Talk:Using Wikibooks/Shelves, Categories, and Classifications

Title Case vs Sentence Case
I understand we need a convention for separating book subjects from book categories, but I'm not sure that using Title Case vs Sentence case is the right way to go about that. For instance, what happens of a book's title is one word? Maybe that's a hypothetical situation that would never arise? What about something like Geometry or Algebra or Economics? Hmmm... apparently the situation is not as hypothetical as I had hoped. --Jomegat (talk) 12:53, 17 June 2009 (UTC)
 * Ideally books would use more descriptive titles and narrower scopes and so they would not have one-word titles. For Geometry and Algebra, those books have pages filed in Category:Title (book). I've renamed some books where there were conflicts with a subject category I wanted to use. Geometry and Algebra simply have too many pages to do that. In the interest of being concise and avoiding confusing the reader, I had not covered this predicament you bring up in the main text of the page. It may not be a guideline or policy, but I would suggest that all books have at least two words in the title to allow the sentence/title case methodology to distinguish between a book's category and a subject's category. -- Adrignola talk contribs 14:07, 17 June 2009 (UTC)

''Please continue the page casing discussion at Wikibooks talk:Manual of Style. --DavidCary (talk) 02:09, 26 August 2009 (UTC)''

Deep filing FULLBOOKNAME ?
This is a small quibble, I know, but wouldn't it be better style for the markup examples in #Deep filing (advanced) to use {{FULLBOOKNAME}} &mdash; thus,  , and so on? (This also relates to another change I chickened out of making, addition of a remark that the one-size-fits-all solution for flat filing has the advantage that if the book is ever renamed, or some pages are moved to another book, the category markup in those pages won't have to be changed at all.) Pi zero (talk) 15:55, 17 June 2009 (UTC)
 * I changed the text to reflect this for filing pages, such as  .    is needed on the bottom of chapter categories to omit the Category: portion of the title when assigning a parent category. The category code for templates can use  only if templates are named using slash notation as subpages of a main template with the book's name. Most images aren't named using slash convention at all and so the category must be specified manually. -- Adrignola talk contribs 16:30, 17 June 2009 (UTC)

Is it not okay to CATEGORISE chapters in non-BOOK, non-SUBJECT/SHELF categories?
If it is okay, perhaps this guide should be updated to reflect this.
 * Transcluded text from Reading_room/Assistance on the matter.


 * Historically, we have not categorized individual pages ("modules") by content independent of the book they're in. If that's not what you have in mind, I'm about to go off on a tangent (though perhaps it'll be interesting anyway).  My long-term plans to reform Wikibooks categorization do particularly call for some not-yet-precisely-defined form of per-module by-content categorization.  There are two reasons I have that in mind.
 * Purely internally, it often happens that a particular page is relevant to some topic in a way that isn't obvious from the topic of the book in which it's contained, so one would like to make that easier to find. For a search to be authentically useful, it must involve human assessment of which matches are truly relevant: this is why string searches include, for each match found, some of the context in which the keyword occurred, so that the person requesting the search can try to assess for themselves whether that match is actually relevant to them.  It would be disastrous to try to get an AI to make these sorts of judgments of relevance, because that would impose some unknown but systematic bias, toward the non-sapient form of the AI, into the search.  To avoid the often-highly-inefficient false positives (and some false negatives, too) of a typical string search, it's desirable to provide a category where each decision to categorize a page has been made by a sapient mind.  There are, of course, a variety of challenges in doing things that way.
 * For the relationship between Wikibooks and other wikimedia projects, it would be highly desirable that we have local targets for incoming links on a wide variety of topics that do not have a shelf on Wikibooks. That is, if one has, say, a Wikipedia article and asks whether or not there is a corresponding Wikibooks page about the same thing, the answer is almost certainly no.  For example, take Condaleeza Rice.  If you look over at the sidebar of that Wikipedia article, there's a section called "In other projects", which (as I write this) has links for Commons, Wikinews, Wikiquote, and Wikisource.  But none for Wikibooks.  The absence of such incoming links from other projects reduces our profile and thus diminishes our contributor base.  We'd have to have at least two books specifically about her to justify a shelf.
 * This is a big part of why I have, over several years, shifted around our categories with intent to eventually clear the way for us to start creating per-module by-content categories. Unfortunately just atm I've gotten bogged down in the sticky process of converting some of the peripheral infrastructure associated with the old "subject hierarchy" to use the new "shelf hierarchy" instead.  (See Reading room/Proposals.) --Pi zero (discuss • contribs) 12:58, 3 June 2020 (UTC)