User talk:Eddiem0710

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Welcome to Wikibooks, Eddiem0710!

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--Pi zero (discuss • contribs) 05:07, 19 August 2020 (UTC)

Book structure
Hello, "Chapters" of books need to be created as subpages of the main book page, not as stand alone articles please. E.g., for a book call "Spam" with two chapters they should be named "Spam/Chapter 1" and "Spam/Chapter 2". Not "Spam Chapter 1" and "Spam Chapter 2", not "Chapter 1". Hope that makes sense. I have moved the ones you have already created, e.g., to Culinary Arts/The Kitchen Brigade. QuiteUnusual (discuss • contribs) 08:06, 19 August 2020 (UTC)

Using Wikibooks
Hi. I've a long-term interest in fundamentally improving the wiki experience. Documentation is part of that (I intend to make wiki pages interactive, too, but that's a long-term project). I'm very interested in what, about starting a book (for example), you find isn't adequately documented by Using Wikibooks. We intend that book to be a central resource, and when it falls short, we want to know all we can about how it's failing so we can then work out how to improve it. (And yes, I also hope, in the long term, we can use this information to "grow" on-wiki semi-automated assistants to help with the various tasks involved, as an alternative to/parallel to Using Wikibooks.) --Pi zero (discuss • contribs) 03:17, 25 August 2020 (UTC)


 * I was thinking that at least a page that clearly showed everything that is commonly used with examples of what to type. If one has to sift through a lot of documentation to find something common they will be immediately turned off. I think if someone can see their idea quickly and easily coming into focus they are more likely to stick around. All the issues about policy and legality can wait until they feel comfortable.  I still haven’t figured out from trying to read docs and policy how to start with a Wikipedia page and turn it into a page or paragraph of my book, I.e., how to import it, where it is once imported, how to reference it.  I think I’ll start a page on this. it can be included as a page somewhere or turned into a dummies book if it good enough. At least we will have something to point to and growl about.Eddiem0710 (discuss • contribs) 13:30, 25 August 2020 (UTC)


 * Sounds worth pursuing. The particular idea I've been pursuing is not entirely dissimilar; both tackle the weaknesses of documentation.  My thinking (for perspective and all, i.e., "fwiw") is that wikis were devised in the first place for just one thing, and it's the one thing they're good at: writing hypertext documents.  So naturally, when a wiki community is faced with the problem of passing on know-how about the wiki, from veterans to newcomers, they do it by writing documents, the one thing wikis are good at.  But "reading the instructions", or "reading the (fine) manual", is not a terribly popular way to figure out how to do stuff; it's a relatively high-overhead approach, and wikis are about making it easy to do stuff with a low price-of-admission.  The high overhead comes from having to set aside where you're actually doing stuff, to go study a document somewhere else and then go back to where you were actually doing it.  The alternative is to have some sort of interactive assistant &mdash;what used to be called a "wizard" although I haven't seen that term used much in recent years&mdash; that helps guide you through it (without ever forcing you do do things a certain way; unbounded flexibility is also part of the wiki ethos) with how-to information that is right there, immediately, where and when you're doing it, without having to go somewhere else to find it.  Further, these interactive things should be crowdsourced to the wiki community, for the same reasons that the primary content of the wiki is crowdsourced to the wiki community:  the wiki community are the ones who have all the knowledge that needs to be expressed, and it just does not work to have the people who know constantly petitioning some central authority (who doesn't know, except as small tidbits of knowledge are spoon-fed to them from those who do) who then makes all the detailed design decisions that go into such a system in ways that the people-who-know are subsequently required to laboriously petition to have fixed.  You want all the decisions, from the most sweeping to the most fine-grained, to be made by those who know.  And I'm hoping all that can become a reality if one starts (as a first step) by adding to wiki markup some simple provisions for interactivity. --Pi zero (discuss • contribs) 14:36, 25 August 2020 (UTC)