Enumerated Section headings?

When a table of contents is automatically generated for a page with multiple sections, each section is enumerated in the TOC. Is there any way to have that enumeration automatically generated at the actual location of the section heading?

This would both help disambiguate the section's level within the page and provide some feedback that the reader has reached the correct section in the page.

...Selden 13:06, 30 November 2007 (UTC)

I don't think so. If you could, I do believe that that and the normal enumerating will occur. Qwerty Binary 13:59, 30 November 2007 (UTC)

There IS a way to have it show up automatically on the headers when you are logged in (it's in the preferences under "misc --> auto-number headings", but I'm pretty sure there is no way to do it automatically and make it so it appears that way to everyone. You could put in a suggestion that people select that setting when viewing your pages if you want, people can take it or leave it as the case may be. Regards. Mattb112885 (talk to me) 19:31, 1 December 2007 (UTC)

Laleena

I've had an account here for a while, but this is the first time I've really been active. I left Wikipedia because of spammers, so I realized I could offer my services here without quite such a threat. I hope for a reasonable reception. Thanks, Laleena 18:12, 1 December 2007 (UTC)

Hi Laleena, welcome to Wikibooks! We have some spam here but we seem to have good control over it at the moment (it's an advantage to being relatively small!). If you have any questions about how things work or what you could do to help don't hesitate to ask. Regards. Mattb112885 (talk to me) 19:28, 1 December 2007 (UTC)

Norse History Fan

Hi all! Been doing research into the Norse for a couple of decades now, and just popped in to update the Wikijunior site on the Norse. I actually came across it while I was researching Viking Age hearths, heh. I've helped out on one or two articles in Wikipedia proper, but never in Wikibooks before. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Freydis Heimdallson (talk • contribs) 23:25, December 1, 2007.

Welcome to Wikibooks! It's always great to see new contributors to Wikijunior! Since you're coming from Wikipedia, you might find this primer useful. If there's something we should add/emphasize/whatever, tell us so we can make the transition between projects easier. – Mike.lifeguard | ^talk 02:21, 2 December 2007 (UTC)

Fiction, non-fiction and poetry

• *Note*: This discussion was originally on Wikibooks talk:Reading room but is more appropriate to be here instead. I'm moving this so it gets the attention it deserves and not lost on the Reading Room organization forum. --Rob Horning 12:06, 1 December 2007 (UTC)

I understand wikibooks is primarily for educational purposes when it comes to books; discussion, outlines etc. I was uploading book covers on Commons of books from my Small Press publishing company and found Commons supported Adobe PDF format. I am adding my full text books in pdf on the Commons page for my publishing company HMS Press. I was wondering if Wikibooks will have a section for just books, ones that the public can download the pdf files and read? Guttenburg Project comes to mind but they are in text (TXT) format. PDF is not editable. Is there room for fiction and poetry n here? Thanks WayneRay 12:14, 27 November 2007 (UTC)WayneRay

This page Category:Books with print version kinda does serve that function, but our main goad is to enable participation and contribution of content so probably some work could be put into the distribution/accessibility aspect...

As for the fiction and poetry for the moment they are out of our scope, but you are free to defend and provide valid arguments for it on the Wikibooks:What is Wikibooks/Unstable policy proposal, your participation is welcomed. --Panic 14:52, 27 November 2007 (UTC)

First off, I have to wonder whether the PDFs that you uploaded to commons are going to remain there. Commons doesn't typically host PDF files, especially not files of books. These files, by the way, are they released under the GFDL, or a similar free license? Are these PDFs of books that have been published? If these are books that are being donated under a free license, we could work on a way to transform them into Wikitext, and upload that text here on wikibooks. We do not host lone PDF files of books, we only host PDF versions of wikitext books. If you are willing to have your books translated into Wikitext, we would be happy to accept them as a donation. --Whiteknight (Page) (Talk) 17:46, 27 November 2007 (UTC)

I do have text copies of the published books and I released the two files under PD, I will have to re-read GFDL and other licenses. I don't know wikitext, is that where anyone can edit as in Wikipedia. PS there are 9378 pdf files in Commons WayneRay 16:21, 29 November 2007 (UTC)WayneRay

From a historical viewpoint I'd like to mention that the topic of fiction has been brought up before here on Wikibooks, and there were some strong (at the time) defenders of allowing at least an educational book oriented fiction that served specific educational goals. Think here something along the lines of the Dick and Jane readers from a couple of decades ago, and more specific to Wikibooks there was a project called "Aardvard the Aardvark". It really was a wonderful book, and there even were some awesome illustrations added by some of the participants that would have made this an excellent juvenile reader (and fit within the basic textbook scope of Wikibooks). The real problem with books of this nature is that there is no real means to resolve an edit dispute when you have two different people trying to take content into different directions, as there is nothing to verify or point to from an objective perspective. This is also the problem with original research... even if the results are reproducible. We had a chemical laboratory that added some of their lab notes to Wikibooks a while back, with the intention to make them available under the GFDL. Both of these were excellent ideas, but they also make it very difficult to work in a collaborative manner.

BTW, a sure sign that something is original research is when you go through and make major changes to a page that you didn't write in the first place, when the original author starts to strongly complain and keeps "reverting" the text back to the original version. This is a common wiki phenomena (also known as an Edit War). Policies such as a neutral point of view and no original research were established to try and calm down these type of editorial disputes, and allowing an appeal to an outside source to confirm or exclude a certain piece of information that was added to Wikibooks. This was something that was originally a part of Wikipedia, and Wikibooks inherited this general philosophy due to the close ties this project has with Wikipedia.

I don't want you to think we don't have fiction here because of some strong-arm political move on the part of a few participants here on Wikibooks, but rather understand the context for why the general prohibition of fiction has evolved over the years of working on books with this project. I wouldn't say that the door is completely shut on the topic, but some very compelling reasons for adding this kind of material to this project would have to be made, and it would be a major policy change for this project. Adding fiction or poetry opens up a whole bunch of potential problems that most people involved with this project don't want to deal with them. --Rob Horning 12:06, 1 December 2007 (UTC)

GFDL and CC-BY-SA license harmonization

For anybody who doesnt read foundation-l, and hasn't been a part of all the conversation lately, there is a bit of an important announcement. For a while now, the WMF, FSF and CC people have been in talks to try to find a way to harmonize the GFDL and CC-BY-SA licenses. The idea being that these two licenses are very common on WMF projects, and they accomplish the same general goals. Well, there is news that a deal has been struck, and future versions of the GFDL are going to be compatible with CC-BY-SA (probably 3.0 or later). Here is a blog post about it:

http://blog.jamendo.com/index.php/2007/12/01/breaking-news-wikipedia-switches-to-creative-commons/

What does this mean for wikibooks? First off, authors who want to cross-license their books no longer need to worry about that. License compatibility means that the two licenses can be used interchangably. That's the most important thing, there may be additional affects as well. --Whiteknight (Page) (Talk) 19:46, 1 December 2007 (UTC)

Oh, the WMF has made a resolution about this:

http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Resolution:License_update

--Whiteknight (Page) (Talk) 19:47, 1 December 2007 (UTC)

I'm not in on the full details of CC-BY-SA, so I guess I'm going to have a "crash course" on the topic. I am worried that quite a bit has been given up on the part of the Free Software Foundation in terms of general goals of the GFDL to achieve this end. There certainly is a substantial faction within the Wikimedia community that thinks it was an awful decision to use the GFDL in the first place, and that Creative Commons has a much better set of licenses than anything the Free Software Foundation could come up with.

BTW, if you use a CC license for some of your content... still be careful about dual licensing. Not all (read *most* are not) CC licenses are interchangeable. There still may be a need for dual-licensing in some situations if you work with people who insist upon using CC licenses... even with this change.

For those interested, you might want to also look at the slashdot thread on this topic. It is rather enlightening (and no, I didn't start it): http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/12/01/2032252 --Rob Horning 01:18, 2 December 2007 (UTC)

If you consider that the prime goal is the free distribution of information, the ideology of any particular license is really not important. That said, I dont think giving up any of the "general goals of the GFDL" is a big deal, because the license was never important: the freeness of the content was. Now, I think there certainly are people who are adherents of the politics of the FSF and the specific language of the GFDL, and those people are likely to be feeling a little upset about all these changes (a few have been voiced on foundation-l already). I think the important aspect of this for us (with "us" being en.wikibookians) is that the concerns we have about cross-licensing books disappear, or are diminished significantly. --Whiteknight (Page) (Talk) 01:30, 2 December 2007 (UTC)

Hi there

Hi there. I'm a new user to Wikibooks – most of my contributions are to the English Wikipedia and to the Wikimedia Commons. — Cheers, JackLee ^–talk– 18:16, 27 November 2007 (UTC)

Welcome JackLee! What kinds of things are you interested in? What kinds of work do you like to do on Wikipedia? We have a special portal page for Wikipedians who come to visit: Wikibooks:Wikibooks for Wikipedians. That page should help get you acclimated quickly (and if it doesnt, let us know where the problems are so we can update it!). --Whiteknight (Page) (Talk) 17:02, 30 November 2007 (UTC)

Thanks for the welcome. Well, I ended up here because an article over at en.wikipedia on the English dessert "Eton mess" contained a recipe which another editor said was inappropriate for Wikipedia, so I thought I'd transfer it over to the Cookbook (see "Cookbook:Eton mess"). Over at Wikipedia I tend to edit biography articles, articles about Singapore law and about Singapore generally. I might see if I can contribute towards books on Singapore law... let's see how much time I have. — Cheers, JackLee ^–talk– 17:24, 4 December 2007 (UTC)

Please Help Me Get Started on Our Class Book

I am a professor at the University of Northern Iowa. My students want to create a wikibook on Emerging Instructional Technology.

I have already added our project to the "Wikibook:List of class projects."

I am having problems getting started. I get to the blank editing box at the bottom of the I want to use a template of a previous book for our book. How do I get that template copied to our page?

The intro materials say to find a model book. I like the one entitled European History. I like the idea of having the table of contents on the first page and then linking to separate pages for each of the chapters.

I need someone to talk with about this. Can you please contact me? You can send me a note through Wikibooks, but I would much rather

• • receive an email zeitz@uni.edu or
  • skype (leighzeitz) with someone who can help me get off to a good start.

Thanks for your assistance.

Zeitz 22:46, 2 December 2007 (UTC) Leigh Zeitz University of Northern Iowa

Question on screen shots copyrights

Another stupid question... I was trying to analyse the exact status of some books and I ran into a series of copyright notices on a user page related to a new guide to Microsoft Project. Should I understand from those notices that having screen shots of a commercial software product is illegal in wikibooks, I tried to understand the copyright pages but could not get a specific answer. If screen shots are illegal I understand that any book like "Quick Guide to Excel" or "How to use Photoshop" would not make much sense in wikibooks context, right? --Jacques 04:39, 4 December 2007 (UTC)

HA! it looks like mike really went to town on that guy's userpage! The problem here at Wikibooks it that images come from a lot of different places, and are copyrighted under a wide variety of different copyright licenses. It's important that we know what the particular licensing arrangement is for every single image here on Wikibooks. In short, it is acceptable to have screenshots of copyrighted programs on Wikibooks. For this, we use a special "Fair Use" license. When uploading an image, there will be a drop-box that contains the various licenses that you can use for the image. Scroll down to the bottom where it says "Proprietary software screenshots": this is the license to use for these types of images. The items on User talk:Gfocaraccio were a problem because they weren't properly labeled with the license, not because they were screenshots of proprietary software.

I hope this answers your question, and you are right that there isn't a lot of explanatory material about images, copyrights, and licenses to be found around here. I'll draft up some stuff on this topic, in hopes that it will be helpful. --Whiteknight (Page) (Talk) 04:47, 4 December 2007 (UTC)

Very clear and helpfull as usual, thanks. The problem here is that the person will probably be scared to death if he ever look at his/her page ;-) Regards --Jacques 04:54, 4 December 2007 (UTC)

License approval?

Is the following license permitted? I'd like to use the documentation supplied to seed a new book on postgresql.

Portions Copyright (c) 1996-2006, PostgreSQL Global Development Group

This software is based on Postgres95, formerly known as Postgres, which
contains the following notice:

Portions Copyright(c) 1994, Regents of the University of California

Permission to use, copy, modify, and distribute this software and its
documentation for any purpose, without fee, and without a written agreement
is hereby granted, provided that the above copyright notice and this paragraph
and the following two paragraphs appear in all copies.

IN NO EVENT SHALL THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA BE LIABLE TO ANY PARTY FOR
DIRECT, INDIRECT, SPECIAL, INCIDENTAL, OR CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES, INCLUDING LOST
PROFITS, ARISING OUT OF THE USE OF THIS SOFTWARE AND ITS DOCUMENTATION, EVEN IF
THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA HAS BEEN ADVISED OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH
DAMAGE.

THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA SPECIFICALLY DISCLAIMS ANY WARRANTIES, INCLUDING,
BUT NOT LIMITED TO, THE IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY AND FITNESS FOR A
PARTICULAR PURPOSE.THE SOFTWARE PROVIDED HEREUNDER IS ON AN "AS IS" BASIS,
AND THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA HAS NO OBLIGATIONS TO PROVIDE MAINTENANCE,
SUPPORT, UPDATES, ENHANCEMENTS, OR MODIFICATIONS.

EvanCarroll 22:42, 12 November 2007 (UTC)

That's a tricky question, and I am inclined to say that this license would not be permitted. I say this because it is viral: it requires all future versions to be released under that license. Wikibooks is GFDL, and we cna't require our contributors to also release their work and contributions under an additional license. I may be wrong about this, however. I think the best course of action would be to contact the distributors of this documentation, and ask them if they would consider offering a license for Wikibooks to release that documentation under the GFDL. As part of that license agreement, it would be possible for us to include a note about where the material came from originally, this preserving the chain of attribution. If people have questions, you can point them to WB:DONATE, because that page answers many questions related to this issue. --Whiteknight (Page) (Talk) 22:48, 12 November 2007 (UTC)

I'd say "no" as well. It does seem likely that the copyright holders could be convinced to license it under the GFDL though. The GFDL does require attribution, so they shouldn't really be able to complain about that. The "viral" aspect that WK mentioned is the only sticking point I can see. If they'll let that slide, then it becomes GFDL-compatible. You should ask them for permission to release it as GFDL; if not, then I don't think it can have a home here. Hope that helps. – Mike.lifeguard | ^talk 02:31, 13 November 2007 (UTC)

One thing to keep in mind is that you can read that documentation, and then write about it from memory, like you would cite a source in a school paper. You can use it as a resource, but you can't copy it without proper citations, that is unless you get permission. That may be an option to consider, although obviously it will be a little bit more work. --Whiteknight (Page) (Talk) 02:42, 13 November 2007 (UTC)

The downer is it doesn't do anything the gfdl would not do, other than require two paragraphs for each distribution which won't allow unrestricted use. Can anyone ensure that this is not possible? EvanCarroll 17:33, 13 November 2007 (UTC)

It is a shame. Since it's such an insignificant requirement though, they may be amenable to dropping that requirement and GFDL-licensing the content. If you want help in contacting them about this, I'd be willing to help. – Mike.lifeguard | ^talk 23:22, 13 November 2007 (UTC)

If you know how to get approval, I'll write the book. I'm not sure how that would work though because third parties have contributed since the original release in the 80s. What I'm getting it is I'm not sure it is UC's liberty to release their contributions from the same clause, even if the clause only protects them, and requires the two paragraphs. EvanCarroll 17:01, 14 November 2007 (UTC)

Yes, third-party contributions do raise problems. You'd have to go back to the original, get permission from whoever owns the rights, and update from there. That way, all the third-party contributions are a fork, and we don't need their permission since we're not using their work. Does that sound right? – Mike.lifeguard | ^talk 21:37, 14 November 2007 (UTC)

Not quite, I'm not 100% sure that is how at works. I say that because I realize the license isn't viral, so it might be safe to assume the work that occurs within the book is in public domain with that following exception; ie, treat the license as if it was viral, unless otherwise noted, even though it isn't explicitly so. It would seem to fall under good-faith anyway. You can't possible track down the hundreds of people that have donated doc-patches to postgresql. EvanCarroll 21:22, 3 December 2007 (UTC)

C++ Programming

I got a complaint about this page today, and I have to say that I agree with the complaint 100%. Some history: There are basically two competing TOCs for the C++ book, and a third TOC that is designed for editors (not readers). These two TOCs are championed, respectively, by User:Panic2k4 and User:Darklama. I put links on this page, and protected it from editing several months ago in response to an edit war between these two (and some other accounts which I suspected to be sock-puppets, but did not investigate). I told the involved parties to discuss the issue on the relevant talk page, and the conclusion that they came up with was to keep the page the way it is now. Frankly, I find this to be an unacceptable fate for one of the most popular pages on our site (based on the wikicharts page hit count). Because the people involved can't come up with a solution themselves, I want to get the community's input on the issue. Here are some ideas:

1. We could merge the page (not the book) C++ Programming with the page C++. The second page is a much more aesthetic disambiguation-style page that could easily be expanded to include the two competing TOCs for the book.
2. We fork the C++ book into two books, one for each TOC. I think that this sets a bad precedent, and I also have a fear that issues of editorial control would become rampant in at least one of the forks. Plus, if we allow this book to be forked (and by extension, any book) whenever there is a dispute between authors, we've basically nullified the idea of "collaboration", and we've given a free license to authors to become uncompromising tyrants over their own book: After all, they can always fork if somebody disagrees.
3. We, as a community can select one of the two competing TOCs, and forcibly "implement" it. I think we all can agree that this is a lousy option because we rarely like to exercise top-down control over individual pages or books. However, the previous discussion was about trying to chose one TOC or the other, and we can consider this discussion to be an extension of that previous discussion, and find a solution that eluded the authors previously.
4. We try to force a merger between the two TOCs. This can be as problematic as option #3, and for the same reasons. But then again, we can side-step the idea of trying to maintain two competing TOCs, and we also mitigate fears of a fork.

