User talk:Proteins

Hello Bill, welcome to Wikibooks! It's always good to have more professional educators around here. You might be interested in our book on Proteomics, which is featured but could always use more contributions. We also have a book on Modern Greek if you want to look at that. I find it's often easier to make contributions to existing books then to try and create new ones from scratch. However, sometimes creating a new book is the only real way to cover material in your particular way for your particular target audience. If you do want to create new books from scratch, I have some software tools that can help and I've collected lots of my experiences and best practices into a guidebook. I've also helped out with some previous classroom projects, if you're looking for some help with that. See Human Physiology or Social and Cultural Foundations of American Education for examples of successful class projects.

Our central organizational portal is Subject:Major Subjects. It's a category hierarchy that lists books according to different metrics. At the moment it lists books by subject, reading level, and status. Eventually I would like to include an alphabetical organization as well. If you navigate through the subpages there you will start to see some of our problems. A good example would be Subject:Mathematics, which has a huge list of all math books that could (and should) be moved into various subcategories ("algebra", "calculus", etc. as examples). Subject:Engineering is an example that I've been working on where books are aggressively divided into subcategories. In Subject:Science, several books are blatantly out of place such as Ruby by examples, or Welding. Subcategories of Subject:Science are pretty well mixed up, with Subject:Linguistics listed as a subset of Subject:Psychology, for instance. As you browse through, I'm sure you'll find a million more examples of things that could be done a little better or are completely wrong. You don't need to worry about being a bull in a china store here. Any contributions you make, no matter how large and sweeping, are bound to be a major improvement over what we have.

If there's anything else you need, never hesitate to send me a message about it. Other then that, you're free to make any changes, edit any books, or implement any improvements anywhere that you see fit. Good luck, and welcome to Wikibooks! --Whiteknight (Page) (Talk) 19:38, 9 January 2009 (UTC)


 * Thanks for the welcome, Andrew! I'm enjoying reading through your New Book Guide.


 * I'm a little confused about the difference between categories and subjects. For example, should I have created a Subject:Alphabet books?  More generally, if I'd like to create sub-categories under Wikijunior for specific types of books, should I use the subject method or categories - or something else?  Similarly, if I'd like to create a Geometry sub-category, should I use subjects or categories?


 * My Greek book is focused on New Testament Greek, which differs from Modern Greek. It's also distinct from Homeric and Attic Greek, the two most commonly taught dialects of Ancient Greek.  A relevant book, Koine Greek, has been begun on Wikibooks; Koine Greek includes New Testament Greek, but is a broader category.  I would have to re-write the book significantly to encompass the other forms of Koine Greek, which I fear would dilute the pedagogy.  It helps to have a clean subject focus, as I think you agree.


 * Back to learning about Wikibooks! Proteins (talk) 19:56, 9 January 2009 (UTC)

Re: Several Questions
It's good that you have so many questions. This is a relatively big site, and there is a lot to learn. I'll try to answer them as best as I can (in a mostly random order). I apologize in advance for some of the complicated topics we're getting into: Again, sorry these answers seem to get so complicated and technical. Eventually all this kind of information should end up in our help book Using Wikibooks. I'll get around to that eventually. Let me know if you have any other questions. --Whiteknight (Page) (Talk) 02:32, 10 January 2009 (UTC)
 * 1) Categories are an organizational tool that's part of the software. They're basically like raw collections pages that keep things together. Subject pages, on the other hand, are our way of making those lists pretty. In a subject page we can include lists of books and subcategories, and we can take junctions and intersections of categories (books in subject X that are also featured, books in X that are not in Y, etc). Since subject pages use categories to work, you usually want to create the category page and then the subject page.
 * 2) The links on Subject:Reading Levels is automatically generated, and we can't really affect the order. If the order does bother you, we could replace the automatically-generated list with a manual list of links. I don't forsee the number and names of our reading levels changing at all, so this might actually be a good solution.
 * 3) "Levels" is capitalized for no good reason. Here at Wikibooks we tend to be in the habit of using Title Caps, which isn't so popular at Wikipedia. We don't force the use of title caps for pages (although we do strongly prefer it for our books), but it's generally not worthwhile to change it.
 * 4) Only the main page of a book should be categorized for exactly the reasons you saw. The pages in the book can be categorized with the name of the book to keep them together, but that's mostly optional. I can see Category:Geometry conflicting with the Geometry book, for instance.If there's a conflict, you can de-categorize the pages in the book because they mess up your lists.
 * 5) The database does update a little bit slowly. If a page isn't updating and you think it should be, make a "null edit" to the page: open the edit window and click Save page without making any changes. That should flush the cache and update the page.
 * 6) I don't see an amber color on Special:Contributions, but I do see a pinkish color. I'm not actualy certain what that means, the software changes so quickly sometimes that I can't keep up with all the changes and new features. I'll ask around and see if anybody knows what this is.