Wikibooks:Reading room/Archives/2005/April

Wikimania!
Registration for Wikimania, the first international Wikimedia conference, is now open. It will be brilliant fun. Everone is invited to join the event this summer.

Wikimania will take place from August 4-8, 2005 in Frankfurt am Main, Germany. The event will combine Wikimedia community discussions and software hacking with academic research, presentations of current implementations, and user/community panels. Wiki fans, community members, and developers are all invited to attend.

Feel free to submit presentations and other content for the conference; for more information, see the call for papers.

Please pass this message along, in English or in translation. For coordination and translations, see our internal announcement oage. To let the rest of the world know, use our public press release.

If you want to help or have great ideas for the conference, please write us via the meta-feedback page, or just ask on the foundation mailing list. Attendees can coordinate travel plans and other informal events on the Wikimania community pages.

Wikimania is an event from the community and for the community - it will be brought to life through your participation and suggestions!

Looking forward to seeing some of you this summer,
 * Sj 23:16, 4 Apr 2005 (UTC), on behalf of the Wikimania organization team.

New Wikistats report for Wikibooks
I'm glad to announce a new report for Wikibooks, generated periodically by the Wikistats job. You'll find here an overview of books, their content and some stats. I discovered there are at least 6 naming schemes for chapters. This made it difficult to automate extraction of chapter names, so in some cases the grouping of chapters may look a bit odd. I'm sure this will improve when the ongoing discussion about standardisation of article titles bears fruit. Please look at Statistics per Wikibook Erik Zachte 17:59, 8 Apr 2005 (UTC)


 * Wow, there are lots of non-English books that are still on en. I wonder who will have to put all of that on VFD? KelvSYC 17:42, 9 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Images in WikiBooks?
I was looking through the Bicycle repair Wikibook and noticed there were no pictures. Is this just because nobody has submitted any, or is there some untold rule I'm not aware of where you're not supposed to use images in WB? Please cc my talk page. Thanks --RealGrouchy 18:44, 9 Apr 2005 (UTC)


 * Thanks for the replies. I plan on taking pictures of bicycle parts and tools and uploading them and integrating them into the modules of Bicycle repair. --RealGrouchy 14:33, 10 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Logo text issue
I'm not a very active Wikibookian, so take this with a grain of salt, but I think the text on the logo could use a little retooling. It's always looked a little odd to me, and I think I just put my finger on what it is.

Specifically, the books are in perspective, but the text doesn't seem to be; the books are pseudo-3D but the text is 2D, aside from what looks like a tad of counterclockwise rotation.

Relevant (if old) links: Logo discussion, some discussion at Wikibooks:Staff lounge archive. Zach 20:08, 11 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Collaboration of the Month
I have created a system for nominating, selecting, and using a Collaboration of the Month. Although I am not an administrator, I am a regular and active Wikibookian. I hope this idea is accepted by the community as easily as the Book of the Month was. Because Wikibooks does not experience concentrated growth, I feel this is a mechanism for doing so.--Naryathegreat|(talk) 01:31, 17 Apr 2005 (UTC)


 * I gave an extensive answer on Wikibooks talk:Collaboration of the Month. --Andreas 09:11, 17 Apr 2005 (UTC)

navigation bar to the left misses "Community portal"
Who can change "Wikiversity" on the left navigation bar back to "Community portal"? (see also my comment on Talk:Main Page) --Andreas 16:38, 17 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Drink recipes
I am considering transwiki-ing a Wikiquote article to Wikibooks because it is actually a recipe for a cocktail, but I have been unable to find any hint that Wikibooks is interested in drink recipes. It seems to me that it might belong to a chapter of Cookbook, or perhaps its own book on Mixology. Has this topic been raised yet? How do Wikibooks editors feel about this? &mdash; Jeff Q (talk) 03:18, 21 Apr 2005 (UTC)


 * Put it in the Bartending book please. (if you bother to transwiki it) This stuff really clogs up the Cookbook with name conflicts. AlbertCahalan 03:50, 21 Apr 2005 (UTC)


 * Perfect! That's exactly what I was looking for. Thanks for the tip. And thanks for the Mixology redirect. &mdash; Jeff Q (talk) 14:11, 23 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Admins
Some of us are waiting around for votes on Requests for adminship for a while. Just trying to get some attention... - Omegatron 13:33, 21 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Navigation
Has there ever been any discussion about next/previous functionality for moving from chapter to chapter? Either software enhancements or special templates. - Omegatron 13:44, 21 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Community Portal
I created a Community Portal similar to Wikipedia's. Please add any links you think are missing, and add books to the Template:Opentask template. --Andreas 19:39, 24 Apr 2005 (UTC)

How to revert?
Hello,

I would like to be able to easily revert pointless edits and strange deletions done to the Blender 3D wikibook, is there a simple-to-use revert button somewhere that I'm not seeing, or do I have to figure out the differences, and copy and paste the previous version every time? The process of figuring out where edits went wrong, then copying and pasting from one browser window to another is eating up my book development time. Thanx. --Spiderworm 23:20, 18 Apr 2005 (UTC)


 * Click on "History" on top of the page (next to "edit"), choose the old version you want to see (by clicking on its date), and if you see it, press edit and save (You will see a warning that you edit an out-of-date revision and any newer changes will get lots.) Hope this helps. --Andreas 07:26, 19 Apr 2005 (UTC)


 * Or become an admin, and get a handy single-click rollback button. I don't know why it isn't just given to everyone after they've been here a while...
 * In other news, nominate me to be an admin! Requests_for_adminship - Omegatron 13:16, 19 Apr 2005 (UTC)
 * Seriously? Arrrrrgh!!! (watch out for multiple vandalism edits though) I have an admin request too, being ignored even though I've had a majority in favor for some time now. Do I need more votes or what? User:Gumba gumba got to trash things for over 90 minutes while I tried to find an admin. Non-admins trip over edited redirects too, being unable to move an article over an old badly-chosen redirect in that case. AlbertCahalan 16:12, 19 Apr 2005 (UTC)


 * multiple vandalism edits? it takes care of consecutive edits by the same user.  i guess you mean two different people vandalizing one after the other.  sadly, wikibooks is so poorly-watched that that probably happens a lot... - Omegatron 19:13, 19 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Open Source
It seems to me that for something as complicated as a textbook you might want to take a lead from projects like Firefox and Openoffice and look for a commercial textbook that someone is willing to donate to the open source market. I'd imagine a textbook no longer in use from 1990 or so could be donated and used as the basis for an updated open source project. Has anyone ever tried anything like this? 68.42.24.89 20:17, 23 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Encarta-Style Electronic Library
This somewhat ties into what someone asked earlier, about converting books to PDF files. Would it be plausible to make an encarta style program for searching and reading text books in there, or a ready-made cd with an index linking to all the files, etc. I think that would be a very good idea, for people to not only test out Wiki Books, but to use them on a daily basis, wherever they are, regardless of an internet connection.