I would like to get some opinions on this from various community members. --Whiteknight (Page) (Talk) 19:50, 24 November 2007 (UTC)

My suggestion is to merge C++ with the page C++ Programming and make the three TOCs as sub-bullets of the C++ programming book and tag the merged page as protected and get rid of C++ page. That way we don't lose any information. The C++ page is anyways quite stable. The merged page should have the same title as C++ Programming as it is one of the most popular pages on wikibooks. Top level navigation pages to reach these books should be aesthetic to build up confidence among the readers. Lastly, Programming languages bookshelf page needs to change in some places after that. ---- Sutambe 20:54, 24 November 2007 (UTC)

I wouldn't mind the merge of the C++ page with the C++ Programming page (If I got it right User:Sutambe problem is of visibility) if that meant the C++ Programming Book would be renamed/restored to the old name. (I remind everyone that the actual book title was an imposition after the merge, and not selected by the contributors (book community), the rational to defend the actual title was more or less the problem with the external link number to the page), at that time the C++ Programming was going to be the made the only work on C++ (results of the creation of the proposal for the fork policy and enforcement of it).

I also get complains about the book title page since I do promote the book (but wouldn't mind it being renamed), I took upon myself to seek references for the C++ Programming as THE C++ WIKIBOOK and correcting them (ie Wikipedia C++ page) so to diminish the problem User:Sutambe raises.

For the actual TOC problem there seems not to be any conclusion to the discussion, that is consensus for the alteration made was not archived. The main problem being that any use of multiple TOCs would (does) break the navigation of the book (the Editor's TOC was not included on the dispute as it doesn't cause problems and was not attempting to take the place of another already existing TOC).

The fork solution was partially taken User:Darklama did create another C++ Book, with a different scope and different audience as is shown on the C++ page, as for the actual content on the TOC2 most of the differences are only on location not content and some pages were already contributed (moved) toward the new book.

As for the proposal of a forced TOC there we would have a problem, Darklama original action was result of a "misplaced" BeBold action that was challenged (and even previously objected to)... --Panic 04:25, 25 November 2007 (UTC)

Btw I take this change to call your attention to the excellent work User:Sutambe has been doing on the C++ book More C++ Idioms, almost single handed. (The books is being translated into the JP Wikibooks also)

"A relaible, growing and useful collection of important C++ idioms. A must-know before one writes industrial-strength C++ code." AbhayB, Aug ‘07 (del.icio.us - one in many positive comments) --Panic 04:46, 25 November 2007 (UTC)

C++ is basically a "portal" page that provides navigation to multiple books. Maybe we should make a Subject:C++ page that contains all these links instead. Although a subject page would make a poor main page for a book. Maybe people need to basically keep C++ Programming as a start page with two TOC options, buy at least make it better looking then it is now. --Whiteknight (Page) (Talk) 00:11, 26 November 2007 (UTC)

Yes it was a redirect, I transformed it into an aggregation/listing of the C++ books and corrected the information on the bookshelves and on several sites that pointed to the C++ Programming or Programming:C++ as a way to improve visibility of the other works...

For what I understand of User:Sutambe proposal, the problem is that there are still many links to the C++ Programming or redirect pages (probably hunting down all pages redirecting to C++ Programming or Programming:C++ on every Wikimedia project and fixing them to C++ would help), the proposal of the user and comment about the facts as they are only reflect this side (the state the actual C++ page is not useful, and the fact that merging C++ to it would help increase visitations to the other books, and I completely agree... (but to satisfy his merge request the book would have to be moved/renamed, idea that I did not object to) --Panic 00:27, 26 November 2007 (UTC)

I'm not sure why renaming or moving of any book is required. I'm saying that the top level page (which is popular) should be dedicated to the broad world of C++ Programming and not to a specific book on C++ Programming. Having said that, there can/should be at least a book with a name "C++ Programming" (which we have). The reason is that, a google search for "C++ Programming" gives "C++ Programming - Wikibooks, collection of open-content textbooks" in the top 5 items. It naturally gives an impression of a collection of books. As of today, that page disappoints readers. I believe "C++ Programming" is a more intuitive search phrase than C++ alone, which is indicated by the hit rate of that not-so-useful C++ Programming page. The distinguishing factor of the two books with identical name is obviously the TOC, which I believe will be bookmarked when a reader has a preference among the two books. On the top level navigation page, we should call those two TOCs as Book1 and Book2, which in turn will take the reader to existing TOCs. I hope that will give an impression of two independent books on "C++ Programming" rather than two in conflict. As a result there will be 4 navigable books from the top page, which is exciting for a book collector. We can again make the C++ page a redirect as it was earlier to preserve existing links to it. ---- Sutambe 18:22, 26 November 2007 (UTC)

Renaming is equal to move, since the C++ Programming is(should be) the cover of the work (and not a list of other works), and needed as part the navigation scheme (as the root of the structure), in this case it should be the TOC as the book was formated like that from the start...

The view that a list of other works shouldn't be on the cover/toc was made by some administrators for a while I add a listing of other programming books on top and bottom of the page (it was smaller at the time so visually/size wise it had a minor impact), I'm not partial of any solution and wouldn't mind an option shared by all books, we already have the category navigational there.

Have you tried hunting down all mentions to C++ Programming and Programming:C++ and redirecting them to the C++ page, there must be still several other pages on Wikibooks alone and on other Wikimedia projects fixing that would probably influence the visibility of it even on Google.

I would object making the C++ Page a redirect to C++ Programming (not the other way around), my logic for having selected that page to start the listing of all C++ works was the way Wikibooks and Wikipedia is structured (namespaces), and using any other page name would be almost (but not quite) as arbitrary.

If you wish to press the point of the merge, select and extend one of the options and if indeed a merge/rename is needed post something on the C++ page and ask Whiteknight to tag the protected page to inform others of the pending change. On the C++ page most edits were done by me, you and Darklama (he didn't yet state any views on this) on the C++ Programming there are a couple of other active contributors, tagging and informing others of the change could set a time frame to have this resolved. I have already stated my views, I do comprehend and simpatize what your goal is (you can start by taking on that work of fixing redirects, I have not done an exhaustive cleanup, only some Wikibooks pages and the En. Wikipedia page if I remember correctly). --Panic 23:57, 26 November 2007 (UTC)

Humm! Now I kind of see the whole situation but don't see any easy, cut and dried solution to it. Lets just add "Category:C++ Programming" and "Category:C++" on the C++ Programming page and keep it as is. ---- Sutambe 08:52, 27 November 2007 (UTC)

(reset) Done , categories have been added. If you all agree I can also add a link from the C++ Programming to the C++ page. Mattb112885 (talk to me) 21:23, 1 December 2007 (UTC)

I'm ok with that. May be it should say "Other C++ wikibooks" or something like that. ---- Sutambe 05:31, 3 December 2007 (UTC)

Stuttering

I am a new user to Wikibooks, and have just travelled over from Wikipedia to alert you to concerns expressed over there about the Stuttering wikibook and its principal author. See and follow some of the links there for further details. This wikibook, which is a featured one, has been largely written by User:Tdkehoe who is the owner/manufacturer of anti-stuttering devices made by Casa Futura Technologies, as he notes on his userpage. While much of the book is unproblematic from my perspective, there are issues with promotion of device use and in particular his products. As a quick example of what is doing on, you might want to compare the chapter about his device, and that of his major competitor. I note that his conflict of interest has been commented upon in 2006, though it does not appear that anything was done about it. . I am particularly concerned because these companies have a history of using media etc to promote extravagant claims of efficacy in the absence of solid evidence. See for a quick overview.

Since I am a newbie here, I was not sure where the appropriate spot to post this was. Please forgive me if I have got it wrong and direct me accordingly. I would be glad to provide further information, if necessary.--Slp1a 13:53, 2 December 2007 (UTC)

Thanks for the heads-up! Wikibooks tends to have a far more relaxed attitude towards this, although it is still considered a problem (just not as big a problem). Certainly if a bias has been introduced into the book towards one product, we will need to correct that bias. However, Tdkehoe's involvement in a company that manufactures anti-stuttering devices doesn't necessarily make him unfit to be a book author, nor does it necessarily make the majority of his contributions on the topic suspect.

Of course, the article that you presented does raise the question about the efficacy of anti-stuttering devices in general, so that's something that maybe deserves some attention as well. I'll try to read over the book and see how much work would need to be done to bring it into NPOV compliance. I would suggest that other wikibookians do the same. Depending on how much work it would take (and how severe the problem is), the book could be un-featured, or it could even be deleted (although I doubt it would come to that). --Whiteknight (Page) (Talk) 16:55, 2 December 2007 (UTC)

Thanks very much. I agree that Tdkehoe should be welcome to contribute his knowledge, and as I said, there is a fair amount of good material in the book. I think it is right, however, that some other editors take a look and see what they think about the NPOV etc. I trust the task you have set yourself won't be too arduous! I'm afraid I have enough to do without embarking on this project myself, but let me know if you have any questions, or need resources etc. --Slp1a 20:03, 2 December 2007 (UTC)

I've sent the author a note (he has email disabled), and I am going to try and read through the stuttering book soon when I have more time to devote to it. Maybe a few other wikibookians would volunteer to give it a quick once-over to find any obvious trouble spots? many eyes make light work. We can remove any problems that we find, and ask this user (and any additional users) to try and avoid future problems to the best of their ability. Of course, if it persists... --Whiteknight (Page) (Talk) 20:23, 3 December 2007 (UTC)

Please check page

Hi,
I have finished my first series of interventions on Microsoft_Certified_Technology_Specialist/Exam_70-536 (deleted link only pages, shorten paragraph header, added short introduction, etc.)

• Could somebody take a look at the module to see if there are any other apparent flaws?

Thanks in advance --Jacques 13:58, 5 December 2007 (UTC)

I noticed something very odd when I was deleting the pages, it seems like whoever made all the links on the page you linked to tried to follow the naming convention, but all of the slashes are backwards, it's supposed to be /subpage/ , not \subpage\ . If the naming was correct, links to the parent page would automatically be generated near the top (like the link to the reading room parent page on the top of this page). Thank you for your improvements so far, that was a lot of link-only pages! Regards, Mattb112885 (talk to me) 21:21, 5 December 2007 (UTC)

Thanks Matt, this is exactly the kind of comment I was looking for since I'm new to wikibooks and don't know how things are supposed to be. I found this that was asking for a renaming. Looks like it was done for the parent page only. Tried it on the first subpage and it worked. It has the interesting side effect that you only need /subpage for a link from the parent page. I will add a "to-do" to rename the other subpages. Thanks also if you deleted some of the "links only" pages I marked for speedy deletion, I knew somebody had to take care of the s... somehow. Regards --Jacques 21:55, 5 December 2007 (UTC)

I have to say that this page is very impressive, in a sense. It's a gigantic outline, with resources, for a book. Few books are so well organized before people start writing, and it must have been a gigantic task for you to get it into this condition. Of course, the road ahead is not smooth and easy by any stretch, but it's a very good start. --Whiteknight (Page) (Talk) 22:39, 5 December 2007 (UTC)

Thanks for the comment. The structure was there before I started working on the module and it corresponds exactly to the exam objectives set by Microsoft. I just did a little editing recently... ;-) --Jacques 01:02, 6 December 2007 (UTC)

How do I just get a blank page I can start writing on?

In all the mass of information on Wikibooks, I couldn't find the answer to the simplest most obvious question..how do I open a page (just like when one clicks on Word and opens a blank new document) so I can begin writing on it? Please could you email me at foundinkualalumpur@yahoo.com ?

Thanks! Jonathan Adams

You know what? That question actually is very common, and I guess we don't do a good job about answering it. I appologize about this, and I'll try to write up some information about it.

There are two methods to get to a blank page:

1. Enter the name of the page you want to find in the search box on the left side of the screen. Click go, and it will take you to the page.
2. Edit a page that you can find, such as User:Foundinkualalumpur to create a link to the page you want to edit. When you save the page, there will be a red link to the page. Click the red link to go to the empty page.

I hope this helps you, let me know if you need anything else. --Whiteknight (Page) (Talk) 04:39, 6 December 2007 (UTC)

Promoting a Wikibook to search engines

In HTML there are meta tags for keywords and description strings to help a search engine to identify the content of web pages. I see that the keywords tag is put in automatically, but the description tag does not seem to be used. I have read that search engines pay more attention to description than keywords nowadays due to abuse of keywords. Is there any way of producing a description tag in wiki markup or is this treated in a different way in Wikibooks? Any comments most appreciated. Recent Runes 22:15, 3 December 2007 (UTC)

The short answer is no. The long answer is that there is nothing we can do directly here, although we can contact the website developers and submit a bug report asking for some kind of additional functionality. We could ask for a way to specify the page description meta tag, but that would likely cause problems from a programming standpoint. Of course, nothing asked, nothing gained. I'll submit a bug report and post tabs about the response. --Whiteknight (Page) (Talk) 23:19, 3 December 2007 (UTC)

Bug posted here at bugzilla: bugzilla:12196. --Whiteknight (Page) (Talk) 18:33, 4 December 2007 (UTC)

I don't know much about how the software works but I would have expected there to be less work in the bug fix if we asked for a way for the user to write the content of the description string by hand, rather than expecting it to be calculated automatically. The wiki text must be scanned already to put in the HTML keywords string. If we had an HTML meta tag in the text, I would expect it could be picked up fairly easily and written into the page header. Anyway, I will be interested to see what the developers have to say, whether they decide to change anything or not.

Another way of attracting interest might be to enable Wikibooks entries to appear in searches on Wikipedia, particularly if people include the words book or course in their searches. (Am I getting a bit technical for this page?) Recent Runes 01:49, 5 December 2007 (UTC)

Unfortunately the developers have already denied the request to add the meta description tag. They said that it was too difficult to automatically generate relevant keywords, and that any automatically-generated description would be just as unhelpful, if not worse. They didn't say anything about a user-specified description solution, but I can imagine that it won't be positive.

As to cross-site searching, I think that's a bit of a pipe-dream for now. There are enough complaints already about the search feature that I doubt a massive expansion in capabilities is something the developers want to get into. Searching multiple sites together would require search hits to multiple databases, which would massively increase server load. --Whiteknight (Page) (Talk) 14:06, 7 December 2007 (UTC)

Online Text Books For The Seventh Grade

I'm wondering how to find the online social studies text book for seventh grade. Thank You!=)

I don't know if this is the right place to ask that question, but I'll try and help. What's the book name, publisher, and edition? Do you need the actual textbook or just worksheets, notes, etc.? Unless your teacher has a password to the actual textbook, you'll probably either have to pay for the online version, or use the paper version. Hoogli (talk) 20:26, 6 December 2007 (UTC)

Wikibookian.org

Some people may be familiar with http://www.wikipedian.org and http://www.wikinewsie.org. These are websites, not officially associated with the WMF, where members of these projects can do things which generally can't be done on the wiki itself. I would like to propose the creation of a "wikibookian.org", a website for established (assuming a definition for "established") wikibookians can be listed and can get some special capabilities. Here are some ideas of things that such a website could be used for:

• Blogging, by wikibookians, about wikibooks, WMF, and other related topics.
• Email aliasing: USERNAME@wikibookian.org. This way, wikibookians can send and receive wiki-related emails without having to expose their email address to the public, and without having to create a junk account specifically for the purpose.
• Posting news and announcements about Wikibooks, individual wikibookians, etc. This could also be in the form of a blog, or a forum of sorts.
• Ability to host personal information, such as images of yourself, which are not released under a free license.
• Have an IRC client (probably in the form of a java applet) that could connect to #Wikibooks, #Wikijunior, #cvn-wb-en, and #en.wikibooks. This way people can do live chat without having to install an IRC client.
• Host software tools specific to wikibooks, similar to the toolserver but specific to our website.
• Host files which are not suitable for Wikibooks, but which could be adapted to become acceptable
• Have poles or questionaires to get information from wikibookians

Many of the issues above are pipe-dreams, admittedly. I think that blogging and email-aliasing could be done very quickly and easily on a cheap server setup. There is certainly a lot to discuss before anybody does anything along these lines, but what are people's initial impressions? --Whiteknight (Page) (Talk) 17:40, 5 December 2007 (UTC)

Wikibookian.org is a link farm as of now but besides that, I think the biggest issue with this is that it could create schisms in the community (between those that are part of the "wikibookian.org" group and those that are not); if this were to be created, I'd like to make sure that nothing related to the administration of the project is hosted there, because it would create a rather biased sampling of the community's viewpoints. Email aliasing sounds like a good idea, though I wouldn't use it since I have too many email addresses already. Mattb112885 (talk to me) 23:20, 6 December 2007 (UTC)

I own wikibookian.org already, I just haven't changed the default text there. I didnt want to do anything with it until we had a plan (if we even get a plan). But you are right, that site shouldn't be used for "business" in any sense, it would just be a way for wikibookians who were both established and interested to get extra abilities, such as the email aliases. I know on a number of occasions, such as when i'm communicating with people about book donations or whatever, that I wish i had a more official-looking email address. Wikiversity allows blogging in people's userspace, although we generally dont. Having a place where wikibookians were free to blog about wikibooks would open things up a little bit, i think. --Whiteknight (Page) (Talk) 00:39, 7 December 2007 (UTC)

Limiting PDF Access to authenticated users

In a different wiki, How can I make the pdf files accessible only to authenticated users?
--Abercrombie (talk) 22:17, 6 December 2007 (UTC)

I don't know that that's possible. To be sure, ask a developer.  – Mike.lifeguard | ^talk 22:46, 6 December 2007 (UTC)

I suppose you could put a password on the pdf file (it's possible to generate them e.g. using adobe acrobat, I'm not sure of any free ones that can do it but there might be) and only give the password to those who are authenticated, I'm not sure if that would suit your needs. Mattb112885 (talk to me) 23:15, 6 December 2007 (UTC)

I don't think we should endorse this practice. -withinfocus 01:24, 7 December 2007 (UTC)

That is true, I would discourage doing such a thing with a pdf on this project (it is meant to be equally available to everyone), I assume that by "in a different wiki" Abercrombie meant that he would like to do something like this on another project. Mattb112885 (talk to me) 04:29, 7 December 2007 (UTC)

Email notification of changes ?

