Testwiki:Staff lounge/Archive 23

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Publications of the Month

I have moved the text of the previous discussion to a new page at Wikibooks:Publication of the Month. After I created the page, i realized it would probably be better of as "Publication of the Quarter" or something like that, so we can move the page to a better name if need be. We can start working out a general policy for this stuff over there. --Whiteknight (talk) (projects) 18:46, 4 August 2006 (UTC)

Book Donation

I've been in talks with the ICD4T people (from a previous discussion) concerning a donation of several of their books (they mentioned having at least 20) to wikibooks. Their books are currently released under a Creative Commons license, and they are working on transfering the material to the GFDL so it can be released here. Should the donation happen, they have requested the creation of two additional bookshelves specifically to hold the material. Considering that the addition of 20 complete books or more to our library is a big deal, I think it is probably worth our time to create these new bookshelves.

I would like to ask people here two things: (1) What you think about creating new bookshelves to hold a donation of new books, and (2) if you would be willing and available to transfer material. Moving 20 books is going to be a reasonably large project, and volunteers would be appreciated. --Whiteknight (talk) (projects) 19:12, 8 August 2006 (UTC)

I would be glad to help with the move. Howver, I strongly oppose the creation of bookshelves to hold these books. Has the organization considered categories, which would be a much more suitable choice? 20 books is not enough for one bookshelf, much less two (completion status is irrelevant on bookshelves, though not on bookshelf templates or hot picks). Bookshelfs are designed for subjects, not for content providers (which categories are suited for). In addition to serving readers, Wikibooks' main focus is the creation of unique content. Imported work should not be given greater importance than our books of the same quality. Since the books are complete (or as complete as a page can get on a wiki), they will all be listed on bookshelf templates and our listing of complete/nearly complete books, which in my opinion is the only page readers should bother looking in and would bring the attention to these books that the ICD4T is probably looking for. --hagindaz 23:29, 8 August 2006 (UTC)

That does make a good point. I will ask them if it would be acceptable to simply have a sub-heading on one of the existing bookshelves, if we provide additional categories, and spotlight the project in some way. I dont know what alternatives this organization has considered: their experiance with wikibooks is highly limited. It would be a very difficult task to try and explain the entire organizational structure of wikibooks to them via email. --Whiteknight (talk) (projects) 14:39, 9 August 2006 (UTC)

The same goes for subheadings. Again, that is not the way bookshelves work. Both our bookshelf system and headings within a bokkshelf are often reorganized as Wikibooks expands, and saying "you can't touch this section" goes against wiki principles. We should not be locked into a certain system by an outside group. If their goal is the spread of knowledge, I doubt they will care. If it's just free advertising they're after, then maybe we shouldn't be dealing with them. On that subject, the transwikied books should only mention ICD4T in the authors/sources section. --hagindaz 15:42, 9 August 2006 (UTC)

That wasn't what i was talking about, specifically. The books that are being donated (i received a partial list today via email) don't necessarily fit into any existing bookshelves, or even any existing sub-headings on any existing bookshelves. Nobody wants to create a new section that is "off limits", the donors are fully aware of the GFDL, and the fact that their works are going to be edited willy-nilly by anonymous people. Some of the topics that these books cover are: e-commerce, e-governance, information economy, e-learning, "Information and Communication Technologies for Poverty Alleviation", etc. At the very least, I think that given this list, it would be prudent of us to create a new "Information Technology" bookshelf, or a special "Information Technology" sub-heading because these books cannot be reasonably shelved anywhere else. These books don't all have to go in the same locations (we could link them together via categories), but few of them fit neatly into our pre-existing classifications. --Whiteknight (talk) (projects) 17:35, 9 August 2006 (UTC)

PS. A listing of these books can be found at:

http://www.apdip.net/elibrary

They are listed under the sections called "ICT4D e-Primers" and "FOSS e-Primers". This should give you a better idea of what these books are about, and how many books we are going to receive. --Whiteknight (talk) (projects) 17:41, 9 August 2006 (UTC)

---

About the creation of a book shelve...

If the creation of a stand alone index for the donated collection is the only problem that prevents us from getting some more content, I'm for it, this will also provide an easy entry to anyone needing to know what books were donated and by whom, will provide an overview of all the collection for future merges and with time it will lose it usefulnesses and disappear/morph/be deleted, so I don't see a problem in creating this index...

in the "willing and available to transfer material"...

If an index exist wkibooks editors can have an idea of what books they are most interested in helping if it's just a problem of moving the work location, it can be used as a place to coordinate the move and vote on "names" and "structural" problems with the new works...

Do remember that after a work is under GFDL, we are free to restructure/merge and distribute it's content (under GFDL restrictions), so any step needed to have any book under this license should be welcomed by the community... --Panic 17:49, 9 August 2006 (UTC)

Implications of releasing an Open Content License book into GFDL for use in Wikibooks

This question comes from a discussion on Sensei's Library.

A user there is open to the idea of releasing a book he wrote to Wikibooks, but was having doubts about licencing issues.

The book in question is "unkx80.netfirms.com/weiqi/howtoplaygo/". The author has stated that it was released under Open Content License, the license used by Sensei's Library (see http://senseis.xmp.net/?SLCopyright).

After some discussion, he stated: "However, I would really prefer to release my work under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial license, because I made not a single cent out of my own work." (see the first link) Would that be possible? Are there restrictions to dual-licensing? If so, what are they?

Since I would like to add more Go knowledge to Wikimedia projects, I'm posting this here. Hopefully I'm not asking in the wrong place, nor is this question already answered elsewhere. I will check this page from time to time, but I would appreciate it if someone left me a message at my Wikipedia user talk page, or replied to his doubts at the first link. Phelanpt 85.139.186.244 02:45, 9 August 2006 (UTC)

I have, quite a while ago, released my How To Play Go work under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 2.5 License. I think I am not likely to release it under the GFDL. unkx80 (author of How To Play Go) 12:18, 11 September 2006 (UTC)

Bookshelves vs. Categories

Why do we have bookshelves? Categories are much easier to construct, as well as being easy to navigate through, if built correctly. Couldn't categories also serve as an easier way to catalog (as opposed to Dewey, etc. (Dewey didn't have a GUI, ha-ha))? --SB_Johnny | ^talk 12:03, 9 August 2006 (UTC)

That is a good point. The category system is quite expansive, and it can take some time to find books that you are looking for: you would have to start at the top of the hierarchy, and slowly click your way down to the suitable sub-category. Bookshelves are easier, because they place all books that exist in a given field on a single page for easy browsing. --Whiteknight (talk) (projects) 14:36, 9 August 2006 (UTC)

For myself, I think that categories are more a waste of time here on Wikibooks and don't offer anything additional beyond what Bookshelves and other classification systems also bring to the table, and indeed offer some problems beyond just the standard classification systems as well.

Keep in mind that the categorization system in MediaWiki is designed specifically to deal with categories of encyclopedia articles, and it also seems to work exceptionally well with classification of multi-media content (like is found on Commons). Trying to translate that to book development, however, is something that is a bit harder to accomplish.

We do use categories effectively here for things like page maintainence and cleanup, as well as for organization of contents within a book such as is currently done with the Cookbook. I completely support those activities and think there is even more room to develop category systems like this.

Otherwise, all I consider any effort to create categories for books to simply be a way to keep people busy, and as Jimbo has suggested, if they are busy doing stuff that doesn't do harm, they perhaps aren't busy trying to vandalize. While I think there are better ways to spend time than developing book categories, that is a personal opinion and it doesn't do Wikibooks harm trying to develop categories. That is why I don't openly revert changes that are adding categories even if I don't support having them in the first place. --Rob Horning 14:53, 9 August 2006 (UTC)

I agree. I've proposed changing the system to one where bookshelves act more like Wikipedia portals. The key feature is that with infoboxes (or DPLs now), sorting a book into as many categories as you want would have been automatic, and would have greatly improved readers' ability to find the book they want (for example: "Category:All completed computing books with a high school reading level"). I also think that the alphatetical, Dewey, and LOC classifications would also work better as categories. Please see Wikibooks:Staff lounge/Archive 17#Replacing Shelves with Portals and Categories for more. --hagindaz 15:28, 9 August 2006 (UTC)

But couldn't the css be slightly modified to make categories work better? What if we stopped using the word "category", and replaced it with "catalog"? Again, Dewey didn't have a GUI, so he had to come up with a numerical metalanguage to talk about the content of books. If the category (catalog) of all categories (catalogs) were presented as a catalog, it seems to me that it would be a much easier way to go about looking for the information you're after. At least in theory, this could be worked into the search function on wikibooks, which at the moment isn't a particularly useful tool. For example, I just searched for "cooking cucumber", which defaulted to a search results page [1] that didn't produce the most obvious result: Cookbook:Cucumber. Is there any chance that we could base the search function on categories to yield more accurate hits?

And I strongly disagree that categorization is a waste of time. It's a lot easier to add a category tag to an article than it is to add the name of an article to a bookshelf.

As far as book completeness icons (commenting on the old discussion linked by Hagindaz), it strikes me that it wouldn't take too much tweaking of the software to simply make those appear on the category (or (again) catalog) lists. Software is pretty easy to modify for little things like that, and as much as I enjoyed playing with my dad's rolodex when I was little guy, I'm not going to transcribe all the numbers in my cellphone onto 3x5 cards just so my daughter can see how things used to be.

(Warning: dreamy thoughts follow): I think a good end result to be aiming towards would be something like this: rather than the search window on the left of the screen, have a link to the main catalog (using a picture of a good-old-fashioned-wooden-drawered-catalog as an icon). Have the main catalog page a pretty place (with more gratuitous yet historically signifigant photos of libraries and catalogs), and make the page "interactive", in the sense that it "interrogates" the reader on what they're looking for, and sends them in the right direction. Use nice icons in the directional pointers too, to make readers feel welcome, and portray a sense that we bother with details.

The beauty of this is that books, chapters, and even stubs (which I think might be better named "outlines", "scrapbooks", or "worksheets" in the WB context) can be categorised in multiple categories. Thus "cooking trout" might give a result leading to recipes for trout, gutting a trout you just caught, a chapter or page in the book on Daniel Boone about the trout he ate and how he cooked them (assuming, of course, that there is a book about Daniel Boone, and that he liked trout), and a chapter on trout in the book on fish farming (again, assuming there is such a book, etc.).

The Dewey system and all other "bookshelf" systems (including the system I use to organize my own books on my own bookshelves) are essentially information technologies. I would like to suggest that we wikibookians have a much more formidable and effective technology at our disposal! --SB_Johnny | ^talk 17:29, 9 August 2006 (UTC)

Just an offhand philosophical note: I studied Dewey at the New School (which he co-founded). He believed in "amelioration", not "idealism": meaning that history moves foreward towards the better and better, but can never be expected to achieve the best. If he were alive today, I'm quite certain that he would have preferred Amazon's search engine to his own decimal system. --SB_Johnny | ^talk 17:33, 9 August 2006 (UTC)

One thing that I would like to see with any classification system is the ability to look at "near by" books that are somewhat close topically, with books that are further away being more dissimilar.... just like an actual bookshelf in a dead-tree publication library. I find Google searches and other similar kind of search tools really don't do this very effectively and instead drown in meaningless details. The question I raise is how to do this effectively in an on-line environment?

I would like to point out that Dewey and LOC classification systems are very linear in nature, and assume that all knowledge can be classified along one axis (hence, the classification number). I would argue that knowledge can be classified along multiple axes, where topical "closeness" would be a matter of how close it would be in an n-space of multiple topical axes. The problem is then how to classify content along multiple axes. Establishing classification guidelines for a single axis is complicated enough. --Rob Horning 19:51, 9 August 2006 (UTC)

Yes, it's complicated, but not arduous in a wiki environment. "Nearby books" pretty much sums up what I was alluding to above: not just the "exact thing your looking for" (i.e, a recipe for trout), but things that have to do with cooking trout (like "a guide to trout fishing", "Daniel Boone" (I'm not sure of that reference is clear... he was a Colonial Era pioneer in what is now the United States), and "Aquaculture".

Now, it is in fact a bit complicated, because these disparate books/chapters need to be somehow interconnected, and for one person to make those interconnections would be a rather daunting task. However, this is wiki! It's not as if someone has to "get on a mission" and connect all the dots (well, Jguk or I might do it, but we wouldn't be obligated to do so), it will just come together over time as readers and editors make the connections one at a time. It's really not an issue of "establishing guidelines for multiple axes", but rather giving a gentle nudge towards a thoughtful use of the catagory system, and letting things grow edit by edit.

Wikipedia insists that all pages be categorised. There's not so much volume of new materials here that we couldn't rather easily achieve 100% categorisation with minimal effort. And if the categories can be worked over to make them truly useful, more editors would become interested in increasing their utility. Again, I just think it's a powerful (and perfectly appropriate) technology, and we should use it for a good cause. --SB_Johnny | ^talk 21:44, 9 August 2006 (UTC)

Based on what i've seen of it, the "Wikibooks Standard Book Number" scheme that was discussed earlier seems to have the ability to show the "closeness" between books. Values on the left-hand-side of the number are rough-grained (sorting between bookshelves and language codes), while numbers towards the right-hand side show the relationship within the larger categories. Perhaps this is something we could discuss here? --Whiteknight (talk) (projects) 18:31, 10 August 2006 (UTC)

(resetting indentation): Where was the WSBN discussion? SB_Johnny | ^talk 11:43, 11 August 2006 (UTC)

Useful to unlock Wikiversity main page

I attempted to add a link to a registration page to meet the requirement that we have ten registered language users to establish the final permanent namespace en.wikiversity.org for the English language users. The page claims it is protected. Thanks. 70.110.37.107 07:03, 16 August 2006 (UTC)

Listing all completed books on the main page?

According to Alexa, the average user browses only 2-3 pages before leaving Wikibooks, so we should do our best to make the best impression possible. I tried replacing the "hot picks" section on Template:Tl with our 32 completed non-BotM books, but it made the template too disproportional. I would therefore like to add a 100% width table a la the PDF box listing these books on the main page. The "hot picks" can be used for our "good Wikibooks." Not long ago we had all our books on the main page, so I think the screen space will be put to good use. Comments? --hagindaz 04:21, 11 August 2006 (UTC)

That's a good idea. We definately should put our best foot forward on the main page. --Whiteknight (talk) (projects) 20:30, 11 August 2006 (UTC)

Wikibooks:General voting rules/Proposal

I want to call the attention of all wikibookians, especially active admins to the discussion about the new voting policy. Wikibooks currently does not have a concrete voting policy in effect, so the adaptation of this policy will potentially create immediate differences in the way business is conducted here. Due to large amounts of discussion, changes, and dissention, there are several versions of this policy being considered:

• Version 1 Written by User:Whiteknight
• Version 2 Written by User:Jguk
• Version 3 User:RobinH's revision of Jguk's version
• Version 4 Written by User:Kellen
• Version 5 Whiteknight's Revision of Kellen's Version.

Also, there are additional issues being discussed, such as the inclusion of a "minimum contributions" clause, that will limit users with less then 20 votes from editing. Also, there is a proposed clause that would allow this 20 vote minimum to be raised in response to abuse.

I will be sending a version of this message to all currently active admins as well, because certain versions of this policy may impose additional responsibilities on admins (such as mediation/arbitration, etc.) We are currently restricting primary discussion to Wikibooks talk:General voting rules/Proposal, although we can spread out to other pages should the need arise. --Whiteknight (talk) (projects) 20:43, 11 August 2006 (UTC)

We seem to have reached a preliminary consensus on making the "version 5" the official working version of this proposal. We have moved the text of this policy to Wikibooks:General voting rules, and can continue the discussion there. --Whiteknight (talk) (projects) 15:11, 15 August 2006 (UTC)

I threw a vote on the page so that we can get it enforced, so vote (about voting) at Wikibooks talk:General voting rules. -withinfocus 15:30, 15 August 2006 (UTC)

Wikibooks:Wiki Standard Book Number

I was woundering if the English Wikibooks had something like Wikibooks:Wiki Standaard Boeknummer (Wikibooks:Wiki Standard Book Number) on the Dutch Wikibooks. It is used on nl.wikibooks.org as an alternative version of ISBN for wikibooks. A WSBN contains the following information: language, main discipline, study, (specialized study), book number (5 numbers). For example: nl-01-08-00-00001 stands for Dutch, Natural science, Computer science, -, first book. nl-02-07-01-00002 stands for Dutch, Social science, History, Antiquity, second book. Evil berry 10:43, 3 August 2006 (UTC)

No, we currently don't have anything like that. We did, previously, have a short discussion on the possibility of creating a new categorization scheme for our books, because the Dewey-Decimal system is non-standard (though widely accepted, in most parts), the Library of Congress system is based on the US, and ISBN numbers arent global. It is a good idea to have a standardized method for numbering and identifying our books here, and is something that we as a community should work on. --Whiteknight(talk) (projects) 17:24, 3 August 2006 (UTC)

Actually, if you could provide us with a basic translation of your system, perhaps we can vote to adopt it here. --Whiteknight(talk) (projects) 17:27, 3 August 2006 (UTC)

You can find a translation here. Evil berry 18:53, 3 August 2006 (UTC)

This sounds like a pretty cool idea. Getting it on Infobox would probably be the best way to distribute it. I hope we can also move "here" to somewhere more appropriate as well. -Matt 00:35, 4 August 2006 (UTC)

I don't see the complaint against Dewey Decimal or LOC classification. Any classification that we would come up with would be non-standard, not widely accepted, and not global in any sense. Why should we expect that we can make a something better?

And why should we reject LOC just because it comes from the US? The LOC system enjoys use throughout the English-speaking world, such as at the Australian National University and at Cambridge University libraries.

Anyway, it isn't clear to me that we need a classification system at all. We have a search tool. Can anyone here say that they browse the categorization pages when they want a book? Personally, I always prefer to do a search. --129.79.157.64 05:09, 4 August 2006 (UTC)

You can do a search then. The categorization scheme isn't harmful and is helpful to some users. Kellen ^T 13:33, 4 August 2006 (UTC)

Dewey Decimal System was created in America, and certain sections, (specifically the christianity) sections are very over-reaching, while many other religions get relegated to a catch-all "other religions and beliefs" section. In many other countries, especially where christianity isn't the main religion, the dewey decimal system is altered to accomodate the "big" religion of the area. This is, a small complaint, but one that is worth considering. The LOC system is highly useful, but it is only really accepted for use in some parts of the english-speaking world. Last I checked there are more languages then just english with a wikibooks project, so it doesnt make sense to use a system that specifically caters to english.

We can always try to find a better, more over-arching system then Dewey or LOC, and if we fail, then we can always resort back to them if needed. I dont see a reason why we wouldnt want to try, however. --Whiteknight(talk) (projects) 14:20, 4 August 2006 (UTC)

Doesn't this just duplicate the existing bookshelf system? "Language, main discipline, study, (specialized study), book number" is really just Language subproject ==> department ==> bookshelf ==> bookshelf section ==> position on the list. The bookshelf system is also more meaningul to readers than a number. We already have five classification systems in use, and while I'm not against using more systems if they improve Wikibooks for readers, I don't see a reason for going with this particular one. --hagindaz 22:35, 4 August 2006 (UTC)

There is another system which is widely used in Europe: w:Universal Decimal Classification, the problem with both Dewey and UDC is that they are copyrighted and you need a license, which costs money. As Wikipedia is so succesfull in setting new standards, and sisterprojects as well, why is it not possible to set a new standard for non-copyrighted free usable international classification? It would be nice if we set-up a discussion page at meta so we can work internationally on this. On nl.Wikibooks we have worked allready to expand here and have looked at other standardsystems to develop that. But we would like to set a standard at least for wikibooks all over the world (and who knows in what this could develop). Any positive or negative comments on that? Londenp 19:40, 9 August 2006 (UTC)

We don't use Dewey and LOC classification just to give a book a number, but rather to allow readers to browse and search for content on a book listing using a system they are familiar with. Most users haven't memorized the existing standard numbering systems, so I doubt nl-02-07-01-00002 will mean more to them than PK 570. I just don't see the point in giving a book a number for the sake of giving a book a number. Changing the unordered lists on bookshelves to ordered lists will have the same effect. Am I missing some big advantage book numbers have? --hagindaz 22:28, 10 August 2006 (UTC)

They are shorter and can be used to find a book when you don't know the title. For example: if you would search for "WSBN nl-02-07-01-00002" on Google you will only get two hits: Wikibooks:Wiki Standaard Boeknummer and Koningen aan de Nijl. When doing a search on Google for "Koningen aan de Nijl" you will get 79 hits. So that's the advantage. Evil berry 18:19, 27 August 2006 (UTC)

For wikibooks in the state that it is in now, I don't think that WSBN numbers are a valuable thing. As hagindaz pointed out, we already have 5 classification systems being used currently, and we don't need to institute a sixth unless it brings something new to the table.

However, If the "Wikipress" or the "Publication of the Month" initiatives take off, It would be a good idea to create an identification scheme that will include the project of origin (en.wikibooks vs nl.wikiversity, for example), the specific revision that the publication is based on, the URL of the book's main page, etc. I don't think, however, that such information could ever be adequately expressed in a single "number". Plus, we may not always have bookshelves: They may very well evolve into other entities, or be replaced entirely. I dont think we should make an entire numbering scheme that is based off an arbitrary construction on our particular project. --Whiteknight (talk) (projects) 22:08, 27 August 2006 (UTC)

Wikiversity has been approved

Jimbo announced at Wikimania over the weekend (August 4th-8th) that Wikiversity has been formally approved by the Wikimedia Foundation board of trustees as the next Wikimedia sister project. I'm sure more details can be found elsewhere, but here is Angela's blog, and I've seen other announcements that were in conventional press publications elsewhere.

