Subject talk:Books by subject

All subjects vs CCO
We are actually listing all subjects in the CCO page and only the top level subjects on the all subject page. The reverse would seem more logical I think. -- Jacques (talk) (email) 17:25, 29 December 2007 (UTC)


 * Originally the "all subject" page did list all subjects. I've moved it to "Major Subjects", because its name was no longer consistent with its apparent purpose. I created a template to list all subjects in order to be consistent with how bookshelves were done, with the intention of also placing it in other places, like subject categories, as well. -- dark lama  17:07, 30 December 2007 (UTC)


 * Thanks for the answer. This is just a suggestion but if you want to put all the subjects on the CCO page you could put the major subjects as the first line of your all subject template, that would eliminate most of the need for the "major subject" page altogether and save clicks. Anyway, have a nice day -- Jacques (talk) (email) 19:22, 30 December 2007 (UTC)

Title or sentence case
In response to this: Books use title case, but I believe all categories use (or are being moved to) sentence case. As the subject pages will correspond with a number of categories, sentence casing them would help. I also find it makes more sense as the subjects aren't titles as such (but then again, I use sentence case in module names). --Swift (talk) 18:16, 9 February 2009 (UTC)
 * I prefer sentence case for subject pages, but if there is a big difference in moving to something standard, I'd be fine with whichever is less work. &mdash; Mike.lifeguard &#124; talk 00:04, 15 March 2009 (UTC)
 * I'm not aware of any big difference. Let's use sentence case to avoid conflicting category names where possible. --Swift (talk) 04:59, 20 March 2009 (UTC)

I would like to make a case of Title casing. Currently there are several sub-subjects of mathematics that are using title casing. For example: General Mathematics, Mathematical Modeling, Mathematical Analysis, and (until today) Applied Mathematics. These look would look quite out of place as sentence casing. Why are all categories being moved to sentence casing? If we make exception for book categories, why not make exceptions for subject categories? Thenub314 (talk) 18:39, 20 March 2009 (UTC)

PS A quick glance makes this seem as if it would apply to Fine Arts, Reading Levels, and a few other subjects. Unless I am missing something completely, which is always possible.Thenub314 (talk) 18:45, 20 March 2009 (UTC)


 * Book categories are not an exception. Book categories take the same name as the book where possible and books titles are normally in title case. If I were talking about the field of medical research, I wouldn't write that I was going to discuss Medical Research. It's just a subject, not the title of anything. OK, you could say that it's the title of a subject page (though others still see it differently), but the argument for title casing is still weaker than for books, and keeping these separate helps keeping book and subject categories separate. See also the topic I started on Reading room/General. --Swift (talk) 15:11, 21 March 2009 (UTC)


 * To Swift: Really depends on the way one looks at it. I see things as "categories should be lowercase and use the plural form, with the exception of book categories which should use the same casing as the book". To Thenub314: There could be books named General Mathematics, Mathematical Modeling, Mathematical Analysis and Applied Mathematics. In fact there is a book called Applied Mathematics already. With no difference between book and subject categories, categories would list all pages in a book and all related books which would cause trouble for people trying to find a needle in that haystack, and would make it impossible to use categories to list books on subject pages because all pages would be listed, not just books. -- dark lama  15:09, 22 March 2009 (UTC)


 * Yes, it does. In this case we seem to see things the same way. However, while you call the title casing of book categories an exception, I just think of it as a different rule. --Swift (talk) 16:32, 22 March 2009 (UTC)


 * Casing doesn't really take care of this problem. As I pointed out in the Reading room.  Nothing stops someone from naming a book and a category "Algebra." (Or for that matter "Physics" or "Mathematics".  It would be better to have a strategy that deals with these conflicts  (Such as allowing the book category to have a different name the the book, which is what at one point I thought the category "Algebra textbook pages" was for. Thenub314 (talk) 17:35, 22 March 2009 (UTC)


