User:Ottawahitech/wikibooks diary

2024-02-27
I've been looking around here since 15 January 2024 trying to see if there is anything I can contribute to this wiki. I still don't understand how this place works. On the surface it appears that the only users who will find this wiki useful are those who want to publish a complete book about a specific topic. I have looked around for a bit and found a lot of old undeveloped skeletons. The exception so far is the cookbook where, I assume, contributors who are not not the original author can add their own recipes. But there are a lot of old, most likely outdated technical half-finished books about proprietary ware with authours who are no longer active.

Today I saw for the first time a banner (MediaWiki:Sitenotice) which shows up on all the pages that I visited: which is a good sign for me because I rarely get to see such banners on other wiki-projects, even when others seem to see them. I wonder why this one does not also show up in the Reading room/Bulletin Board
 * "The Wikibooks community is developing a policy on the use of generative AI. Please view the draft policy and provide feedback on its talk page."

Also today I discovered that the book The Wikimedia movement has had content in it sine 2024-02-05 that I did not see until today and I wonder why. I am pretty sure I have checked this page periodically since I started participating more frequently on 2024-01-15.

2024-03-01
When I first started editing here I tried to find a new book every day by clicking Random book (Navigation menu). Then I started finding books in the list of Recent changes. I wish it was easier to locate books through Browse.

Some interesting pages discovered by accident:

One of the things I am trying out here is actively using my watchlist, something I rarely do on other wikis. This wiki is different because it does not automatically add pages that I edit to my watchlist which, so far, is a pain. But we'll see how I feel about it as time goes on and I have accumulated lots of pages on m watchlist. note to self: check if this is something controlled through my preferences. Another I do different here is use visual edit whenever I can (also a pain, but hopefully will get better when I get used to it).
 * 1) MediaWiki:Sitenotice
 * 2) Field Guide/Birds/Falco peregrinus
 * 3) Horticulture/Chainsaws
 * 4) Transwiki:Civics
 * 5) Cookbook:Fried-brain Sandwich
 * 6) Diablo Canyon Nuclear Power Plant: The WikiBook
 * 7) How to Solve the Rubik's Cube

visual stability
One of the things I really like about Wikibooks is its visual stability (I need to find a term for this). Knowing where things are helps when trying to go through foreign language wikis. The English wikipedia and others have moved on to a different looking page.

When I log in at WB I see the same every time:


 * On my first horizontal line: Ottawahitech Alert (n1) Notices (n2) My discussion Sandbox Preferences Beta Watchlist Contributions Log out
 * My second horizontal line: User page Discussion Read Edit Edit source View history
 * on the vertical left bar I see:

Navigation menu

 * Main Page
 * Help
 * Browse
 * Cookbook
 * Wikijunior
 * Featured books
 * Recent changes
 * Donations
 * Random book
 * Using Wikibooks

Community

 * Reading room forum
 * Community portal
 * Bulletin Board
 * Help out!
 * Policies and guidelines

Tools

 * What links here
 * Related changes
 * User contributions
 * Logs
 * Mute preferences
 * View user groups
 * Upload file
 * Special pages
 * Page information
 * Get shortened URL
 * Download QR code

Sister projects

 * Wikipedia
 * Wikiversity
 * Wiktionary
 * Wikiquote
 * Wikisource
 * Wikinews
 * Wikivoyage
 * Commons
 * Wikidata
 * MediaWiki
 * Meta-Wiki

Languages
If I ever decide to write a book (I really don't think so right now), what would I write about? One thing that comes to mind which is not properly covered in any of the wmf-wikis (I think?) is a comparison between wmf-wiki and Yahoo Groups administration

2024-03-18
I just discovered Requests for comment/Global ban for Slowking4 (2) when I was following links posted by @MathXplore on another wiki which led me to the VP at ENWQ where an announcement of this meta RFC had been posted on March 14. Just curious why the same announcement was not posted here

2024-03-20 Happy birthday
Just received a happy birthday note from my calendar. Today is my fourth birthday at [https://en.wikiquote.org/w/index.php?title=Wikiquote:Village_pump&oldid=2760053#Would_this_be_the_correct_page_to_ask_how_to_make_amends_for_any_harm_we've_caused_Wikiquote? the English Wikiquote], sigh...

Note to self: fix the wiki link above