It has been a very long, long road for the participants of that project, and it should be noted that it is still going to be on a beta-trial basis like Wikinews was for the first few months, but Wikiversity is now going to be a completely independent project from Wikibooks.

A big thank you should go to all of the people who helped in putting together the various proposals and trying to come up with the concept that has been involved with Wikiversity. In a way, this is resolving the Wikibooks:Votes for deletion/Wikiversity that was started almost exactly one year ago to the day. Wikiversity has been a part of Wikibooks for so long that it is going to be interesting to see what will happen with the Wikiversity participants actually having their own space to develop and grow on their own.

Just guessing, but I think this link will soon be valid:

Wikiversity:Main_Page

as will:

http://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/Main_Page

The technical side of things here might get a little interesting, but it will be exciting. --Rob Horning 19:13, 9 August 2006 (UTC)

That's good to know. It'a about time that something happened with this project. Unfortunately, I forsee wikibooks having to host a large number of redirects to moved wikiversity material, in the future. --Whiteknight (talk) (projects) 02:22, 10 August 2006 (UTC)

I put a note up on the Wikiversity page about the creation of this project. Here is the text of my note:

This weekend (August 4th-8th) Jimbo Wales announced that the wikiversity project has been officially approved by the board, and the project is going to be moved to it's own server within the month. Initially, there will be 3 languages, and the project will be in a "beta" version for a 6 month trial period. Discussion about how/when/where to move material can happen in a local discussion page, or at Wikibooks:Staff lounge. Material not in the "Wikiversity:" namespace should not be deleted off this server unless it has undergone an official transwiki.

Basically, I dont want people to delete bona fide wikibooks material to the new server and delete it here if we are using it. If material is forked between wikiversity and wikibooks, we will need to decide if it belongs on one or the other site, or if it can be altered to remain on both. Basically, I dont think that we here at wikibooks need to do alot of work to make this move happen, I just dont want to lose alot of content because of it. --Whiteknight (talk) (projects) 02:53, 10 August 2006 (UTC)

Congratulations to the Wikiversitians! Or is that Wikiversityites?

On a practical note, we now need to decide:

1. What content will move to Wikiversity and be deleted from Wikibooks
2. What content will be forked on Wikiversity but remain on Wikibooks because it is a textbook or annotated text
3. What content will not move to Wikiversity

To aid this, I suggest going through all modules beginning with "Wikiversity:" and categorising the pages as such:

1. Category:Wikiversity page
2. Category:Wikiversity fork
3. Category:Wikiversity textbook

Once this exercise is complete, the categories can be reviewed and transfers/deletions made. Relevant images and templates will also have to be added to these categories.

We'll probably need a central place to allow discussions and monitor process. Maybe a dedicated page, Wikibooks:Wikiversity initialisation perhaps, would be best suited to this, Jguk 07:46, 10 August 2006 (UTC)

Should pages that are added to the three categories listed above (Category:Wikiversity page, Category:Wikiversity fork, Category:Wikiversity textbook) be removed from Category:Wikiversity? This would be a "book keeping trick" that would make it easier to know which articles have already been recategorized. It might also be useful to have a template that could be used to mark pages that have been recategorized and that would direct editors to the central discussion page (Wikibooks:Wikiversity initialisation) in case there are questions about the recategorization of particular pages. --JWSurf 15:25, 10 August 2006 (UTC)

Changing text on Help:Administrators

I was looking over some of our help pages, and I noticed that the Help:Administrators page contains text that is inaccurate:

Administrators are Wikibookians who have "sysop rights". Current Wikibooks policy is to grant this access liberally to anyone who has been an active Wikibooks contributor for a while and is generally a known and trusted member of the community. "This should be no big deal," as Jimbo has said.

Current wikibooks practice is not necessarily to grant sysop privledge "liberally", and not to any person who is "generally known". People who are nominated at WB:RFA are frequently required to have a firm knowledge of current wikibooks policy and practice, be active on pages like WB:VFD and staff lounge, and work towards the common good. I propose we change the text of this page to mirror the reality of the situation, to something that is less misleading:

Administrators are Wikibookians who have "sysop rights". Current Wikibooks practice is to grant this access to wikibookians who are well known, trusted, and demonstratably knowledgable in matters of common wikibooks policy and practice.

The only reason I bring this up is because many recent requests for adminship have centered around the nominee's activity and knowledgability in matters of policy, and their work on more then just a few small insular policies. It is also commonly frowned upon for a user to seek admin rights only for the goal of helping their own "pet projects" more efficiently. --Whiteknight (talk) (projects) 02:31, 10 August 2006 (UTC)

What you say would better reflect current practice. It's a shame we don't follow what is currently said - but as we don't, we shouldn't say it, Jguk 07:47, 10 August 2006 (UTC)

What is currently said does sound like a more liberal and open system - is there any reason we shouldn't change the practice, and keep the words the same? Or perhaps some kind of compromise?

I don't see why using sysop rights to help "pet projects" is a negative thing - as long as they're actually helping something, and using their powers for good :).--Singkong2005 13:57, 11 August 2006 (UTC)

Why did the community turn away from the liberal practice? Were there specific instances where administrators greatly misused their rights on account of ignorance of WB practices? If not, then I'd suggest returning to the old practice. --Swift 16:48, 11 August 2006 (UTC)

In reality, the "practice" hasn't changed, in that nominations for RFA are still posted on WB:RFA, and orginary users are allowed to vote and discuss the issue either way. However, if you look through the old RFA discussions, you will see that many users cast votes based on certain metrics. Some users will only vote "support" if the nominated user has a significant edit count, is active, consistant, and has demonstrated a knowledge of policy. At the moment, these metrics are not specified as being required, but most users cast votes as if they are actual requirements. It is also not possible to tell voting users "your vote isn't valid, because you are measuring the candidates against an invalid metric". I think that we should change the policy to reflect the fact that prospective admins are subjected to a certain amount of scrutiny, and are held up to a certain standard whether it's specified or not. --Whiteknight (talk) (projects) 20:34, 11 August 2006 (UTC)

I'd prefer not to see the policy changed - surely we shouldn't change a good policy to reflect not-so-good practice. Rather we should seek another solution... Perhaps the introduction to RfA discussions should point out what the policy is. I suppose this means that the person requesting or nominating for adminship makes a direct reference to the liberal policy. Whether or not people choose to follow the liberal approach in their voting is up to them.

If it continues to operate this way, and if we don't change the policy through the appropriate voting procedure, then it should be mentioned on Wikibooks:Requests for adminship that this is what happens, but that it's a result of the way people choose to vote in RfAs and not as a result of policy. --Singkong2005 06:14, 15 August 2006 (UTC)

I actually like the current phrasing for the most part. A minor change I'd like to suggest is changing:

Administrators are Wikibookians who have "sysop rights"."

to:

Administrators are Wikibookians who have "sysop tools"."

It's really less about being an "honored wikibookian" than it is being "a trustworthy person who wants to help out". For those of you who are also wikipedians, you might be aware of the rather nasty tensions that have been building up about adminship and community, and I'd hate to see us repeat the mistake here. If you're not familiar with this, see this debate on wikipedia and you'll see what I mean. --SB_Johnny | ^talk 11:03, 15 August 2006 (UTC)

Hopefully we don't have the same problems as wikipedia has in this matter. We've already included wording on Help:Administrators that an administrator can be "desysopped" if they are inactive for 2 months or so (i cant remember the exact timelimit). Also, admins can be called in for a removal vote on a per-nomination basis.

I am a firm believer that admins and b-crats are "just normal users" who are trusted enough to have some restrictions removed. However, because admins are central points of policy (admins must act to delete pages, regardless of deletion policy, for instance) it is expected that an admin is well familiarized with the policies that they are going to be expected to enforce. An admin who isn't watching VfD discussions, and who isn't working to fight and block vandals is, in my opinion, not an "active" admin, and doesn't deserve priveledges. As such, we should mention on Help:Administrators that admins are expected to understand policy because they are the key enforcers of policy. Also, users shouldnt be elected to be admins unless they have shown a demonstratable need for the lifted restrictions. Personally, I would like to draft an Wikibooks:Administrators policy policy to address all the issues concerning admins and bcrats, and make their election, actions, and removal explicit parts of our policy. I have little faith however, that such a policy would be accepted by the community, and currently the actions of admins are guided by some meager lines in the Help:Administrators help pages. --Whiteknight (talk) (projects) 13:52, 15 August 2006 (UTC)

PS. to address User:Singkong2005's concerns directly, I just want to point out that this isn't an official policy concerning admins, it is simply a help page that describes the admin process and lays out some general guidelines concerning administrators. It is, and i repeat this, only a help page. I would like to change the text there to reflect the fact that administrators are not elected lightly nor liberally. The numbers of administrators are small, and the community expects them to actually use their tools for the good of the community. Those aren't unrealistic, or even problematic expectations.

Also, as a side note, the current text says that sysops are granted rights as per policy, when there is no such policy on the books. Either we need to create a policy, or we need to change this text. --Whiteknight (talk) (projects) 13:56, 15 August 2006 (UTC)

Fair enough - sorry for not catching that earlier. I still prefer the liberal approach, but if it's not actual policy, then I've got no basis to push for a reference to it being included in the help page. --Singkong2005 14:15, 15 August 2006 (UTC)

Video games, again...

Looking over recent changes, it seems there are still a lot of these books being worked on. Was a policy ever decided? --SB_Johnny | ^talk 13:27, 10 August 2006 (UTC)

The only policy that governs this is the proposed policy of Wikibooks:Game textbook guidelines. So I guess the answer is, no, there isn't a policy that has ever been decided. It is generally presumed that video game walkthroughs are now against Wikibooks policy, but beyond that it is still widely up in the air. BTW, this policy pre-dated the discussion by Jimbo, and was something that the Wikibooks community was moving toward, so it isn't that big of a surprise. All that made me upset was removing content based on this proposed policy and absolutely no discussion prior to the content removal. Those discussions are now happening on the VfD page, although people are still invoking the name of Jimbo from time to time with these discussions. --Rob Horning 21:27, 10 August 2006 (UTC)

Robert, do you think Jimbo would be willing to render an opinion on this? As much as I appreciate the passion of the contributors to those books, I really don't see them coming anywhere close to being "textbooks". SB_Johnny | ^talk 21:37, 10 August 2006 (UTC)

I have to admit that my first reaction here is God, I hope Jimbo leaves us alone! I don't mind Jimbo coming here and voicing his opinion on the subject, but we are also sufficiently intelligent and understanding general attitudes of the WMF that I think we can come up with policies and not have Jimbo come here for micromanagement of policies. Jimbo has rendered an opinion on the subject, and he can speak for himself on the matter. My objection is mainly that the opinion is ambiguous enough that anything and everything can be deleted using the textbook-only philosophy that is behind the idea. --Rob Horning 16:06, 25 August 2006 (UTC)

IIRC, the problem was that enforced policies weren't being enforced. To some extent that's still happening, with data collections (which m:Wikidata was proposed for since no projects exist for this kind of information) being kept and other pages being kept simply because users like them despite their violations of these "enforced" policies.

"Those discussions are now happening on the VfD page, although people are still invoking the name of Jimbo from time to time with these discussions." - I don't see anything on the VFD page for either comment. Are you referring to anything in particular? Thanks in advance, hagindaz 22:48, 10 August 2006 (UTC)

I think a big part of it, was that jimbo came flying in here from outer-space one day, and declared that videogame manuals were bad. Now, i'm inclined to listen when Jimbo speaks, but the "No Videogame manuals" thing was never really made into a community-enforced policy, because it only exists as a declaration of Jimbo. When the statement was made, alot of freaking out happened, and some books did get moved. Unfortunately, even if we say that "videogame manuals can now stay on wikibooks forever!", alot of damage has already been done, and we won't be in any better a situation. We would do good to actually have an official discussion, and create an official policy about this matter with full community participation. Maybe then we can settle all this once and for all. --Whiteknight (talk) (projects) 23:07, 10 August 2006 (UTC)

Jimbo's name is still invoked from time to time, but it is becoming less frequent. My main objection is when content is deleted because it is "not a textbook" (see Special:Log/Delete and dig through the archives for details) you need to do more than simply justify its removal on those grounds. I've complained enough about that subject and I do believe that some content has been deleted that perhaps shouldn't have been removed. That said, we really do need to come up with a formal policy on this topic and make it unambiguous enough that admins can actually know if a page ought to be removed or not and not tie up the VfD pages with rehashing the same arguments over and over again. --Rob Horning 16:06, 25 August 2006 (UTC)

Good call rob. There is a page that perhaps we need to focus some attention on now:Wikibooks:Textbooks. We should come up with a draft of specifically what a textbook is (or at least a variety of examples of what textbooks have been). Such a page probably should become a "policy" and not a "guideline", because the definition that we provide is going to have a profound affect on the very direction and future of the project. If our mission statement says "Wikibooks is for the creation of open-content textbooks", then such a definition on our part is integral. --Whiteknight (talk) (projects) 18:33, 25 August 2006 (UTC)

Languages page naming policy

I'd like to suggest a naming policy or guideline for languages:

This policy is based on maximising the learner's exposure to the language while still allowing easy navigation and searching for all users.

• Page names should be in English as this makes it easier for people browsing the category.
  • On the main page of the language, e.g. Indonesian, a piped link may be used to display the Indonesian name, with the English translation given after. (The
  • On the linked page, below the English, the translation should be given (as a level 1 heading? level 2? using <big><big>?)
• Page names should describe the contents, rather than just "Chapter 1," or "Lesson 2," etc. (as currently used by Spanish and Indonesian, for example). Numbering the pages makes it hard to insert new lessons in between. Using descriptive names would make browsing categories easier; it would also allow easier comparison of lessons in different languages (if an editor is looking for ideas on structure, for example).

Just wanted to put that out there... I'm not too dogmatic about these points, but would like to see a guideline in place. --Singkong2005 06:09, 11 August 2006 (UTC)

In general, page names should be descriptive, and should not be simply "Lesson 1", or "Chapter 5", unless the content of that page is so unrelated under any heading that a single descriptive name cannot be given. The use of english-titles, or even translations is often decided on a per-book basis, so i don't think we need to make it standard for all books. Authors are given a certain amount of latitude to create books in the manner that they see fit, and I personally don't want to encroach on an authors right to design his book, by enacting a policy that makes everybody do things in a certain way. However, I also don't want to encroach on your right, as a wikibookian, to go into these books, and make any changes that you see fit. be bold, and make the changes yourself, if you think they are warranted. If nobody objects, the changes stay. --Whiteknight (talk) (projects) 12:14, 14 August 2006 (UTC)

Browsing Books

One main problem in reading and using Wikibooks is that its hard to get to the next page of a topic. To improve on the usage of the site and ease at learning from the project, I think that within one project all the pages should be tied together. A command at the bottom of the page to "next page" or even a box listing all other sections in the book would be a great addition to the current project and help to navigate between various topics.

-Madge

I have created Template:Tl specifically for this purpose. It should be added to the bottom of each chapter in a book. A lot of similar templates have been created, but most are only for use on the top of each page, where they do no good, since clicking the back button takes the same amount of time as scrolling up or pressing the home button.

This should eventually be built into the software, but until then templates will have to suffice. m:Wikibooks extension has been proposed as a solution. --hagindaz 19:55, 11 August 2006 (UTC)

If this is used, it's important that any time order of the pages are changed, or a new page is added in between, the templates of relevant pages (either side of a change) are updated. It would be nice if it were automated, but I can't see how that would work, unless pages could be assigned some kind of paramter according to where they appear on the content page. So if we use this template, perhaps we could develop some automated tool or bot to check that following these template links leads us through every chapter of a book. --Singkong2005 03:24, 12 August 2006 (UTC)

I am currently working on a bot that is capable of following links and navigation templates (or, more specifically, I'm working on a reusable library that can do these things, and a series of front-ends designed for specific uses). It's going to take alot of time to get my bot ready, but potentially it could perform a task like this. --Whiteknight (talk) (projects) 14:31, 12 August 2006 (UTC)

If you care about this, you might want to vote for the Book construct feature. Updating navigation links is a pain. I use Template:Tl to minimise this pain (auto navigation avoids you having to type in the book name because it assumes that the book is in ".."), but what would really be simpler is some kind of wikimedia-supported page-order construct. -- Kowey 20:03, 17 August 2006 (UTC)

Standardisation of category and book names

Ran across some difficulty categorising in the how-to area because of various capitalisation usages in the category names. Specifically, I made the category Animal care, which now has a subcategory for Animal Care (which is both a book title and a category containing the book's chapters).

I'd like to propose that categories used for subject areas use capital letters only for the first word, while categories used to tie in the pages of a particular book be all or mostly capitals (with the time-honored exception of prepositions and articles).

Further, I've noted that many pages and books use redundant categories, such as "booktitle category", "subcategory", and "supercategory". In order to keep the main categories streamlined, I'd like to propose that

• Booktitle categories should go only into subcategories, not supercategories (i.e., if it's in Category A, and Category A is a subcategory of Category B, don't put it in Category B).
• Book pages should only go into the booktitle category, unless they are cross-categorised (i.e., Animal Care/Dogs would be categorised both in "Animal Care" (the book category), and "Dog care" (note lower case)).
• Either categories should always be two or more words following these capitalisation rules, or new books should not be titled with the name of a pre-existing category (i.e., not allowing a new book titled "Animals", because there is already Category:Animals).
• Use [[Category:BOOKNAME|*]] for bookname categories, so that book names will appear before page-collection categories. Thus, for example, Animal Care (the category for the book) will appear at the beginning, while "Dog care" will appear under "C" (which might contain both pages from several books addressing the issue, as well as the separate books relating to dog care ("Collie Care", "Chow-Chow Breeding", etc.).

I might think of more. SB_Johnny | ^talk 23:34, 11 August 2006 (UTC)

This raises a good point that there aren't alot of standardization rules concerning the use of categories. Perhaps what we need is to draft an official guideline (i don't think it should be a policy) as to the use of categories. There are alot of inconsistancies in the category scheme that probably should be addressed. --Whiteknight (talk) (projects) 12:10, 14 August 2006 (UTC)

I've been patching together a proposal at Wikibooks:Categories, if you care to lend a hand :). --SB_Johnny | ^talk 15:27, 14 August 2006 (UTC)

Topic area staff rooms?

Just as schools sometimes have separate staff rooms, does Wikibooks have a policy of encouraging subject-specific questions to be posted in specific places rather than here? If not, I think it's worth considering.

Would this be best done by creating a new page, or using the relevant bookshelf talk page? (e.g. Wikibooks talk:Languages bookshelf for languages). I'm inclined to favor the bookshelf talk page.

If that's agreed on, then a small box could be placed on all the talk pages, and category pages, saying: For discussion relevant to all (Language) books, go to the bookshelf talk page. A box with links could also be placed at the top of this page.

I think this would help discussion to occur in the most appropriate places, and thus improve collaboration. Any objections or comments? --Singkong2005 03:22, 14 August 2006 (UTC)

---

I for instance don't like that idea, this area is for general discussion or to solve major disputes if this is fragmented useful information will only be harder to find and create a barrier to get more participation from users.
Can you give me an example of a problem that can't be solved on the local project and needs a different forum ?
Most problems that can't be addressed locally probably should get posted here, using bookshelf order or even book relations to create other forums will not address any problem we are having in wikibooks, heck, I'm having problem now just checking the few pages I'm working/interested or debating stuff on. --Panic 04:13, 14 August 2006 (UTC)

It would be useful for any issue that affects multiple languages - e.g. anything you currently see on Wikibooks talk:Languages bookshelf. That page is already operating the way I suggested, in a de facto way, but it could be done better if we made it official.

Another example: noone has commented on my Languages page naming policy, above - if there were a place that lots of languages people were watching, then this might be different.

I think this would actually make it easier to keep tabs on discussions in areas we're interested in, as they wouldn't be jumbled together here. It would also involve people who don't want to follow Wikibooks-wide discussions, but would happily put this languages discussion page on their watchlist. --Singkong2005 04:36, 14 August 2006 (UTC)

Another issue: People might feel shy about posting a languages-specific question on the staff lounge, as it feels like the wrong place - I know that was my initial reaction with certain questions I had.

Here's a basic box we could use, if we have agreement - we could call it Template:Tl:

Likewise for Physics, etc, as applicable. (I don't think we could make a general one, as the page names don't indicate which bookshelf to link to.)

I also added a link to the Help page (which I think should be less controversial).

A box with links could also be placed at the top of the Staff lounge. --Singkong2005 05:07, 14 August 2006 (UTC)

BTW, I don't mind posting a message on Staff Lounge in order to attract attention to a major topic, but suggest follow up comments to another page. This has been done frequently in the past, and that can be done even for topical issues like something that would affect only language books.

As far as using the bookshelf talk pages as topical discussion areas, this is something that was done historically on Wikibooks but has faded away due to the huge expansion in the number of bookshelves and their eventual removal as prominent features on the front page. In many respects, the bookshelves, as originally conceived, were supposed to be portal pages to related Wikibooks and something akin to the Wikiprojects on Wikipedia. I'm not exactly sure how to get this working the way it was (see Wikibooks talk:Information technology bookshelf for an example of extensive discussions in the past) but I havn't seen any real attempts to do topical discussions lately except for policy discussions. There have also been some semi-abortive attempts to set up explicit Wikiprojects here, but those aren't very well organized either. --Rob Horning 07:40, 14 August 2006 (UTC)

I don't think therre are enough people involved to justify more than one room (I assume we're talking about something similar to the multiple topic areas at the Village Pump?) It's hard enough to hold attention on just this one page.

