User talk:OvertAnalyzer

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Welcome to Wikibooks, OvertAnalyzer!

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--Pi zero (discuss • contribs) 02:00, 10 October 2020 (UTC)

Categories
Hi. I saw your comment at Wikipedia sister project links, and your Category:California here.

Your attention to sister projects is greatly appreciated.

The thing is, that isn't how we use categories on Wikibooks. In fact, we've been working for several years on the problem of providing a specific page on arbitrary topics, suitable for incoming links from sister projects, and we still haven't yet actually got a solution in place. The closest thing we have atm is shelves, which are tied together in the book Wikibooks Stacks, but shelves only classify books, not pages in books. You can read about the current initiative at Reading room/Proposals, and the history of our infrastructure at Wikibooks Stacks/History. --Pi zero (discuss • contribs) 02:15, 10 October 2020 (UTC)


 * Hello Thank you for taking the time to help me understand how Wikibooks operates, and how it is organized. Based on what I understand so far, it doesn't sound like Wikibooks has a good way to group all books and pages related to a specific topic. I was hoping there would be something equivelant to the old fashioned card catalogues that would point to all the materials on a particular topic. On one hand, it's good to see there is a plan to restrict how categories are used within Wikibooks. I've always felt categories on Wikipedia are a bit chaotic, duplicative, and not particularly intuitive. On the other hand I'm disappointed Wikibooks doesn't seem to have a way to group information by topic. My concern with creating a page for "arbitary topics" is you would end up duplicating what is already on Wikipedia. If, for example, I created a specific page for California on Wikibooks, it seems it would end up duplicating a lot of what is already on Wikipedia. Personally, I would prefer to maintain the information about California on Wikipedia, then point readers to a catalogue of books they might find useful on Wikibooks. I'll continue reading more about Wikibooks and its organization so I understand it better. Thanks again for you help. --OvertAnalyzer (discuss • contribs) 21:24, 10 October 2020 (UTC)
 * Would it be appropriate to create a Shelf for California that grouped all books related to California? --OvertAnalyzer (discuss • contribs) 21:29, 10 October 2020 (UTC)


 * This is all very relevant to me, as this sort of infrastructure is something I've been chipping away at for years. (Sorry if I get overenthusiastic about it; I will get to your question about a Shelf:California, below.)  It appears that when Wikibooks was first set up, folks here understimated the difficulty of several aspects of growing a library of books, one of which was that organizing the collection of books is not so easy.  (Though I do like that we haven't attempted to adopt some hierarchy from another collection with different dynamics, such as the Library of Congress; our circumstances here are unique to us, and imho our solutions should be customized for us, too.)
 * Over the past several years I've undertaken some systemic changes, leading to the Wikibooks Stacks, which is mostly completed but has stalled atm because there are certain templates I should adapt from the old subjects system to the new shelves system that are so confusing I had trouble figuring out how to change them, and I lost my momentum on the undertaking. But that effort-to-rearrange really started with the insight I've gained into the problem of sister-links by working on infrastructure at Wikinews.  A Wikinews "topic cat" corresponds to a Wikipedia article (something we have to watch carefully on Wikidata, to point out when occasionally someone starts to do it wrong), and then each topic-category has a bunch of explicit sister links to related pages on other projects (example).  But I've set up a slew of these topic cats, and there's almost never any corresponding page on Wikibooks (the other project I'm an admin on, so I really notice this).  I really wanted to have categories of this sort; but we already have two different major kinds of categories &mdash; book categories and shelf categories.  I've added explicit prefixes to those, in order to keep track of which categories are which &mdash;like Category:Book:Algebra and Category:Shelf:Algebra&mdash;, and if I can get finished with the cleanup from that, I hope to create another set of categories with a third prefix that would support topic categories, that can categorize modules within a book as well as books as a whole, and thus serve as targets for sister links from other projects.
 * One thing we've got pretty neatly set up at Wikibooks is using categories to keep track of the constellation of pages associated with a book. It was a real improvement to our infrastructure when I set up a book, Wikibooks Stacks, to contain the whole hierarchy of shelves (and the departments at the top of the hierarchy); and I'm in the process of setting up a similar arrangement, modeled on book categories, for keeping track of the constellation of pages associated with an assistant.
 * Books differ from encyclopedia articles in at least two important ways: books are more coherent at a larger scale than encyclopedia articles, and books can go much more in-depth than encyclopedia articles. (There may be some other really important things I'm forgetting, but those are two important things that come to mind atm.)  There's no reason for either Wikibooks or Wikipedia to worry about "duplicating" information that's also in the other; as I say, Wikibooks can go into more depth and is organized differently, and if at any given moment there's some information-overlap between the two projects, that's as may be.
 * Regarding your suggestion for a Shelf:California: I did consider that possibility. It turns out, though, we don't even have a shelf for the United States.  It seems as if we could have a United States shelf, but we don't yet, and it would take some careful thought to how to set it up well, and it seems like we'd want to do that before tackling Shelf:California.  Then we'd want to think through the candidate books to go on a Shelf:California.
 * (addendum) There's also some question of where to put these shelves, in the hierarchy. (00:32, 11 October 2020 (UTC))
 * I'm frustrated to find that if you use Special:Search for a category containing, say, "Algebra", the shelf is ridiculously far down the list of matches. If the search is in mainspace, Shelf:Algebra is more than three-quarters of the way down a list of almost three thousand pages; and even in category space, where there are only 64 matches, Category:Shelf:Algebra is number 23.  Some thought seems warranted on how best to integrate the activity of topic-searching with whatever gets put in place for topic-categories.  (I wonder if there should be another book for this, just as there was Wikibooks Stacks for shelves, or perhaps should Wikibooks Stacks itself somehow incorporate the new pages?)
 * --Pi zero (discuss • contribs) 23:33, 10 October 2020 (UTC)