won't be a higher level page. Of course, it is also possible that even if we were to do this, someone else would write another book that happened to involve cucumbers - e.g., science projects using cucumbers - and this would then not be linked. I can't think of any structural way within the intent of Wikibooks that can solve the Wikidata problem. Frankly, that's not surprising because Wikidata was - in my opinion - predominantly developed to work with Wikipedia. QuiteUnusual (discuss • contribs) 09:48, 7 September 2020 (UTC)

Wikidata was planned as if there were only one Wikipedia, actually; its rigid one-to-one-mapping arrangement loses when presented with multiple-language Wikipedias that don't analyze the world quite the same way. However, for the long run, I have hoped to solve the general problem of providing Wikibooks targets for incoming sister links —which would be a problem even without Wikidata— by introducing a whole new set of categories here for potentially-per-page topical categorization. The first problem that had to be solved was that we already had, at that point, two different kinds of categories that would get confused with each other, and this would be introducing yet a third kind of category. I'm now several years in to, and mostly but not yet entirely finished with, an overhaul of our entire existing category hierarchy, in preparation for introducing a third set of categories that would provide suitable unique targets for encyclopedia-like topical categories. Cf. Wikibooks:Reading room/Proposals#Now under construction: Wikibooks Stacks
Wikibooks Stacks/History#Stacks. --Pi zero (discuss • contribs) 11:31, 7 September 2020 (UTC)

It's disappointing to see Wikidata wrongly disparaged in this way; it was neither "predominantly developed to work with Wikipedia" nor "planned as if there were only one Wikipedia". Wikidata is perfectly capable of representing the concepts on Wikibooks (just as it does for other non-Wikipedia sister projects); you can have a Wikidata item corresponding to "Cookbook:Cucumber" and another corresponding to "Horticulture/Cucumber", if you wish. My question is more about whether there is, or should be, a Wikibooks page representing the general subject of "Cucumber", in the sense encompassing not only cookery and horticulture, but also biology, representations art, and any other aspect. Pigsonthewing (discuss • contribs) 11:17, 9 September 2020 (UTC)

Seems to me you may be somewhat hasty in supposing that "wrongly disparaged" thing. Despite widespread good will and competence of Wikidatans (in my experience), there are some structural design flaws in Wikidata, which can be traced back to structural bias that flows from the Wikimedia Foundation through the vehicle of Conway's law. (That is, design by a top-down centralized organization will favor top-down centralization, which is often profoundly inappropriate for an inherently distributed bottom-up volunteer community.)

Notably, the function of Wikidata toward other projects is apparently based on naive assumptions that (1) information is structured in a unique, unambiguous way, and (2) interwiki links should be limited to perfect matches in this unique structure. Neither of which is true. The structure is not at all unique, consequently its organization ought not be entrusted to the POV of a single central project (a particular instance of the general damage to voluteer projects caused by wresting local control away from them); and interwikis are an important social (only partly, and flexibly, ontological) connection between projects that should be maximized and cannot be properly judged by mechanical/objective means, so here again it is inappropriate to relegate their control to the POV of a single central project. Granted a single central project can be valuable in aiding coordination of other projects, though that is not, alas, the function baked into Wikidata's technical design. Just for example: on English Wikinews, we have a category called "free speech"; and iirc there may be one or two other-language Wikinewses that have such a category; but several Wikinewses have instead a category whose name would translate as "censorship" (interesting optimism/pessimism interplay there), and I think when I delved into this a few years ago I may have found one or two Wikinewses that managed to find some yet-different approach to the subject. Freedom of speech is definitely not the same thing as censorship, and although these categories would likely apply to many of the same news articles, they might occasionally lead to different categorization decisions; nevertheless, if these categories did not have interwiki links to each other it would be a disservice both to readers/researchers and to the social well-being of the Wikinewses involved; and Wikidata's organization pretty-much guarantees they will not be linked to each other. That's a flaw in the design of Wikidata. (Yes, I see how it's possible to fix, even now, with some time and effort; but it's not easy, nor quick, to effect a large-scale fix to a problem people don't want to acknowledge.) I have occasionally see, though cannot alas readily produce an example of, some simple cases of the same phenomenon arising on Wikipedias. --Pi zero (discuss • contribs) 13:29, 9 September 2020 (UTC)

Should there not be a higher level 'Cucumber' page, which is paired with sister projects? Pigsonthewing (discuss • contribs) 13:47, 14 September 2020 (UTC)

The answer to this is distributed through some of the earlier remarks.

• We wouldn't call it "Cucumber".
• Eventually, I hope, we'll have infrastructure in place so that the page you're asking about would be called Category:<some prefix>:Cucumber. I have been moving toward a solution of this sort for several years now, but am not yet there. Not sure yet what <some prefix> would be; we have a prefix Book: for the category tracking all pages associated with a book, and Shelf: for the category tracking all the books that belong to a shelf.

--Pi zero (discuss • contribs) 14:56, 14 September 2020 (UTC)

Invitation to participate in the conversation

We are excited to share a draft of the Universal Code of Conduct, which the Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees called for earlier this year, for your review and feedback. The discussion will be open until October 6, 2020.

The UCoC Drafting Committee wants to learn which parts of the draft would present challenges for you or your work. What is missing from this draft? What do you like, and what could be improved?

Please join the conversation and share this invitation with others who may be interested to join, too.

To reduce language barriers during the process, you are welcomed to translate this message and the Universal Code of Conduct/Draft review. You and your community may choose to provide your opinions/feedback using your local languages.

To learn more about the UCoC project, see the Universal Code of Conduct page, and the FAQ, on Meta.

Thanks in advance for your attention and contributions, The Trust and Safety team at Wikimedia Foundation, 17:55, 10 September 2020 (UTC) 

Global ban RFC for Nrcprm2026/James Salsman

Nrcprm2026, better known as James Salsman, has an active discussion regarding a possible global ban.--GZWDer (discuss • contribs) 07:57, 26 September 2020 (UTC)