I hadn't realized that bookshelves were supposed to be used as projects. That's a good idea,

(Pardon me breaking your answer mid-sentence, but I want to focus on the first part of your comment.) I'm a bit confused - you don't want more than one discussion room, but you think that bookshelves as projects are a good idea - in my mind that's contradictory as the two ideas are inseparable, and you're endorsing one and opposing the other. Perhaps you could explain what you mean?

My response to your first point is ::::* It's already split up in practice, just not clearly delineated and signposted; and

• More people might get involved in a discussion room which is clearly signposted and which covers an area specific to a person's interest. (I for one will be removing the staff lounge from my watchlist soon so I don't keep getting distracted from work... but I would like to be able to watch a Languages discussion room.)

See my slightly modified proposal at the end - I would appreciate your response, and hope we can resolve this. --Singkong2005 06:03, 15 August 2006 (UTC)

but it does point to a problem I've been having with WB all along, namely that everything is "different" from WP, in a way that makes it seem like a moral tenet ("Thou shalt not emulate Wikipedia"). IMO we could and should take more from the structure that's developed over there, and perhaps even default to WP rules when we can't get clear consensus on rules here (for instance, as there has long been a debate here over voting rules (which rather limits any other decisions we might want to make), we could for the time being just default to w:WP:CONSENSUS). SB_Johnny | ^talk 08:26, 14 August 2006 (UTC)

I disagree with that pretty strongly, for a number of reasons. This may not be the place to get into details about my opinions, but as far as i'm concerned, we can learn lessons from wikipedia if we want to, but ultimately wikibooks is different fromw wikipedia in nearly every way. As to the other matter, "subject-specific questions" don't really have a home on wikibooks yet. The staff lounge is perhaps an unfortunate catch-all, but with the limited readership we have here, I would rather post all messages here with the hopes that more readers will see them and respond. The bookshelves could entertain questions that are specfic to their subject matter, but there aren't enough people monitoring the bookshelf talk pages. There have been times that i've responded to messages left on bookshelf talk pages (bookshelfs that i am not active on), and i've had to redirect the questions here so that better eyes could read them.

In summary, Wikibooks is not wikipedia, the staff lounge is the best place to ask questions, and nobody really reads the bookshelf talk pages. Now, most of these points are contingent on the fact that wikibooks has a very limited group of active editors. If the wikibooks population (or at least the wikibooks sense of community) increases, some of these things will need to change. Perhaps we could consider actions like over at wikipedia to increase our sense of community, and therefore get more people active in more things. That would be good. --Whiteknight (talk) (projects) 12:04, 14 August 2006 (UTC)

I guess my point is that the way WB works is a bit "wikipedian-unfriendly", in that a potential contributor coming over from WP isn't going to find what they're expecting to find, and there really is a bit of an "anti-wikipedia" feeling expressed here and there. I'll try to write something up (Wikibooks:Wikibooks for wikipedians?) to remedy that a bit (it could be included in the perhaps it could be linked in the ((welcome)) tag).

As a solution, I suggest having a big, clearly visible box on the top (and perhaps also on the bottom) on the staff lounge page directing editors to current proposals. Looks to me like most rules and guidelines need to get a square-one treatment (for example, Wikibooks:Naming policy is tagged as enforced, but the debate over adoption never came anywhere near consensus). SB_Johnny | ^talk 15:24, 14 August 2006 (UTC)

There is definately a concerted effort to differentiate ourselves from wikipedia. We are a separate project and (for better or for worse) we do things a little differently here and there. Some people might harbor negative feelings towards wikipedia, but it's not institutionalized. Our policy cannon is still a little bit behind, but we are working on it. I don't think that we can make any big changes until we get our voting policy formalized (the fact that this was never done was a big oversight, but it can't be helped now). Because we have never had a voting policy on record, some other policies may have gotten enforced through "unofficial" means. Fortunately for us, nobody is really complaining about the naming policy, and nearly all new books are using the "forward slash" policy. A page "Wikibooks for wikipedians" would probably do alot to help explain what we are all about, and possibly even drum up some support for our little project, so If you want to draft a page like that, that would be a good idea. --Whiteknight (talk) (projects) 16:58, 14 August 2006 (UTC)

Well, got a start on the wikibooks for wikipedians page. Problem arises again in that there aren't guidelines and policies to link to where a wikipedian would want them linked. We'll get there.

As far as tha slash convention is concerned, I (me, SB_Johnny) strongly object: both on principle (because there was no consensus), and in particular (because I don't like it). --SB_Johnny | ^talk 18:19, 14 August 2006 (UTC)

Regarding the issues of where to post questions & discussion... I like the idea mentioned by Rob Horning, of posting here and directing responses elsewhere. So here's an alternative proposal to what I originally suggested:

• I do something with the bookshelf header & the box template (which I experimented with above) to suggest that for general languages-related questions, people post at the Staff lounge and the Languages bookshelf talk page, and direct responses from the Staff lounge to the bookshelf talk page.
• I'll put a note in Help:Languages to that effect as well.

How does that sound?

Re the small number of people responding - I think that having clearly marked subject-area-specific areas for those who are interested in those subject areas will make it easier for people to keep track of these topics, but without having to follow a lot of stuff which is not of interest. So hopefully that will lead to more involvement, in the long run. I confess I'm speculating, but whatever is the case, we should make things more clearly marked, so people know where to ask questions. --Singkong2005 17:12, 14 August 2006 (UTC)

There is nothing stopping people from asking questions on the specific bookshelves, and in fact that is probably the prefered method of asking subject-specific questions. Staff lounge, ultimately, should be a place for discussing topics that can't be discussed on other pages. I would say that you shouldnt encourage people to cross-post questions both on staff lounge and on subject-specific pages. There is no need to fragment a discussion like that. If you want the general community involved, ask at the staff lounge. If you dont, ask somewhere else. --Whiteknight (talk) (projects) 20:05, 14 August 2006 (UTC)

Too many indents, so I'm going back to the left side of the page...

Hmm, no consensus here, but the status quo (no guidelines as to where to post) isn't good, so it would be good to resolve this:

• Panic objects strongly;
• SB Johnny doesn't think there's enough people to split up the discussion room.
• Whiteknight, you seem to be agreeing with my original suggestion (though you haven't commented specifically on the idea of putting the boxes);
• Rob Horning said "I don't mind posting a message on Staff Lounge in order to attract attention to a major topic, but suggest follow up comments to another page" which I adapted as a policy of cross-posting, but Whiteknight said not to encourage cross-posting.

A solution might be that major issues relevant to a particular bookshelf are mentioned briefly here (in line with Rob Horning's suggestion). Generally, however, bookshelf-specific discussions are kept on that bookshelf's talk page, while cross-bookshelf issues are discussed here. This doesn't accomodate SB Johnny's & Panic's concerns, which directly contradict Whiteknight's and my ideas... - I don't quite understand Panic's concerns (see my response above) and I'm also replying to SB Johnny explaining why I disagree; but I also don't want to dismiss these concerns.

I feel quite strongly about this but I'm not quite sure how to resolve it. I'd appreciate further responses by Panic and SB Johnny to the above suggestion. --Singkong2005 05:38, 15 August 2006 (UTC)

Well, I'm not sure what you mean by directing comments from/towards different conversations. You mean you want the whole conversation transliterated onto both pages? If so, that seems a bit cumbersome.

I do agree (very strongly and occaisionally needing to brush foam away from my mouth) that it's hard to get a conversation/debate started here, but I don't think there can really be a technical fix for that... it's the nature of the community, not the structure.

(Warning: waxing metaphorical) Let me point out that I don't think there's anything wrong with the members of the wikibookian community... it's just the way we are here due to the nature of our project. When I lived in the city, I was part of the town watch, said hi to 20 or 30 neighbors every day when passing them on the street. and enjoyed the hustle and bustle. I live on a farm now in the middle of nowhere, and while I only see maybe 1 or 2 of my neighbors each day, I know them a lot better, and we help each other out from time to time without having any organised "project" to tackle this or that issue.

So maybe a more appropriate tool we could use would be some sort of "help desk" page, where some of the more active editors could list themselves and their interests (there's something similar at WP... I'll try to find a link to it), and if someone (like you) needs people to bounce ideas off of, they can either ask on that page, or ask the volunteers on their talks.

Off to find that link... sound good so far? --SB_Johnny | ^talk 14:59, 15 August 2006 (UTC)

Ah, here it is: w:Wikipedia:Cleanup Taskforce. Not that this is necessarily a cleanup issue, but I like the structure of the project. --SB_Johnny | ^talk 15:04, 15 August 2006 (UTC)

I don't think I have been particularly clear about my opinions, as evidenced by User:Singkong2005's statement above. I am against the segmentation of the staff lounge into sub-rooms. I am neither for nor against boxes (at the top of staff lounge, or whereever) that can redirect subject specific questions to the relevant bookshelf talk pages. I don't think that there is enough traffic on the bookshelf pages to get questions answered in a timely manner, but that's no matter. --Whiteknight (talk) (projects) 15:09, 15 August 2006 (UTC)

What do you think of the "taskforce" idea? (I'll volunteer if at least one other person does). --SB_Johnny | ^talk 17:20, 15 August 2006 (UTC)

I'm not entirely sure what you mean by "taskforce". I must have missed that part of the discussion (and now i can't find it). --Whiteknight (talk) (projects) 18:36, 15 August 2006 (UTC)

It's that wp link just above (w:Wikipedia:Cleanup Taskforce), which seems a good structure for organising a "helping out" gang. --SB_Johnny | ^talk 18:49, 15 August 2006 (UTC)

SB Johnny (1): "You mean you want the whole conversation transliterated onto both pages?" Ye gods, no - that would be awful. My suggestion was that if a major discussion topic is starting on a bookshelf talk page, it could be mentioned here, but the discussion would take place entirely on the bookshelf talk page. (I'd earlier suggested that all bookshelf-specific questions be posted in both places, but the discussion takes place on the relevant bookshelf talk page... but that would be excessive). Re technical fixes and the nature of the community... I've come to believe that technical fixes can help a lot (after all, where would we be without wiki software?) but yes, ultimately people have to be involved. As I mention below, I think signposting will help; and it least it won't hurt even if I'm wrong.

SB Johnny (2): I think the task force idea as you described it could be very helpful... I like the idea of a place that people can add their name (perhaps grouped by subject area) and/or say something like "For issues of language learning, esp XYZ, feel free to ask me." Then even if it's a quiet discussion room, people can use it to find help. (I wouldn't be watching the page, but I'd be happy to be contacted.)

Whiteknight: agree that making subrooms is a bad idea - I raised it as a (less preferred option) but I should have been clearer in scrapping that and suggesting the bookshelf talk pages be used for this purpose. Lack of traffic could be an issue, but with good signposting (appropriate boxes here and on each book's main talk page) traffic might increase.

Sounds like we're closer to agreement now (I think). --Singkong2005 23:56, 15 August 2006 (UTC)

(resetting indentation)) I'll try to build up a skeleton for it tomorrow morning and see how it feels. Please provide some input! :) --SB_Johnny | ^talk 00:06, 16 August 2006 (UTC)

Draft a box, or some kind of template that we could use to transfer subject-specific questions to more appropriate places. you could use somethign like:

Language questions, go to: languages bookshelf talk page. Science questions go to the Science bookshelf talk page...

You would probably have to make it less verbose then that, and maybe make the font a little smaller. We have alot of bookshelves, and listing all of them could take up a not-insignificant amount of space in a template. We could post such a template here and at the community portal and the help desk. If the template looks good, we can call a vote whether to include it or not. --Whiteknight (talk) (projects) 00:04, 16 August 2006 (UTC)

Single user logon

I just wanted to draw everybodies attention to a news artical I found today on wikipedia:

• wikipedia:Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2006-08-07/Wikimania tech
• meta:Single login specifications

According to this artical, they are working on a "single user" account system that will handle users from all wikimedia projects. Of primary note is that people who have multiple accounts, one on each wikimedia project (such as accounts on wikibooks and wikipedia, or on multiple languages, etc) will have their accounts merged. In essence, there would be a single login portal for all wikimedia projects. Also, all separately-named accounts with the same confirmation email addresses would be linked together (if i understand it correctly).

If there is a conflict between two separate users with the same username on separate projects (a User:jim on both wikibooks and wikipedia, for instance, that belong to different people), the user with the highest edit counts will get to keep the username.

It would behouve people then to check some other projects, and ensure that your username is either a) unique, or b) that other people with your username are less active then you. --Whiteknight (talk) (projects) 20:24, 14 August 2006 (UTC)

PS. Here is a quote from the artical that should answer some questions as to the process of unification:

During the transition, user accounts from all wikis will be added to a temporary database. In cases where only one account exists for a given username, that account would be named the global account, "winning" the right to use that username throughout Wikimedia projects. Where a conflict exists (either multiple users with the same username, or one user with accounts on multiple projects), the account with the most edits would in most cases be named the global account. Next, all accounts with the same confirmed e-mail address would be matched up. All accounts with no edits would be re-assigned to the global account. For accounts still unmatched, upon login, passwords would be stored and matched.

So according to this text, it would be a good idea for everybody to go around to all their username and pseudonyms scattered across wikimedia, and ensure that every account has an identical password and confirmation email. This will help you during unification. If anybody is having a conflict, and would like to change their usernames before the unification, I will be able to help you. --Whiteknight (talk) (projects) 20:28, 14 August 2006 (UTC)

I'm going to have a bit of a problem with my user accounts, as I have stuff under different user names and some other interesting problems. Active users like myself who are on multiple Wikimedia projects are likly to be the ones that give the most headaches. My account on Meta is the one that is going to give me the largest fit right now, as I would like to keep the user history I have there. Perhaps I can get a Meta admin to help me out before the big day comes. --Rob Horning 22:03, 15 August 2006 (UTC)

It's my understanding that usernames with identical contact email addresses, and identical passwords are all going to be lumped together. In essence, if you have multiple usernames, you will gain "global access" to use all your usernames on all projects (unless there is a conflict, in which case you might lose one of them or another). For instance, I am "User:Whiteknight" here on wikibooks, but I am "User:Wknight8111" on wikipedia. I assume I am going to receive global rights to both usernames on all projects. I went around to all my user accounts, and made sure all the passwords and email addresses were identical. I also took the liberty of creating new "placeholder" accounts on projects where I am not active, so that another user can't create an account with the same name as me on another project. I think of this as being a helpful thing, because anybody who creates an account "User:Whiteknight" in the next few weeks is just going to lose it. --Whiteknight (talk) (projects) 23:30, 15 August 2006 (UTC)

Wikibooks mailing list and irc

I wanted to make a few points. First off, Users should join the mailing list for wikibooks (I don't have the link to it right now, but i'll get it in a minute). Also, there is a wikibooks chatroom at irc://irc.freenode.net/wikibooks that (i think) we could use for excellent real-time chats. I've just joined the mailing list myself, and I am trying to be more active on irc as well. --Whiteknight (talk) (projects) 22:35, 14 August 2006 (UTC)

Does anyone know of an irc client for mac OSX? (I haven't used irc since the mid 90s, when I used to log on from a shell). --SB_Johnny | ^talk 11:08, 16 August 2006 (UTC)

Nevermind, finally found one that seems to work. --SB_Johnny | ^talk 11:19, 16 August 2006 (UTC)

The mailinglist can be signed up to from: http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/textbook-l . --Whiteknight (talk) (projects) 16:42, 16 August 2006 (UTC)

Official Admin Policy

I am working on a draft of an official policy concerning admins, bcrats, and checkusers. I personally feel that wikibooks needs such a policy, but i want to entertain some discussion and see what the community thinks on the matter. The draft of my new proposal is located at:

Wikibooks:Administrators/Proposal

I dont want to start active discussion on this really until we finalize the voting policy. but I do want users to come take a look at it, and see if there are any glaring problems with this draft. I have intentionally kept parts of this draft vague and open to interpretation, because I dont want to put too many rigid restrictions and guidelines on admins. I do make special note that admins can be removed if they are inactive, or if they violate policy. Alot of the points here were lifted from Help:Administrators, but it is my opinion that we need an official policy on this matter, and not just a limp help file. --Whiteknight (talk) (projects) 15:05, 15 August 2006 (UTC)

English Wikiversity is now Live!

For those that are interested, Brion just started up the English Wikiversity wiki:

http://en.wikiversity.org/

For those that want to help participate, feel free to go ahead and register an account, dig in, and help give this project the boost that it needs.

Unfortunately, my suggestion to fork Wikibooks didn't happen, so instead we have to do a more traditional Transwiki of the contents from here to en.wikiversity.

Thanks again to everybody who has made this come about an get started. --Rob Horning 15:42, 15 August 2006 (UTC)

BTW, Congratulations to you Rob!. Organizing the initial project proposal vote was certainly a major key effort to eventual success.Lazyquasar 08:38, 16 August 2006 (UTC)

OK, I checked out Transwiki. It seems to state explicitly that it is not for use between different wikis to choose the copy and paste. Is this out of date? If so is there a step by step procedure somewhere that shows how to maintain the history log? We have a lot of data to move from the "prototype" wikibooks Wikiversity to the actual [[2]]. It would be nice to do it correctly. Do I have to request Wikibooks adminship to do this or can a regular user do it? Lazyquasar 08:35, 16 August 2006 (UTC)

That is definitely not current anymore. We can directly import pages from meta and wikibooks through Special:Import (sysop status required), which preserves the change history. sebmol ^? 12:05, 16 August 2006 (UTC)

Special:Import has never worked for me, and indeed all I get is that the feature has been disabled by the developers. I wish there were some other way to transfer content from one Wikimedia project to another that would preserve the histories through other than copy and paste, or using a 'bot that does the copy and paste. The message I get from MediaWiki is: No transwiki import sources have been defined and direct history uploads are disabled. That doesn't sound too encouraging. Special:Export does work.... sort of. Even then, it doesn't include the full history or do a page dump of everything it should, but instead is a stragely formatted version of the webpage and nothing else. Essentially of little value especially since it can't be used with the import. --Rob Horning 13:47, 16 August 2006 (UTC)

You're correct, it has to be enabled specifically. On Wikiversity, both meta and wikibooks have been enabled as import sources. And it works like a charm. All you have to tell is the name of the page you want to import, in which local namespace it should be placed and if version history should be copied. Check my contributions and follow the links to Wikiversity on some of the pages I've imported. The version history is intact. sebmol ^? 16:02, 16 August 2006 (UTC)

I have created a template for pages that have been moved to Wikiversity. As mentioned elsewhere, these will all be pages about organizing Wikiversity, not actual textbooks. If there is a need to have them categorized automatically, please change the template to suit your needs. sebmol ^? 12:09, 16 August 2006 (UTC)

Textbook definition

Seems to be coming up a lot these days... anyone want to help? See Wikibooks:Textbooks --SB_Johnny | ^talk 15:40, 16 August 2006 (UTC)

It is about time we got this definition nailed down firmly. I'll come help out later, cause i'm pressed for time right now. --Whiteknight (talk) (projects) 16:02, 16 August 2006 (UTC)

Yup, should get done with high priority... the wikiversity folks are a bit worried about our VfD system here. --SB_Johnny | ^talk 16:06, 16 August 2006 (UTC)

Wikibooks:General voting rules

The current text of the general voting rules policy is up for vote. This is the same version of the text that we have been discussing for several weeks now. A consensus vote to approve this policy will cause it to be marked Template:Tl, and for the rules and regulations to go into effect immediatly thereafter.

Some key points about this policy that are worth understanding:

• All important decisions (WB:RFA, WB:VFD, policy changes, and others) must be decided by community consensus. Majority vote is not acceptable for making decisions.
• All users must have a minimum of 20 bona fide, productive contributions to be eligible to vote in important discussions (listed above). Users with fewer then 20 contributions may have their votes removed without warning.
• BOTM, COTM, and "Wikijunior book of the Quarter" will continue unaltered. These situations will still be allowed to use their pre-defined voting methods.

If this policy reaches consensus, these rules go into effect immediatly, and will be used to decide all currently open WB:VFD and WB:RFA votes. Since this proposal will have such a big impact on wikibooks, it is highly recommended that all users come in and discuss the issue on the talk page, and vote in the poll. --Whiteknight (talk) (projects) 17:03, 16 August 2006 (UTC)

In response to some comments and criticisms about this policy, I have made the following changes:

1. Added a section about being bold.
2. Removed all mention of the word "vote" except where we are describing that wikibooks does not operate by majority vote
3. Removed all minimum contribution requirements. Any user can discuss on any topic.
4. Noted that comments should be judged on their quality, not numerical quantity. Sockpuppetry therefore is useless.

I hope that these changes are acceptable to most wikibookians. We can discuss these changes on the policy talk page, and hopefully the community will agree on it. --Whiteknight (talk) (projects) 21:42, 17 August 2006 (UTC)

"fact" template?

Is there a template here for tagging something unsourced? If not, anyone object if I transwiki/fork w:Template:Fact? --SB_Johnny | ^talk 18:27, 16 August 2006 (UTC)

Wikibooks:Blocking Policy

I would like to suggest we adopt a blocking policy/guideline. In addition to helping prevent admin abuse, it also help give admins a clue of is and is not acceptable. I have copied Wikinews's blocking policy (my personal favorite) to Wikibooks:Blocking Policy. --Cspurrier 21:02, 17 August 2006 (UTC)

RFC on a Wikibooks template on Wikipedia

Certain Wikipedia articles link to Wikibooks using templates listed on w:en:Wikipedia:Wikibooks#Wikibooks. I've created a new template to merge all of the ones currently in use.