Is is possible to set up email notification for the watchlist ? Otherwise users have to poll the site regularly to notice the changes.

--Xerces8 (talk) 08:11, 7 December 2007 (UTC)

Unfortunately, there really isn't a good way to have changes emailed to you. There are two things that I can suggest to you: First, add all the pages that you want to keep track of on your personal watchlist. This way, you can keep track of all changes that you're interested in by simply bookmarking that page and visiting it regularly (about once a week). Second, individual page histories have automatic RSS feeds associated with them. If you have an external feed reader, you can add these pages to that service, and get regular RSS updates about those pages. However, using this method, you would need to add 1 RSS feed for every page that you are interested in. Unfortunately, there is no RSS feed for your watchlist. --Whiteknight (Page) (Talk) 14:01, 7 December 2007 (UTC)

Actually on Meta its possible to receive email notifications when any pages in your watchlist changes. It doesn't appear to be an extension, so I assume its some built-in feature that we could perhaps request be enabled here as well, if enough people support it. --darklama 14:24, 7 December 2007 (UTC)

I would assume it's a volume problem. If I received an email every time a page on my list were changed, or even a daily digest, that would be a decent volume of mail. On the bright side, it would help to keep people itnerested, because they would be regularly nagged about changes on wikibooks in their email. --Whiteknight (Page) (Talk) 14:46, 7 December 2007 (UTC)

I thought it is obvious : email notification is (should be) optional. A user preference. --Xerces8 (talk) 19:18, 7 December 2007 (UTC)

I have wondered for a while now whether or not it would be feasable to have an email sent out when i recevied a new talk page comment, like on meta. I find I have less and less time at this time of year to check my talk page and if I was emailed telling me about a new message posted, I would be able to respond much much faster. I don't think it would take much effort for the developers to implement this feature, nor the feature that emails the user when a page on their watchlist is altered (though i would assume these are the same extension) presuming that the server load wouldnt be too great and there was suitable support here. Urbane (Talk) (Contributions) 10:54, 8 December 2007 (UTC)

Greetings from Seattle!

Hi, I'm new here. I have already done some minor edits (spellings, grammar, structure, images) and I'm interested in helping with small things like that. I'm interested in music and will re-write a score to look nice if it's not too difficult. I'm also interested in computer-related subjects and will help there if I can (though I'm not really all that knowledgeable with that stuff.). If you're curious, I'm a junior in high school (16 y/o) and live in Seattle/Renton. If you need anyone to proof read any new additions, I'd be glad to do it. Tyaedalis (talk) 23:46, 7 December 2007 (UTC)

Hello Tyaedalis, welcome to Wikibooks! Music is an area where we always need more help, Computer Science and related topics have a lot of books, but many of the books need some major TLC. Age doesnt matter around here, some of our most productive members are also some of our youngest. Good luck, and happy editing! --Whiteknight (Page) (Talk) 23:48, 7 December 2007 (UTC)

Thanks, I'll see if I can find anything to help with in the music section. Tyaedalis (talk) 00:31, 8 December 2007 (UTC)

Any books ready for Publishing?

Are there any books that are ready for fixed editions with all that this implies for quality, integrity and reliability? See Wikipublish. RobinH 17:21, 30 November 2007 (UTC)

We could start going through the list at WB:FB. That's probably the best place to start looking for a "good book". Also, we could go through all the books with available PDF versions, as they tend to represent the book at it's best. That is, authors tend not to create a PDF if the book is incomplete or if it has glaring problems. Also, authors may omit pages from a PDF if those pages are craptacular. On a slightly different note, what do you propose we do once we identify a book that is in such a condition? --Whiteknight (Page) (Talk) 19:20, 30 November 2007 (UTC)

It would be good to create some "fixed editions" of books that have been fully vetted and upgraded. This would raise the profile of Wikibooks as a resource because it would answer the critics. Looking at the popularity of various books, Human Physiology might be a good starting point. RobinH 09:46, 5 December 2007 (UTC)

Newspaper

I founding this (as I said on the Bulletin Board) and would anyone like to help? It will be much like the Wikipedia Signpost, with news about Wikibooks. Laleena 18:15, 1 December 2007 (UTC)

I didn't realize that you were starting a news project about wikibooks, i thought it was a general newspaper. If you are trying to write news about wikibooks, that's something different entirely! What are your plans? how do you envision this working, and being formatted? Are you going to do it the way Wikipedia has done it, or are you trying something different? I would love to help with something like this, and good news stories about Wikibooks would definitely be posted on my blog for the whole foundation to see. --Whiteknight (Page) (Talk) 18:58, 1 December 2007 (UTC)

I think we tried something like this before, here, it kinda fell by the wayside but I still think it would be a good idea. Mattb112885 (talk to me) 21:21, 1 December 2007 (UTC)

You're right that it did get left by the wayside, but mostly because there wasn't a lot to write about, and people couldn't agree on how best to distribute newsletters. I have a bot that can do it, but bots become untenable for very large lists of contributors. In addition, the list of recipients was not "opt-in", but was instead populated with users who appeared to be active, which is not always the best way to do it. If we had a templatized version similar to the WP version, people could put the template on their user page and news stories could be updated directly in the template. Plus, we could use a bot to send stories or notifications to people who "subscribed" to the newsletter by including the template on their user page. I'm certainly interested in trying something like this again, but we do have a lot of questions to answer. --Whiteknight (Page) (Talk) 20:31, 3 December 2007 (UTC)

I would like the format to be like the Signpost one, but this would still be highly unique. Many of my ideas come from the workings of the Signpost. No communications are necessary outside of Wikibooks. Also, features such as the latest admins and other types of administrator should be there. Thanks, Laleena (talk) 13:48, 8 December 2007 (UTC)

Copyright question

I think that the anon who marked Poems by Shpendi Sollaku Noé as a copyvio (though I could not find a source) is right, but IANAL and know little about copyrights so I will ask, is the translation of a copyrighted work under the same copyright as the original work? If so we should probably delete it as a copyvio. Mattb112885 (talk to me) 19:00, 6 December 2007 (UTC)

I think the answer may depend on the country, but I am not sure about that. However even if copyright is not an issue, its outside project scope and would more likely belong on Wikisource instead. --darklama 21:33, 6 December 2007 (UTC)

Intrinsic POV?

Hi. I hope this is the correct page to ask this question.

I am writing an essay entitled "The Case for <something>". In this essay, I survey a particular field of knowledge and then assert that that it would be useful for HS students to be familiar with that field, giving examples of how such knowlege would make the students better able to deal with problems they will face during their lives.

With regard to my survey of the field in question, I believe that I am maintaining an NPOV. But I am not neutral about whether I think students would benefit from the knowledge. The point of the essay is to assert a point of view on that question.

I'd like to take advantage of the Wikibook medium to open my essay up for collaboration, but I'm afraid it may be impossible for the overall concept to meet the requirement of an NPOV.

Your guidance, please? Thanks. --Lindsay (talk) 06:01, 8 December 2007 (UTC)

I suggest putting your essay up on Wikiversity instead. Essays are more appropriate there, where this sort of original research is generally accepted. As far as the NPOV problem (sense NPOV exists on WV too), I think using facts to backup your view that its beneficial would reduce or possibly eliminate any NPOV issues. Allowing other people to balance it by contribute facts to the contrary would also help make the essay more neutral. --darklama 15:05, 8 December 2007 (UTC)

Thanks, Darklama. I appreciated your remarks on NPOV for the essay, and I've moved it to Wikiversity as you suggested. --Lindsay (talk) 00:36, 9 December 2007 (UTC)

Video file extensions

Do you know the appropriate video file extensions that are allowed to upload to the server to incorporate into any wikibook page(s)? Any help will be much appreciated!

YODA 04:49, 14 November 2007 (UTC)

I've never seen a video file incorporated into a Wikibook (or any Wikimedia) pages, it is probably explicitly disallowed in order to save bandwidth but someone else probably knows better than I do. Regards. Mattb112885 (talk to me) 05:08, 14 November 2007 (UTC)

I have to be honest, I've never seen video around here (or on commons or on WP) either, so I assume it's not allowed. As Mattb mentioned, it's probably out of concern for bandwidth, if anything. A good bet would be to upload a video to a different file-sharing site, such as youtube, and post a link from here to there. --Whiteknight (Page) (Talk) 18:50, 14 November 2007 (UTC)

yes videos are allowed. they can be uploaded to commons (think .ogg is the only file type permitted though) and then inlcuded onpages by using the following code. [[Image:Videoname.ogg|right|thumb|320px|description (optinal)]] which will give the video to right (random vid used on wn}--Markie (talk) 10:57, 9 December 2007 (UTC)

Uploading a formatted textbook

Hello, is there a Way to upload a formatted textbook using wikipedia text formatting codes ? Thanks in advance—The preceding unsigned comment was added by Gchillemi (talk • contribs) 04:04, December 9, 2007.

You are welcome to donate books to Wikibooks if they're appropriately licensed and fit within project scope. You can upload a PDF (for example), but we prefer to have wikitext so it is easily editable for all contributors. If that's not possible, we'll take the PDF and (hopefully) someone will convert to wiki markup later.  – Mike.lifeguard | ^talk 04:16, 9 December 2007 (UTC)

The Front Page and Featured Books

Ebook sites have a quite different approach to showing off their wares from the approach at Wikibooks:

http://www.ebooks.com/

http://ebooks.whsmith.co.uk/345C9A6D-B0B9-4A85-AAB3-F3661D572A88/10/46/en/Default.htm

http://e-library.net/

etc...

The difference is that these sites show their books up front. If Wikibooks were a commercial site it would disappear without trace because it is so hard to browse. People want to look up and down the book list and select things that grab their attention, they don't always go straight for a known topic.

I know that this issue has been discussed before. What has happened in the past is that Wikibooks is temporarily opened up and then three other views prevail: tidiness, performance concerns and the view that Wikibooks is for contributors rather than readers. Slowly these views take over and our wares, the things we want people to see, get tucked away ever further.

I would like to see the Library catalogue put away in a separate area for contributors and all the navigation paths for reading books filled with descriptive summary boxes. Like they do on commercial sites (see http://www.ebooks.com/ ).

Most importantly the link to "featured books" shouldn't be an afterthought, tucked away at the bottom right of the screen, it should be the most prominent link on the front page.

When we get to "featured books" there should be a selected list of book summaries with little pictures. Above each list there should be a link to a department where a similar, but larger list appears.

In fact ebooks.com is an excellent model for how an ebook site should appear and we could do a lot worse than adopting their approach. However, for the moment my chief gripe is that "featured books" is not a prominent link on the front page and when you get there all you see is an uninspiring list and some cryptic drop down prompts that take you into the library catalogue, not featured books, if you click straight on them. RobinH 11:23, 5 December 2007 (UTC)

BTW, does anyone know why Featured books doesn't rank at all on the usage counter ( http://tools.wikimedia.de/~leon/stats/wikicharts/index.php?lang=en&wiki=enwikibooks&ns=all&limit=100&month=10%2F2007&mode=view ) ? Are the navigation paths within Wikibooks excluded (Wikibooks:Reading_room is also absent)? RobinH 12:28, 5 December 2007 (UTC)

Only the main namespace, the wikijunior namespace and the cookbook namespace are included. So yes there excluded because they are in the Wikibooks namespace. --darklama 16:53, 5 December 2007 (UTC)

I can agree in theory that our Main Page can always use a little improvement. But, if we compare our main page to the www.ebook.com main page, we have just as many book images displayed on the main page (they use cover shots, we use regular images, but the point is the same). We also have more in the way of explanation that we need to put on the main page, and more links to other sites, etc. I can agree with you that there should be a more prominant link to featured books. What if we made the title of the right-hand column say simply "Featured Books", and made that title a link to the page? Let me actually try that right now, and we can see if it addresses this concern.

One other thing that we could try would be to remove the title bar from the main page, probably using Javascript. This would free up some valuable screen realestate where more books and links could be jammed in.

Another thing worth considering is that there has been some non-negligible talk about creating something similar to http://www.veropedia.com for Wikibooks: A place where "good" stable versions of books could be posted as read-only. Books that are good could be imported from Wikibooks to the stable sight for reading, and development versions would stay on wikibooks for continued editing. If we had a website that was only for "reading", we would be able to highlight more books. --Whiteknight (Page) (Talk) 17:18, 5 December 2007 (UTC)

Why not have a page that links to specific PDFs? The page could be entitled "Fixed editions" and have the PDFs linked at he bottom of the standard "blurbs" about the books. I like the change to the front page, ideally it should say "Some featured books - click here for a complete list" but there is so little space. RobinH 14:44, 6 December 2007 (UTC)

I could try to add another small line to it, let me play with that and see what happens. --Whiteknight (Page) (Talk) 15:13, 6 December 2007 (UTC)

I think I've solved the problem with the dynamic navigation templates. The titles for each drop-down are no longer links, which definitely makes sense. When you click that, you're expecting it to drop down, so the behaviour should be that, and nothing else. I've also linked to the relevant Subject: pages inside each template. So if you're looking for languages books, you hit the bar for languages, and it drops down. If you don't find what you want, there's the link to the rest of the books.  – Mike.lifeguard | ^talk 19:26, 5 December 2007 (UTC)

Thats a big improvement to the featured books drop downs. Is there any way to allow the first drop down to be open all the time? Perhaps a dummy drop down could be placed above the others with a small selection of this month's featured books. This would then encourage people to click on the other bars as they scroll down. RobinH 14:44, 6 December 2007 (UTC)

Certainly the Featured Books should be THE most important thing on the front page. This is our main selling point - our best books. It would also be nice to have a random list of some of the featured books on the sidebar so they're visible to all users and not just those who visit the mainpage. Xania ^talk 01:08, 6 December 2007 (UTC)

I have been getting a real itch to start digging into the MediaWiki codebase and start becoming a developer, in part because of the issue of having some sort of stable pages. I've tended to shy away from even the thought because I haven't been all that thrilled with the politics involved, but I've come across a couple of limitations lately that are just screaming for some sort of MediaWiki extension or modification that IMHO would be incredibly simple to implement if I could just find the appropriate section of the code to modify. Stable pages are one of them, with the only caveat that it would require a new data field in the page record. Essentially some way to mark what is the current "stable" page. I've dug through the data dumps enough that I have a pretty good idea on how the MediaWiki data is organized, and I don't think this would be that radical of a new change. --Rob Horning 14:19, 6 December 2007 (UTC)

The FlaggedRevs extension aims to do just that, providing "stable versions" of a page that are displayed by default, and an extra tab to go to the "development version". Because of some of the technical challenges of that project, en.wikibooks is being considered as an early beta tester of this extension. I think with some lobbying, we could get en.wikibooks slated for the same test. This would very quickly solve our problem with stable versions (or at least provide a good temporary solution until we get a good automated PDF generator), so I dont think we need to jump into the code and hack together our own solution to it. However, I'm sure you know as well as any, Rob, that there are plenty of other extensions and improvements that we here at Wikibooks could definitely use. --Whiteknight (Page) (Talk) 15:13, 6 December 2007 (UTC)

The main page and featured books look a lot more useable now and should entice browsers into the system. RobinH (talk) 09:48, 10 December 2007 (UTC)

Checkusers

Some people may not be aware, but there is a new checkuser up for vote at WB:RFA, I would like to ask all wikibookians who haven't yet to go there and take a look.

There have also been some questions as to how many CUs we need here on Wikibooks. We currently have 4, User:SB Johnny, User:Derbeth, User:Herbythyme, and myself. Adding User:Mike.lifeguard makes 5. The question is, is 5 too many? For people who don't know, a CU is a person who has access to the IP records of the website, and IP addresses of registered users are not pieces of information that are commonly available. This raises security and privacy concerns which should not be dismissed out of hand.

Because of the security issues involved, there are some questions that need to be considered:

1. What requirements, if any, should we impose on candidates above what the WMF requires?
2. How many CUs do we need? Should we set hard limits? We have, because of the WMF, a hard-minimum of 2 CUs already.
3. Should CUs have something akin to "term limits"? Should they have stricter activity limits then ordinary administrators?

