User talk:Leightwing

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Come introduce yourself at the new users page. If you have any questions, you can ask there or you can contact me personally on my talk page. Just hit the "+" sign on the top of either page, and enter your question! Urbane  (Talk)   (Contributions)  21:37, 25 August 2007 (UTC)

re: Questions Regarding Pre-university courses
Hi Leightwing,

Thanks for you message. This series of books is not one with which i have had previous experience, however i believe that, having looked at the scopes and aims of the two books, you have made correct assumptions.

The High School Mathematics book looks to be a self-help guide, for students to use themselves whereas the Primary School Mathematics book looks to be aimed exclusively at parents, to help them teach their children maths to aid their school work. The High School Mathematics book will focus more tightly on the actual mathematics, looking in depth at mathematical technique and teaching it to the reader. The Primary School Mathematics book will focus heavily on the methods used to teach mathematics to the young, expecting the reader to be generally competent with maths, but not so much with teaching.

It is unusual for books in a series to have such different purposes, but not unheard of.

I hope this clears things up, if not please don't hesitate to send me another message and I will take another look at it for you.

Urbane  (Talk)   (Contributions)  22:17, 26 August 2007 (UTC)

I have had a look through the edits that you have made to the series so far and they are of high quality. Keep up the good work!

Image copyright problem with Image:3puppiesonly.jpg
Thanks for uploading Image:3puppiesonly.jpg. The Wikimedia Foundation is very careful about the images included in Wikibooks because of copyright law, and requires that we maintain a strict copyright policy. The image that may soon be deleted unless we can determine the copyright holder and status.

The copyright holder is usually the creator, the creator's employer, or the last person who was transferred ownership rights. Copyright information on images is signified using copyright templates. The three basic license types on Wikibooks are open content, public domain, and fair use. Find the appropriate template in Image copyright tags and place it on the image page like this:.

Please signify the copyright information on any other images you have uploaded or will upload. Remember that images without this important information or giving false information can be deleted by an administrator. If you have any questions, feel free to contact me, or ask another Wikibookian at the help desk. Thank you. Webaware talk 05:06, 27 August 2007 (UTC)


 * Please also check your other image uploads; they will be deleted in about a week if no license info is provided.  – Mike.lifeguard  | talk 22:36, 30 August 2007 (UTC)

Formulas and images
G'day, you might be interested in the MathML markup support in Wikibooks. This allows you to insert properly formatted maths formulas without having to upload an image. For example, I've replace your image of the five puppies formula with this:

$$P = 2 \left ( \frac{1}{2} \right ) ^n$$

See m:Help:Displaying a formula for more details.

Can I also suggest that when you create an image for upload, consider formats other than JPEG. JPEG is really good for photographs, but not very good for line art and mathematical graphing. Anything that is made up of mostly lines is better as either SVG (vector art) or PNG. If your graphics package supports those, your images will come out cleaner and clearer than they would as JPEG. cheers, Webaware talk 05:23, 27 August 2007 (UTC)

Wikiversity course?
The pages you have been working on, the "Primary Mathematics" pages appear to be more of a wikiversity course then a wikibooks textbook. The wikiversity project moved off this server some time ago, although some old pages still remain here that have not been completely deleted.

There are two options for you, if you want to continue work on this book:
 * 1) We can try to reformat these pages to be a "textbook" and not a course. In this case all the pages can stay on wikibooks, but it will take a little bit of formatting work to make everything correct.
 * 2) We can move your work to Wikiversity. You won't need to change the format or layout of your work, but you would need to create an account on that server to continue working on it.

Please let me know what you would like to do. --Whiteknight (Page) (Talk) 14:51, 28 August 2007 (UTC)


 * Your confusion is understandable, this is a confusing situation. The way to progress right now really depends on what you want to do. Do you want to write a textbook or do you want to write a course? That decision will determine which environment you work in (wikibooks or wikiversity, respectively). Let me know what you would prefer to do, and I can go about fixing some of the links and moving the pages to where they need to be. I would much rather that you got off to the right foot then if you tried to work from a bad starting point and get very frustrated.
 * Let me know what you want to do. --Whiteknight (Page) (Talk) 15:06, 28 August 2007 (UTC)


 * Okay. Let me look around at Wikiversity, see what needs to be moved and who I need to talk to about doing it. I'll let you know as soon as I have some results for you. --Whiteknight (Page) (Talk) 17:04, 28 August 2007 (UTC)

All the pages from the Primary Mathematics course have been successfully imported to Wikiversity. The new page for you to edit is: v:Topic:Primary School Mathematics. The versions of the pages here on Wikibooks are going to be changed into book pages. Let me know if you have any questions. --Whiteknight (Page) (Talk) 20:49, 28 August 2007 (UTC)