Please have a look at w:en:template:wikibooks-poc and the (rather quiet) discussion over at w:en:template talk:wikibooks#Reoganizing_the_Wikibooks_templates. --Swift 02:02, 18 August 2006 (UTC)

I like it. I know that i've had problems trying to pick which template to use between all the different options they have over there. --Whiteknight (talk) (projects) 02:19, 18 August 2006 (UTC)

Ack! Don't delete the old template... it's used by a lot of books, notably the cookbook, which is coloned. See discussion on naming policy for more on that. --SB_Johnny | ^talk 11:39, 18 August 2006 (UTC)

There is a "cookbook" template on wikipedia, that is used to link directly to the cookbook modules. We can change the "wikibooks" template however, and not affect the cookbook too much (hopefully). Also, the cookbook has it's own namespace, so the naming rules for it are going to be a little different from the naming rules for regular modules. --Whiteknight (talk) (projects) 13:28, 18 August 2006 (UTC)

OK, the Cookbook should probably get its own template then. --Swift 23:16, 18 August 2006 (UTC)

Actually, the Cookbook could also be transcluded using {{wkikbooks-poc|Cookbook:Pasta}}. --Swift 23:29, 18 August 2006 (UTC)

118 educational comics offered to Wikipedia

Jean-Pierre Petit is a 69 year old french scientist well known in France not only for his work but also for a large set of didactical comics (see his bibliography on the french WP: everything but the "Livres" section are comics) that used to be sold in book stores until recently. These comics cover many (mostly scientific) topics and usually get to concepts studied in colleges and universities. See The silence barrier for example.

Some years ago, when his contract with his publisher ended, he chose to offer these books for free download on the internet and gathered a (still growing) team who does a great job at translating these comics in as many languages as they can. As of today, on his website Knowledge without borders, 22 comics are offered for free download in 22 languages (select a flag) totalizing 118 books. BTW, for whomever is interested, these comics are also available in "textless" version for everyone volunteering to translate them

A couple of days ago, he discovered Wikipedia and liked it (who doesn't ? ;-). He then wrote a message (here is a backup) on the Help Desk, proposing to give away all those comics so that they can be placed on Wikipedia, offering « scientific knowledge to as many people as possible ». Great !

Problems :

• Some of these books were sold in book stores, and only the french version afaik. Some were not published because they were written after his contract ended. Therefore, I don't know if these comics should go to wikisource or wikibooks (that's why I'm writing this message on both projects, btw)
• 118 books in 22 languages make a lot of tedious operations : registering on the appropriate wiki project, uploading, making cross-links to translated books, etc. It's even possible that there be no wikisource/wikibooks project for some of the 22 languages
• JP Petit is not familiar at all with Wikipedia : the culture, the syntax, the licenses, how it works, what goes where, and so on.

My opinion is that he has many other things to do than to learn all these concepts and he would appreciate a strong coaching. Even better : if someone very familiar with Wikipedia could do the job on his behalf (uploading every file to the right place, adding the appropriate license, descriptions, crosslinks, ...), I'm sure it would spare him a lot of discouraging troubles. If you wonder, no, I can not be this hero (I don't know wikisource/wikibooks and I miss the time) but, if necessary, I could play as a mediator since I'm french and I have a fair grasp of wikipedia culture.

I hope his offer will interest you. Regards. — Xavier, 04:05, 19 August 2006 (UTC) (PS: JP Petit doesn't know me, I'm writing this on my own just because I support his idea of "Knowledge without borders")

Nice books! Probably wikisource... though someone should explain the GFDL to him, as he might not like the idea of someone else selling them. --SB_Johnny | ^talk 11:27, 19 August 2006 (UTC)

I'd be interested in translating some of those comics, but I can't find those textless versions. --84.239.157.217 20:04, 19 August 2006 (UTC)

http://www.savoir-sans-frontieres.com/without_text/ ? --Swift 21:54, 19 August 2006 (UTC)

Indeed. I've just sent him a (lengthy) mail about licence issues. This may be a concern since JP Petit has not clearly stated that he allows his books to be freely modified/translated/sold. I made him aware that someone is volunteering for Finnish/Swedish translations (great!). 84.239.157.217, you can also contact him directly via e-mail to offer your help. — Xavier, 22:38, 19 August 2006 (UTC)

Wikialbum - proposal for new project

I wrote that message at commons too.

Hi. Before i submit it at meta. Commons is a repository of files, but for users better will be project such as Wikialbum, when picters will be bigger and description will be larger (in their language only). So look for example at Częstochowa - a lot of pictures, good work with sections but photos are very small and describtion is week. When I want to look for Jasna Góra monastery, I look for category :Category:Jasna Góra. So, without description. I can make new page in main for Jasna Góra only, but it will be something like Częstochowa.

But look here: User:Przykuta/Album:Jasna Góra. Black background, large description, only in pl (good for pl users), big photos, only good quality... (not all at that example are Quality Images, but I think exactly about QI. We can use these images (QI) to make Wikialbum - as a new page space in commons or as a new Wikimedia Foundation project). Indywidual preferences - background (white, black or other), text - normal or italic...

That project demand cooperation between commons and wikiboks, I think.

With regards Przykuta 12:01, 20 August 2006 (UTC)

I think I prefer the commons format. --SB_Johnny | ^talk 12:06, 20 August 2006 (UTC)

See also the discussion which Przykuta started on commons:Village pump#August 20. --Swift 17:07, 20 August 2006 (UTC)

Vandalism, Vandalism Templates

There was a wave of vandalism this morning, that consisted of several sockpuppets. The first one, User:Jimbo WaIes recreated many of the vandalism templates and categories that were previously deleted. The others, User:Software Piracy and User:Cornlevel moved pages in a WoW style attack, many of the pages were "PENIS PENIS", etc. I reverted the moves (most of them, at least), but I found a few instances where repeated moves overwrote redirects with redirects, and then the page history needed to be undeleted. If anybody finds a page that seems to have been hit with vandalism, and can't be reverted, let me or another admin know about it.

Also, I edited the text of many of these templates with the following note:

This category or template has been deleted as per community consensus. It has been protected from recreation. For any questions, please go to The staff lounge, or as User:Whiteknight

and then I protected all these pages from editing and moving, so that they can't be recreated. It seems to me that the vandals are simply trying to glorify themselves by creating these templates, and putting them on non-vandal user pages. If anybody has any questions/comments about this, let me know. --Whiteknight (talk) (projects) 13:40, 21 August 2006 (UTC)

Just to clarify so that others wont be as confused as I was: the vandal has the username User:Jimbo WaIes, not User:Jimbo Wales. Brilliant, though! --Swift 18:29, 21 August 2006 (UTC)

Does this have anything to do with the history cutoff on Wikibooks talk:General voting rules? The history doesn't show any edits prior to this morning, UTC.--Swift 18:38, 21 August 2006 (UTC)

It does, unfortunately. that page got moved multiple times. I reverted the moves, but it seems that I reverted one too many times, and deleted the page to revert it with a redirect. I was able to salvage the original text from before the vandalism, but the history seems to be gone now. Luckily, it is only a talk page, but it shows how terrible the vandalism was today.--Whiteknight (talk) (projects) 20:07, 21 August 2006 (UTC)

Wikibooks:General voting rules

We are going to try and bring this one back to a decision, because it seems that all major concerns have been addressed from the last straw poll. Here are some of the major changes that have been made (and are probably going to cause more problems this time around):

1. All mention of the word "vote" has been removed, and further emphasis was put on the ideas of "discussion" "compromise", and "consensus".
2. The minimum contribution requirement was removed, all users may now participate in any discussion
3. Comments are to be judged based on their quality, not on the numerical quantity.
4. The "decision making process" steps are going to be replaced with a nice flow-chart (but haven't been changed yet)
5. We are going to implement this as a "guideline", not a "policy". Text has been added that we should follow the "spirit of the policy", not the "letter of the policy".

It is my hope that the community can agree on this, and that we can finally get some kind of official decision-making apparatus in place. The current discussion is happening at Wikibooks talk:General voting rules. --Whiteknight (talk) (projects) 20:12, 21 August 2006 (UTC)

How to get book to appear in search?

I started a wee book a few months ago. I can navigate to it with Categories, but it doesn't come up when I put words from the title into the search box. What's going on? Curyous1

Wikibooks titles are case-sensitive. what is the title of your book? --Whiteknight (talk) (projects) 03:24, 22 August 2006 (UTC)

A wiki book is so bad that it should be off-line until improved.

I've been updating Wikipedia Fortran and, as part of that, clicking on links to see what is actually linked to. Clicking on Wikibooks Fortran, found the Fortran book with text such as the following:

"Functions are more simple than subroutines. A function can only handle one variable, and can be invoked from within a write statement, inside an if declairation if (function) then, etc. A subroutine handles many variables and can only be used as a stand-alone command."

An amazing collection of errors for so few words! My time is going into Wikipedia, I'm not taking on a Wikibooks project.

My assertion is that the current Wikibooks Fortran text is so bad that it can not do any good and possibly does damage - should anyone associate the quality of that text with the quality of Fortran in general. I'd like the book removed from public access; either set so that only its editors have access or entirely deleted. How can that be done?

Thanks Rwwww Template:Unsigned2

Perhaps others can provide them, but I don't know if we have any policies on quality. If you find erraneous information, I'd suggest you either fix or delete the passage. You don't need to take on a Wikibooks project, just fix what you see. --Swift 07:17, 22 August 2006 (UTC)

You can always just remove the link from wikipedia...--SB_Johnny | ^talk 09:17, 22 August 2006 (UTC)

I'll put a cleanup notice on the book, and perhaps a warning that there are some errors in the text. It really isn't our policy to hide projects that need help from the public: It's the public that is going to make that book great eventually! --Whiteknight (talk) (projects) 12:58, 22 August 2006 (UTC)

While I might agree that if such a book became a "Book of the Month" candidate or actually recieved such a distinction that it would be inappropriate (think featured article on Wikipedia), Wikibooks is really a place for editing and developing content. I would argue that if something is so poorly written that it wants to make you discharge bodily functions, there is a high likelyhood that somebody will come along and try to fix it and make a huge improvement, or even significantly edit it to the point that it is unrecognizable from the previous content. I've seen that happen both here on Wikibooks as well as on Wikipedia. If you want to mark this as a work in progress and put cleanup notices on every page to show its "in progress" nature, that seem appropriate. -Rob Horning 14:00, 22 August 2006 (UTC)

Wikibooks:Counter-Vandalism Unit

I am trying to start a local chapter of the counter-vandalism unit, or WBCVU. Joining is easy, all you need to do is sign up! The WBCVU members monitor for and repair vandalism. You don't need to be an admin, all you need is a desire to help out the project. If you are interested in joining the group, come to the new page, and sign up. --Whiteknight (talk) (projects) 21:25, 22 August 2006 (UTC)

What is the point?

Since the day I started contributing to wikibooks I've been fighting vandalism, that group doesn't provide more power to its members nor does it impose any duties, so what's the point, labeling people and separating them into small groups only brings trouble...--Panic 16:06, 23 August 2006 (UTC)

I understand what you are saying, but the point isnt to get better at fighting the vandalism, necessarily, but instead to build a sense of community. Wikipedia has such a unit, and even though we aren't wikipedia, we can still learn some lessons from them. Wikibooks has pretty poor community at the moment. That doesnt mean that the individual people are bad at what they do, it just means that we aren't as sociable as we could be. At the moment, wikibooks is a large, faceless community, and by making things more personal, we can get more users more involved. We aren't separating people into groups so much as we are allowing people to step up their level of involvement.

Ideally, we could have all sorts of such groups, that people can get involved in. Wikipedia has many such groups: people handing out barnstars, people sending out "happy birthday" messages to users, people fixing articals as groups. I would like to have all these things here at wikibooks, but we have to start somewhere.

If you don't want to join, that's no big deal. Some people will, some people won't: we all get to decide our own level of involvement. --Whiteknight (talk) (projects) 16:43, 23 August 2006 (UTC)

I think it's a great idea, mainly for the organising factor. By setting up a group around a project, we better coordinate, learn from each other and build up a knowledge-bank which is useful for fighting vandals. This weekend we had a visit from Tojo who Whiteknight fended off pretty much on his lonesome. Having a way to contact those who are experienced at waging wiki wars instead of everyone jsut doing their own buisiness would be a great asset. --Swift 17:21, 23 August 2006 (UTC)

Admin - please delete

Could an admin please delete Three Men in a Boat. I created it accidentaly, thinking I was in WikiSource. Thanks, Reuvenk 04:40, 23 August 2006 (UTC)

Done. --SB_Johnny | ^talk 10:49, 23 August 2006 (UTC)

What should go in the Sidebar

Folloing Rob Horning's suggestion, I'm bringing up an issue related to a suggestion I made on Mediawiki talk:Sidebar. I proposed that the Cookbook be put in the navigation box. After all, the Cookbook has it's own namespace which definately sets it apart from Wikibooks' more "common" books. The Cookbook even has it's own template on Wikipedia.

What are peoples' feelings about this in particular, and the question in this section's header in general? It might also be a good idea to split the navigation box up into specific books (Cookbook, Wikijunior, ..., Wikiprofessional) and general helpful links (Main Page, Help, Books *). --Swift 17:55, 23 August 2006 (UTC)

Alot of people concentrate their efforts in the cookbook, and I would venture to say that a sizable portion of the entire wikibooks community focuses their attention there. So I say that we should make a link to the cookbook a prominent part of our site. Yes, put it in the sidebox. --Whiteknight (talk) (projects) 18:02, 23 August 2006 (UTC)

I think that the Cookbook is a worthy addition, and that it is something that very nearly is a seperate project along the scale of Wikiversity and Wikijunior. With it having its own namespace and some significant independent policies and style that pertains just to this one book, it might be worth having here. I'd still like to see what some other users think of this idea first, however. If it is added, I would like to put it between "Help" and "Wikijunior". --Rob Horning 10:19, 24 August 2006 (UTC)

Sounds good to me. --SB_Johnny | ^talk 17:20, 24 August 2006 (UTC)

I definitely disagree. There are many popular books here and Cookbook is only one of them. I find it unusual that it even got its own namespace when other categories of books could also use one yet no one seems to want that. The links aleady on the sidebar are pushing it in my opinion. A page of "Popular Books" should be created and then links will go from there, but I certainly don't want to see the Cookbook have its own main link. This is an unfair advantage that several other larger books won't even have. -withinfocus 18:10, 24 August 2006 (UTC)

"Advantage"... huh? --SB_Johnny | ^talk 18:32, 24 August 2006 (UTC)

Being listed on the main page gives you far more exposure and accessibility. To be listed on every page is even more powerful. Not every big book can be listed on the sidebar, and those unlisted books are being treated unfairly. Some of the already-listed items aren't very popular to begin and I don't recall it being much of a consensus to have them listed there either. I think a site like Wikipedia is proper in what it's listing and we've listed way too specific and overhyped sections of the site. -withinfocus 21:18, 24 August 2006 (UTC)

While we are on the subject, I definately think that "wikistudy" and "wikiprofessional" shouldn't be on the sidebar (they aren't nearly important enough to be in the sidebar, but they could be on the main page). Also, I think we are getting close to a time when we should remove the "wikiversity" link as well: Put a redirect link on the main page if we need too, but wikiversity isnt a part of this project anymore (except in a temporary storage capacity). Adding the cookbook makes sense to me, because it does draw a significantly higher proportion of the wikibooks community then any other books here. It was given it's own namespace as a result of it's enormous popularity, and I think we are right to nurture projects that are drawing positive attention to our site. In the sidebar, and in other high-profile places, we want to put our best foot (or feet) forward, so that people can see what we can do here. --Whiteknight (talk) (projects) 22:16, 24 August 2006 (UTC)

I agree that those sections should be removed, but perhaps this is a time to suggest that other namespaces be created by the developers. We're moving out of it now due to NP, but I thought it was a great idea to have namespaces by bookshelf or another high-level category like Programming. I personally think Cookbook is old and that's why it got the namespace, not by popularity. Having favoritism for certain books isn't fair to me, and I think we should just link something like Book / Collaboration of the Month or "Good Books" or whatever the page is. I really just don't think the Cookbook is that important. -withinfocus 01:21, 25 August 2006 (UTC)

I think we should be careful with populating WB with namespaces. What I see as their main advantage is that one can limit searches to them. Apart from that, categories do a good job at grouping. Is there anything else that speaks for namespacing books?

The [BC]OTM link is an idea worth considering. --Swift 07:33, 25 August 2006 (UTC)

Where can we see Book usage? Had a look at Specialpages, but saw nothing. I'd be reluctant to give specific books such promenance on the sidebar, though. I see the cookbook as a special case due to its special nature. I'm not locked on that though.

SB Johnny seems to be taking on the Wikiversity cleanup. Perhaps he can redirect when he starts, and delete when he has finished moving? --Swift 07:33, 25 August 2006 (UTC)

RFC on the Cookbook template on Wikipedia

Yes, another RFC :-). Could those interested have a look at w:en:Template:Cookbook and give their thoughts?

When looking through the Cookbook recipes I found no subpages, so I didn't equip the template with that functionality. Does anyone know if there are any recipes with subpages? --Swift 18:00, 23 August 2006 (UTC)

I like it. If we had a better image for our cookbook, it owuld be better.--Whiteknight (talk) (projects) 18:03, 23 August 2006 (UTC)

Yes, it would be nice to be able to distinguish the Cookbook a bit, but I'm not artistic or imaginative enough for taking on that task ... --Swift 21:27, 23 August 2006 (UTC)

I'm reasonably good with my copy of photoshop, but only at touching up images, not at creating them. Not everybody can be an artist! --Whiteknight (talk) (projects) 22:11, 24 August 2006 (UTC)

There are a couple of subpages in the cookbook in general (you can check by looking at the index), but no recipe or ingredient should be using them. Kellen ^T 10:06, 25 August 2006 (UTC)

Guidelines, templates, etc

I have created a number of templates that will be useful in designating "guidelines" as opposed to "policies". Among these are:

• Template:Tl
• Template:Tl
• Template:Tl

I have put the Template:Tl template on the few pages that already were in Category:Wikibooks guidelines.

Now, there are a number of proposed policies and drafts of this or that lying around that the wikibooks community (as far as i can tell) already accept as common sense. I would like to move some of these from Template:Tl to Template:Tl, if for no other reason the to close the books on issues that never quite became policy, but that are useful nonetheless. Among these pages are:

1. Wikibooks:Talk page
2. Wikibooks:Title pages
3. Wikibooks:Annotated texts
4. Wikibooks:Image use policy
5. Wikibooks:Assume good faith
6. Wikibooks:No offensive usernames
7. Wikibooks:Editing disputes policy
8. Wikibooks:Forking policy
9. Wikibooks:Semi-protection policy
10. Wikibooks:Profanity

there is a proposal on the table for many of these drafts to be removed in favor of Wikibooks:Be nice, a vague, over-arching proposal which says in a few lines of text which the others say in a few pages. I would like to change Wikibooks:Be nice to an accepted guideline as well, although not in lieu of these other guidelines.

Also, I have made Wikibooks:General voting rules into an official guideline, and have moved the text of that guideline to Wikibooks:Decision making.

If nobody objects to any of these changes, I'm going to start making them. --Whiteknight (talk) (projects) 22:08, 23 August 2006 (UTC)

Are you anxious to get these done? I haven't been here too long and wouldn't mind going through each one. I don't mind it if you go right ahead, but what do you guys say about doing one a week, one after the other? We'll be done by then end of the year and each one will have gotten a brainstorming ... but then again, perhaps they already have had all the attention they need.

One thing I'd like to do is implement the ideas I mentioned on Wikibooks talk:General voting rules on WB:PAG (essentially explicitly stating that policy must be followed, but a guideline should be followed). See Wikibooks talk:Policies and guidelines if you are interested. --Swift 03:42, 24 August 2006 (UTC)

I'm way ahead of you Swift, I've changed the text of the Template:Tl template to say "must" instead of "should". I've also created the Template:Tl template that says "should". What might be a good idea, however, would be to place a prominent link to that RFC on the WB:PAG page.

Also, I'm not in any hurry to make any changes, necessarily, but I feel like many of these proposals have been sitting in limbo for far too long, and it is about high-time we made a decision on them, yes or no. Your idea of spending a week on each individual proposal is a good idea in my book, and it will ensure that people who want to get involved can, that changes aren't made too radically or too quickly, and that each proposal will get a fair share of attention. Starting on monday then, howabout we focus our attention on Wikibooks:Be nice. There is an outstanding call that many of our other policies (no profanity, no offensive usernames, no personal attacks, etc) should be merged into the Be nice policy. We can look at that proposal first, and then decide at a later time if the text of other proposals is redundant or not. --Whiteknight (talk) (projects) 16:45, 24 August 2006 (UTC)

No-one will accuse you of being slow on your feet :-). As for the RFC and WB:PAG, I'd like to see a must/should defining clause on the page, but I'm not sure about referencing the RFC since it is external to this project. Not that the IETF isn't to be trusted, though ;-). I was going to formulate this, but got sidetracked by reading old discussions on the talk page... (come on: stay on track).

Good. Then on Monday it's Be nice week! --Swift 08:08, 25 August 2006 (UTC)

Beginning wikiversity cleanup

I'm going to start locking down the pages that have been imported to wikiversity. I'm in touch with the admins ("Custodians") over there, and will be working closely with them during this process.