These are things that we very much need to consider, and I would love to get all possible input. --Whiteknight (Page) (Talk) 00:17, 10 December 2007 (UTC)

I feel that Checkusers are a very sensitive matter and Wiki projects should ensure that as few people as absolutely necessary have access to such a tool. Use of the tool should be available to other administrators and/or editors on request (only to show the frequency of use with IP addresses removed). The Wiki foundation or stewards should have proof of identification for anybody with access to Checkuser. Activity limits for checkusers should be very strict and tools suspended when a user is absent (reactivated upon request). What are the WMF requirements for checkusers? How do they verify the identity of people wanting such tools? How can we find out how frequently it's being used? Xania ^talk 00:37, 10 December 2007 (UTC)

Seeing as I'm the administrator being nominated, I might as well make some comments. I agree with Whiteknight and the CheckUser Policy (which is Foundation-wide) that access to the data in the CheckUser log is a privacy concern. It would seem, then, paradoxical that the Foundation would require a 2-CU minimum per-wiki. This is because there must be a minimum of 2 so they can be a balance on each other - they can check each other's activity; this avoids a single user monopolizing access, which has serious implications that need to further explanation.

The CU policy does have a 1-year inactivity limit, after which CUs will have the rights removed. This is the correct course of action. I'd argue for a shorter period, since the CheckUser data has a shelf-life dependent on the rate of editing. That is, an unavailable CU is useless, since the data doesn't last forever. Our current CheckUsers, while certainly trustworthy, and certainly competent with the tools, are not particularly active here, and this has been the case for some time now. If a request could linger here for so long the check is impossible due to the CU's inactivity, then that's not OK. I don't know whether that's the case with any of our current CheckUsers, but is something worth looking at.

I think setting a specific number of CUs to have is too rigid. Rather, we should maintain enough for current and anticipated needs. What that number is depends on the community.

On the subject of a term-limit, I see no justification for this. If a CU has the trust of the community and is doing their job (active and responsive to requests from the community) then there's no need to re-confirm every X months. OTOH, since they have access to private information, we should have some system to recall CUs if they lose the trust of the community. I'm not sure how that might work, but I want to outline a few features I think this process should have:

1. It must not be a popularity contest; the most effective CUs may not be well-liked, but that's not the point
2. It must be easily initiated by anyone in good standing with the community
3. Once initiated, there should be a period of discussion, followed a simple re-confirmation vote (using the same requirements as the initial vote as outlined in the CU policy).

Addressing Xania's idea of making portions of CU activity available to the community upon request: This has been addressed at Foundation-level and rejected because this would leak private information to the community - which is the point of having CheckUsers. The loss of transparency is trumped by privacy concerns. See several threads at Meta: m:Talk:CheckUser policy#The log is problematic m:Talk:CheckUser policy#checkuser in user log.

Hopefully this will clarify my stance on certain issues, and help others come to their own conclusions, both about the issues addressed here, and about me.  – Mike.lifeguard | ^talk 00:47, 10 December 2007 (UTC)

In direct response to Xania, the WMF has a number of specific policies (I am searching for a link to the relevant policy now, will post a link when I find it). CUs must be "of age". Proof of age and identity must be provided to the WMF. For me personally, I photocopied a piece of personal identification (a drivers' license, in my case) and emailed it to the WMF office. To my knowledge, all other CUs and stewards must do the same thing. Because of the legal ramifications of having access to IP information (and a CU can see slightly more then "just" IPs), all CUs must be adults, must be identifiable, etc. I am not entirely certain, but I think that when a CU steps down or has their tools removed, they can request the WMF to destroy the copy of their information (it may be held for a certain time, I dont know). There are people who have not run in the past, and people who have withdrawn from the position in response to these requirements.

The WMF also has a special "Ombudsman Committee", or "... Commission" (i dont remember which) that specifically handles problems related to CUs and personal information. That is, if there is a complaint about a CU, or if a CU did something inappropriate, the Ombudsmen can be contacted, and they do all the necessary legal mumbo-jumbo. To my knowledge, this issue has never come up, but they do have apparatus for it.

As another issue, and one that I just heard about recently (again, not sure how accurate it is), a CU election requires 25 "votes", with a "majority" of them being positive. That is, if there are 24 support votes, and somebody casts an "oppose" vote, that brings the total to 25, and in effect causes the person to be elected. In short, opposition votes, unless there is a majority of them, actually serve the same purpose as a support vote (in that they can cause a CU to become elected). I have to double-check this issue, of course, but I have a decently reliable source and no particular reason to doubt him.

I hope this answers a lot of questions. --Whiteknight (Page) (Talk) 01:01, 10 December 2007 (UTC)

For clarification: The CU policy quotes the parts of the foundation:Privacy policy that are relevant to CUs. The foundation:Resolution:Access to nonpublic data provides the requirement for age and proof of identity. The vote must show: "consensus (70%-80%) in his local community, with at least 25-30 editors' approval" for rights to be granted.  – Mike.lifeguard | ^talk 01:35, 10 December 2007 (UTC)

Make a book less confusing

The Pilingual Primer has been nominated for deletion. Xania has recommended to make it less confusing. Anybody willing to help to make the book less confusing before it is deleted is welcome to do so. --Fasten (talk) 13:59, 10 December 2007 (UTC)

Changes that aren't changes

Hi all, Apparently I'm missing something when I look at the history pages for a book. I've seen several instances when comparing changes in the history where the left-hand side is marked in yellow and has a minus sign next to it. On the right-hand is highlighted in green and has an addition sign next to it. And yet the left-hand and right-hand versions are identical. Can anyone explain this to me. Thanks.--PaulWLepp (talk) 15:24, 11 December 2007 (UTC)

Changed characters are in bold red text; if the changed characters are whitespace, then you won't see it since there's nothing to bold and make red. I think that's the only case where this might happen. Someone who knows more about how diffs are calculated might be able to tell you more.  – Mike.lifeguard | ^talk 15:32, 11 December 2007 (UTC)

Print version vs templates and categories

This message will be archived normally

I have a template that I use at the top of each of the chapters in Adventist Youth Honors Answer Book. One of the things this template does is put the chapter name in a nice little box at the top by using SUBPAGENAME. Unfortunately, this shows up as "Print version" on the print versions of each section. (There are multiple sections because this book is pretty huge.)

A more important thing that I'd like a little help fixing is the way this template slaps the chapters (based on SUBPAGENAME) into various categories (based on the arguments passed to the template). I don't want the print versions to show up in the categories. I tried checking SUBPAGENAME against "Print version" in [an old version], but there was no joy. I prolly messed something up, but I have no clue where I went wrong.

Uploading an E-Book

The ebooks satisfies the requirements. Now comes the technical problems: how do I upload the text formatted files ? Where do I find documentation on wikibook markup language ?

Giuseppe Chillemi —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 87.11.106.30 (talk • contribs) 10:32, December 9, 2007.

Wiki markup help can be found in the Help pages, though it's often easier to find the relevant ones at Wikipedia simply because they have more people to work on them.

Use Special:Upload to upload the file(s). Please read the instructions before uploading - you must give a source and license template when you upload material.  – Mike.lifeguard | ^talk 12:42, 9 December 2007 (UTC)

If you need help, feel free to email me, and I can help you with a book donation. --Whiteknight (Page) (Talk) 00:13, 12 December 2007 (UTC)

Miktex Latex to Wiki Latex ???

I am quite familiar with Latex, but it doesn't work in Wikipedia. I copied the following example from the wiki latex book, but it doesn't work. Is there a conversion compiler somewhere?

\begin{subequations}

\begin{gather}

a x + b = 0 \\

a x^2 + b x + c = 0 \\

a x^3 + b x^2 + c x + d = 0

\end{gather}

\end{subequations}

I tried adding "math" and "/math" (greater and less than signs omitted for display purposes), but I cannot get the above, or any latex2 anything to compile. The article I am trying to create, I have already written and compiled successively with Miktex. 76.103.80.207 (talk) 04:27, 10 December 2007 (UTC)

Our LaTeX version is very limited. Delete the \begin and \end lines there, because they are not supported. Also, remove the \\, and put each equation into a <math>...</math> tag. This should make them appear on wiki. --Whiteknight (Page) (Talk) 13:45, 10 December 2007 (UTC)

Actually you can use \\, in some supported \begin and \end sequences that the <math> tag supports. As in:

<math> \begin{alignat}{3} a x+b = 0 \\ a x^2 + b x + c = 0 \\ a x^3 + b x^2 + c x + d = 0 \end{alignat} </math>

${\displaystyle {\begin{alignedat}{3}ax+b=0\\ax^{2}+bx+c=0\\ax^{3}+bx^{2}+cx+d=0\end{alignedat}}}$

Read Help:Formula to learn what's supported. --darklama 14:39, 10 December 2007 (UTC)

Hello there, How can i help?

This message will be archived normally

I have just joined Wikibooks and would like to help edit texts, i don't think i would be contributing any new texts but definitely would like to help anyone edit texts. I guess my being a journalist has something to do with it. So can anyone get me started as in how can i sub-edit texts at Wikibooks?—Preceding unsigned comment added by Waffen (discuss • contribs)

Hello Wikibookians!

Hi there; my name's Vartan! I'm not exactly sure what I plan to do here. Whatever I see that needs changing - I'll change it. It's a wiki, right? :)

I have an account at Wikipedia and Commons. I also edit at AboutUs.

I used to stay away from WikiBooks because I thought you probably had to be a book geek to edit it. But I just realized I'm wrong. :)

--VSimonian (talk) 20:25, 12 December 2007 (UTC)

Hi there Vartan. If you have some experience on editing on other sister projects, then you can easily provide us some help. Take a look around, see what interests you, if you don't know were to start take a look for instance in this last page I marked as needing work done, Computer programming/Language concepts there are plenty of things to do around here... --Panic (talk) 20:45, 12 December 2007 (UTC)

Thanks! :) --VSimonian (talk) 21:14, 12 December 2007 (UTC)

Welcome to Wikibooks! I also see you are Armenian and Russian. If you speak these languages, the Armenian and Russian books could use some help. I am basically in the linguistics and languages department here, so if you need help for a good method to create a useful language book, let me know. And of course computer programming too could work. :) Good luck! Cheers. --Girdi (talk) 21:20, 12 December 2007 (UTC)

Heh - I am Armenian but I don't speak Armenian. :) However, I do speak Russian - I'm actually taking Russian classes (writing and reading) now. Thanks for the idea! --VSimonian (talk) 21:41, 12 December 2007 (UTC)

Пожальуйста! --Girdi (talk) 02:22, 13 December 2007 (UTC)

"Why Give?" blog

The WMF has started a blog to accompany the current fundraiser effort. Posts come from many people, and are meant to discuss the value of WMF projects, some reasons to donate, stories about donating and helping, etc. I would like to put up a post about Wikibooks and the sister projects, and how donations to the WMF can help them too (not just wikipedia, which is what most other posts are likely going to focus on). I would be willing to write such a post myself, but I would like to get input from other wikibookians, and possibly even write the post collaboratively here on-wiki.

The blog is located at: http://whygive.wikimedia.org

Quotes from the blog, as well as the approved comments are used in the sitenotice for the fundraiser, above, so things that we say about wikibooks could easily get some very good coverage around wiki-world. --Whiteknight (Page) (Talk) 15:08, 23 November 2007 (UTC)

Just a quick update, Apparently some people liked the blog entry that I drafted, and now it's posted up on the Why Give? blog:

http://whygive.wikimedia.org/2007/12/13/wikibooks-and-the-future-of-free-education/

People, especially in this fundraiser, tend to focus their attentions on Wikipedia. Some people talk about how good Wikipedia is, or how bad Wikipedia is, but a convincing case is never made as to why people should donate. My goal with this was to try and show that the sister projects, especially Wikibooks, really have a lot of potential for future growth and development, and that people should donate to support that growth. Also, it serves as a shameless plug to try and attract new readers/contributors. --Whiteknight (Page) (Talk) 13:54, 13 December 2007 (UTC)

Book authorship tool

The user interface isn't quite ready yet, but you can just alter the link for now. Here's what it came up with for the gardening book: http://tools.wikimedia.de/~kalan/bookauthors/?q=A_Wikimanual_of_Gardening

I don't know how this will apply to the new license, but it can give you something to work from for now using GFDL author lists (I'm going to use the top 15 non-bot/non-IP editors, and will contact the contributors on the Wikipedia side to make sure there are no alternate username issues). --SB_Johnny | ^PA! 16:34, 12 December 2007 (UTC)

Greenspun illustration project: requests now open

Dear Wikimedians,

This is a (belated) announcement that requests are now being taken for illustrations to be created for the Philip Greenspun illustration project (PGIP).

The aim of the project is to create and improve illustrations on Wikimedia projects. You can help by identifying which important articles or concepts are missing illustrations (diagrams) that could make them a lot easier to understand. Requests should be made on this page: Philip_Greenspun_illustration_project/Requests

If there's a topic area you know a lot about or are involved with as a Wikiproject, why not conduct a review to see which illustrations are missing and needed for that topic? Existing content can be checked by using Mayflower to search Wikimedia Commons, or use the Free Image Search Tool to quickly check for images of a given topic in other-language projects.

The community suggestions will be used to shape the final list, which will be finalised to 50 specific requests for Round 1, due to start in January. People will be able to make suggestions for the duration of the project, not just in the lead-up to Round 1.

• General information about the project: m:Philip_Greenspun_illustration_project
• Potential illustrators and others interested in the project should join the mailing list: mail:greenspun-illustrations

thanks, pfctdayelise (talk) 13:28, 13 December 2007 (UTC) (Project coordinator)

Split module from book

Hi. Stupid question once again... Do we need some kind of authorization to "split" a module from a book to make it a book by itself (and changing the title accordingly). The idea would be to split Microsoft_Certified_Technology_Specialist/Exam_70-536 from the Microsoft_Certified_Technology_Specialist book and make it a book on its own. The title could be something like ".NET Development Foundation (70-536)". There are two main reasons we would want to do that:

• The exam is part of more then one certification (6 in fact), its kind of weird that it is "glued" to one of them.
• Putting .NET somewhere in the title would be a little more meaningfull about the content of the module.

I would like to it now because:

• I am starting to split the document (pages are getting too big and Mike is sending posting "split" requests :-)). I would like to do the change before having too many pages.
• Also I am referencing the book on discussion groups and other places and I would like to have an address that would not be redirected. So any problem if I do that split? Regards -- Jacques (talk) (email) 19:46, 13 December 2007 (UTC)

Authorization per se is not required but to avoid conflicts and since the changes you are proposing go a bit beyond the BeBold status, you should attempt to reach a consensus with all Wikibookians working on the same pages, try posting in the talk pages a notice and see if you get any reaction, as courtesy you could also attempt to find out who was most involved on editing the pages even if the works has stopped, you can even find out people willing to help you on those tasks.

Split the changes you intent on doing in smaller proposals if not directly related (ie: rename of the book, and splitting it into chapters) add those proposal to the relevant book talk/user pages and establish a close time normally 7 days after the last argument was posted (avoid votes) by asking directly for objections/comments. --Panic (talk) 20:00, 13 December 2007 (UTC)

Very clear thanks, I will follow your recommendations and post a seven day notice on the relevan talk pages to see if there is any objections. As for the past contributors I did some reseach and did not find any actually active. As for me, I have done a couple of edits on this book lately :-) Regards -- Jacques (talk) (email) 20:35, 13 December 2007 (UTC)

There is no reason to wait, except out of courtesy, if there has indeed been no active contributors to the book in awhile besides yourself (say several months). I think you've probably already done enough and any changes would be in good faith. --darklama 21:19, 13 December 2007 (UTC)

I agree with Darklama. If you're the only one working on it, you should get to do things at your own pace. Be bold, create the new book, and let us know if you need any help with it. --Whiteknight (Page) (Talk) 23:25, 13 December 2007 (UTC)

Page name changed to .NET Development Foundation which becomes a new book and double redirects arranged. -- Jacques (talk) (email) 06:32, 15 December 2007 (UTC)

Howdy All!

Howdy all ive been using the wikimedia project for a while now and decided to help give back a bit by fixing some stuff up. Since I am a web developer I am starting first in the CSS area since it is rather decrepit looking at the moment. Hope to spark some interest there since I'm new and don't understand how all the formating works yet, help would be appreciated. I look forward to working with you all in the future. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by AKCaveman (talk • contribs) 11:33, December 14, 2007.