 * These kinds of things happen, unfortunately. Here is what you can do:
 * Copy + paste the text of the pages here to the pages at Wikiversity. This will update them to reflect the work you have already done.
 * Upload all your images to Wikimedia Commons. Commons is an image repository that is shared among all the projects, Wikibooks, Wikiversity, Wikipedia, etc.. If you upload images to commons, they will be visible from Wikiversity and Wikibooks. If you upload them to commons, all the image links will "find" the images again.
 * I'll get the "overview" page imported, I didnt realize I missed it. That should take care of the problem. If you have any other questions, or if you need help with any of this, let me know. --Whiteknight (Page) (Talk) 21:29, 28 August 2007 (UTC)


 * If there appears to be a discrepancy, make sure you are always logged in! Follow the steps I outlined above to resolve the problem permanently. I still have not been able to get your overview page imported. I don't have the ability to import pages myself, I have to request it from other users (who may or may not be too busy to handle all my requests immediately). Copy+Paste all your changes from Wikibooks to Wikiversity, and then upload all of your images to commons. By the time you are done that, hopefully the overview page will be imported and you will be in business. --Whiteknight (Page) (Talk) 00:03, 29 August 2007 (UTC)

Some comments on your edits
While I appreciated your additions to Primary mathematics:Negative numbers, particularly the graphics, I do have some suggestions:

1) Please add a comment with each edit (the comment box is right below the edit box) so we know why a change was made. In the case of new materials or additions, it's fairly obvious that you added it because you thought it would be a good addition.  However, in the case of changes to existing text or deletions, some explanation is needed as to why you feel the changed text (or no text at all) is better than the old text.

2) Specifically, I wonder why you blanked out the sections I wrote on multiplying and dividing negative numbers. I've restored the material, because surely anything on this subject is better than nothing.

3) I feel we should have sections for each of the four basic mathematical operations to be done with negative numbers, although a case could be made for combining addition with subtraction and multiplication with division.

4) I wrote my material for students and you wrote for teachers and parents. Perhaps we eventually need to split into two lessons for each topic, with these different audiences in mind.  However, in the meantime, we should avoid deleting each other's material simply because it's written with another audience in mind.

5) I believe section titles are typically written with only the first letter and any proper nouns capitalized, not using mixed case (I actually prefer mixed case, but that's not what I've seen here).

6) I'd avoid using terms like "manipulatives", without defining them, as many parents and teachers may not understand this term, not to mention students.

StuRat 19:48, 31 August 2007 (UTC)


 * OK, thanks for your reply. I have a somewhat different background, coming from teaching some rather remedial adult education students.  It may be difficult to believe, but there are many adults who lack the ability to do math with negative numbers, then need to pick up this skill to take their high-school equivalency test, pass a test to get a promotion at work, etc.  It sounds like we are going to split the lesson into two, one for parents and teachers (yours) and one for students, be they children or adults (my version).  Can you please provide a link to your new location ?  I'd like to take a look (I probably won't edit it unless I find a spelling error or something like that).  Also, you mentioned not knowing how old the existing page was.  You can use the "history" tab at the top of any page to find out how old the page is (first edit, at the bottom) and how recently it was changed (last edit, at the top).  The summary provided with each edit is also listed there, as are links to the user and talk pages for each editor.  You didn't say you would start providing edit summaries, but I hope you will, as that's a valuable way for the various editors to communicate the reason for each edit.  As for spelling, I always try to cut and paste my edits, then spellcheck them on a word processor or e-mail program before saving them.  I only found one spelling error in your material, but that might be enough to make it worth your while for you to do the same. StuRat 14:05, 1 September 2007 (UTC)


 * Thanks, I changed the student oriented version back to include my content, but also retained some of your content, such as the illustrations. I noticed that the 3 pluses in the answer for the last illustration are not in an oval like the first two; does this have any meaning ?  I also suggest you use the "Show preview" button to see what each section looks like before you pick "Save page", as that means fewer edits and edit summaries are required. StuRat 17:01, 1 September 2007 (UTC)

I've now added "cross-dabs" to the top of our two lessons, so readers can jump between the two. One hint on cutting and pasting, I use CONTROL A (select all) followed by CONTROL X (cut) to cut the entire page, then paste (CONTROL V) it into a word processor for spellchecking. It's easy to recall the cut sequence, because you "AX" the contents out. StuRat 17:36, 1 September 2007 (UTC)


 * OK, I added cross-dabs at the top level now, too, and hope to eventually add them for every other subject. You might want to create an "Introduction" or "Theory of learning" topic and move some of the material you have on the top page there.  (Those looking for a specific lesson have to scroll through a lot of text to find them, at present.)  Thanks for adding that new illustration.  It seems to be a bit fuzzy with a couple red splotches, though, do you have a cleaner copy ?  One thing we apparently agree on is that there is no need to teach the names of the subtracthend, multiplicator, divisor, and all those other silly names.  I recall wasting quite a bit of time trying to memorize those in school. StuRat 01:31, 2 September 2007 (UTC)