Rather than deleting right away, I'm going to just protect them for now... I figure we should wait until they are out of the trial period (6 months) before going ahead with the deletions. This will be a slow process, because we're creating stable redirect pages on wikiversity for linking from the pages here. Should be done in a couple weeks. --SB_Johnny | ^talk 18:09, 24 August 2006 (UTC)

Admins: please use template Template:Tl if you lock pages. --SB_Johnny | ^talk 20:31, 24 August 2006 (UTC)

WB:BOTM and WB:COTM

There is about a week left in the month of august, and the BOTM and COTM votes for september have drawn a pitifully small number of votes. The COTM page has attracted only 5 unique voters (I voted twice), and the BOTM page has only attracted a single vote, towards a single nominee. I will look through the list of Wikibooks:Featured books myself tonight, and see if there are any other good choices for either of these categories. Alot of our BOTM and COTM choices recently have been "computer related", so perhaps we could make a conscious community effort to pick a more "soft" subject. --Whiteknight (talk) (projects) 22:22, 24 August 2006 (UTC)

I would dare say that perhaps this next month we shouldn't have a BOTM? I havn't spent much time lately trying to review Wikibooks that perhaps deserve the honor, and my problem I have with the current BOTM is that none of the books I find to be worthy of the distinction. There must be something here on Wikibooks that has made signficant progress and worth note on the front page. Perhaps even a previous BOTM book that has shown considerable progress from when it was last recognized? There certainly has not been a multiple winner yet. --Rob Horning 15:31, 25 August 2006 (UTC)

I agree with you that if there are no worthy candidates, that perhaps we should put off BOTM for a month, or even insert an artificial "Focus of the Month" instead. For instance, I think that wikibooks really needs a stronger sense of community, like what wikipedia has with all the wikiprojects, and the CVU, and Esperanza. Perhaps we should try and create a certain amount of community infrastructure, and use the month of september to promote it?

We could replace both the COTM and BOTM (neither has many votes) sections on the main page with advertisements for other initiatives like those mentioned above. Also, it was mentioned somewhere else that perhaps we could start spending a week each on some of the old policy proposals that have never been decided one way or the other: discuss each for a week, come to a quick decision whether to "make it policy/guideline", "reject it", or "save for later". In this way we could tie up alot of loose ends of that sort, and get more people interested in wikibooks administration (in the sense of "helping to run the community", not RFA). --Whiteknight (talk) (projects) 18:53, 25 August 2006 (UTC)

PDF Version template has an error

The PDF Version template has an error - on the Special Relativity book it brings up Wikijunior Solar System. RobinH 08:54, 25 August 2006 (UTC)

It wasn't the template, but the link it referred to. The file does, for some reason, link to a book on the Solar System, while File:Special relativity.pdf links to the right docuement. Special Relativity seems to have started out at Special Relativity ... which may be the cause of the confusion. --Swift 10:18, 25 August 2006 (UTC)

Move talk page

Can some admin move Wikibooks talk:General voting rules to Wikibooks talk:Decision making. It seems that Wikibooks:Decision making was moved to WB:PAG which is probably why Wikibooks:General voting rules's talk page didn't get copied over. --Swift 11:09, 25 August 2006 (UTC)

Yeah, by "it seems it was moved", you really mean "Whiteknight messed up, and moved shit to all the wrong places". I'm sorry for that. I've turned Wikibooks talk:Decision making into a redirect for Wikibooks talk:General voting rules. This is just a temporary solution to the problem (and not even a good one, really), but I will have time to fix it later and correct all the ensuing double-redirects that would be created from the page move. --Whiteknight (talk) (projects) 12:27, 25 August 2006 (UTC)

Archival templates

We should probably have archival templates to put on debates once they've concluded. Wikipedia has a number of those at w:en:Category:Archival templates, but I'm not sure which ones we'd need. Instead of being bold and creating a few which will get duplicates that will only confuse matters for users, I deceided to turn to the Lounge for discussion. --Swift 12:48, 25 August 2006 (UTC)

I don't think it is necessary to maintain these discussions verbatim on the talk pages, or even in archive pages. I think that such discussions, especially if they are significantly old can simply be deleted, because their text will be preserved in the page history. Also, discussions that are significantly old and obsolete (discussions where a decision was made that was later superceeded) don't even help to explain the process that went into the current state of policy. Also, It is important to note that many important parts of a discussion happen on the Mailing Lists, or on IRC, and cannot be documented here anyway (unless we copy text from these external resources onto our servers, which seems a dreadful waste of time to me).

Discussions that should be kept can be moved to a specific archive page, and we can use a general "This page represents an archive for page {{{1}}} for the time period {{{2}}} till {{{3}}} Please do not edit it." This way the talk pages we are using don't fill with clutter and become unweildy. --Whiteknight (talk) (projects) 18:48, 25 August 2006 (UTC)

Checkuser rights

I would just like to post a quick message before I go away for the weekend about the current elections for checkuser rights at WB:RFA. There are a number of people under consideration for these rights currently, and we need at least two candidates to receive 25 votes or more before anybody can get them. Here are some points to consider:

• Checkuser rights enables an admin to see the IP address of a registered user. Ostensibly this is so that vandals who are using sockpuppetry can be detected and blocked much more quickly and more efficiently.
• There are some privacy concerns in having a user being able to see an IP address, and therefore a candidate needs at least 25 votes to receive the permissions.
• Current wikimedia policy is that a project may not have only one checkuser, but needs to have 2 or more.
• User:Derbeth currently has enough votes (26, at last count), but we need a second person.
• User:Uncle G has many votes, but has lost some support recently due to his inactivity. I (User:Whiteknight) currently have about 17 or 18 votes, and User:Robert Horning was recently nominated but has only a few votes.

I would like all wikibookians to at least be aware of this, and people who are in support of it should come down and cast votes as they see fit. --Whiteknight (talk) (projects) 21:37, 25 August 2006 (UTC)

I'll throw in some votes. I'm not active here so I don't know how much weight they would carry but I'll put them in anyway. Gerard Foley 21:44, 25 August 2006 (UTC)

At this point I think it is just numerical, so every vote has equal weight. The 25 vote limit is completely absurd outside some of the bigger projects. en.wikipedia can probably pull together 25 votes before anyboyd announces that there is even a nomination, but en.wikibooks needs to scrape for every precious vote that we can get. One day our project will be bigger (hopefully) so we dont have these problems. Thanks for the votes! --Whiteknight (talk) (projects) 21:52, 25 August 2006 (UTC)

User:Walter, a steward, has just granted User:Derbeth and I (User:Whiteknight) checkuser rights. Thanks to everybody who has voted. --Whiteknight (talk) (projects) 22:12, 28 August 2006 (UTC)

WoW vandalism

There's been several offensive page moves today. --86.134.56.248 14:08, 30 August 2006 (UTC)

There has been a large amount of vandalism this morning. The following users were all involved (that I can see):

• User:Sunlight2
• User:Hoggle
• User:Baron Cornett
• User:Bricks and Flings

Also, all these accounts originated from the same IP address that left this warning message: 86.134.56.248

I have blocked that IP address, and all these accounts, and I have reverted most of the page moves. I am going to go through and start deleting the obscene redirects. Anybody who is interested in helping can feel free. If i have missed anything, please send me a message and I will fix it. --Whiteknight (talk) (projects) 16:02, 30 August 2006 (UTC)

Wikibooks rival ?

There's a competition out there you know http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2006-08/uog-gtp083106.php

Kpjas 08:06, 1 September 2006 (UTC)

Actually, it looks like "competition" for wikiversity... If I understand the project correctly, they plan on writing the texts here on wikibooks :). --SB_Johnny | ^talk 11:04, 1 September 2006 (UTC)

BOTM and COTM

I have updated the BOTM and COTM winners for September, but I warn people that the text of the entries is very bad. People who are associated with these books (or people with a better grasp of these topics then I have) are encouraged to edit the text of these templates. --Whiteknight (talk) (projects) 15:33, 1 September 2006 (UTC)

Wikibooks Logo Vote

There is currently a movement to change the wikibooks logo on meta:

There are several good candidates, including an option to keep the current logo. Also, there is somequestion about the current motto that is on the logo image ("Think Free, Learn Free"), and whether it should be altered or even omitted entirely.

I would recommend that all wikibookians go over to meta, and voice your opinions. Voting is scheduled to begin on this issue on Sept 7th. --Whiteknight (talk) (projects) 01:43, 6 September 2006 (UTC)

Gaming manual as a textbook

I'm throwing down the gauntlet here on this issue again. I am sick an tired of a bunch of content being removed simply because it is of a particular theme. In particular, the removal of the gaming guides was IMHO totally out of line, but in this case I would like to prove both Jimbo and the rest of the anti-gaming guide people that they are not only wrong, but flat out wrong about the removal of content simply because of the topic, not because of the content.

I'm willing to consider a number of options, but what I'd like to do is write a real honest-to-goodness textbook that would be of the quality that it could be used for a university class, but that the topic of the textbook is a video game. Specifically I'd like to do Doom if for no reason other than Jimbo has specifically marked it for deletion and claimed that it could never be made into a textbook. I'd love to prove him wrong on this point in particular.

You can easily prove me wrong. Show me a University course where the objective is to learn to play Doom, and where the students work from a textbook. If not, then what is the point?--Jimbo Wales 21:55, 25 May 2006 (UTC)

My former employer, Columbia College Chicago, has a new game design major. While no course on Doom per se is taught, part of the new curriculum is a course on game engines and writing and designing virtual gaming environments. It seems like it wouldn't be much of a stretch to use a textbook that is survey of say the original M&M, Doom, and WoW to describe the art and design of these virtual environments. As long as the rigor exists in the treatise, it could very well be used at the course. Of course, one could include historicity and the nature of actually WRITING a game guide as a chapter. Plus, I can't imagine Columbia College is the only higher ed that has a curriculum in this topic .02USD jtvisona 05/28/06

I believe what you are saying is that textbooks suitable for students can be written about games. I would agree with that. Indeed, going by Jimbo's amendment to What is Wikibooks [3], so would he. What we are doing, however, is to systematically remove game walkthroughs (ie books about games which clearly do not fall within the definition of "textbook"), preferably after having found a new home for them elsewhere on the web, Jguk 07:39, 29 May 2006 (UTC)

This is not intended to be a video game walkthrough (which should have been the point of the debate well before the removal of the gaming guides), but rather an in depth scholarly review of this game, and to point out the historical significance that this game has within the computer gaming industry. The historical roots of this game, including Castle Wolfenstein, Commander Keen, and other earlier ID software games, as well as other computer games would be included in this book as well. How Doom has affected the development of other first-person shoot 'em up games would also be a significant point in this book as well.

All other Wikibooks and in general Wikimedia policies should be followed when developing this textbook, which the end goal is to reach a standard that if this is deleted, that wikibooks itself should be simply shut down as a failed project.

I don't know if there are any video game textbook supporters left on Wikibooks, but if there is anybody interested in taking on this project, please let me know. I think a real textbook can be written on this topic. Others may disagree, but this is also to see if there is any room left on Wikibooks to even permit the writing of such a real textbook. My opinion is that just because of the subject matter that it shouldn't be deleted out of hand. --Rob Horning 12:19, 19 May 2006 (UTC)

Video games are going to be an extremely disturbing phenomenon in the next decade or two as they become enmeshed with real life. When online cash can be withdrawn from ATMs as real cash we are talking about something serious occurring. Wikibooks may well be the "cutting edge" publishing medium that gets out of video games just as they start to take over the world.

I do not play these games myself but it is obvious that they are the test bench for the future virtual reality working and trading worlds. There are currently 6 million on-line gamers involved in games that have real world cash interfaces and this type of cash represents over $800,000,000 dollars of real world money (See current edition of New Scientist).

Don't get me wrong, I really hate the idea of people going to work by sticking on a VR goggle-set but sadly it looks like the future. It is probably already a reasonable business idea to set up as a shop-keeper or interior designer in an on-line game. RobinH 13:10, 19 May 2006 (UTC)

But not all games deal with internet cash. In fact, most of the games that deal with internet cash are strictly casino games like Texas Hold' Em or BlackJack, except online. Thats like using Porn movies to say that the movie industry is poor, and Hentai and Porn Books to say that the book industry is also unsuitable for textbook materials. --Dragontamer 19:02, 19 May 2006 (UTC)

What I was saying is that games that involve cash but which are not casino games or pure porn are a new development that is likely to take off in a big way - see Business week story. These games are a test bed for VR commerce and a VR economy. We should not ditch games just when games are about to "happen". RobinH 19:41, 19 May 2006 (UTC)

Lol. I misread your post :-/ Agreed. --Dragontamer 19:56, 19 May 2006 (UTC)

Don't worry Robert, I'm still here kicking for Video Games on Wikibooks. My first question is what stance should we take on Doom? The real obvious one is to take the Doom Source code and then do an analysis from there. The primary advantage is that yes, this fits the classical definition of textbook, but it probably wouldn't save the video game bookshelf.

Another perspective I see we can do is to see Doom as an art of itself. Using Game Design textbooks like Chris Crawford on Game Design, we could use his vocabulary of what a game is, and then analyse the game akin to a book or movie. Perhaps the level design and how mazes are as they are in Doom, the pros and the cons. Etc. Etc. From this perspective, it would be like the Muggles'_Guide_to_Harry_Potter but for doom instead. --Dragontamer 19:02, 19 May 2006 (UTC)

Robert, as long as it's not just a walkthrough, I'd be fine with it. I have been a big supporter of the Textbook Rule, but if the topic of a textbook is a video game, I'd be more than willing to help. Let's get cracking. --LV ^{(Dark Mark)} 14:31, 20 May 2006 (UTC)

Personally, I'd have no problem at all with a textbook on Doom along the lines that Robert suggests. Wikibooks is for textbooks. I believe we all agree that books similar to those used in existing classes in a number of learning institutions are within our scope. Additionally, I believe we all think that Wikibooks' scope is wider than that - although we do disagree on how much wider it is than that and how to define accurately what we mean by a textbook that can't be used for a current class in a learning instition.

To my mind a lot of what a textbook is is in the aim and style and the use to which a textbook can be put. It would be foolish to say that there can be a textbook on every conceivable topic, yet at the same time it is possible to write interesting and informative textbooks that do not correspond to classes in schools, universities or adult education centres. Robert's proposed book on Doom, for me, appears to meet the right criteria. I would stress though that our current book on Doom does not.

I would, however, ask Robert, for his own sake, to think whether he really wishes to pursue his idea - as I'm sure we are all aware, writing a book takes up a surprisingly large amount of time. However, if Robert will put in this effort in essence just to prove a point (and at the risk of Jimbo ordering the book off Wikibooks anyway) then I will not in any way seek to hinder him, Jguk 16:29, 20 May 2006 (UTC)

I'm sorry, but I'm not following your logic, Robert. How is a "scholarly review" a game manual? The book Doom can't be turned into a textbook without rewriting all of the content, which is what you intend to do. Correct me if I'm wrong but Jimbo has never said that a textbook can't be written on this topic. In his WB:WIW revision, he said quite the opposite. I think what you have to ask yourself is whether a book would be usable in a classroom on any aspect of game design, like an annotated text would be in a literature classroom. I also don't know what to popularity of video games has to do with this. There are even colleges devoted to video game design, but not one has a "How to finish Doom" or "Doom Manual" class. --haginძaz 16:59, 20 May 2006 (UTC)

So make it a rewrite... even if it has to be from scratch. Monopoly had this happen and has become a much better book as a result. The opinion of Jimbo was that Doom could never be used as a textbook because of the subject matter. Yes, he did say a textbook could never be written about this topic. This was mentioned specifically as an example. My proposal here is to rewrite, perhaps even from a clean sweep of the current Doom Wikibook being thrown out, to turn this into a textbook that could be usable in a classroom. Major sections would include game play, economy (weapons and ammo), algorithms, and historical impact of the game both in terms of roots and what games have been developed from this one game.

Based on what I am percieving from the people trying to remove video games, they are trying to delete content because of subject matter alone, and not content. The discussion has become so heated that the issue of wheither any university-level courses were taught on the subject, with incredulity occuring when some actual courses were pointed out.

In addition to all of this discussion, until Jimbo came in here and really pushed for textbooks, Wikibooks was about books, not textbooks. Essentially, this was for content that would normally be considered acceptable on Wikipedia, but for its length and the need to break it up into multiple sections. Some additional flexability was granted for Wikibooks to do non-encyclopedia type works. I will admit that the first Wikibook is the Organic Chemistry, and that was a textbook. Other content is on Wikibooks however, including content added by WMF board members that is clearly not a textbook in nature.

I have been approached now by two different people who are openly trying to encourage me to fork Wikibooks with actual server space to do so. I think this is an unfortunate situation, and I would rather that forking doesn't occur. I still havn't decided if my effort is going to be used to work on those forks and abandoning this project altogether or if there is something worth saving here. I do believe that far too much content has been removed from Wikibooks, especially when much of that content was added on good faith that it belonged here.... even surviving VfDs earlier. While there was and is still cruft on Wikibooks, taking out two major bookshelves (Video Games and How-tos) is not a way to win friends and grow this project. Especially when there is no place to move it within the context of Wikimedia projects. Had this been done with Wikiversity (I guess they are next with the axe now) another fairly significant community would have been destroyed as well, with some potentially outstanding ideas lost permanently. --Rob Horning 19:30, 20 May 2006 (UTC)

Wouldn't you agree that the content you will be using to create a Doom book would work better as part of larger textbooks, such as as examples? In my opinion, yes, it would be a textbook teaching concepts taught in classrooms, but just not a very good one. I don't think it occurred to Jimbo that someone would bother teaching game design using only Doom, as better examples exist.

Has any attempt been made to ask the board or Jimbo himself whether he has the right to dicate policy? I would like to hear someone outside of Wikibooks say that this community has the right to decide upon Wikibooks' scope. If that happens, an active discussion should ensue and I'll give my opinion on the matter. --haginძaz 20:34, 20 May 2006 (UTC)

Well said Robert. As for critical study of Doom; I cannot think of a more revolutionary game than Doom. In fact, the word "Doom Clone" described First Person Shooter genre for *years* after Doom was released. It would be great as a case study. --Dragontamer 03:51, 21 May 2006 (UTC)

I cannot speak for the others, but my input in this matter has always been from the perspective of a gamer. I originally came to Wikibooks because of the Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas guide, where a large portion of my contributions were and likely still are. And once it was suggested that they be moved I was fine with that, as to me it makes sense to move to a more focussed, gamer-friendly wiki. Indeed I've talked to many outside of the wiki environment who were surprised that a site called "Wikibooks" had videogame strategy at all!

I bear gaming topics no ill will. If someone starts "A Tempest in a Coffee Pot? Jack Thompson Vs. the Gaming World" I'll be right in there expanding it and linking to interviews and the like. But if someone starts "The Definitive Grand Theft Auto: Vice City Stories Solutions Manual" I'll take it to Vfd soon after. Serious Wikibooks can and will one day be written regarding videogames, but the current game guides simply don't fit that category. And is moving them off Wikibooks all that dissimilar from your tabula rasa propsal? Garrett^Talk 04:53, 21 May 2006 (UTC)

Again and again, this argument comes up. And again and again, people fail to come up with a good reason for why Video Games should be removed. Unless I'm missing something here, but I don't see any good reason for video game guides to go away, aside from stir up trouble in the community.

My strongest protest to this move is that it of all things, slaps long time editors in the face, and kicks them out of the wikibooks community. Whether or not this is for the "better" of wikibooks, we will have to live with the fact that we got a bunch of now former editors of wikibooks, who are very disgruntled.

As Robert said, this move has made some people to go as far as make forks of Wikibooks. Isn't this a tiny little tipoff that just maybe something is off here? 2 people asking for forks means there are a *whole* lot more than just 2 people pissed. The only reason there is to this nonsense is that "Jimbo Says". If it isn't obvious to anyone yet, Jimbo seems to be more busy at Wikipedia than here, to put it mildly. As I've said before, there have been admin requests that were denyed for having fewer than 270 edits, and having 6 month breaks. As much as I don't wanna downplay Jimbo here... I just wanna point out that "Jimbo Says" is not a good enough reason for all this. --Dragontamer 06:03, 21 May 2006 (UTC)

I'm wasn't making any point, merely refreshing what I've said in previous debates before jumping into this one in an attempt to avoid any further confusion in an already complex debate. Bah.

I'm not one to go too much against the flow of what the Foundation says, which is why I've largely accepted what Jimbo said. In the end the Foundation owns the servers, however we collectively have supplied both funding and content, thus making users by and large feel that we have some say in how we run things. Jimbo has always encouraged us to make our own policy decisions, however he has stepped in occasionally when those decisions didn't go the way he felt the Foundation stood (e.g. Getting a Girl and other such modules).

But recently he's become more and more vocal, and less and less present to clarify his rationale. The videogame policy change is the climax; even to those supporting the move it's a stunning change of events. Is this the Foundation speaking, or is it only Jimbo? And to what extent do the Foundation board members back Jimbo's statements as being ex cathedra, so to speak? And, also, to what extent do we the community (who are arguably responsible for Wikibooks' content and in turn its success) get a say in matters?

I'm all for continuing a happy medium, but things are getting out of hand. This is why I have put my transwikiing efforts on hold. I need to know where we stand. If we're to allow game guides, sure, I can use the log to undelete what I've moved and everybody will live happily ever after. If we're not, fine, I can continue work. But I really feel it's time we heard from the board itself, and not just Jimbo. I want to see closure to this issue. I really don't care which decision is reached, as long as it's both official and final. Garrett^Talk 07:20, 21 May 2006 (UTC)

I put a note on Jimbo's WP page.