Hi there! Always good to see new contributors. If you ever need help with anything, just ask; we don't bite :)  – Mike.lifeguard | ^talk 15:10, 14 December 2007 (UTC)

I'm new

Mike.lifeguard added a welcome template to my talk, suggesting I say hi here... So, I'm doing so. I'm an experienced en editor, and don't necessarily expect to be devoting very much time here, unless it's requesting imports from tagged articles over on en. I did work for a time on the "distributed proofreaders" project on Gutenberg, but that's basically as far as it goes for my experience with PD (or otherwise Free) books. I also took an interest in voting for wikibook's logo, but that's all :-). Cheers, all! --Storkk (talk) 15:28, 14 December 2007 (UTC)

Hello Storkk, and welcome! Experienced Wikipedians are great to have around here, several of our books were created by adapting wikipedia articles. We also have another logo discussion going on right now, if you want to participate in that as well. Welcome to Wikibooks! --Whiteknight (Page) (Talk) 20:23, 14 December 2007 (UTC)

I saw that on meta. I'll keep an eye on it once it gets around to voting again. Cheers, Storkk (talk) 21:19, 14 December 2007 (UTC)

Greetings

At Whiteknight´s invitation I thought I would drop in and say hello. I edit at the English Wikipedia as myself (Haiduc) and specialize in Greek mythology, gay history and psychedelian bric-a-brac. I look forward to being of use over here, though it is not yet clear how that will unfold. As a closing remark, perhaps you will forgive a bit of doggerel that occurred to me the other day:

If you want to hear and see

Give up radio and TV. Haiduc (talk) 20:03, 14 December 2007 (UTC)

Hello Haiduc, welcome to wikibooks! I dont know that we have any books on Greek mythology, Gay history, or anything, but you can always start a book on those subjects if you can't find one. If you need any help, let us know. --Whiteknight (Page) (Talk) 20:20, 14 December 2007 (UTC)

Fair Use again

This topic receives occasional attention on the various policy talk pages, but never on a prolonged or continuous basis. With discussions elsewhere about allowing books to be cross-licensed under GFDL and CC-BY-SA for better flexibility, it seems strange to me that we are still allowing completely unrestricted fair use image uploads. Anybody who goes sorting through the list of fair use images is likely to find many abuses of the "license".

People upload fair use images all the time, often improperly, and the burden falls onto the intrepid admins who sort through images to find the mistakes and to take action. There are abuses and misuses of fair use that have never been caught, and more are being uploaded regularly. I can tell you that I spend little to no time sorting through uploaded images, and I know that there are several other admins who don't deal with the topic either. I believe that the burden for properly asserting fair use should fall onto the image uploader, not on the admins. Before uploading a fair use image, a person should have to make the case as to why a free image cannot be substituted or created for the purpose, or why the author of the image will not agree to grant Wikibooks a license to use it. I'm not advocating here that we restrict fair use images, or that we delete them or whatever.

What I envision is a process where people should have to "apply" to upload a fair use image. Only after the use of the image has been approved on a per-image or per-collection basis can it be uploaded and tagged with {{Fair use}}. The approval process would be minimal, possibly as little as a single admin saying "okay" or "not okay", optionally with some discussion if the case wasn't clear-cut. This ensures that all fair-use images are examined by an admin (many of our existing images have not been so examined), and that fewer abuses of the system are allowed to be uploaded to our server. This is, I think, a pretty good compromise between people who want to continue to allow fair use images here, and those who want to try and limit the abuses of fair use images that have historically been prevalent here. --Whiteknight (Page) (Talk) 01:46, 19 November 2007 (UTC)

I think the idea of having fair use images pre-approved is great. In essence, this is the best of both worlds (the "unrestricted fair use" and "Ban fair use" camps). There are, however, some problems with implementation:

1. Restricting "approval" rights to admins is too restrictive. I already have a method I'd like to suggest.
2. Someone could just upload a fair use image, and not tell us. This is something we need to solve before any process (including the one below) could work. Monitoring new uploads is feasible now, but may not be in the future. As part of this initiative, we might consider making un-approved fair-use uploads a candidate for speedy deletion. Also, disabling the fair use templates in the drop-down might be useful; it would encourage users to ask first. A really easy way (though it may not be possible) is to disable upload for everyone except admins. Again, this may not be technically possible. If it is, though, free images go to Commons, and fair use gets approved and then uploaded by admins (since they're giving us the source anyway).
3. We need to do something about the bad fair use images we already have. This is a huge undertaking, and one that will require a plan, if only to avoid duplication of work and drama when it comes time to delete some (which is inevitable).

We could borrow a process from WP:BAG - a set of people who know what they're talking about, who provide specific recommendations. In this case, we'd get all admins plus people who have a good record with image uploads; anyone from that list can "approve" a fair use image for upload. We'd have a noticeboard where would-be uploaders can make a request to upload a fair use image (or batch of images) and provide appropriate source and rationale prior to upload. Once it's decided that the image is legit, upload away.

This can also be used like Commons:Help desk - users can also ask about tricky licensing questions for other works. This may seem redundant to WB:HELP, and (o noes!) another page to watch, but I think having a page dedicated to licensing issues will be useful. (Of course, licensing questions would still be welcome on other discussion pages, but this would be a central location) In addition, we can create a focused "tutorial" for uploaders, which could function much like upload wizard at WP and Commons. Uploaders are required to look at this page, and potentially navigate through subpages as they narrow down towards what license they should use. (Alternatively, we can direct them to Commons if Commons would accept the license) If they hit "this image is a logo" (etc) they're taken to this pre-approval page, where they ask before uploading.

This is only an outline of several versions of a process that I think could work if we decide to go down this path. I believe it strikes a necessary balance. Fair use is a problem, and ignoring that fact weakens the project. On the other hand, there are legitimate uses for fair use, and those legitimate uses shouldn't be unnecessarily restricted because fair use has been misused in the past. This sort of system would allow fair use, while eliminating (or at least greatly reducing) the potential for misuse.

– Mike.lifeguard | ^talk 03:24, 19 November 2007 (UTC)

One thing that I mentioned on IRC is that we could change {{fair use}} to include a category for Category:Fair Use (unverified). Next, we could create a template {{fair use verified}} that would not include that category. Verifying fair use images, and avoiding duplication of work would be as simple as changing templates on images that we verify. The beauty of this approach is that any user could change the template, but users who are not familar with the process here would be unlikely to know how to (and thus less abuse). --Whiteknight (Page) (Talk) 03:28, 19 November 2007 (UTC)

I would like to note that one of the reasons I put together WB:FUP in the first place was to attempt to simplify the process of acting as an administrator in determining if an image would be acceptable on Wikibooks or not, in terms of being a copyright violation. I read dozens of threads about this topic on Foundation-l, and I am openly noting that this "policy" was one I borrowed from the Italian Wikipedia.... being in my opinion one of the most reasonable and simple policies on the topic that I have ever seen. The English Wikipedia policy on fair use is nearly unworkable in my opinion, and something that is still causing all sorts of problems. Better put into a nutshell, there was a camp or school of thought on en.wikipedia that all images should be allowed unless there was an overwhelming rationale to eliminate them. The WMF board (and particularly Erik) have been very active in trying to change the opinion including by "official decrees" by the WMF on the topic, but it still hasn't eliminated people trying to push fair use to the hard boundaries allowed by law. Another reason for writing the FUP was trying to convince contributors to Wikibooks that the educational rationale for uploading content simply doesn't apply in the context of Wikibooks. I still find people who don't understand that concept.

Perhaps it might be useful to require fair-use images to state the explicit reason (aka "rationale") if they are to be kept. The "upload" page already has listed the general exceptions covered under the FUP in the drop-down box, and perhaps we could "enforce" that further to suggest that if no reasonable rationale is given (or if it is given improperly) that the image could be a candidate for speedy delete. If it falls into one of the noted categories in the FUP, it is considered "safe", but other kinds of images may be considered. One of the weakest excuses I've seen on en.wikipedia is allowing fair use because there is no other method to get a copy of an iconic photo such as w:Image:WW2 Iwo Jima flag raising.jpg. Historical justifications are not allowed under American copyright law (there may be weak common law to support the idea, but it isn't statutory), and I don't understand why they are permitted here. For this one image, however, a rare exception is made because the Associated Press did grant copyright permission to Wikipedia...but the person who asked for the permission screwed up and didn't force it to be GFDL compatible (being before such an idea was widely encouraged).

BTW, I support the idea that non-admins can help out in the process of sorting through fair-use images. I have no doubt that anybody insane enough to be helping out with this process is likely to be nominated very quickly to become an admin. (hint, if you want to become an admin, helping with projects like this is one sure way to make it happen). This is similar to somebody labeling pages for spam and other cleanup work on Wikibooks where marking with templates can flag the content for review. I completely support such an approach that you are suggesting here, Whiteknight. --Rob Horning 12:07, 19 November 2007 (UTC)

I figured that saying the words "fair use" in public would be a good way to get rob more involved :). You know as well as anybody that i'm very anti-fair-use, but I recognize that there just isn't enough support around here to ban it outright. At the very least, I think it's prudent to try and limit the abuses of {{fair use}}. This kind of system doesnt put any restrictions on how fair use can be applied, but it does require that every instance of it be properly justified and attributed (which are legal requirements of a fair use defense anyway). --Whiteknight (Page) (Talk) 13:00, 19 November 2007 (UTC)

I noticed inacuracies...

On the page Do-It-Yourself/Breed siamese fighting fish I noticed many mistakes. I am not sure if I spelt "inacuracies" correctly, however, take a look at what I said on the discussion page.Jourdy288 (talk) 22:24, 17 December 2007 (UTC)

If you find mistakes or errors, you should be bold and fix them! This is a wiki, so all our members are empowered to make changes and improvements. If you have any questions about this, feel free to let us know. Welcome to Wikibooks! --Whiteknight (Page) (Talk) 22:26, 17 December 2007 (UTC)

project work

This message will be archived normally

          I'm a new user to wikipedia.....How can I get access to wikipedia effectively.....

I'm eager in starting a project work on astronomy.....guide my work........

Sources

Hello, I’ve just added some content about Walking Stick insects in the Wikijunior Bugs Project and I have two questions. Is there a place where I should list my sources? And, is it customary to refer readers to other books on the subject?

Thank you for your help.

Flolit (talk) 16:59, 14 December 2007 (UTC)flolit 12/14/07Flolit (talk) 16:59, 14 December 2007 (UTC)

Good questions! Wikibooks isn't like wikipedia, so we generally don't use the reference tags like they do. Some books list sources at the bottom of each page, and some books list all the sources for the entire book on a separate "resources" page, or something like that. I would take a look at how the rest of the book does it (if it lists sources at all). If the rest of the book does it, follow the style already in use. If the book doesnt use any sources, you can come up with the best way to implement them.

It is perfectly acceptable to list other books on the subject, although again, we aren't Wikipedia. If you must link to other books, do it in a separate "see also" section, or possibly an entire "see also" page (you can name it whatever you think is appropriate, of course). If you have a separate page for "resources", you could list all your references and related wikibooks in one page. Hope this helps! --Whiteknight (Page) (Talk) 14:44, 16 December 2007 (UTC)

TOC?

Can someone please tell me how to create a table of contents? I've looked everywhere and I can't find a thing....--Portlandiaman (talk) 00:23, 18 December 2007 (UTC)

Are you talking about a TOC for a book (that points to other pages) or a TOC for a page? TOCs for a page are automatically generated if the page has 4 or more headings. If you have fewer then 4 headings, but want a page TOC to appear anyway, you can write the word "__FORCETOC__" on the page to create a TOC anyway. you may be interested in reading Using Wikibooks, a handbook we are putting together for new users here. --Whiteknight (Page) (Talk) 00:54, 18 December 2007 (UTC)

Thanks--Portlandiaman (talk) 03:12, 19 December 2007 (UTC)

"Wikis Go Printable"

Erik Moeller sent out this message to the textbook-l mailing list:

http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/textbook-l/2007-December/001214.html

Is it just me, or is this exactly the kind of thing that we want around here, or what? Print-On-Demand for "collections of wiki pages" (sounds like books to me), automatic PDF file generation, etc. These are the kinds of things that we have always wanted, and it seems like the foundation is coming through big.

I've already started a campaign of shameless begging to have the software installed here earlier. Anybody want to help? --Whiteknight (Page) (Talk) 21:09, 13 December 2007 (UTC)

OMG, yes. How?  – Mike.lifeguard | ^talk 00:02, 14 December 2007 (UTC)

My approach is to get on my hands and knees, put on my best pair of puppy-dog eyes, and say "Pretty please?" Another solution would be to just send a lot of emails to foundation-l, textbook-l, wikitech-l, etc until people say "fine! we'll install the damn software. Will you please just shut up!?!?". Both methods are equally good, i think. --Whiteknight (Page) (Talk) 00:05, 14 December 2007 (UTC)

This is in beta, and plans already exist to roll out on WMF wikis in "early 2008" - I'm as excited as you, but I don't think we can make this process move any faster by being annoying :)  – Mike.lifeguard | ^talk 04:14, 14 December 2007 (UTC)

Print Version Creator

The Gadgets extension (which we discussed above and in other places) was installed on all Wikimedia projects. Already, a few gadgets have been submitted and installed here for people to try and use. Some of these gadgets are very interesting, and are worth testing out.

I've submitted my "Print Version Creator" javascript. It's a semi-automatic tool for creating a printable version of a book. For simple books, it's as easy as 4 button presses to create and save the printable version. Once you install the javascript, the interface and all the instructions are located at User:Whiteknight/Print Version Gadget.

I have some other scripts that I am preparing as well, including a script to categorize books by subject, a script to create a book automatically from an outline, and some other small tools to make authoring easier. I sincerely hope this is helpful, and I would love to hear feedback from any people who use them. --Whiteknight (Page) (Talk) 02:31, 19 December 2007 (UTC)

Hi! New here, need help.

Well, I just recently joined wikibooks (today actually) and had a question. In the Muggle's Guide to Harry Potter, it says something about Beginner, Intermediate, and Advanced sections. I'd consider myself an Advanced reader, but am curious as to how I access the Advanced Section, (Greater Picture)? If anyone can help me out, that'd be great. Thanks! —Preceding unsigned comment added by KEFIOX (discuss • contribs)

Hello. The Beginner, Intermediate, and Advanced "levels" are meant to differentiate various sections within our book pages. You can find out more info here. The different levels are not directly accessible but embedded into almost all book pages, like this page on Harry Potter. The flow of the page is marked with level warnings to keep readers from learning too much before they're ready. The Greater Picture is available on almost all of our pages and is tagged with the Advanced level. Hope this helps, and you can always contact me if you would like to learn more. Thanks. -withinfocus 02:57, 2 December 2007 (UTC)

That's what I thought at first. But whenever I go to a section like this, I see the Beginner level and the Intermediate level, but no Advanced level. I think I stumbled across an Advanced level that had nothing under it, but I can't find it anymore. Also you said that The Greater Picture is tagged with the advanced level, but I've only seen it tagged with the Intermediate level, there isn't even an Advanced level here, yet there is a Greater Picture. Hmmm.... Confusing?

Mildly. The thing is: there are no warnings for a beginner. If you're intermediate, you can go past the warning that says that beginners should go no further. If you're advanced, you can go past the warning that says intermediates should stop here. The spoiler warnings are end markers, not beginning markers, and they are warnings only. Nothing is locked away from you, it is all at your own discretion. Chazz (talk) 20:39, 19 December 2007 (UTC)

Hello there! :)

Because of Whiteknights warm welcome, i want to introduce myself to you. My name is Stefan and i am mostly involved in the german wikibooks, where i am writing currently on books about Inkscape, Making Soap, Computerbased translation, Drawing for beginners and astronomy for beginners, which can be considered finished. I alredy thought about translating one or two of them to give english readers the opportunity to make use of them, but currently i have simply not the time to start such a big project. If you understand german language, you are welcome to take a peek in my books. --SvonHalenbach (talk) 17:04, 17 December 2007 (UTC)

I don't know the first thing about German but your work sounds impressive! I hope you have felt at home here in En Wikibooks. Let us know if you need any help, though it seems that you have a lot of experience with wikis already from what you've done on the German project. Regards. Mattb112885 (talk to me) 00:16, 20 December 2007 (UTC)

I'm a new user. To Wikibooks anyway.

I've been around Wikipedia for a while.

But whatever. Anyway, I'm introducing myself. My name's Pandu. If I contribute anything, chances are it'll be grammar fixes. I know pi to 78 digits as of right now. I think chocolate is awesome. And... uh... yeah. That's pretty much it.

--cuckooman4 (^t/_c) 04:02, 20 December 2007 (UTC)

Hi Cuckoo, welcome to Wikibooks! Any contributions are welcome, including (and in some cases especially) grammar fixes! You know 7.8 times as much of pi as I do, so congrats in that! Good luck getting to 100 (if you plan to, might as well, you're almost all the way there!) Regards. Mattb112885 (talk to me) 04:05, 20 December 2007 (UTC)

Haha, thanks. I think I might contribute some to the JavaScript book. --cuckooman4 (^t/_c) 23:47, 20 December 2007 (UTC)

Me too

Hmm. 3,141259 or something like that (there may be a mistake already in that, after that it is all blurry=), but for most purposes I have learned that 3,141 is well good enough, althoiugh I did at one time own a book with a million digits of Pi, Btw, many books of math tables will include a thousand digits of Pi hidden in their table of random numbers, which is a very cool thing. Have an interest in most things but don't know any one thing well enough to write a guidebook on it. So likely I too will mostly copyedit. -- Cimon Avaro (talk) 16:30, 23 December 2007 (UTC)

Copyediting is great! We tend to have a lot more authors around here then general-purpose copyeditors, so every addition is a welcome one. Welcome to Wikibooks. --Whiteknight (Page) (Talk) 17:38, 23 December 2007 (UTC)

Dual Licensing Books

I would like to dual license the books I have contributed to Wikijunior, GFDL and CC By 3.0. From a technical standpoint do I need to put the license statement on every page? or can I just put it on the author's page? Also are there any small prefabbed dual license templates, or should I make one? -- xixtas ^talk 04:36, 14 November 2007 (UTC)

You can't dual license a book unless every past, current and future contributor agrees. However I don't think dual licensing can be enforced as a requirement for contributing to any book, making dual licensing an entire book unrealistic, and there is problem with its viral nature which would also prevent it. You can however release all your own contributions under both licenses and for example state on your user page that all your contributions are dual licensed under the GFDL and CC By 3.0. Hope that answers your questions. --darklama 14:26, 14 November 2007 (UTC)

If someone writes his or her book entirely by himself or herself, and keeps the copyright to it, I see no reason why a book can't be GFDLed if that person so desires. If there's more than one person involved, then consents obviously needs to be gotten from all the contribs. 204.52.215.107 00:20, 4 December 2007 (UTC)

If you write a book by yourself, and it is entirely your own work, you may release it under any license and distribute it to as many recipients as you want under any license you want. However, the point is that Wikibooks can only host a copy that is GFDL. Wikibooks must receive a copy under the GFDL, but you may, as an author, release it to any other recipient under any other license of your choosing, if you wish. If you as an author own the copyright, you have the authority to release it to wikibooks under the GFDL if you wish. We take book donations all the time. --Whiteknight (Page) (Talk) 00:25, 4 December 2007 (UTC)

Assuming I can get all past contributors to agree. Why can't a book be dual licensed? IF you want to contribute to that book, then you need to respect the license chosen by previous authors. Why shouldn't authors be able to do this? --xixtas ^talk 16:45, 14 November 2007 (UTC)

I will not write more on this thread than this post, since the "same" issue is already under discussion on another thread, I only do it to clarify that only right holders need to agree to the change (not every contributor) but the community can object to that type of change and if approved would involve being transparent to future contributors by extending the submit clause to that possibility.