 * Casing takes care of this problem most of the time. As I also pointed out in the reading room, casing could take care of this problem all of the time if there was a setting similar to $wgCapitalLinks but limited the case sensitivity to categories. In that scenario, Category:Algebra and Category:algebra would be two different categories. -- dark lama  14:45, 23 March 2009 (UTC)
 * Sorry about wiping out Swift's edit, not quite sure what I did to cause that. Well, if I understand things correctly, there are three options on the table.  Title casing, Sentence casing, and strict lower casing.  I like lower case better then sentence case.  Thenub314 (talk) 10:25, 24 March 2009 (UTC)


 * While sentence case won't avoid all possible conflicts, the redundancy in the first character is somewhat useful for links starting sentences because the way the casing is not uniquely determined for all English words. While hardly a critical feature, it allows us to link to a subject both from the start of a sentence and from within one without having to pipe the links.
 * A simple way to avoid overlaps is to give books more descriptive titles, and/or ones that stick out more in the sea of online resources. --Swift (talk) 10:57, 24 March 2009 (UTC)


 * Yes using more descriptive titles would be the ideal even though the majority of books probably don't do that. Casing for words does matter in English sometimes: Doctor vs doctor for example. Being able to identify clearly whether what is being referred to is a title or a subject could reasonably be considered another case in which the difference matters. -- dark lama  13:29, 24 March 2009 (UTC)


 * Guidelines here seem to point to book titles being title case and so sentence case for categories avoids conflicts. While subjects can be any name as the category they pull from is in the code, it'd be nice if they match, so that would mean they should be sentence case too.  It's why I made the subject category Category:European history to file all the books that were put in Category:European History and that serves as the one major example that defines my stance on that, in the absence of technical changes or policy changes that would prevent another occurrence. -- Adrignola talk contribs 06:44, 30 April 2009 (UTC)

''Please continue the page casing discussion at Wikibooks talk:Manual of Style. --DavidCary (discuss • contribs) 13:33, 3 December 2013 (UTC)''

Name
The name Subject:Major Subjects sounds like "important" subjects rather than "top-level subjects".

I propose a couple:
 * Subject:Contents (like Help:Contents
 * Subject:Books

I don't want to bore everyone with something they don't really want to discuss anyway. So if you just want to keep it like it is then write ~. Arlen22 (talk) 11:20, 3 August 2009 (UTC)


 * I like the name as it is, but as a second choice I could also be happy with "Top-level subjects". Although I do concede there are a few peculiarities.  For example the subjects: featured books, reading levels, standard curricula, help, and wikijunior are not really subjects in the sense that, they are not things that are studied.  None the less, I do not think that this is really a problem. Thenub314 (talk) 11:51, 3 August 2009 (UTC)

Visibility of books on top-level subject pages
Some Subject pages like Computing and Science list books in various stages of completion, while others like Humanities and Mathematics don't, due to some using the "subject page" template and others using the "root subject" template. Do we want to show more consistency here, and which option do people prefer? Recent Runes (discuss • contribs) 23:35, 11 April 2012 (UTC)
 * We need to move to the root subject template on all the root subjects. There are too many books to list every book under every root subject right on the first page.  Talk about overwhelming your readers.  The only reason they don't all use the root subject template is that not all the books on say, computing, have been filed into more specific subject areas. – Adrignola discuss 13:09, 12 April 2012 (UTC)

Which classification system does Wikibooks use?
Hi, I'm a newby so forgive me if this question has already been re-hashed many times over the years. A pointer to previous discussions/decisions would be appreciated! I've not found them yet. The classification system for Wikibooks doesn't (to me) seem to correspond to any accepted standard other than CCO. This CCO seems to me to be a standard for meta-data rather than a library classification system. As a result, my newby impression is that we: a) have an arbitrary (non-standard) classsifcation system b) have (as a consequence of a) little insight into the priorities for Wikibooks to fill the existing knowledge gaps