Also, just to be clear, I am not asking people to fork WikiBooks content to my wiki. My wiki in the public domain, and so is not a suitable place to move the content to unless you are the copyright holder. Except for the Pokédex, which as a collection of facts is not covered by the GFDL, I have just finished copying them all. All I did was to letRob Horning (who supported my admin request for simple.wikibooks before) that there are other options. The choices as I see them are to help out one (or more) of these other wiki's, or to use your energy to try and fight Jimbo with no guarantee of success and little to no progress on these books while doing so. Gerard Foley 23:54, 21 May 2006 (UTC)

Why don't we just all petition the Wikimedia Foundation for an entirely brand new domain where video game guides and other how-to books could reside (Wikigames or Wikiguides, or some other creative name), leaving Wikibooks for just textbooks (and perhaps while we're at it move Wikiversity too?). Or keep them here and form a Wikitext for only textbooks. We already have a lot of content that could populate both, and it would all be contained under the Wikimedia umbrella. Anyone wanna take this to meta with me? --LV ^{(Dark Mark)} 01:32, 22 May 2006 (UTC)

I'll help out with that. I have the same user-name at Meta, so send me a message there, and I will help petition. --Whiteknight(talk) (projects) 01:38, 22 May 2006 (UTC)

The only thing I see that is an issue, is why split a community already so small and fragmented? We aren't even at the "critical point". So much work is needed to start up a new book; editors rarely search outside their pet projects. Newcommers are fustrated as they stumble upon stubs and stubs. The newbies who do find a project they are willing to work for quickly find their contents deleted, sometimes with no explanation, or any clue to where it has gone.

Frankly speaking; I think a forking of wikibooks in any way would cause this project to crumble, unless it is a "fresh start" and everyone is actually willing to "do it right" this time (if you know what I mean).

And after the fiasco with wikiversity, I'm not... encouraged... to take anything to meta anymore. Though if enough people join the cause, I may change my mind :-/. How many months have those wikiversity people been trying?

In closing, I'd like to ask; why not change the Wikibooks policy to include video games, howtos, guides, and other instructional resources? A new domain name would be a difficult goal to aim for, and it seems that changing policy to include what already is on Wikibooks is a *much* easier idea than:

1. Petitioning for a new Domain Name
2. Winning that petition
3. Writing a proposal to Wikimedia board
4. Correcting that proposal over a period of several months
5. Transwiki everything over
6. Restart policy from scratch

Chaning the policy only involves telling Jimbo Wales and/or the board that we've changed our mission to what we actually do.--Dragontamer 01:52, 22 May 2006 (UTC)

We only need a new domain if we want video games guides at a WikiMedia project. Why is this so important? There are already plenty of places willing to accept this content:

• http://strategywiki.net/wiki/Main_Page For video game guides, uses the GFDL.
• http://www.gmcfoley.com/wiki/index.php?title=Main_Page My own site, Public Domain, but will accept basically anything Wikipedia does. It’s new, so it’s a fresh start.
• WikiCities I don't know the URL, but I'm sure they have a wiki which will take all this content.
  • That would be Gameinfo. Garrett^Talk 04:41, 23 May 2006 (UTC)

If Jimbo doesn't want this content, let's take it elsewhere! Gerard Foley 02:27, 22 May 2006 (UTC)

But if we can, why not try and keep this under the Wikimedia umbrella? I know forming a new domain under WM can be tough, but I think if enough users still want to work on them, we should at least try to find a WM place for them. If the proposal is rejected, then go to outside sources. My opinion. --LV ^{(Dark Mark)} 03:17, 22 May 2006 (UTC)

Hm. As interesting as the idea of a separate project is it would have some growing problems. Most importantly Wikibooks has been the videogaming recipient for several years now; no matter how loudly any policy changes are stated on Wikipedia there will still be content dumped here due to habit. And so a good portion of transwikiing work will be spent moving such stuff off Wikibooks and into "Wikiguides", and then the userbase there will in turn have to move it around within their own system or else just plain delete it. If the Foundation are going to keep videogame guides in the family why not just leave them here? And as for the likelihood of the Foundation accepting the proposal, I really can't say how videogame content on its own, even if bolstered by non-gaming howtos, can fit the Foundation's "educational mission". Garrett^Talk 04:57, 22 May 2006 (UTC)

The problem is Jimbo was very clear about this, normally he just [4] likes to wonder], but on this issue he was black and white. Video game guides do not belong here. Period. Gerard Foley 13:52, 22 May 2006 (UTC)

As much as wikitruth has some valid points... I wouldn't go as far as to say I believe it 100%. Opinions on people are wide spread, and I'd rather not judge Jimbo on something other sites say about him. But anyway; please, explain why Video game guides don't belong here, and second, why we can't change policy to include them. --Dragontamer 12:17, 23 May 2006 (UTC)

Rob, FYI, the game w:Final Fantasy X was the subject of a quite thorough post-grad Phylosophy thesis recently. You should read the Abstract and Introduction, the thesis author mentions a lot of reasons why games can be considered the Shakespeare of our times. It is a pity games are beeing evicted from here. Thank heavens we found a home for the Final Fantasy stuff! Renmiri 07:13, 23 May 2006 (UTC)

• • Meaning and Emotion in Squaresoft’s Final Fantasy X — Graduation thesis by Glen R. Spoors, Edith Cowan University - Australia

Dragontamer, if you want to know why Video game guides don't belong here? Because Jimbo says so! Why can't we change policy to include them? Because Jimbo wants them gone. I have a list of books I was going to keep an eye on my user page, a quick look and you can see I was a supporter of video game books. I started some of them myself. IMO it just isn't worth fighting for them here when other wiki's will welcome them with open arms! Gerard Foley 19:19, 23 May 2006 (UTC)

You could also read this post I made [5] Gerard Foley 19:23, 23 May 2006 (UTC)

Page break for editing purposes

So then we convince Jimbo/Wikimedia board to say it is better for guides to stay here. Lord Voldemort wants to create a new wiki for it. You want to create a new wiki for it. I want them to stay; or to move them to a new wiki for it. Renmiri thinks they deserve to stay. All in all; I see so much support for this stuff, not only from typical editors, but from at least 2 Wikibooks admins. If Jimbo really doesn't want them here, well then, he'll have to live with his decision of (IMO) killing off the wikibooks project. Too many contributors are leaving because of this decision (video game contributors or not), and maybe we all can reverse this decision. And the advantage is now on our side to say why things belong. Damage is already being done to the Wikibooks reputation because of this decision, and instead of me hypothesising about it, I can actually point it out. Your fork is a near perfect example. The activity levels of admins is another one; it may be too soon for me to point this out, but coincidence or not; Special:Contributions/Robert_Horning and Special:Contributions/Kernigh activity level dropped a *lot* right after his little announcement (from 10+ contributions a day to 2+ days a contribution). I'm sure they're still here, reading, waiting to see what will happen soon on wikibooks before offering their time and energy on this project again. I know other people have gone "missing", but I can't name them off the top of my head.

It is much easier to keep things here than to make a new wiki; on wikimedia or not. Though, if Jimbo says goodbye one more time, I guess we'll have no choice but to leave. But we aren't losing any "time" here on this issue, and I argue that there is no "wasted effort". Making a wiki is too large an undertaking for me to just say "Alright, I'm leaving". We got policy to make, and early policy to make as well. We'll have to come up and lay down the lines precisely, with no "gray" areas. The community will have to grow, we'll have to fight vandals, set up a hierarchy, etc. etc.

Thats all done here in Wikibooks now. The only thing to do is convince people (more or less, Jimbo) that we want this kind of content somewhere, and that Wikibooks is better off overall if we stay.

I suggest to Lord Voldemort: instead of that proposal for a new wiki; why not propose we change policy to stay here? I'm willing to support that 100%.

Crazy Idea, i know, but thats why I'm here :-p To offer crazy ideas.--Dragontamer 19:43, 23 May 2006 (UTC)

I wouldn't say, "Hey let's create a whole new wiki" if that wasn't where Jimbo/Board were leading us (and always have been, for that matter). The Wikimedia Foundation has in its bylaws, that WB is "a collection of e-book resources aimed specifically toward students (such as textbooks and annotated public domain books) named Wikibooks".[6] So somehow I don't think changing our Wikibooks policy is good enough. I simply see everything (Jimbo's statements, the bylaws, the educational goal, etc.) and think it's obvious that game-guides are not to be included. That's why I suggested an alternate domain. I just don't know anymore. Instead of asking, "What's so wrong about having video game guides here", ask yourself "How great would it be if there was a website dedicated to the distribution of free textbooks to every person in the world?" --LV ^{(Dark Mark)} 20:34, 23 May 2006 (UTC)

I don't see where video game guides conflicts with that at all. Maybe I'm oblivious, but from what I'm seeing (that is, major users who have stopped contributing, people moving out of Wikibooks and into forks, other pissed off users who probably aren't going to come back), removal of these guides has essentially killed that goal, or at least caused a major setback to Wikibooks in general. --Dragontamer 21:00, 23 May 2006 (UTC)

If you are going to try to fight for them to stay at Wikibooks, then go ahead and good luck with it! Just don't expect me to help, I'm too busy writing these guides, and my CSS guide also is coming on nicely also IMO :)! I 100% won’t be coming back to Wikibooks either way. I have invested too much time & money into by wiki to abandon it now. I mean the $10 offer for 200 words will cost me $200 alone, which comes out of my own pocket! Plus there’s hosting costs, back-ups, getting advertising, trying to get a new host so I can fix the ugly url's etc.. No, I'm gone for good. The only thing I'll be doing is helping to move anything which is free of copyright over to my wiki (such as the 24 hours I spent copying the Pokédex). Yes, this decision will probably only help kill Wikibooks, but perhaps the damage has already been done? Gerard Foley 20:51, 23 May 2006 (UTC)

I understand 100%. Good luck on your wiki project! No hard feelings from me (you deserve none at all) --Dragontamer 21:00, 23 May 2006 (UTC)

If wikibooks were my project, I would have set it up differently, but at the same time there is a certain amount of value in having an open-textbook resource aimed directly at students. I don't think that this will kill wikibooks, but it will slow us down a little bit. Good luck on your projects, and I know that we here at wikibooks are going to need alot of luck as well. --Whiteknight(talk) (projects) 23:25, 23 May 2006 (UTC)

Well, Renmiri - me - is just a n00b at Wikibooks and pretty new at Wikipedia too, so my lamenting that game guides are being evicted doesn't have the benefit of all the knowledge of WikiMedia history, bylaws, etc... But precisely because I am a newbie is that I wanted to give you my perspective: Game guides are, IMHO, where the Wikibook administrators of 2015 will cut their teeth in. From what I have seen in game sites and in Wikipedia / Wikibooks, this is where 13-16 year old - or even younger - will start thinking about cooperation and content management. I'm willing to bet that the first textbook a high school kid reads voluntarily will be a game walktrough. Even for the older newbies like me and others, the game guides provide a less stresful way to get into Wikimedia editing. A Wikipedia page about heart surgery, ancient history or all the others I have browsed those past few years looked pretty intimidating. Yet a page about a game made me confortable enough to click on that scary edit tab and I fixed a couple of things. Three months later me and other n00bs had injected so much life into that particular game series of pages that 10 pages were cited as Good Article and one got confirmed as Featured Article. And our newly found boldness for editing started spreading around to other topics and to Wikibooks. In my view, it may be necessary to evict game guides for the many reasons cited above, but Wikibooks is losing an excellent opportunty for training and nurturing new book editors and book readers. Get them while they are young, and on a hobby like games and those readers and editors might be yours forever ;-) Renmiri 01:24, 24 May 2006 (UTC)

I come exactly from your background Renmiri. My first major edits were on Maple Story, a video game. --Dragontamer 01:26, 24 May 2006 (UTC)

My first wiki-edits were on the Chrono-Trigger artical at wikipedia. I strongly believe that there should be a place for game manuals for precisely the reasons that have been mentioned. I even voted back in the day to keep the game manuals here. However, it seems that the focus of wikibooks has changed (or at least re-focused on it's original goals), and I don't think that there is a big reason to fight that. Wikibooks will be hurt the most by a lack of focus. If we want to put everything and anything here, we should just rename it "wikieverything". Unfortunately, the line has been drawn at game guides. But look at what we have now: dedicated editors who are going to take their game guides to a new, more appropriate venue, and a highly-focused instructional resource in wikibooks. Our situation is certainly bittersweet, but if it has to happen, we might as well see the silver lining. --Whiteknight(talk) (projects) 02:12, 24 May 2006 (UTC)

Wikibooks has always accepted manuals, howtos, gameguides, and so forth. We knew where the line was drawn, and we know exactly why Wikibooks isn't a "Wikieverything". Even before the Jokebook incident, we were already pushing Wikiversity to leave, deleting other non"wikibook" material, and everyone knew exactly why it didn't fit policy. The line was already drawn, and now it is redrawn again. Now, even very instructional material like Wikibooks:Votes_for_undeletion#FAQ_for_alt.internet.wireless and arguably textbooks like that *very* informative MJ book are at risk.

And with a line drawn somewhere inbetween Chess and Video Games... I see nothing but confusion ahead for wikibooks if it continues down this path. No metric, aside from "Jimbo Says" decides the line between Chess and Video Games. And I doubt there would be any defined line between them.

And without defined lines; there will be no justification for really any action at wikibooks. Policy right now is shot; the "Accredited institution" metric is probably the only one that is being used at any rate, and even then, that metric is shot. The only thing left here is for us to argue opinion vs opinion; with no solid policy to say why something could survive a VfD now.

That is what is causing the fustration right now. And with the line now drawn at such a blurry place (Chess/Go vs other games), I dunno what to say. What about Omok/Gomoku? 6 in a row? Connect 4? There is no policy to say what lies exactly inbetween the lines here.

The problem is far deeper than just Video Games on wikibooks. But I feel allowing Video Games on Wikibooks will cure nearly all of this policy debate up. Unless you have a policy that cleanly cuts Video Games away from Puzzles and Chess, or include them all (or none), Wikibooks will stagnate. --Dragontamer 02:32, 24 May 2006 (UTC)

Revived from archives Minun 19:00, 7 September 2006 (UTC)

Im copying the ones that didn't get transwikied to my own Wiki a list can be found here, cheers Minun 19:00, 7 September 2006 (UTC)

This certainly was an interesting discussion, but I dont know specifically what you want changed? You want wikibooks to allow video-game walkthroughs and strategy guides? There never has been a restriction that says textbooks about videogames or videogame design are not allowed, the only thing that has been restricted are the strategy guides, walkthroughs, and instruction manuals. Anybody is more then welcome to create a book that talks about Doom from a scholarly perspective: an "annotated text" on the storyline and narrative, a case-study of the Doom graphics engine, etc. These things are and always have been allowed. --Whiteknight (talk) (projects) 19:07, 7 September 2006 (UTC)

I believe they should be kept too, so im on your side, but its just that Jimbo Wales plans to delete them (or at least someone said so) Minun 19:20, 7 September 2006 (UTC)

No, Jimbo never said he was going to delete all videogame books. He did say however that the strategy guides and videogame walkthroughs should be deleted. Books that consider the topic of videogames from a scholarly point of view are fine. Jimbo meerly said that he doubted that Doom would ever fit the necessary criteria to be kept, and I agree with him on that point: Our Doom book is only a walkthrough and a strategy guide, nothing more. --Whiteknight (talk) (projects) 21:06, 7 September 2006 (UTC)

Out-of-copyright math textbook

I found a copy of an old calculus textbook that is out of copyright and is in excellent condition; the content looks pretty solid as well. How do people feel about copying such a book in their entirety into Wikibooks? There are a lot of formulae in the book that would be easier for me to code using the <math> tags than to, say, try to put it in TeX form for upload to Project Gutenberg. Note that there is some redundancy with the calculus book I found in the math wikibooks section. Thanks. — RJHall 20:53, 7 September 2006 (UTC)

If you think it should be uploaded somewhere, I would try wikisource. If you are not dead-set on uploading the book verbatim, then perhaps you could use the text of that book, and the formulas from it to expand and improve our Calculus book. There is no sense in having two calculus books, when we can merge all the good information into a single book. --Whiteknight (talk) (projects) 21:04, 7 September 2006 (UTC)

Wikisource sounds reasonable. After it is uploaded there, the content could then be used to expand the calculus book. Thanks for the idea. — RJHall 21:40, 7 September 2006 (UTC)

Once it is uploaded, I would love to go through it and work to help out our calculus book (which is in bad shape). let me know how it goes. --Whiteknight (talk) (projects) 00:42, 11 September 2006 (UTC)

Error in book "Basic Book Design"

Just glanced at this book and found a howler immediately. The use of Times Roman as a body font for a book is the sure mark of the rank amateur, yet the subject book perpetuates this error. Times roman is a narrow face designed for newpaper columns. At the usual meassure of a bound book it allows entirely too many characters per line. See Bringhurst et al.

John Culleton Able Indexers and Typesetters Template:Unsigned

The correct place to mention a problem like this is in the talk pages of the book itself. Also, if the book is wrong and you would like to correct it, this is a wiki, and you are free to make changes yourself. --Whiteknight (talk) (projects) 01:24, 8 September 2006 (UTC)

Requesting Import Function

I have requested that the import function be enabled for transwiki from en.wikipedia to en.wikibooks. There is always a backlog of transwikiable materials over there, and often it either just gets deleted, or sometimes gets transwikied improperly (without pagehistories, etc.).

I've been using the import function at wikiversity, helping move things from here to there, and it's a very graceful tool. I don't see any particular reason why we shouldn't be using it for these types of transwikis as well.

See meta:Talk:Requests_for_permissions#Import_Function_for_English_Wikibooks for more information. --SB_Johnny | ^talk 10:40, 9 September 2006 (UTC)

For the amount of material that moves from there to here, it does make sense to create an easier pipeline for the data. --Whiteknight (talk) (projects) 20:55, 10 September 2006 (UTC)

Note that this also has the advantage of putting the transwiki process in the hands of the wikibooks staff, since what I'm hoping to get is the import function, as opposed to the export function. The tool can also be configured to automatically add these articles to the Transwiki: pseudonamespace, which will help us keep track of things. --SB_Johnny | ^talk 10:28, 12 September 2006 (UTC)

I have started a separate page on this for registering support or opposition, at the suggestion of some posters to foundation-l. Please see Wikibooks:Request_for_enabling_special:import for more details. --SB_Johnny | ^talk 15:56, 14 September 2006 (UTC)

Simple English Wikibooks

there is a simple english wikibooks that could really use some work, as it is up for deletion. There are not many books in it, and yet it haqs the potential to be a great to for simple english users. So, come and edit! Template:Unsigned

I have to disagree, the forking of english-language content between the "regular english" wikibooks, and the "simple english" wikibooks is a bad idea, and I refuse to support it. There are currently books here on "regular english" wikibooks that are specifically listed and written in simple english format. I personally am for the deletion of the "simple.wikibooks" project, and the merger of all that text and data to this server. --Whiteknight (talk) (projects) 20:51, 10 September 2006 (UTC)

Pt2._Act_2._Scene_IV and "what links here"

I just discovered Pt2._Act_2._Scene_IV and lots of similar pages and wanted to find out the book they belog to. (Either it is not a textbooks or the naming convention is not obeyed) But the "what links here" butten disappered.

And ideas or hints?

--Krischik ^T 11:25, 10 September 2006 (UTC)

It's apparently part of King Henry IV Part 2 (links). I'm not sure what it's all about, but I left a note on the IP's talk page. Is there even such a play? (I'm not a Shakespeare expert by any means). There weren't any notes on the talk pages that I could see, perhaps they were meant for commons. I'm hoping to hear back from the user. --SB_Johnny | ^talk 12:40, 10 September 2006 (UTC)

Back when Wikibooks was quite new, some users moved over a ton of Shakespearean works. At least a year ago I marked a bunch of Romeo and Juliet and Hamlet pages for deletion, but a lot could still get by. I used [7] to see a lot of old junk here. -withinfocus 16:53, 10 September 2006 (UTC)

William Shakespeare's Works is the current collaboration of the month, and it would seem a shame to delete information that could potentially be used to benefit that book. I would say we should find all related pages (and i'm sure there are plenty) that we can move into that book's namespace. Pages that can be annotated within a reasonable amount of time can stay. Pages that are not annotated after an acceptable amount of time should be transwikied to wikisource (if the materiall currently doesnt exist on that server), or it should be deleted. --Whiteknight (talk) (projects) 20:58, 10 September 2006 (UTC)

The information that was here was purely a bunch of bad dumps of the plays themselves. Such a thing is for Wikisource and should be deleted here. The pages are 1-2 years old with no edits in many cases and are quite past a reasonable timeframe for improvement. -withinfocus 02:02, 11 September 2006 (UTC)

Yeah, I know what these pages are, but the only reason I am advocating leniency is because of the current COTM. If this page hasn't been incorporated into that book within this month, then it should be deleted. I'm just saying that we should give it a chance considering the current COTM. --Whiteknight (talk) (projects) 02:05, 11 September 2006 (UTC)

I don't think it really has anything to do with the collaboration... annotations and analyses belong here, PD texts really don't. I'm pretty sure the dump over the weekend was all brought over from gutenburg or somewhere similar, and should really just be put on wikisource and linked to from whatever materials are developed on wikibooks. --SB_Johnny | ^talk 14:17, 11 September 2006 (UTC)

pagemove deletions...

I've run across several cases lately where pagemoves were being done "copy-and paste" because the destination page had a stub on it. Most of these page moves have been attempted in order to bring various books into compliance with the naming convention.

I suggested the following to a user who was doing this because he was frustrated by the stubs:

1. Blank the destination page

2. Add Template:Tl to the page, and also have it redirect to the page that you intend to move (so that you can fix any links in the meantime while waiting for the deletion).

3. Don't worry... I make it a point to empty the speedy deletion category daily, so it won't be long before the deed is done.

I'm wondering if the css could be altered on the page that "shoots down" a pagemove because of a pre-existing page at the destination name to suggest something along these lines.