In any case after the change the copyvio rule would apply, any other right holder could came forward and request to undo the change, so apart from the normal instability all works suffer because they are open to unverified contributions no big problem would be created. --Panic 17:02, 14 November 2007 (UTC)

The authors/rights holders v. contributors thing is not germane to this discussion and we should not allow it to be bogged down by that question. I do not believe that Wikijunior World at Work has any contributors other than the photographers (whose work is already licensed under CC By), myself and one other person.

So it seems like the whole book could be dual licensed if all of the contributors (Karen & I) agree. --xixtas ^talk 18:29, 14 November 2007 (UTC)

The Wikibooks interface says all over the place that text is released under the GFDL. It's under that assumption that authors are making edits. If an editor comes to your page and makes a contribution without noticing the special licensing requirements, we could end up with a problem of having to delete some edits from the page history. I grant to you that this is not a likely problem, but my point is the same: Many editors may not see the special license before they start to make edits, and we can't expect everybody who edits every page to take note of all possible special license restrictions.

Unfortunately, Wikibooks:Copyrights is significantly vague on this point. It says "All content is considered to be released under the following terms [GFDL] unless otherwise indicated (for example; a clearly-marked quotation)". It says that content can be clearly marked as being under a different licensing scheme, but it only gives the example of a quotation, which implies small snippets of text embedded within the larger document.

I will note, however, that some other books have already tried this same thing. Specifically, the WNDP-APDIP Books are noted as being dual-licensed under GFDL and CC-BY-SA-2.5. Nobody yet has raised any concerns over this, although that may simply be an indication that not enough people have seen it. I think the time is getting ripe for us to contact the foundation about this point, because it seems to be getting raised more frequently. --Whiteknight (Page) (Talk) 18:39, 14 November 2007 (UTC)

This subject has actually been getting some good coverage lately on foundation-l. The general trend there is to say that dual-licensing an individual book is not a good thing. There are a few points that have been mentioned:

1. If you dual-license a book, you cannot move or merge content with a book that is not dual-licensed. this means that parts of our collection become essentially incompatible with other parts of it.
2. We can't change the copyright notice on the bottom of the edit page to show different copyright warnings on a per-book basis. As an aside, it would be possible to show different warnings on a per-namespace basis. If people insist on dual-licensing, that may be a route for us to pursue.
3. We run the risk that google, or other sites like it, may stop indexing our site so aggressively because of our license inconsistencies. This may not be a big problem with a CC-BY-SA cross-license, but if we give editors freedom to choose any arbitrary cross-licensing or alternate-licensing scheme, we could easily get into this situation.

Anthere has moved part of the discussion to textbook-l, i suggest that more wikibookians get in on it. I'll try to post updates as things happen. --Whiteknight (Page) (Talk) 13:52, 21 November 2007 (UTC)

I'll try to respond to the textbook-l thread, but I don't see what the problem is with dual-licensed content. One of those "dual-licenses" absolutely must be the GFDL when adding content to Wikibooks and/or Wikipedia, and it would be strongly encouraged that the other "license" be something that is generally free-content (as in freedom) compatible. I have a hard time seeing a dual-licensed Microsoft EULA/GFDL document for example, but that is potentially one weird combination you could see under such a combination.

I also strongly disagree with the invocation of Google here, as I highly doubt that they will stop indexing Wikibooks strictly because of inconsistent licenses. As long as we are being consistent with the GFDL as a minimum requirement, this is a complete non-issue here. Mind you, this is under a dual-licensing concept that allows you to use either license, allowing the end user the freedom to choose one or the other license for future end distribution. A dual license that requires both licenses for all future releases is a violation of the GFDL, making any distribution (or even modification through a Wiki interface) of the content a copyright violation because the GFDL terms would be violated.

I also disagree that a dual-licensed book can't be moved or merged with content of a book that is not dual-licensed. The issue that does come up in this situation is that the content must be declared to be one license or another. In the case with merging with other Wikibooks content that is not dual-licensed, it simply reverts to the GFDL and the second (or third) license is ignored from that point on.

The copyright notice on the bottom of the page could include a note that some of the Wikibooks content is dual licensed, and before redistribution you may want to check out some sort of "about" or "introduction" page of the Wikibook for specific license information. That certainly could be added to the Wikibooks:Copyrights page for more details about what may be dual-licensed. This copyright disclaimer on a per-book basis isn't as big of a deal as you are making out here. Again, if you assume it is licensed with the GFDL alone, you are fine. The second license is just an alternate way of obtaining the content and redistributing the content.

The one valid argument against dual-licensing is under the scenario of somebody taking Wikibooks content that is dual licensed, copying the content to another Wiki that uses the second license (such as a CC-by second license.... there are many Wikis that are now using CC licenses instead of the GFDL). In this situation, they have created a fork of the dual-licensed Wikibook under the alternate license, and if they make further modifications those additions may not be available under the terms of the GFDL. Meaning that we on Wikibooks can't "take the content back" and bring it back to Wikibooks. But the original GFDL version on Wikibooks would still be available, so it isn't a total loss, just that additions would have to be re-written and it would cause forking of the content. Forks are generally not desirable as it does cause confusion as to which version is the latest or "most authentic". --Rob Horning 15:24, 21 November 2007 (UTC)

Whiteknight seems to have left out one point that was brought up on foundation-l, which I consider to be main issue with dual licensing any works on Wikibooks or any other existing Wikimedia project. Dual-licensing is about giving everyone a choice between which license to use when using, modifying, creating derived works or redistributing the work. If books could be dual-licensed on Wikibooks, we couldn't say that all modifications/derived works on Wikibooks have to be under GFDL or both licenses without violating the dual-licensing terms. This could lead to all sorts of problems if the licensed picked isn't GFDL and would violate Wikibooks' current copyright policy. That could lead to problems with mixing GFDL and non-GFDL books or mixing GFDL modules with non-GFDL modules within the same book depending on your POV, and problems with determining what the correct license is for the book. --darklama 16:29, 21 November 2007 (UTC)

Why is this an issue? I think contributors to a specific Wikibook perhaps should be notified somehow (on the TOC page and introduction, perhaps a special template on most of the "main pages" as well) that the content contributed is dual-licensed before they add the content, but mixing GFDL and non-GFDL books is not a problem...as long as the content is dual-licensed to include the GFDL as a minimum requirement. A problem does come when you mix non-GFDL content that does not allow its inclusion with GFDL content in any form, and that is a situation we should try to avoid. --Rob Horning 01:13, 22 November 2007 (UTC)

If Book "A" starts off dual licensed with GFDL and MS's EULA, then I could come along and make some contributions to it and say that I choose to use MS's EULA only. Everyone is than forced to agree to the terms of MS's EULA if they want to use it in any way, can no longer mix it with GFDL material because EULA is incompatible with GFDL and its no longer dual-licensed, and can no longer be used, modified or redistributed as freely as the Wikimedia Foundation and Wikibooks requires. --darklama 02:14, 22 November 2007 (UTC)

This situation that you are describing here is only a problem if "Book A" is placed somewhere other than on Wikibooks. All contributions to Wikibooks must be done according to the terms of the GFDL as an absolute minimum, so any contributions that you add only under the terms of another license simply aren't allowed here on Wikibooks. It says that right on the edit window.... "Please note that all contributions to Wikibooks are considered to be released under the GNU Free Documentation Licence." This is something that must be made clear to anybody contributing to Wikibooks, and is IMHO something that should be made clear in every situation for this project. So WMF requrirements are irrelevant and it really isn't a problem a problem as far as the WMF is concerned.

The real trick is to convince the contributor that the second license must also be used. This is where local Wikibooks policy is more useful when you can try to enforce a dual-licensing regime on individual Wikibooks, where there has been established when the Wikibook was started a second license that is an opt-out dual licensing regime. Under this sort of policy which permits a dual license, the contributors to the individual Wikibook can decide to keep the dual licenses, or by consensus opt-out to switch to GFDL-only. This doesn't have to be complicated, and we can still preserve the GFDL requirements here for Wikibooks. Again, I don't see the problem. As I pointed out above, if somebody opts-out on the second license and adds substantial content to a Wikibook somewhere other than the Wikibooks website does this become a real problem. But that is not really a concern for us on this website because we still have the dual-licensed version that was before it was changed or updated. There is no copyvio for the older content to be forked from the modified version that no longer uses the GFDL version. --Rob Horning 11:14, 22 November 2007 (UTC)

If dual-licensing were allowed on Wikibooks without changing the requirements that all contributions must be released under the GFDL, required GFDL be used as a minimum, and disallowed opting out of GFDL, Wikibooks could at worst be putting itself in legal trouble for violating the terms of use for dual-licensing, misrepresentation of what is permitted, or for violating the terms in which someone contributed contents, and could result in a lot of lost contributions from having to rollback to a point before there contributions were added. Also basically by stating that people can't opt-out of GFDL, that books aren't really dual-licensed and can't be dual-licensed because people have no say in what license is used for derived works on Wikibooks. Making all books eventually only GFDL again, without the possibility for using any other license. To me that means there really would be no purpose achieved in even trying to dual-license a book or allowing it, because only the first-version would be dual-licensed and all contributions from that point forward would be GFDL and would only allow reuse, modifications, etc. under the terms of GFDL. --darklama 16:04, 22 November 2007 (UTC)

I would have to agree with your concern here about allowing something other than a voluntary opt-out dual licensing regime would cause problems. I also think it would violate the terms of the GFDL to use any other licensing regime that requires a second license for all future versions in addition to the GFDL, which is not a problem for Wikibooks. Content added under such an arrangement is simply a copyvio and must be deleted as any other copyvio contribution. You (Darklama) and I have gone the rounds on how critical a copyright violation absolutely must be taken care of (I don't think you need to press the panic button so quickly), but there are already very well established policies and precedents to deal with this situation.

Mind you, I'm not saying that people can't opt-out of the GFDL, but I think it would be an astoundingly wise policy (and fits with the rest of the project) that people can't opt-out of the GFDL....if they insist on keeping the content on Wikibooks. That is a completely different creature than suggesting that people aren't legally permitted to opt-out of the GFDL elsewhere. At the same time, I think it would be a good policy for Wikibooks as a project to strongly encourage...or even require content to maintain the dual licensing arrangement for those Wikibooks which have one. If a book has been "abandoned" by some general criteria (no active edits for several months, for example), a new group of contributors might be able to remove the second license and make the Wikibook GFDL-only. But if a book has been abandoned in this way, the reason for maintaining the second license is irrelvant as well. --Rob Horning 15:43, 23 November 2007 (UTC)

My concern is only with what Wikibooks would or wouldn't permit when modifying a dual-licensed book kept on Wikibooks and not what happens to a copy of any books outside of Wikibooks (pushing a panic button is far from what I'm trying to do, rather just trying to get my concerns across to you in a way I think you'll understand). For GFDL-only works its pretty straight-forward any use, modifications or derived works, and redistributions must be licensed under the GFDL whether its kept on Wikibooks or not. For dual-licensed works any modifications or derived works can be under any one of the licenses used. For example works dual-licensed under GFDL and CC-By-ShareAlike gives a person using, modifying or creating derived works, a choice between using the GFDL or CC-By-ShareAlike. What I understand you are suggesting as wise is that Wikibooks should limit these permissions for any dual-licensed works kept on Wikibooks, which I'm suggesting can't be done without violating the permissions to modify a work kept on Wikibooks under CC-By-ShareAlike use only. I'm also suggesting that a work can't be required to be dual-licensed for all modifications or derived works kept on Wikibooks either without violating the same permissions. I think what Wikibooks does, doesn't, would or wouldn't permit, would be in conflict with what the licenses permit (possibly not being legally permitted). --darklama 19:49, 23 November 2007 (UTC)

Something I forgot to add is that I think this would make knowing what license our books are under much more confusing and would probably discourage there use in favor of something less confusing, which would not help Wikibooks in its goals to make free textbooks for schools and other educational institutions. --darklama 16:44, 21 November 2007 (UTC)

I'm not a freaking stenographer! I can miss a few details here and there. --Whiteknight (Page) (Talk) 16:32, 21 November 2007 (UTC)

This doesn't have to be confusing if we maintain that the GFDL is a minimum requirement, and that all dual-licensed books must be done with opt-out licenses that permit a GFDL-only version. If in doubt, assume that the terms of the GFDL apply and you can ignore the other licensing terms. The point of a second license is to give more flexibility to those who are going to use the content elsewhere, particularly if a Wikibooks is being used as a development area for a book that has an outside community that may for one reason or another require a second license... to be compatible with content that has absolutely nothing to do with Wikibooks. It becomes a problem when you have a dual-license regime that requires both licenses which must be maintained, as this violates the GFDL. So I admit that there can be some problems with a dual-license environment, but it doesn't have to be confusing if we can narrow the scope of when a dual-license is permitted here on Wikibooks. Again, I don't see what the problem is as long as we maintain that the GFDL is a minimum requirement for all content contributed to Wikibooks. --Rob Horning 11:34, 22 November 2007 (UTC)

The problem arises when editors (like me) are just not comfortable with the Creative Commons licenses, since they have serious weaknesses when it comes to preserving the virality of free use in derivative works. GFDL can be a pain when publishing individual images or even encyclopedia articles, but it's really not a big deal at all for publishing a book. While it's true that a lot of other collaborations have opted to use the CCs, there's really no reason why someone couldn't just make a derivative ("book fork") here on wikibooks, or anywhere alse using GFDL. --SB_Johnny | ^PA! 12:19, 22 November 2007 (UTC)

So little of Wikibooks is dual-licensed that I highly doubt that you have any real problems finding much content that is GFDL-only for licenses, particularly if you insist to work on only GFDL'd content. Still, this is an interesting situation where you could have a major contributor to a Wikibook that would insist upon a "fork" of a dual-licensed book, resulting in completely different development as a separate Wikibook. Such separate branches have been frowned upon in the past, even to the point of merging Wikibooks together when they covered more or less the same identical topic. The question that would have to be raised is should we as a project allow forks of this nature to exist at all to create several "versions" of these books? --Rob Horning 17:32, 23 November 2007 (UTC)

The point of allow contents to be used elsewhere under a different license could not happen under this setup, since any contributions to the book would make the book GFDL-only and so any use of it elsewhere would have to be under GFDL. Making the dual-license short-lived without the intended benefits. I agree with Karl Wick's view on this matter, the only way to convince me that this isn't going to be a legal problem with the described setup would be if a good copyright attorney said so. However I also think this copyright attorney would need to be one that WMF has used and trusts. --darklama 16:04, 22 November 2007 (UTC)

I don't see why the dual-licensed Wikibook has to be short-lived here. Perhaps you or I am reading too much into this or are getting confused. The GFDL is non-negotiable on the part of the WMF... in part to try and keep a consistent licensing arrangement between sister projects (Wikinews not withstanding), but I'm just trying to suggest that you can maintain a Wikibook with additional contributions from multiple people that also uses a dual-licensing arrangement. This certainly doesn't violate copyright law in any form, and is something very common in the free software/open source software environment. That it may be more unusual with free content non-software projects (like Wikibooks) is all that is different here. I'm also trying to explain that there are some very legitimate constraints on what sorts of dual-licensing arrangments that can be used on Wikibooks...when you understand that GFDL-compatibility throughout the project is something desirable. --Rob Horning 17:32, 23 November 2007 (UTC)

GFDL is negotiable according to what was said on the foundation-l mailing list, just impossible to get rid of due to the impossibility of tracking down all the anonymous users and getting there mission to use a different license. However as was said on foundation-l, we could say that all works created after a certain date are under a different license and slowly move to recreate all the other books from scratch under the new license (but thats not really the issue here). What I'm saying is if GFDL must be used, then any dual-licensed works that includes GFDL as a choice would become GFDL work once modified, since contributors would not be able to pick a different license for works kept on Wikibooks. I'm suggesting if a book were modified by person "A" and there contributions have to be released under the terms of the GFDL, then person "B" couldn't then require there modifications to that book be released under CC-By-ShareAlike only, since it wouldn't be compatible with the GFDL. I'm trying to explain that even though there may be some very legitimate constrains desired that they may not be legal under copyright law, once you try to dual-license a work, because you have to consider what the licenses permit and what dual-licensing permits, and that it would be better to leave it to a good copyright lawyer that is consulted or used by the WMF to figure out what would be legally permitted for Wikibooks to do, if the Wikibooks community decides to go this way. --darklama 19:49, 23 November 2007 (UTC)

As for switching licenses and gradually changing all old content to the new license through some sort of re-write.... I don't see how that is possible. I would love to see somebody well versed in FLOSS licenses (like CC-by and GFDL) who also has a legal degree to demonstrate how that may even be legally permissible at all. I don't think it can be done at all. People suggesting it may be possible are doing only wishful thinking and trying to come up with a legal scenerio that would allow them to change the terms of the GFDL. --Rob Horning 03:28, 25 November 2007 (UTC)

Trying to break this up a little bit, I don't think it is an impossibility to suggest that parts of Wikibooks clearly marked as being developed under a dual-license arrangement must attempt to keep that arrangement when additional edits are added. Page forking is a real issue if somebody wants to be a real pain and insist upon GFDL-only, but I think we can insist as a project policy that any such edits which are done here on Wikibooks maintain the dual license on all edits, unless some sort of consensus among all those editing the page/book want to switch to GFDL-only. We are not preventing anybody from taking this content and redistributing it elsewhere under just the GFDL, but a GFDL/CC-by-SA dual licensed book certainly could be developed with an internal policy (internal to just that book) to insist that any edits done here on Wikibooks maintain that dual license arrangement. Why is this such a huge problem? If you don't want to contribute under the dual license, then don't contribute.