Any help/comments much appreciated! Mikemorrell49 (discuss • contribs) 17:34, 21 November 2017 (UTC)
 * Our subject hierarchy is home-grown. We occasionally add to it, or adjust it slightly.  We used to also keep Library of Congress classifications on books, and after many years of trying to make that work, we gave up on it and removed those.
 * Some history, insofar as I understand it. Early in the project, our books were organized using bookshelves; however, they didn't work well in the long term.  They didn't get maintained, because their maintenance had to be done by hand.  An alternative system of subject pages was created, that depend on dymamic page lists to automatically list all the relevant books based on categories.  The part of the maintenance task that grows proportional to the number of books is therefore (mostly) distributed to the books themselves:  each book has a subjects template on its main page, and those templates control which books are listed in which subjects with no manual maintenance to the subject pages.  Eventually, as the bookshelves got worse and worse, the community was almost ready to officially deprecate them in favor of the subject pages, but there was one remaining problem: the DPL on a subject page would only list books that named that subject specifically, not books in sub-subjects.  I figured out a way to automate that (using an extensive automatically populated system of hidden "allbooks" categories), so that each subject page now lists books in subsections too; and once I'd got that up and working, the community deprecated the bookshelves.
 * I'm in the process of a major overhaul of the Wikibooks category system, which I started about a year and a half ago. We have two main kinds of categories:  book categories, each of which corresponds to a book and contains all that book's pages, and subject categories each of which corresponds to a subject and contains all books that explicitly list themselves as belonging to that subject.  For years there were two or three major problems with this arrangement (depending on how you count):
 * It was hard to tell the difference between the two: a book category had the same name as the book, and a subject category had the same name as the subject, and the only way to tell the difference between them was that, by convention, book titles use title case (all important words capitalized) while subject names use sentence case (only the first word and proper nouns capitalized).  Which was confusing at best and became really awful if a book title had only one word and was also the name of a subject.  We coped with the one-word-title problem by hook or by crook, pointing out that a book with a one-word title is probably too general and ought to be made more specific, and using a technical hack to change the name of the book category in maybe three or four cases that we couldn't otherwise avoid.
 * The wiki software provides links to categories at the bottom of each page, but we mostly didn't want that: we wanted links to the subject pages instead. So all those cool dynamic page lists were buried off where they were less likely to be seen, because when you clicked on the name of a subject at the bottom of a book main page what you got was this relatively useless category page instead.
 * With all this confusion already between book categories and subject categories, there was no way we could further overburden the category namespace with categories for keeping track of topics on particular pages of books. And without those, most topics on other sister projects have no corresponding page here, which prevents sister projects from providing nearly as many sister links to Wikibooks as they might &mdash; and therefore reduces the number of users who are led here from other sister projects.
 * First I renamed the subject categories by putting a  prefix on them; and in the process I was able to set up the subject categories so they echo the corresponding subject pages, solving the problem that those cool dynamic page lists didn't immediately come up when you clicked the subject links at the bottom of a book main page.  Then I started the bigger task of renaming all the book categories by putting a   prefix on them; on that phase of things, I've completed and signed off on about two thousand out of three thousand book categories.  At the current rate I might finish that in December or possibly January.  So now we have, for instance, Category:Subject:Geometry and Category:Book:Geometry.  Some time after that phase is completed, I'd like to see us start phasing in per-page categories; hopefully we'll think that through carefully and get it right.  We've already had some preliminary discussions about it, notably struggling with what prefix to use instead of   or.
 * The Wikibooks community as a whole doesn't make strategic decisions about what we think should be covered; it's a matter of what books users want to write, subject to community standards (especially WB:What is Wikibooks) as enforced, usually reluctantly, in extreme cases at WB:RFD. (Some projects have, or try to have, a well-defined set of items to cover, like Wiktionary or Wikipedia, while others have by nature such a vast range of possible coverage that author preference becomes dominant, like Wikibooks or Wikinews.)
 * --Pi zero (discuss • contribs) 21:40, 21 November 2017 (UTC)
 * --Pi zero (discuss • contribs) 21:40, 21 November 2017 (UTC)