(And yes, Category:Candidates for speedy deletion is empty!) --SB_Johnny | ^talk 18:34, 12 September 2006 (UTC)

Fighting Game Moves

Can an admin please start deleting this book so I can start updating the links to in on Wikipedia. Thanks, Gerard Foley 13:38, 25 August 2006 (UTC)

I'd like to note that if you want something deleted, please simply use the Template:Tl template instead. Admins routinely do monitor the speedy deletion category, and if there is a question if it should be deleted it can be moved to a VfD discussion instead. Routine junk and stuff that has already been supposedly deleted by VfD but left over pages are still found on Wikibooks can be marked for deletion by any Wikibooks user, and that is something that helps the whole project. Indeed, if you have spent quite a bit of time marking pages for deletion like this, it is highly likely that you will become an admin, particularly if you show that you are using good judgement on what pages you are marking for deletion. I can name several admins here on Wikibooks who got started doing exactly this kind of cleanup work as ordinary registered users. --Rob Horning 15:09, 25 August 2006 (UTC)

Perhaps I should explain this a bit more. I copied the Fighting Game Moves book over to WikiKnowledge, then I turned the main page into an external redirect, then I tagged the subpages with the delete template. I didn't tag the subpages' subpages as there is little point is editing 100+ pages that are going to be deleted. Next I waited, waited and waited until today I came here. I want to make a start on updating the links to the book which appear on Wikipedia but I want to wait for the book to actually be deleted from here before I start. I have noticed some admins seem to have left the Wikibooks project after the whole "video game guide" thing which might explain why these things are taking longer than usual. Thanks, Gerard Foley 15:56, 25 August 2006 (UTC)

I'm deleting all the pages except the root right now. -withinfocus 19:45, 25 August 2006 (UTC)

All done. Now only the root page exists with a proper link to WikiKnowledge. The page has also been protected. -withinfocus 20:14, 25 August 2006 (UTC)

Thanks very much, I'll get started on updating the Wikipedia links. Gerard Foley 21:10, 25 August 2006 (UTC)

Sorry for beating a dead horse, but I really don't understand why you waited. Once everything had been copied into http://wikiknowledge.net/wiki/ , what blocked you from immediately updating the links? --DavidCary 05:57, 18 September 2006 (UTC)

interprojects

The books should be more interactive, this is a wiki. Why not take profit of wikipedia and wiktionary just linking the useful words? Now wikiversity is created, we should improve and make non conventional textbooks Template:Unsigned

How can I download a wikibook?

Hi, I love wikibooks but I need to be able to refer to them on my laptop in places where I study and there is no Internet. However, I am having a hard time figuring out how to save a wikibook. I tried wget, but saw the robots.txt disallowed it. I downloaded the XML for all the wikibooks and set up my own version of wikimedia on a local copy of apache to run it, but this didn't have the pictures, and the math equations were expressed as things between <math> tags that didn't make sense instead of the little images for equations here on the main site. Any ideas? -Template:Unsigned

Some wikibooks are translated into pdf files... unfortunately I'm not sure how this is done. Just curious: which book is it? --SB_Johnny | ^talk 00:20, 30 August 2006 (UTC)

Depending on your browser, you can usually download and save the HTML of the page, and then load that HTML file into your browser when you are offline. --Whiteknight (talk) (projects) 01:19, 30 August 2006 (UTC)

Right, but still no images, equations included.--SB_Johnny | ^talk 09:18, 30 August 2006 (UTC)

Modern browsers, such as Mozilla, allow you to save a webpage with all of relating images. Sblive 23:15, 3 September 2006 (UTC)

I'm impressed you went to all that effort. The math equations are rendered by Texvc and TeX. But if you just want to refer to a wikibook offline, I agree with Sblive: the easiest way is use a modern browser such as Mozilla or Firefox to save "complete" web pages, including all images, mathematical and otherwise. (You want the "complete" option, not the "HTML only" option). --DavidCary 05:57, 18 September 2006 (UTC)

Images without copyright status

We've got a serious problem with these, see, for example, Special:Uncategorizedimages. All the images on that list (1,000 in all, though there are certainly more as the list stops at "d") have no copyright status listed. If anyone would be willing to help go through and check them (and add the appropriate templates), that would be a helpful.

To prevent this backlog from being made worse, we should also keep an eye on the [upload logs]. Many of the old images that lack copyright status were added by users who are no longer active, and will end up being deleted! --SB_Johnny | ^talk 11:45, 3 September 2006 (UTC)

Actually, we really need a bot for this. There are a lot of unlinked images as well, that might be appearing on external sites. Anyone know how to make one? --SB_Johnny | ^talk 20:20, 3 September 2006 (UTC)

There is almost certainly a bot for this already; you may have better luck asking on WP for someone to come over and help. Kellen ^T 21:28, 3 September 2006 (UTC)

A friend from wikiversity has one (he's also an admin on the french wikipedia). Now listed on the RFA page as a bot request. --SB_Johnny | ^talk 22:52, 3 September 2006 (UTC)

Algebra

The current state of the Algebra section on the math bookshelf is lousy. Several books are all listed as being on this same topic, but there is no order and no organization to these books. Currently, the books that are on this subject include:

• Algebra I - A Verbose Approach
• OLPC - Algebra 1 in Simple English
• Algebra
• Intermediate Algebra
• Linear algebra
• Abstract algebra
• Conic Sections
• Discrete mathematics
• Pure Mathematics 1

Also, between these books, there is a large amount of cross-linking, mutual dependency, and forked material. To make this matter worse, some of these books, like Algebra, contain all sorts of chapters on unrelated material! Algebra contains information on probability, information theory, Logic, mathematical proofs, and trigonometry! none of these subjects really fit into the definition of "Algebra".

I would like to propose a complete rewrite of these books. Some of the books will be merged, and others will be rewritten. I would like to end up with the following listing:

• OLPC - Algebra 1 in Simple English (unchanged)
• Algebra (incorporating Intermediate Algebra, Algebra I - A Verbose Approach, Conic Sections)
• Linear Algebra
• Abstract Algebra (incorporating Discrete Mathematics, Pure Mathematics 1)

Where the last three books form a single progression of material, with little or no overlap, no forking, and no cross-linking of chapters. Material in these books that don't fit into this progression will be moved to more appropriate locations on the math and sciences bookshelves. My complete proposal for this project can be found HERE on my user page. If there are no major complaints, I would like to start this project soonish, because these books need this work really bad. --Whiteknight (talk) (projects) 16:41, 6 September 2006 (UTC)

Asking for a hand at wikiversity might get some collaborators involved: v:School:Mathematics. --SB_Johnny | ^talk 22:15, 6 September 2006 (UTC)

I dont want to worry about finding other contributors, i'm industrious enough (and bored enough, and stupid enough) to do all the work myself. Basically, I just really want to get community approval before I start a project this large. --Whiteknight (talk) (projects) 01:06, 7 September 2006 (UTC)

I agree, the organization of these books is not good. Best of luck to you. I'd help with those but my LaTeX is not good at all. Mattb112885 02:24, 8 September 2006 (UTC)

I have posted warning messages on all the affected book, and I intend to perform this merger/restructuring within the upcoming week. I will post more information on the project, as I make progress on it. --Whiteknight (talk) (projects) 23:31, 24 September 2006 (UTC)

Wikibooks:Textbooks

I would like all active editors and wikibookians to come take a look at this page. Wikibooks currently suffers in many of our policy matters because we say that wikibooks is only for "textbooks", but we don't have a hard-and-fast definition of what a "textbook" is. I think that it is highly important that we as a community try to come up with some kind of definition for precisely what a textbook is, and how one is identified. Such a defintion could potentially clear up a number of issues, including several VfD disputes, the entire matter about the "videogame guides", and other issues as well.

On the textbook-L mailing list, Jimbo said someting recently about wikibooks being only for "textbooks", and I sent him back a reply saying that we currently do not have a precise definition of that word. If we as a community do not create a satisfactory definition for "textbook", it is possible that one could be mandated to us from Jimbo or the foundation. --Whiteknight (talk) (projects) 21:03, 10 September 2006 (UTC)

Good move. I hope this can help clarify the difference between Wikiversity and Wikibooks. Some Wikibooks, particularly in languages, are currently based around lesson plans - I'm now thinking that "lessons" should probably be moved to Wikiversity. The textbooks at Wikibooks can be less restricted in terms of how much information goes in each page, as we don't have to worry about the amount of material that can be taught in one lesson. Textbooks are something a teacher can select from, or that a student can dip into as needed; a lesson suggests a pre-decided set of material for most or all of the students to work through at the same time.

Or have I got it wrong? (Note, I'm not criticizing lesson pages, especially since I've seen some fantastic lessons developed recently by Junesun - it's just that lessons are different from textbooks, and now that Wikiversity is launched, they each have their own place.)

See also the Wikiversity project pages Adding content and What is Wikiversity? for some discussion on the demarcation, which I added there to try and clear things up. --Singkong2005 08:24, 11 September 2006 (UTC)

Can you give examples of language books having such structure? --Derbeth ^talk 10:08, 11 September 2006 (UTC)

Actually, don't most language textbooks have that structure (e.g., Chapter one, introducing yourself, Chapter 2: asking directions, etc.)? --SB_Johnny | ^talk 10:36, 11 September 2006 (UTC)

Many do, though some are more like textbook chapters, and some are more like just lessons (e.g. Dutch). Indonesian starts off with lessons, then has "Tools for learning" at the end (That heading was basically an attempt by me to group the material that hadn't been put into lesson form.)

See also Help:Bite-sized language lessons (and courses based on this approach, such as Modern Greek and Korean/RWP - it's a superb approach, IMO, which deserves to be fostered, but it's very much about making lessons rather than textbooks in a broader sense. We need to decide if it goes here or at Wikiversity. If we want it here, then there's a conflict between the scopes of the two projects. --Singkong2005 05:25, 12 September 2006 (UTC)

Any textbook, I think, should be arranged in a manner so that a classroom can learn from it in an organized and linear fashion. A "textbook" that doesnt complement a class is useless. One of the primary reasons why I voted against the wikiversity project proposal in the first place was because of this exact problem: How do we differentiate classroom textbooks from classroom lesson plans that are text-based? But, that's hardly the issue here. The issue is that we need to define "textbook" simply to fill a glaring hole in wikibooks policy. Without such a definition, we are blinded on certain matters, and are essentially making some decisions by a flip of the coin. --Whiteknight (talk) (projects) 12:28, 11 September 2006 (UTC)

I don't think a textbook has to complement a specific course - textbooks are often used for dipping into. Courses in school or university don't necessarily follow a textbook, or use one textbook, and others (or chapters from others) may be put on the reading list.

It may be that we aren't exactly trying to define the English word textbook, but rather what sort of book we want to develop here. A book which is written to be easily read, to lead the student through in a logical sequence of lessons, is quite a different thing from a textbook which is filled out and examines a subject in great depth. Both are good, but we need to distinguish them. Given that Wikiversity is focused on lessons, it seems logical to me that we should avoid overlapping any more than we can avoid.

Anyway, I didn't mean to take over this discussion, but it's clearly one of the things that has to be considered for this policy.--Singkong2005 05:25, 12 September 2006 (UTC)

Don't worry about taking over this discussion, any input is good input! Regardless of the exact way we define the word, we need to distinguish what is and is not acceptable here, and we also need to define precisely how wikibooks "textbooks" are different from wikipedia "articles", or wikisource "books", or wikinews "stories", or whatever. This is an opportunity for us to define ourselves, and I think we need to take it. --Whiteknight (talk) (projects) 21:54, 21 September 2006 (UTC)

Just adding my two cents here since I'm already adding a comment below. I agree with Singkong that restricting Wikibooks to classroom use is too narrow. I think we should rather fix our scope on anything worth learning (which isn't covered by other projects). This of course isn't any more easily defined than "textbook" ;-) ... we have a lot of work ahead of us with documents such as WB:WIW (though I think Wikibooks:Inclusion criteria/Proposal may be a better approach). --Swift 02:36, 23 September 2006 (UTC)

I think the proposal adds little to what is already covered by WB:WIW. True, WB is said to be only for textbooks and, no, we don't define the term anywhere, but I think we are far better off defining what a Wikibook is. See my comment on Wikibooks talk:Textbooks. --Swift 02:36, 23 September 2006 (UTC)

Policy of the Week: Wikibooks:Be nice

I am starting an initiative that had been discussed earlier, but had never until now been implemented. This initiative is going to be called "Policy of the Week", and this is how it's going to work:

1. We pick a policy that is proposed, and should be decided one way or the other.
2. We discuss that policy for 1 week, making changes, reaching consensus if possible
3. After 1 week, depending on the current state of the discussion, the proposed policy is enforced, rejected, or no decision is made and the policy is kept as a proposal. If the policy is kept as a proposal, it gets bumped to the bottom of the list of policies, and we will return to it after we have discussed other outstanding proposals (unless the policy is decided before that time).

The policy of the week for this week is: Wikibooks:Be nice. We should have a decision on it by sunday sept 17th. --Whiteknight (talk) (projects) 14:43, 11 September 2006 (UTC)

"Policy of the week" sounds like a good idea. Instead of always picking a "proposed policy", perhaps we could occasionally pick an older "official policy" and focus attention on how to better explain it to newbies. (And re-open discussion on whether it is still necessary). --DavidCary 05:57, 18 September 2006 (UTC)

I agree with that whole-heartedly. I think that people should be involved with the administration of this site, much more involved then people typically are. There are a few nagging proposals that I personally would like to see decided, and when that is done, we can certainly focus our attention on other policies that need work. For the record, there was no consensus on this policy during the week, so it is still a proposal. --Whiteknight (talk) (projects) 21:48, 21 September 2006 (UTC)

New Wikibooks Logo: Voting Open

The voting on the new wikibooks logos has started:

meta:Wikibooks/logo

All wikibookians should come and voice support for the different logos. --Whiteknight (talk) (projects) 22:21, 11 September 2006 (UTC)

Voting on the logos is going to close on Sept 21. Currently, my favorite entry (#8) is winning with over 30 votes, but there is plenty of time for things to swing in a different direction. Everybody should go to meta and vote! --Whiteknight (talk) (projects) 18:03, 19 September 2006 (UTC)

The second round of voting is open. We should have actual wikibookians voting in this instead of just meta-nerds. See meta:Wikibooks/logo Kellen ^T 12:49, 25 September 2006 (UTC)

Articles in cookbook namespace

Hi. I'm from Indonesian Wikibooks. How does en.wikibooks treat articles in cookbook namespace? Does en.wikibooks add the numberofarticles each time user create new cookbook article? Thanks Borgx 02:30, 13 September 2006 (UTC)

I don't think the articles in the Cookbook namespace are currently counted, but this is because mediawiki assumes all "real" content will be in the main namespace. Kellen ^T 07:28, 14 September 2006 (UTC)

I see. FYI, just in case you want to treat those articles as content pages and have mediawiki count it as valid articles, there is now a way to do that (see bugzilla:3212), unfortunatelly there still an opened bug corelated with that. (see bugzilla:7292). Borgx 23:25, 14 September 2006 (UTC)

Policy of the Week: Wikibooks:Title pages

This week, I would like to turn my attention to the Wikibooks:Title pages proposal. This one is so simple, it is more like a style guideline then an official policy, so I would like to propose to make this one into an official "guideline", instead of a "policy". We can discuss this at:

Wikibooks talk:Title pages

If consensus can be reached on the matter by next sunday, I would like to make this an official guideline. --Whiteknight (talk) (projects) 00:57, 18 September 2006 (UTC)

Good job overseeing the beaurocratic tasks, WK! Sorry I went AWOL on you guys, but I'm just reajusting after driving over half the continent of North America and settling temporarily down in Wisconsin.

I changed the template to reflect the guideline (as opposed to policy) proposal and commented on the possibility of expanding on the scope of the guideline. --Swift 02:24, 18 September 2006 (UTC)

Just a heads-up, currently there is a suggestion on the table to reject this policy, and instead merge the important points of it into the Manual of Style. If nobody objects to this, i will be willing to perform the merger myself by the end of the week. --Whiteknight (talk) (projects) 21:49, 21 September 2006 (UTC)

As of tonight, (sunday, 24 Sept), there is some consensus to reject this policy, and merge it into the Manual of Style. I am going to perform these actions now. People who dissent with this action can discuss it on the relevant talk pages. --Whiteknight (talk) (projects) 23:05, 24 September 2006 (UTC)

Removing some original research

I have just found two books that are source books for new role-playing games invented on Wikibooks: Oni d20 and JAGS-2. They are obviously original research and not suitable for Wikibooks. I wanted to contact their authors and ask them to find another place for these books, but unfortunately none of them has active mail address. Does anybody know any wiki where these books can be moved? --Derbeth ^talk 08:04, 18 September 2006 (UTC)

Applied Science level of science required

Can anyone comment on how much depth of science is required for this course. The specification is not very clear and I only have one specimen paper to look at. Template:Unsigned.

Link? --SB_Johnny | ^talk 10:08, 19 September 2006 (UTC)

I'd guess this is A-level Applied Science - the only wikibook with Applied Science in the name. --Singkong2005 14:58, 21 September 2006 (UTC)

"A-level" applies to British education standards, high-school, I think. SB_Johnny | ^talk 23:52, 21 September 2006 (UTC)

Please help improve this template...

I made the template Template:Tl to mark up pages for books that describe techniques that should never be tried without the presence and guidance of an experienced mentor (I'm going to use it for a book on arborculture, which among other things describes the proper way to cut trees with a chainsaw when one is 100' up in the tree and needs to make sure the branch doesn't fall on the roof of the house that it's currently hanging over), but I imagine it could be useful for other books as well. I don't like the template in it's current form, but it gets the point across:

--SB_Johnny | ^talk 01:04, 23 September 2006 (UTC)

There already is a similar template in use as Template:Tl, but it's not exactly the same thing. I do like this one, however. --Whiteknight (talk) (projects) 23:01, 24 September 2006 (UTC)

RFC on WB:PAG cleanup

After a (brief) discussion on the talk page, I've restructured and partly rewritten Wikibooks:Policies and guidelines and am now requesting comments on the work. See before and after. --Swift 07:51, 23 September 2006 (UTC)

Preserving pagehistories of merged modules?

I was just wondering if this should be done, or if it's really not worth the trouble.

For those who are unfamiliar with the admin's tools, a module that is merged into another module can have its history merged after the fact by deleting the destination module, moving the module that was merged in to the article's space, and then restoring all the deleted edits. It's kind of a pain in the neck to do it (I've only done it to correct a few copy-paste pagemoves and a couple merges with long edit histories), but perhaps it's worth the time? And would this technically be required by the GFDL?

The major crisis of consciousness I had about this was the mass-merger of a large number of templates used in one book into just 1 template. The merged pages had histories, and it might have been good to merge them all, but deleting-merging-undeleting 30 times would have been an arduous project (not to mention having a lot of windows for human error to climb through), so I just ended up speedying them as requested. It's been gnawing at me for a couple days now, and I'm wondering if I should really just go back and do the merges the long way. Is this just silly? --SB_Johnny | ^talk 17:57, 23 September 2006 (UTC)

Your efforts to work inside the GFDL is commendable! After glancing over the section on combining documents I'd say that, as you described it, what you did was a breach of the license (I'll be glad if someone explained that I'm wrong). But — and there is always a but — if you rewrote the template from scratch, then, I reckon, you'd be fine. It's my understanding that GPL software is frequently rewritten to be published under the BSD license in order to solve licensing issues.

And what you did was definately rewriting, not modifying; right? :-) --Swift 20:18, 23 September 2006 (UTC)

Actually, I didn't do the combining (or rewriting, etc.), I just cleaned out Category:Candidates for speedy deletion... the actual content work was done by another editor :-). --SB_Johnny | ^talk 10:20, 24 September 2006 (UTC)

BTW, I asked for some opinions on this at wikipedia, and the feeling there was that this is important for GFDL reasons. There's no policy, but there is a technical manual on the subject: w:Wikipedia:How_to_fix_cut_and_paste_moves. --SB_Johnny | ^talk 10:00, 7 October 2006 (UTC)

Bug in Maths Rendering engine

There is a bug in the maths rendering engine when converting to html if you $6.022x10^{23}$ there is a - added afterwards. Keytotime 13:27, 24 September 2006 (UTC)

http://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/7367 --Swift 16:52, 24 September 2006 (UTC)

Confusion over The Completed Books

I am confused over how books are chosen for the Completed books link section on the main page. Several, if not most, of those books do not seem very complete. They are filled with red links and include stubs in areas that could be expanded. Could someone please clarify this for me? Thanks.

It's pretty arbitrary, i think. If you find books in that list that do not belong, you can remove them. If you find books which are not listed but should be, you can add them in. --Whiteknight (talk) (projects) 01:00, 26 September 2006 (UTC)

Watchlist not updating

The watchlist puzzles me, and it seems a bit arbitrary whether edits in watched pages actually show up in the list and show up consistently. I have seen edits in watched pages that never made it to the watchlist and entries in the watchlist that disappear from it (eg. edit 10:32, 26 September 2006 146.136.11.87 in microtechnology) - but can still be found in the history page of the modules that had been edited. Sadly the list seems to mainly show my own changes, where I would be much more interested in other peoples edits... I have seen the problem for some months. KristianMolhave 19:49, 26 September 2006 (UTC)

Is this your own personal Special:Watchlist, or the Special:Recentchanges list? The two lists behave differently. --Whiteknight (talk) (projects) 21:31, 26 September 2006 (UTC)

My personal KristianMolhave 22:57, 26 September 2006 (UTC)

Oh, okay. Your personal watchlist operates with a slightly different set of rules then the Special:Recentchanges list does. For starters, your watchlist only shows the most recent edit on each page. Therefore, if there are multiple edits to page X, you will only see the most recent edit in your watchlist.