I'm also trying to suggest there are often some very good reasons for developing a dual-license situation, particularly if we are trying to involve another community outside of the normal Wikibooks users for a specific project where they are unsure of using the GFDL when the book begins. I think that sort of situation would be an ideal use for dual licenses. Or as I pointed out, if one of the applications of how the content will be used is in conjunction with substantial content that is using another license (such as the Scratch book I have been working on), there is again a strong and compelling reason to include a second license. In both of these situations, if conditions change in the future (due to those involved becoming much more comfortable with the GFDL), a switch to a GFDL-only license may eventually happen. And it would be a huge loss to Wikibooks as a project if book projects like these couldn't be started because of a blanket prohibition of dual-licenses on specific pages. I don't think it is always in our best interest to insist upon only GFDL'd contributions. --Rob Horning 03:28, 25 November 2007 (UTC)

I agree its not impossible, I think I've seen documents flying around on the internet that are dual-licensed before. I just don't think dual-licensing is as simple as it seems to be suggested when working in a collaborative wiki environment that has historically been GFDL-only like this project is. I'm all for allowing dual-licensing and even maybe allowing the use of any free-license for any book like is already allowed for images and other media, so long as WMF and WMF's copyright attorneys say its legally permitted, Wikibooks come up with something to help readers and writers understand what this means, and has a consistent way for writers to indicate what license there work in a book is released under so that anyone who wants to use, edit, or redistribute it knows what license(s) are used. Its already confusing as it is when wanting to redistribute books with images and other media files that use different licenses, Wikibooks shouldn't make it even more confusing and harder to do without addressing the current problems. --darklama 15:28, 25 November 2007 (UTC)

It looks like this whole issue is going to be moot shortly. WMF, FSF and CC have been in talks to make the GFDL compatible and interchangeable with the CC licenses and will supposedly by used on Wikipedia soon to make it easier for Wikipedia to migrate to CC. --darklama 15:31, 1 December 2007 (UTC)

Here's the resolution – Mike.lifeguard | ^talk 16:24, 1 December 2007 (UTC)

Not to prolong this thread any longer, but I would like to point out that the supposed merger of the CC-BY-SA license and the GFDL still doesn't deal with dual-licensing with content licenses other than these two licenses. This thread and discussion still has tremendous value well above and beyond the feel good love fest promoted by the Creative Commons Council and the Wikimedia Foundation. I still want to see just how the WMF is going to pull off the supposed conversion of the GFDL to CC-BY-SA on all WMF projects... and I haven't heard from the FSF about this issue either. --Rob Horning (talk) 04:08, 25 December 2007 (UTC)

Common Lisp book

Hey there, I'm new on Wikibooks and joined because of Common_Lisp. I hopefully fixed the chapter structure, added a cover page and cleaned the Beginner Tutorial. I most likely screwed up something, so you're invited to check =) --Qubodup (talk) 16:47, 23 December 2007 (UTC)

That's why wiki is so great, because you can screw up and it's easy to fix. The common LISP book has been all but abandoned for a long time, so it's good that you've put effort into it. I'll give it a read-over, if you want somebody to double-check you. --Whiteknight (Page) (Talk) 17:44, 23 December 2007 (UTC)

Wikiprojects

Are the Wikiprojects still used or are they obsolete now? I found quite a few projects that appear to have been abandoned, although they still say they are active. Helpfulstuffnz (talk) 03:20, 20 December 2007 (UTC)

From a practical standpoint, they have basically been abandoned. In general, we just don't have the critical mass (or at least we havent historically) to maintain these kinds of projects, and so they gradually become abandoned. There is certainly no reason why we couldnt have a wikiproject, but none of them have been popular yet. --Whiteknight (Page) (Talk) 03:22, 20 December 2007 (UTC)

I think we should hang on to them, most are going in the right direction and cover the early stages of the project's tasks. They are "off the shelf" templates that might save work later. RobinH (talk) 11:20, 20 December 2007 (UTC)

Perhaps if there were some more prominent links to the Wikiprojects page, it might renew some interest in the projects. Helpfulstuffnz (talk) 03:24, 21 December 2007 (UTC)

The question of "prominent links" is interesting. I will give my newbie point of view here. I was surprised when I saw the present discussion because I was sure that projects where discussed in the reading room project page. Why a reading room project page if you have a Wikiprojects page? Even if there was a reason this is just too confusing. The WB site can probably benefit from some streamlining but please do not add links, DELETE some of them (or merge pages in the present case, you will get your "prominent link" for free). I am very positive here but I fight with my poor english trying to convey this impression. Regards. -- Jacques (talk) (email) 04:25, 21 December 2007 (UTC)

I agree with Jacques, less is more. I never get into Wikibooks by the front door and do think that many things could be reduced, the noise level is to high. The problem seems that we can't establish a limit for the creation of things in the same way we act on removing them. Some of the structural, or community oriented projects/ideas should benefit from having a prioritization or a chain, but I don't see it working out. It's more or less the problem that I have with talkpages on a book, people post to them but very few Wikibookians notice(reply) the posts. (I avoid replying to posts with more than 2 months, I do so only to reset the archiving countdown.) --Panic (talk) 05:21, 21 December 2007 (UTC)

Another newbie remark here. If you look at wikipedia's wikiprojects list it is very interesting to note that most are related to subject areas (without even counting the portals). My understanding is that on wikibooks those are covered by books. So books are actually wikiprojects and they essentially have all the exposure. The management of books is done at the book level, I have some difficulty to see the benefit of having another structure for those. For the "maintenance" projects there are very few ressources around here so management overhead is certainly an issue. On the other hand I have some difficulty to identify exactly where to discuss the maintanace tasks (ex. the discussion below on categories). Maybe Helpfulstuffnz or RobinH would have some ideas on how we could centralize those discussions without creating management overhead. -- Jacques (talk) (email) 04:08, 26 December 2007 (UTC)

Whither Wikibooks?

Something new is needed at Wikibooks. We have some fair books now but these are not attracting new editors. If you look at some of our featured books they are not being edited by new experts in the field and some quite popular books have been almost untouched for months. Yet our sister project, Wikipedia, has large numbers of contributors. We seem to have a fairly large readership with over 20000 views a day ( Wikicharts) and rank about 3000th on the net (for a comparison ebooks.com ranks 18000th). My hunch is that many of the readers are going straight for the pdf files (this needs to be checked).

As an internet site we are hugely successful and it seems to me that we will need to accept the awkward truth that books are written by a handful of people and read by many.

So what is the way forward? Some of our most complete, reliable and rapidly developed books have been written as group exercises. This is a key area and possibly the front page should contain a prominent box advertising collaborative writing in a seminar/classroom context. It is also the case that most criticisms of Wikibooks focus on the changeability of texts, Wikibooks:Wikipublish is probably critical to our long term success but we have so few editors with the time required.

Perhaps we could resurrect the "joke book" and place boxes for featured books on every page....

Any thoughts? RobinH (talk) 11:45, 20 December 2007 (UTC)

The fact that books are written by few and read by many isn't awkward or unexpected. Quite the contrary, it's exactly what many of us have assumed for a long time, and it's confirmed fact on Wikipedia (i'll dig up the statistics if i can find them). The split between readers and writers is about 90%/10%, if I remember correctly.

Putting more information about collaboration on the main page is not a bad idea. However, for those of us who remember the old COTM, the last few COTM books before that program was cancelled were abysmal. In short, putting collaborations on the main page did nothing to actually attract collaboration, or to help improve the book. However, if we took books that already were active and put a "spotlight" on them, that might help. Given the historical evidence of COTM, however, i'm inclined to say that putting a collaboration on the main page just isn't going to do anything productive. --Whiteknight (Page) (Talk) 15:19, 20 December 2007 (UTC)

It would be interesting to know how many readers are going straight for pdf files... The type of collaboration that I had in mind was collaboration in the context of an academic environment where Wikibooks is used as a tool to enthuse students with the idea of producing essays for something worthwhile. What is needed is some way of selling this concept to university dons. RobinH (talk) 11:43, 21 December 2007 (UTC)

Also, the Wikipublish thing might be getting a technological boost coming up, because the foundation is having print-on-demand and automatic PDF generation capabilities added to the software. I've also been pushing for a read-only site or sub-domain or something where books that are good and stable can be hosted. Having a stabilized version of a book will make it more usable for classrooms (since the book won't be changed mid-semester) and will make it more attractive to educators and parents (because they won't be prone to vandalism). The Wikipublish project could become something so simple as an editorial board, checking books for quality, editing and updating them, and then saving them as stabilized versions. There are a lot of things going on with the WMF and the software that is going to help us out in a big way in the coming months, so I'm of the mindset that we need to wait and see, so that we don't waste effort trying to do manually what the software will eventually be doing automatically. Of course, if the foundation drags it's feet on these things (which isn't an unreasonable assumption) we will need to take action ourselves. --Whiteknight (Page) (Talk) 15:24, 20 December 2007 (UTC)

This is good news. The big problem is going to be getting enough enthusiastic editors with enough time. RobinH (talk) 11:43, 21 December 2007 (UTC)

I think attempting to resurrect the joke book would lead to mass hysteria, so let's not go there. As far as the reader:editor ratio is concerned, one possibility with the featured books is that most people who read them aren't that knowledgeable about the subject they're reading about, which is why they do not edit it. Even if a professional does read it (for reference or curiousity or what have you) they may be deterred from editing a book that is deemed "nearly complete", or they may just want to avoid having to write more about their profession (I know WK has said before that engineers at least seldom like to write about engineering, since they have to do it all day anyways). It's somewhat different with an encyclopedia article since it's a lot smaller of a scale and less detailed than a book on the same topic, at least in my view.

I do agree, however, with the emphasis on collaborations, though as WK pointed out it is difficult to get those together who would want to collaborate (class projects are convenient since they all are in the same place anyways, getting a random group of people from the internet together is an entirely different proposal).

With regard to the publishing, it would be difficult to verify all of the information in a nearly complete book, without a bunch of people (i.e. experts in the field) who can look it over and catch any mistakes and so forth. However, if such a professional saw that we were looking for verifiers, such as through use of a template, it is possible that they would be more inclined to help. Regards. Mattb112885 (talk to me) 17:58, 20 December 2007 (UTC)

One thing that I do want to do is find a way to get the new book list posted on the main page. The problem with that is that it takes space to add this list, which means we need to remove something from the main page if we want to add something new to it. I am highly in favor of removing the "navigation" links from the lower-left corner, or at least compacting them. If we have about 5 links to the "departments", and not two dozen links to various bookshelves, that would save us the space we would need for an abbreviated new book list. Putting books that are "good" on the new page is likely to increase readership but not necessarily increase contributions. However, putting books that are new or "bad" on the front page with a big "you can help!" message is likely to do exactly that. At least, it's a hypothesis that I think is worth testing. --Whiteknight (Page) (Talk) 18:44, 20 December 2007 (UTC)

I definitely support your idea of reducing the bookshelf list on the main page to major headings. RobinH (talk) 11:43, 21 December 2007 (UTC)

I was wondering if it would be possible to convert every book possible to PDF and actually send somebody to Wikipedia to switch at least some of their activity to Wikibooks. Meta would probably have some executives to come over, probably bringing a retinue of followers with them. However, reading over the above thing, that might also get contributors over. I know a Wikipedian (Valentinian) who is majoring in English and Contemporary History at a Danish university, and he might be willing to write things on Danish in English or vice versa. That could really get us going.. Also, I know Wikipedians who might be interested in switching completely to Wikibooks. Thanks, Laleena (talk) 01:45, 21 December 2007 (UTC)

As for the PDF versions, it would be possible to create a PDF out of every book, but it doesnt make sense to go through the effort for stub books, or small books, or books in bad condition. However, there is going to be an automatic PDF extension being installed next year that will allow us to create PDF versions of books quickly and easily. I dont think we should do anything drastic until this new extension is installed.

As to attracting wikipedians, I agree that it would be a great benefit to us. Some of our members, notably User:SB Johnny have tried long and hard to attract Wikipedians to Wikibooks, and it's largely not been successful. That doesnt mean that it can't happen, just that our attempts so far have not be fruitful. Maybe we just haven't tried hard enough. If you know any wikipedians who are (a) upset at wikipedia, (b) interested in writing books, (c) just looking for a change of venue, or (d) fans of wikibooks, definitely try to invite them here. We have Wikibooks:Wikibooks for Wikipedians to get them started, and Using Wikibooks for a more in-depth discussion of our project. --Whiteknight (Page) (Talk) 23:08, 23 December 2007 (UTC)

new user 'ere

new user here, I'm gonna get the genetics book on the featured page, watch for it! —Preceding unsigned comment added by Hagrye (discuss • contribs)

You should sign comments with ~~~~. :D --cuckooman4 (^t/_c) 01:06, 24 December 2007 (UTC)

I like that attitude! We have a lot of books that are incomplete, and all they need is a little love and attention to push them up to the next level. Helping a book to become featured is a very big accomplishment that can take a lot of work, but can also be a source of great pride and value. I'm very happy that you're adopting the Genetics book, it's in a bad state right now, and needs lots of help. Speaking of help, don't hesitate to ask us if you need anything at all. Good luck! --Whiteknight (Page) (Talk) 19:42, 26 December 2007 (UTC)

Haskellalalalalala

I'm a programmer who mostly reads things on Wikibooks, though I make an effort to correct grammar and spelling. -Jsnx (talk) 22:38, 28 December 2007 (UTC)

Welcome to Wikibooks Jsnx, even the occasional fix to grammar and spelling go a long way to producing higher-quality books. Let us know if you need any help. --Whiteknight (Page) (Talk) 22:42, 28 December 2007 (UTC)

Categories

I was planning to do some categorizing of uncategorized pages starting in a couple of weeks. I did some research and was very surprised to find that there where heated discussions on that subject!!?? For example: the proposed guideline does not seem to have been adopted, past categorizations operations gave way to heated remarks, etc. So if there are still some major problems with this concept please stop me before I start. -- Jacques (talk) (email) 15:51, 23 December 2007 (UTC)

User:Robert Horning, if he is around, can probably explain the opposition to this better then I could. I think a big part of the discussion was that categorization should not be compulsary: That is, we should not force pages to be categorized, but at the same time if people want to do it there is nothing to stop them. The problem, I think, was that we don't want to make it seem that pages must be categorized, especially if we don't have a standard system for doing it. However, over time, we have developed better methods and standards of categorizing pages, books, and other categories. I think (and I'm sure there are going to be complaints with this) that it should be perfectly fine to categorize pages if you want to do it.

Also, you will learn here, that there are no issues where 100% of people agree. Every issue is a debate, and sometimes you just need to do what you want to, in order to keep yourself happy and interested. --Whiteknight (Page) (Talk) 22:12, 23 December 2007 (UTC)

I certainly have been leading the opposition to the mandatory use of categories in Wikibooks. Wikibooks is not Wikipedia, and the same "rules" simply don't apply here. Also, I think that the kinds of categories that are created just to put a page into a category aren't always well thought out or really useful. In addition, from years of experience as an administrator on Wikibooks, I just don't think the supposed benefit of being able to watch for new pages on the Special:Uncategorizedpages is as big of a benefit here as it has been suggested on Wikipedia. There are many other administrative tools that can be used to perform the very same task if you really get down to it, and adding categories in this regard is just a waste of time that can be better spent doing something else. That is of course my opinion, and if you want to waste your time doing something you think may be productive, I'm not going to stop you from it. But I'm also not going to support you either, and feel like removing categories in books that I'm working on is also just as valid of an action.

Categories are a useful tool that can be used to index content, and nothing more. I certainly am strongly against any sort of general Wikibooks policy that requires the use of categories in the way that you format the Wikibook. BTW, this isn't to say that I'm against general categorization of whole Wikibooks, which in this case is much more related to how you can perceive an article on Wikipedia... but typically an individual Wikibook consists of multiple pages, so it largely breaks down the perception of what is accomplished on Wikipedia. This, IMHO, would be like somebody trying to categorize every independently editable section of every Wikipedia article. I suppose that might have some usefulness, but would be very clumsy to accomplish. Of course, this is just my viewpoint on the issue. --Rob Horning (talk) 03:38, 25 December 2007 (UTC)

First thanks both of you (Andrew and Robert) for giving attention to my post. I'm new to wikibooks so I may be missing important things here. Could you please confirm / infirm the following:

• Contrary to a Wikipedia article, a book on Wikibooks has typically many pages.
• So here the concept of uncategorized pages covers both uncategorized books and uncategorized subpages making it a different concept then on Wikipedia.
• An argument can be made about the usefullness of categorizing subpages
• Categories form the basic indexing mechanism for books. The new "subject" scheme that is gradually replacing bookshelves relies on categories
• It is reasonable to think that every book should be attainable thru the subject / category indexing scheme
• The exact structure of the category acyclic graph and the connection points between a particular book and that graph are clearly open to discussion

If the previous paragraph makes any sense then can you tell me how I can get a list of uncategorized books so I can do the important stuff and leave the rest for somebody that has time to spare. Note that the list of uncategorized pages having more then 5000 entries you cannot get the list of uncategorized books from it. Regards -- Jacques (talk) (email) 06:07, 25 December 2007 (UTC)

• Wikipedia is more like a single book (an encyclopedia) with many pages (articles), while Wikibooks has many books which is why subpages are used here and not as much on Wikipedia.
• Yes uncategorized pages and many other listings cover both books and subpages, unlike Wikipedia which consists of only a single book.
• Categories form the basic indexing mechanism for both books and subpages. The new "subject" scheme is intended for books only and should gradually replace bookshelves and departments, and yes it relies on categories.
• I think its reasonable to think every book should be attainable through subjects and categories.
• The exact structure of the category scheme as well as its usefulness are debatable. However I think the community's continued use of the category system shows that its desirable, both past and current common practices show that there is a general consensus as how categorization should be done, and any discontinuation or change of the category system while debatable is unlikely to happen without discussion and agreement.

Before you can get a list of uncategorized books you would first need to be able to come up with an accurate list of all books, which Wikibooks doesn't have. I think this is one reason why its good practice to categorize subpages as well into there own book category. --darklama 16:36, 25 December 2007 (UTC)

In case the above isn't clear, this is what I see happening most often, and it makes sense to me: all subpages of a book are categorized into a category which is usually the same as the title of the book (since there will never be 2 books with the same title, their categories will also not overlap). The "front page" (the top of the hierarchy) gets categorized into those which describe the content of the book. The "book category" keeps all pages together - the the binding on a book; the "subject categories" allow users to find the book according to its content. The "subject categories" should correspond to those which will make it appear in the appropriate Subject: pages (if there isn't one which is appropriate, then it should be created, though there shouldn't be too make "missing" ones now - we have a good set, I think). Hope that helps.  – Mike.lifeguard | ^talk 22:04, 25 December 2007 (UTC)

As suspected I was missing something important. For a newcomer the lack of an exhaustive "book list" is kind of weird for a booksite. I understand that it is not necessarely trivial to build though (thanks in part to a chat with darklama). I will leave the discussion like this for a couple of days in case somebody as another important missing piece to add. Thanks again for your insights. -- Jacques (talk) (email) 03:39, 26 December 2007 (UTC)

One of the problems that we are fighting here is the MediaWiki software itself. Clearly it has been tweaked to work with encyclopedia articles almost to a fault, although there are some extensions which have been added for purposes other than building encyclopedias. One of the policies that is very unique to Wikibooks and is not found on Wikipedia in any form is the Wikibooks Naming Policy, which was drafted for the explicit purpose of trying to make some sense to how Wikibooks pages were organized. I think it is reasonable to presume at this point that nearly all of Wikibooks has been moved into this naming system in one form or another, and one of the purposes of this was to help identify a collection of all books, not simply all pages. When Wikibooks was first started (and no naming policy at all), some books had a very free-flow on how separate pages were named, and wandered aimlessly from one page name to another and no real structure at all. In the long run, this has proven to be a disaster in terms of project management, and one of the reasons why a formal naming policy was even established in the first place.

Several attempts have been made to try and come up with an exhaustive book list in several different forms, and this meta issue of trying to organize Wikibooks content between the front page, the actual Wikibooks themselves, and helping a reader access information that is on this website has been a tough challenge. A concept called Bookshelves was established early in the history of Wikibooks to help organize this content, and some newer schema have also been developed over the years to help organize this content. Finding Wikibooks content has always been a very tough problem, particularly when it was in what would be called an incomplete or stubby version that did, however, have some real potential for further expansion. We have even had several variations of how to address the "best of Wikibooks", but at the moment the Featured books process seems to be working rather well. This doesn't address, however, how to find content that isn't quite one of the "best of.." books.

Categories clearly can be useful in helping to find these books, and removing the sense of pure anarchy that has been the case here on Wikibooks for a considerable amount of the content currently here. Just don't get caught up with the idea that the categories are the end goal here, but instead try to focus on the idea that the goal is to help a reader or new user to Wikibooks to be able to identify some content they are looking for that is already written here, or to confirm that an idea for a new Wikibook is a genuinely new idea that hasn't been tried before. If this is accomplished, I am 100% supportive of any ideas you may come up with to help this general goal, and I see very little in the way of opposition from anybody to help with this huge task. --Rob Horning (talk) 14:17, 26 December 2007 (UTC)

In my opinion the "search and browse" template on the main page is too cluttered... we DO have some space we're not using underneath it so if needed we can make the font bigger or something (at least the font of the template's title should be bigger to bring some attention to it). I'm also not sure if it's necessary to have all of the bookshelves listed on the template, maybe it would be better to just list the departments? If we do that we can bring more emphasis to the other forms of organization. Regards. Mattb112885 (talk to me) 16:35, 26 December 2007 (UTC)

I agree with Rob here wholeheartedly (at least his last comment). The categories themselves are not the ends, but are instead a useful means of organization. Categories do not always make sense, are not always easy to navigate, etc. This is especially true if the categories themselves are not properly categorized. Since there are so many categories, it is not reasonable to expect that they are going to be properly organized in relation to one another. However, using DPL and the Subject pages, we can create very nice lists of books based on various category intersections. Take a look at Subject:Engineering for an example of this: Lists are automatically generated of sub-topics, engineering books, featured engineering books, engineering books with print/pdf versions, etc. In this case, we've taken a large number of categories, and combined them into a single page that really contains some useful information. If all books are categorized based on subject, features (print version, pdf version, etc), reading level, status (featured, good, needs cleanup, etc) then we can use DPL and the subject pages to display those category intersections in a very intuitive way. For instance, if you want to contribute to computer programming books, you would go to Subject:Programming, scroll down to the section "Books that need cleanup work" (this section doesnt yet exist, it's hypothetical), and you could find a list of all programming books that need help. There is a lot of potential to this system that we haven't used yet, mostly because we can't agree amongst ourselves how exactly to do it, and because we refuse to mandate that it must be done to begin with. This is why, I think, that people like Jacques should be encouraged if they are interested in categorizing pages, because the work that they do will be helpful eventually, if we can get the correct DPL lists set up. --Whiteknight (Page) (Talk) 19:38, 26 December 2007 (UTC)

I disagree with User:Whiteknight here on the fact that we should let resources do something if it might be usefull at some point. The problem is that this is not the main subject here so we shall eventually discuss that elsewhere. -- Jacques (talk) (email) 03:56, 29 December 2007 (UTC)

OK let’s try to close this discussion with a newbie synthesis.

• The primary organization unit in Wikibooks is a book. Books are composed of pages.
• MediaWiki was developed primarily for Wikipedia. It implements the concept of a page but does not directly support the concept of a “book”. Wikipedia can be viewed as a single book with many pages.
• Categorization can be done at 3 levels:

• Categorizing books (by topic, by status, etc.)
• Categorizing pages inside a book (ex. type of recipes in the Cookbook)
• Associating pages with their books (conceptually a page could be in more than one book thru transclusion)

• A number of organization schemes for books have been tried since the start of the project. The actual naming policy (book name/page name) makes it trivial to associate a page with its main book. Some older books do not follow this naming policy (ex. The Cookbook).
• While most books are clearly known and searchable thru subjects and bookshelves there is no exhaustive list of all books at the moment.

My main personal conclusion here is that we should not talk about categorizing pages anymore but instead of either categorizing books or of associating pages to books (assuming that categorizing pages inside a book is the job of that book's team, not a global maintenance task).

Starting with that distinction we could eventually set clear objectives like:

• All books should be attainable thru the subject / category scheme
• All books not following the present naming convention should have an alternative way of associating their pages (ex. Namespace for the Cookbook, book categories in the main namespace)
• All pages should be either a book or associated with a book (thru naming, categorization or other mean).
• Etc.

The next step for me will be to try to build an exhaustive list of all books and submit it to the community along with its maintenance procedure. If anybody wants to help or give some insight they are more than welcome to do so. I will move this discussion to the Card Catalog Office (CCO) talk page because an eventual book list would go there in the current organization of the site. Watch that page for other interesting category talks :-) And finally thanks again for every contributions in this discussion. -- Jacques (talk) (email) 03:56, 29 December 2007 (UTC)

archive page created under CCO talk and discussion on book list subproject created, see you there -- Jacques (talk) (email) 14:35, 29 December 2007 (UTC)

2007: Year in Review

It's getting towards the end of the year, and I decided to write up a recap of what we did as a community over the past year. I have put all that I could find/remember into a blog post here:

http://wikibooks.blogspot.com/2007/12/2007-year-in-review.html

I have also looked at some of the page counter data since it was installed in October, and made some observations about our page hit counts in a blog post here:

http://wikibooks.blogspot.com/2007/12/page-counts.html

I'm certain that I am missing a few details here and there, so definitely let me know and I will add it. Here are some points that I find most interesting:

• We passed 1 million page edits (i dont know if this includes deleted edits)
• We have over 90,000 pages
• We seem to have about 3000 or more page hits per day, on average. This is likely a very low estimate.
• We promoted 8 new admins, 3 new checkusers and 0 new bureaucrats. We de-sysopped 12 admins, 2 of which were bureaucrats. While the project does appear to be growing, our corps of administrators appears to be shrinking.

Here is another point that is worth making:

• We currently have about 33 administrators. Of these, 4 of them are stewards or developers and aren't going to be active here anyway. About 10 or so (by a quick count) are probably going to be de-sysopped within the coming year due to inactivity. That means there are only about 19 "active" administrators. It may be worth asking in 2008 whether 19 is enough or not.

Anyway, this is just a short progress report, I think the information here is generally positive and shows that Wikibooks is continuing to grow at a steady pace. --Whiteknight (Page) (Talk) 15:37, 24 December 2007 (UTC)

In my newbee tour of wikibooks I ran into these charts. Charts and statistics are allways open to all kinds of interpetations but I think they show that the last statement by whiteknight is true. Wikibooks is continuing to grow at a steady pace but in absolute terms. Said differently the growth itself is not growing nor shrinking (not more nor less active editors, not more nor less heavy editors, not more nor less page edits per month, etc.). Regards -- Jacques (talk) (email) 16:22, 27 December 2007 (UTC)

0 bureaucrats? What am I, chopped liver? ;p --SB_Johnny | ^PA! 17:33, 27 December 2007 (UTC)

My mistake! I must have looked at the wrong RFA (there are several under your name!). There was 1 bureaucrat promoted this year. --Whiteknight (Page) (Talk) 01:51, 28 December 2007 (UTC)

I would like to thank the admins/bureaucrat/sysops for all their hard work. So few workers yet so much done. Happy New Year to you all! RobinH (talk) 13:04, 30 December 2007 (UTC)

Quenya

Well I'd like to file an official complaint as the Quenya-book is the ONLY book which is no longer featured. The remarks Whiteknight made are really quite arbitrary! A lot of the other featured books have even more unresolved links, etc. (and to my knowledge the Quenya-book has none!)

Or is it that every Wikibook has to be in the form lesson 1, lesson 2, ...?

If you don't like a book that treats grammar systematically or a book on a constructed language, then please let me know and I'll remove it.

And btw I have removed that template "no longer featured", it is really offensive!

User:Dirk math (talk) 07:30, 29 December 2007 (UTC)

The criteria for featured status are fairly clear, though they are guidelines. I don't see how {{Was Featured}} is "really offensive!" but if you want to change the wording, go for it. For the problems with having Quenya featured (ie where it isn't meeting the featured book criteria), read through the discussion. The problem is not that every Wikibook has to be in the lesson format you describe (most are not), nor is it a problem that the book deals with a constructed language (we have many others which do the same thing). The community was in favour of defeaturing it due to its small size and incompleteness. It was once among the best Wikibooks had to offer, but that is no longer the case.  – Mike.lifeguard | ^talk 16:25, 29 December 2007 (UTC)

Ok, I've found the discussion. So let it simply be as a non-featured book. If someone has tips how to improve it, please put them on my talk-page.

User:Dirk math (talk) 18:30, 29 December 2007 (CET)

I just want to add that this isn't the first book to be de-featured and that just because a book has been de-featured doesn't mean it can't become featured again later on. Any de-featured book can become featured again if the quality of the book improves to meet the community's current expectations and the community supports featuring it again. However it wasn't until recently that someone thought to create a template to use for books that have been de-featured. I can agree with putting the {{Was Featured}} template on books can be bad thing and misinterpreted. I propose if this template is to be used at all in any form, that it should be put at the top of book discussion pages instead and that it would be better to just remove the featured template from the book. --darklama 17:52, 29 December 2007 (UTC)

There may well be other books which are of the same standard as Quenya and are still featured - if that's the case then nominate them for removal of featured book status.

I agree though that the 'was featured' template isn't very good. It's kind of advertising that a book isn't very good anymore. This template should only be used if the editors of the book want such a thing on their book - I'd imagine that most might like a little template saying something like "Quenya is a former featured book" - any other comments and suggestions should be left on the talkpage. Xania ^talk 19:38, 30 December 2007 (UTC)

First off, the Quenya book is not the only book that previously was featured and has since been removed from that list. Some other such books are: Demystifying Depression, [[Nanotechnology], and Wikijunior Human Body are three that I can find in a very brief search. However, it is the first book that the {{Was Featured}} template was ever put on. In fact, I created that template specifically for the Quenya book because of comments that people made to me about it. I will admit that the template may not be my best work, but the beauty of wiki is that nothing needs to be perfect the first time around. What I wanted to show with that template was that featured book status is a revolving door: a book that is removed from the list can be upgraded and then made featured again. In other words, I don't want to highlight the past glory of the book, but instead highlight the need for authors and editors to rise to a higher standard. About my "arbitrary" comments on the matter, are you referring to this or this?

Also, we don't have a set format about how a book must be, and a quick look around some of our other featured books will show a very large diversity in terms of formatting and presentation. We also have nothing against Conlangs, one of our other featured books, Unilingua is featured still (although a brief inspection of it shows that perhaps it too needs to be reconsidered now). If a featured book is not worthy of being featured now for whatever reason, it should be nominated as such. Again, this isn't punishment, but instead admission that our standards are rising around here, and some of our authors are doing phenominal work that other books should aspire too. It's not an offense, but instead a celebration. --Whiteknight (Page) (Talk) 20:51, 30 December 2007 (UTC)

Question

does anyone know how to develop anaglyph images with the use of the re channel offseta d with the history brush

I'm not entirely sure what you are asking about. Can you be more specific? --Whiteknight (Page) (Talk) 14:23, 31 December 2007 (UTC)

The first part of the page has no "[edit]" button.

In the Wikibook "Neuroscience", the first section of Chapter Four at: http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Neuroscience/Cellular_Neurobiology/Cells_of_the_Brain starts with a sentence that says: ...glial cells and generally considered... It should say: ...glial cells are generally considered... But that part of the page has no "[edit]" button. What can I do? Thanks.

This is true of every page on Wikibooks. Sorry. Laleena (talk) 19:20, 31 December 2007 (UTC)

Everything can be edited, sometimes it's not obvious as to how. There are two methods that you can try to edit the top section of this page. The first is the easiest: At the top of every page there is a tab that says "edit this page". Clicking that tab will allow you to edit the entire page at once, including this top section. For the second method, go to Special:Preferences, click on the "gadgets" tab, and then check the box for "Edit Top Section". This javascript-based gadget will add an "edit top" link to every page, so you can edit only the top section of the page. I hope this helps. --Whiteknight (Page) (Talk) 19:40, 31 December 2007 (UTC)

Javascript Updates

The developers installed a couple patches to the software yesterday, and one of those patches (submitted by our own User:Darklama) rearranged the order in which javascript scripts are loaded. This is a good change because it allows people to skin and customize various extensions. However, a lot of our previous javascript here was dependent on the old order of things. If anybody finds a bug or an error or a missing feature or something, let us know so we can fix it ASAP. --Whiteknight (Page) (Talk) 16:47, 28 December 2007 (UTC)