For this reason, if an edit is made, and then another edit is made, the first edit will seem to disappear. Also, if you make sure to faithfully and quickly respond to all comments in your watchlist, your name will appear the most frequently in your own watchlist. --Whiteknight (talk) (projects) 01:07, 27 September 2006 (UTC)

AhAhh -and I'm testing it with this edit :-) KristianMolhave 14:52, 27 September 2006 (UTC)

Wikispecies citing book

Hello, I'm mostly contributing on Wikispecies. I'd like to start a source-book here that provides the original description to species, made by the original author who described the species first (and gave it the name). Just the physical description, so there's no copyright on the work (as with the names itself). It is quite important to have such a reference, as these original citings are published in magazines all over the world, sometimes these descriptions have been placed on the net.

The problem is that these texts are multilingual. The oldest texts are mostly latin, but the more recent citings (last 200 years) are in English, Spanish, Japanese, or whatever. The reason I like to start this book here is that the accepted scientific language moves more and more towards English. (It is a still matter of much debate, but I'll better leave this out) Ideally, every original citing will get a translation into English.

Is there an objection that I contribute in this multilingual fashion? --Kempm 07:53, 28 September 2006 (UTC)

I think it would be a very interesting project, especially considering all the changes to taxonomy over the past 2 decades. Will this also include basionyms and other names between the original names and the current one? Are some of these going to be pre-linnean, or are they all binomial nomenclature?

For help with the translation, you might want to ask around at wikiversity or the biology-related projects at wikipedia. I'm afraid my latin is a bit rusty, otherwise I'd lend you a hand with this. If you're unable to translate whole entries, a quick synopsis would be helpful as well... or even a modified version of the taxoboxes used on wikipedia. --SB_Johnny | ^talk 08:01, 29 September 2006 (UTC)

In principal only the binomial (Latin) system, which is being used today. I didn't want to include much more information besides the original description, and it's possible translations. Wikispecies is to answer questions like basionym, homonym, or whether a taxon is paraphyletic. I think Wikispecies are the ones to answer questions like that. I do want to provide links to wikispecies though, and as all other projects, links to the wikipedias.

Thx for your answer, I'll best get started to make a few drafts. --Kempm 17:23, 29 September 2006 (UTC)

Perhaps someone would like to help me design a template navbox for the project Nomenclatural citations that I started. I'm very text-orientated myself, but I think the content of the project can use something colorful. The template should bring a little colour to the page, but emphasize the data. Also it must be pretty easy to implement. The data it should contain:

• Standard link to Main project page, and link to an overview page
• Taxon name, and place in taxonomic hierarchy (perhaps this data needs to be split)
• Author names, that link to one overview page and a year (perhaps these two need to be split also)
• A place where to give the source, which should link to one source page
• Possibly a link to an Internet page
• Wikipedia link

An example of a constructed page that contains this data is Nomenclatural_citations/Grateloupia/huertana (top 5 lines). I hope some web wizard can help me on this. --Kempm 17:33, 30 September 2006 (UTC)

I hastely put a suggestion up at Template:Nomenclatural citations infobox and have transcluded it on Talk:Nomenclatural citations/Grateloupia/huertana. --Swift 22:49, 30 September 2006 (UTC)

Thank you very much Swift. I am going to add your template. --Kempm 06:25, 1 October 2006 (UTC)

User statistics

Is there a way to get browser hits and number of visitors counts statistics on wikibooks? thanks/KristianMolhave 19:57, 28 September 2006 (UTC)

Unfortunately, no. The idea has been brought up several times, but the general concensus is that it would consume too many server resources to maintain such a count. --Whiteknight (talk) (projects) 22:37, 28 September 2006 (UTC)

One thing that has been suggested, however, is to use on a particular Wikibooks page that you are interested in, to use some sort of external page hit counter. While I wouldn't recommend that this be done for all pages or for even a specific Wikibooks page for an extended period of time, it can try to help you get a general idea of what sort of traffic this website pulls in.

At the moment, the best we have beyond turning the MediaWiki page counter back on is to use the Alexa page hit service. BTW, Wikibooks seems to have stagnated over the summer according to this ranking system. I could give my opinion (very POV) of why this is happening, but it is an interesting set of statistics to look at. If these results are correct, Wikibooks has a general reach of 0.04% of all internet users access Wikibooks at some point, or about 15 million page view per day, putting Wikibooks in the top 4000 of all websites. Not too shabby, is it? --Rob Horning 19:57, 2 October 2006 (UTC)

If you have the time, I would be very interested in hearing your opinion on the subject, Rob. (BTW, the actual reason is that the growth of all Wikimedia projects either slows or stagnates over the summer, because kids are out of school and have nothing to research or study. Wikibooks, being a textbook site, would of course be hit the hardest. You'll see that the same thing happened last summer. How does this compare with your opinion?) --hagindaz 03:46, 3 October 2006 (UTC)

Language Instruction Audio (Pimsleur Methods)

The wikibooks are great efforts to provide instructional tools in learning foreign language. It would be great if there is a dedicated accompanying audio instruction.

Recently I've been using Pimsleur methods to learn spanish, and I find it very good. If anyone is an expert in liguistic and language instructional methods, and is interested in doing Pimsleur audio on Indonesian language, I'd be delighted to help to read out the phrases, since I'm an indonesian native speaker. However, I can't be the one who organize and edit the audio because I don't have experience in language teaching methods. Besides, I think "pimsleur method" itself is not copyrighted (am I correct) although there are pimsleur branded instructional recordings released by Simon and Schuster. Hence I'd think it's possible to replicate the method and record our own instructional recordings in order to make language instruction more accessible (currently the Simon and Schuster Pimsleur is really expensive!).

Chaerani 01:44, 29 September 2006 (UTC)

Wikistudy?

Is wikistudy like wikijunior, but for older?--Tigru 12:33, 29 September 2006 (UTC)

"Inactive" books, stubs, and redirects

I've seen some disturbing comments over the past few days about deleting "inactive" books (i.e., books that aren't currently being worked on). I feel strongly that this comes from a fundamental misunderstanding of what wikibooks is and is not. I'd like to propose the following policy for "inactive books":

Wikibooks is:

• A place to write, develop, and host open-content books.

Wikibooks are not:

• Web forums, home pages or blogs that should be deleted if they're not being continually improved.
  • We're not exactly short on server space, so they're not doing any harm.
  • We're not "doing the contributors a favor by hosting their pages here", wikibooks are written for the readers, not for the contributors (though of course it's fun for the contributors, too).

Stubs should be deleted:

• When they have no content, and have been hanging around for several months without any content
  • (If a stub is bothering you, just add Template:Tl to the module, which will bring it to the attention of admins, but not make "offensive additions" to Category:Candidates for speedy deletion.)

Stubs shouldn't be deleted:

• When they were just made yesterday
• When they have content, but aren't "finished" (what's the big hurry?).

Redirects should be deleted:

• When they were minor pages or stubs (i.e., the page was moved very early in the book's development)
• When the original page was created using a bad title (i.e., "Chapter" instead of "Book/Chapter", or "Bokk" instead of "Book"
  • If a redirect page is sitting where another page should be, just start writing the page there
  • If a redirect page is sitting where another book needs to be moved to, just change the redirect to the page that's to be moved there, and ask an admin to move the page for you.

Anyway, I'd like to get some feedback on this. Category:Candidates for speedy deletion was empty a couple weeks ago, but is now chock-full of deletion requests that I personally find inappropriate. --SB_Johnny | ^talk 13:57, 30 September 2006 (UTC)

Wouldn't it be better to simply modify Wikibooks:Deletion policy than to come up with yet another policy document?

Also, I did a random check on the speedy deletion candidates and couldn't find much objectionable (unused redirects, page renames and the huge number of original content that nominated yesterday). --Swift 22:26, 30 September 2006 (UTC)

There might be links on other sites to the old pagenames. I get the feeling the "water conservation" series in particular was written with something in mind (non-profit orgs, etc.), so the redirects might be serving a purpose (and are certainly doing no harm). The shakespeare book was September's CotM, and the source material was under discussion here (I personally think it should be deleted, but I don't think we ever heard back about why it was posted here... was there any annotation done on it?), so probably should have gone through VfD. --SB_Johnny | ^talk 09:56, 1 October 2006 (UTC)

and are certainly doing no harm. Granted. I just don't like the idea of having messy redirects mucking up the otherwise serene, clean structure that is Wikibooks.

The Shakespear original texts were also mentioned at Talk:William Shakespeare's Works/Contents#Adding Original Texts but no-one replied.

was there any annotation done on it?. No.

probably should have gone through VfD. They qualified for speedy deletion as they clearly violated WB:WIW as original texts. They have now been deleted.

What do you think about taking this to Wikibooks:Deletion policy? It might be more constructive to suggest modifications to existing official policy. --Swift 03:26, 2 October 2006 (UTC)

I disagree with some of this. A book is a big commitment, and a book can have more variables associated with it then a wikipedia artical does, for instance. A wikipedia artical needs to be informational and expository. A book, however, requires a unifying theme to tie all the subjects together, it requires a target audience, an organizational structure, and a clear voice. A stub-book, or a book which is hopelessly incomplete, which doesnt have any contributors, and is unlikely to attract contributors in the future is as good as no book at all. Wikibooks may be able to host content, but we should not be required to host useless, meaningless, or unusable content. --Whiteknight (talk) (projects) 23:41, 1 October 2006 (UTC)

Well yes, most of the stub books are trash, but not all of them are. The challenge is organizing them in such a way as to make them easy to absorb for the next writer who comes along months, years, or perhaps decades later. I don't think it's a question of being "forced" to host something, since for all practical purposes our closets have infinite room for more filing cabinets. Best option might be to simply ask for volunteers to "adopt" the major categories and try to come up with a standard stub-sorting system, as well as templates for use in alerting the authors of new projects about the existence of compatible stubs.

BTW, Wikibooks doesn't have a particularly clean structure at the moment, though it's been getting better thanks to Jguk's "category spree", which I've been following up on in the how-tos category. --SB_Johnny | ^talk 10:32, 2 October 2006 (UTC)

Request for automatic creation of an index

Maybe this question has been asked before, but I can't find a reference to it.

Would it be possible to facilitate the creation of a book index (similar to the index with key words found in paper books, refering to page numbers) with some kind of template that would create the links automatically?

I suggest something like:

{{bookindex 
 | book=TITLE OF BOOK
 | keywords=key1,key2,key3,etc...
 }}

I would like this to produce a page like this:

TITLE OF BOOK

• key1: linkToKey1a, linkToKey1b
• key2: linkToKey2a
• key3: etc...

I guess this is technically possible.

I know that you can always use Google to search the books, but then you would search ALL the books, not just the one you're interested in.

Jbib 14:50, 30 September 2006 (UTC)

Sounds like a good idea, but I have no idea ho you'd do it. If you personally want to search a book and all it's chapters, try using Special:Prefixindex. --SB_Johnny | ^talk 15:52, 30 September 2006 (UTC)

Thanks, Johnny, but that page only lists the chapters in a book, there's no search option. Jbib 18:09, 30 September 2006 (UTC)

You wouldn't be able to search any index created on Wikibooks, for that you'd need a modification of or an extension to the Mediawiki software.

As for your "keys", would this be something like categories? --Swift 22:29, 30 September 2006 (UTC)

Where can I request such an extension? Jbib 08:20, 2 October 2006 (UTC)

I expect you'd have to convince someone to write it or do so yourself. --Swift 08:48, 2 October 2006 (UTC)

No. For instance, in a book about Windows, I would like to find all the pages that talk about the clipboard. Jbib 08:20, 2 October 2006 (UTC)

Category:Windows/clipboard? --Swift 08:48, 2 October 2006 (UTC)

Might be nice to have automated searches within a category, actually, but it would be a pretty major software fix I think. Derbeth or Whiteknight might be able to create a bot for it though (or maybe you could?) Bugzilla's got a serious backlog these days. --SB_Johnny | ^talk 10:13, 2 October 2006 (UTC)

Wikibooks portal

I noticed that the Wikibooks portal (the one at http://www.wikibooks.org) still redirects to a page on the English Wikibooks called Wikibooks portal. All the other Wikimedia projects have seperate portals that are not part of any language, so shouldn't this be the same for wikibooks. Minun ^Spiderman 15:52, 30 September 2006 (UTC)

Interesting... you might want to bring that up on Foundation-l. --SB_Johnny | ^talk 16:53, 30 September 2006 (UTC)

Agreed. Please see mediazilla:7396. --hagindaz 17:16, 30 September 2006 (UTC)

Thanks, I have also posted on the Foundation-l mailing list. The only problem is I can't find the link, does anyone know how to find a post on the mailing list Minun ^Spiderman 12:01, 1 October 2006 (UTC)

here ya go :). --SB_Johnny | ^talk 12:26, 1 October 2006 (UTC)

I recieved a mail back saying:

The message's content type was not explicitly allowed

But I don't really see what was wrong with my mail. Thanks for the link anyway, happy editing Minun ^Spiderman 12:28, 1 October 2006 (UTC)

Did you sign up on the mailing list first? --SB_Johnny | ^talk 12:31, 1 October 2006 (UTC)

Im sure I signed up. It also happened AGAIN when I replied to a message that came in my mail Minun ^Spiderman 12:34, 1 October 2006 (UTC)

I've tried it again, and I think its working Minun ^Spiderman 12:40, 1 October 2006 (UTC)

Wait, I said that too soon. I'll have to give up until I find out whats wrong Minun ^Spiderman 12:42, 1 October 2006 (UTC)

In defense of leaving the portal page on en.wikibooks

There are several things I would like to point out here. First of all, what is now the English Wikibooks was originally the "parent" wiki for all of the other Wikibooks projects. Indeed, until about six months ago, there was still some considerable non-English content on this wiki (marked for deletion, but still there) from before the various language editions were created and the content moved off of this website in a fashion similar to what is happening right now with Wikiversity.

In addition, English Wikibooks has the administrators and other volunteers that are capable of being able to support the maintainance of this page. Is there any specific complaint about how Anglo-centric the portal page is right now? Or that updates to the page are not being handled in a timely and contientious fashion? Or that languages are being over or under represnted (including English)?

I have been involved somewhat in maintaining the portal page, and certainly any reasonable suggestions on its improvement are welcome. Because of its prominance and importance for all of the various language editions of Wikibooks, it should be some very well protected page editable only by administrators. What I don't understand here is why this page absolutely must be moved from here to some other project like Meta or a "beta" Wikibooks project other than to satisfy some weird sense of political correctness and anti-anglophilism. --Rob Horning 20:12, 2 October 2006 (UTC)

If I may ask, how does the portal page get updated now? --Whiteknight (talk) (projects) 23:12, 2 October 2006 (UTC)

Any user from any project updates m:Www.wikibooks.org template/temp, which is then checked by a meta sysop and copied over to the live version. --hagindaz 01:44, 3 October 2006 (UTC)

...some weird sense of political correctness and anti-anglophilism. ← yeah, that probably captures it. So currently wikibooks.org just redirects to en.wikibooks.org? If so, then yes, bettter to keep it here where it can be watched over than on a meta with few pages and therefore few eyes on the balls. --SB_Johnny | ^talk 23:35, 2 October 2006 (UTC)

But it doesnt redirect anymore. As of today, wikibooks has it's own portal page that isn't on en.wikibooks anymore. --Whiteknight (talk) (projects) 00:21, 3 October 2006 (UTC)

Good points, but check your premises. :) The live version is protected, and there are as many active admins on meta as on Wikibooks to update it, so that won't be an issue. --hagindaz 01:44, 3 October 2006 (UTC)

An HTML version has these advantages, Rob: our most viewed page will no longer be converted from wikicode, saving processing power and loading time, English transliterations for languages in foreign scripts appear on mouseover (and project codes don't), language metadata is used for browsers, and the search box can now work with all languages, rather than only English.

You will of course be able to update the page, Rob, along with those who aren't admins on en, who will no longer have to describe an error or update on the talk page (which means no more spelling and link mistakes!). English won't be needing many updating, and the other projects will be able to update the page themselves now, which means less work for you! The updates will be checked by meta sysops, who will be watching the page, before appearing on the live version. In short, you will have the same abilities you already have, along with other users. --hagindaz 01:44, 3 October 2006 (UTC)

If you insist on having direct control over the live version, I suppose we can ask to host the page locally. It didn't occur to me that you would feel this strongly about such a minor point, especially since you haven't been active enough to update the portal over the past month, but whatever you decide is fine by me. --hagindaz 02:23, 3 October 2006 (UTC)

I'm not insisting on any sort of control... indeed all I'm saying is that the admins here on en.wikibooks have done a pretty good job of keeping the portal page under control for the past couple of years. And this is available to any trusted user who achieves admin status. That said, I really don't care either way and if somebody else wants to pick up the ball and try something different, that is fine with me. I am, however, suggesting that this can and should be done by "community concensus" and not just based on a whim because nobody is going to be fighting the change.

Far too much stuff like this happens, particularly when it relates to major and long-term issues when no community concensus is even attempted. I am just urging caution and suggesting that there may not be the urgency to make changes just because you can make changes. That and just because other projects are doing something some way doesn't mean that all of them have to be done that way. --Rob Horning 23:14, 4 October 2006 (UTC)

Wikibooks:Administrators

To inform, Wikibooks:Administrators is now an enforced policy. The current version has been accepted for some time and with no dissenters has moved to enforced. -withinfocus 07:47, 1 October 2006 (UTC)

I am very happy about this. Thank you for being bold about it. Not having an administrator policy being enforced has been an annoyance to me for some time. --Whiteknight (talk) (projects) 23:37, 1 October 2006 (UTC)

Broken links on the main page

I have noticed two broken templates on the main page

• Wikibooks:Book of the month/October 2006
• Wikibooks:Collaboration of the Month/October 2006

Is there anything we should do about them Minun ^Spiderman 12:49, 1 October 2006 (UTC)

Fixed. --Derbeth ^talk 14:35, 1 October 2006 (UTC)

Admins and de-adminship

The following is part of a conversation that I have been having with User:Omegatron over the de-sysop nominations that have been called on WB:RFA, due to inactivity. Omegatron believes that users should not be de-sysopped for any reason besides malicious behavior. I am of the opinion that adminship is not a lifetime membership, and that if you dont need it, then you shouldnt have it. --Whiteknight (talk) (projects) 22:10, 2 October 2006 (UTC)

---

Being a regular user on wikibooks brings with it no obligations whatsoever, but admins do have the additional tools for the express purpose of fullfilling other obligations. If a user does not want these additional responsibilities, they shouldn't become an admin in the first place. -- Whiteknight

I wholeheartedly disagree. Would you mind copying and continuing (this part of) this discussion on a public talk page on Wikibooks so others can be included and I can see what others have to say? I'm sure there's an ongoing discussion on pages related to Wikibooks:Requests for adminship. Feel free to copy anything I said in this email thread. --Omegatron

Again, such a definition would result in hundreds of admins. --Whiteknight

Good. That's what's supposed to happen. There is apparently a significant difference in what is meant by "adminship" on wikibooks as compared to en.wikipedia or Commons, but the significance and authority of the original concept was explained by Jimbo:

"I just wanted to say that becoming a sysop is *not a big deal*. I think perhaps I'll go through semi-willy-nilly and make a bunch of people who have been around for awhile sysops. I want to dispel the aura of "authority" around the position. It's merely a technical matter that the powers given to sysops are not given out to everyone. I don't like that there's the apparent feeling here that being granted sysop status is a really special thing."

--Omegatron

I am trying to make adminship less special by saying that it isn;t a lifetime membership, and that it isn't a membership at all. "admins" aren't part of some special club, they are no different from normal users whatsoever, and should not be treated differently, except that they have additional tools that they are expected to employ for the good of the community. In this respect, adminship isn't a privledge, or a badge of honor: it is a commitment to work towards the betterment of the project. If you are not using those tools, why would you keep them, and for that matter, why would you want them? Where is the benefit in your ability to come back to wikibooks after a year of absence or more, and being able to block users and delete pages here?

I would also agree with your statement that wikibooks does treat the matter differently from wikipedia: the wikibooks culture has been growing away from that of wikipedia, and our differences are a point of pride for some of our members here. Not that we dislike wikipedia, but we are a distinct entity with our own methods of operation, and we are happy to be seen as such. Adminship is simply a tool, like a hammer. And I am of the opinion that you dont need to be carrying a hammer around with you long after you have lost all your nails. --Whiteknight (talk) (projects) 22:10, 2 October 2006 (UTC)

We have discussed this matter three times I believe in past discussions here as well as other places. The policy was enforced with community approval and I don't think it's appropriate to have another huge discussion with the same people saying the same things again and again. This has all been said before and there is nothing new here. Yes, our policies are different from other wiki sites. I don't see a problem with that. -withinfocus 22:32, 2 October 2006 (UTC)

Where are the other discussions? — Omegatron 23:00, 2 October 2006 (UTC)

Wikibooks talk:Administrators was one, but it appears to be incomplete. I will look for others. --Whiteknight (talk) (projects) 23:05, 2 October 2006 (UTC)

Wikibooks:Staff_lounge/Archive_21#Administrator_Inactivity_Decision Is another.

[8] is the third.

2 new templates for new page patrol

I created two templates and a category for use in new page patrolling.

• Template:Tl ("Query empty page"): for pages that have little or no content, but might be notes for later additions of content.
• Template:Tl ("Query duplicate page"): For pages that are duplicates of other wikibooks pages.

Mostly created them because it allows tracking through the category system, when Template:Tl and Template:Tl don't seem appropriate. --SB_Johnny | ^talk 11:47, 20 August 2006 (UTC)

Thank you. Could you explain a little more about how someone would use these templates? I don't understand the point of "Template:Tl". Why would I ever use it instead of Template:Tl ? I don't understand "Template:Tl" either. Why would I ever use it instead of Template:Tl ? --DavidCary 05:57, 18 September 2006 (UTC)