Wikibooks:Reading room/Archives/2005/October

Forking of Wikipedia content
I've been following the Votes_for_deletion page and there was one Wikibook that I actually fell in love with that has been deleted. The reference (before deletion) was Nikola Tesla. I did object to its deletion, and may still file a protest in Votes for undeletion. I'm here in the staff lounge to address the larger issue.

I understand the basic idea of Wikibooks, and have contributed to several here. I do think that many people contributing here don't totally understand the differences between Wikibooks and Wikipedia, and often contribute "articles" rather than "book modules". Simply writing something here at Wikibooks is not a substitute for writing a Wikipedia article instead.

In the case of the above mentioned book, however, it was quite a bit more. The content of the Wikipedia article about Nikola Tesla has been growing quite a bit, and due to the content length, an effort was made to move some of that content over to Wikibooks. There was an editorial dispute in part due to the length of the article, and I don't want to go into the details here. On the positive side, when the move was made to Wikibooks, it was chopped into several chapters, with an excellent title page and even a good appendix section. In short, it was a well adapted beginning of a Wikibook, IMHO. It was also better organized and adapted into a book-like format than most Wikibooks that are considered "typical" here at this project.

I think the staunch objection to forks of Wikipedia articles is a bit overstated, and that there are legitimate reasons that content from Wikipedia articles could be used to be the kernel of a new Wikibook, where added content that would not fit a Wikipedia article due to length or other editing issues at Wikipedia. Certainly there should be no objection to using material from Wikipedia to create a new Wikibook.

The added issue of biographies here at Wikibooks is also unreasonable. I don't see any legitimate reason why a good biography shouldn't be a Wikibook, and there are numerous "educational" reasons why learning about the lives of various famous people could and should be included here.

My question to the Wikibooks community is: When should a "fork" of Wikipedia content be considered legitimate for the creation of a new Wikibook? Can Wikipedia content be used to create a stub for a new Wikibook? Rob Horning 7 July 2005 14:05 (UTC)


 * Basically the idea is that a Wikibooks page shouldn't just be the Wikipedia article with fifteen extra paragraphs, as it is not only immediately redundant (unless greatly expanded beyond that) but will also get quickly out-of-date as editors focus their attention on Wikipedia. It needs to be as fat and detailed as possible (without unnecessary "cruft" of course), while Wikipedia aims to be as brief and detailed as possible. You need to establish the fork as something on its own while going into depth far beyond what an encyclopedia could possibly cope with.
 * Also you must ensure that the scope and perspective are not different from WP's version. For example say I take an oversized edit to the Controversy section of the Abortion article and pad it out tenfold for an Abortion-focused Wikibook. The problem is, if I don't write about the other topics as well, even if briefly, it would make it seem as if abortion being wrong and evil was the only way of thinking! If you see what I mean.
 * The main problem with biographies is no doubt that they will inevitably end up being based on the dreaded Original Research. Also most biographies state the author's opinion, whereas the Wiki ideal is to present other biographers' opinions.
 * I'd say you can use a WP article as a stub as long as you do something with it. If it just sits here for a few months after you've lost the urge to expand it, that's not good. My suggestion, and indeed what I'm doing as we... um... "read", is to work on a new Wikibook entirely offsite until such time as it goes far beyond what the WP article currently covers or will ever cover. If I lose the urge to work on it and it remains a crappy stub, I'll just file it away somewhere and maybe work on it later. If I keep going, I'll eventually post it here.
 * That's the problem. If I took a section from WP and posted it here right now and then made slow progress on book-ising it, someone's bound to take one look and decide to kill it off.
 * Anyway, hope that answers all your questions. Gee, almost lunchtime, I hope I just made sense... :) Master Thief Garrett 7 July 2005 23:50 (UTC)


 * It occurs to me that you will always get duplicated content between Wikipedia and Wikibooks. I suspect most of the books on this site have corresponding articles on Wikipedia, and you may still get the forking-problem, in the sense that both will contain information not present in the other. The fundamental problem here is that by defining Wikibooks and Wikipedia to be authoritative places for information on the same range of topics, there is an inherent ambiguity as to where the text on the subject should correctly go.


 * Surely the more sensible approach would be to first write a Wikipedia article, then should the article expand to the size suitable for a book, the whole lot is transferred over here, and use interwiki linking from Wikipedia (i.e completely remove ALL content from Wikipedia). After a while, Wikipedia would die off, and Wikibooks would be left with a fully comprehensive bookshelf. And if you have that, why do you even need an encyclopedia?


 * In reality, some entries on Wikipedia would never grow large enough to warrant a whole book on the subject, in the same way that some Wiktionary entries will never warrant a Wikipedia article.


 * If it seems a bit harsh to remove the Wikipedia entry to make a book, then perhaps the content should be copied to Wikibooks, and then summarized in the Wikipedia article, making it very clear where the book is, and that all future content should go there, not on Wikipedia itself.


 * Main problem is that all the wikis are trying to achieve the same thing at the conceptual level, and could all be merged. They're all hosted from the same database servers, using the same apache servers and the same squid proxies, so why are they all separate systems? I guess it would be an administrative nightmare, but I could imagine the "one big wiki" approach to work quite well. Perhaps the set of PHP scripts isn't quite up to the challenge. I really don't know.


 * Aya 8 July 2005 02:34 (UTC)


 * The point I was trying to make, particularly with the Nikola Tesla Wikibook I mentioned, was that it was approaching the size that editors were culling information from the Wikipedia article to try and make it smaller. The amount of content certainly was not an issue in this case, and indeed was a part of the editorial dispute at Wikipedia.  Yes, there was a NPOV issue, but that was not the primary reason for deleting this Wikibook.


 * The only reason given for deleting this content here on Wikibooks was strictly because it was a fork of Wikipedia content. That seemed as though it was sufficient grounds to kill the entire Wikibook.  I will be the first to admit that it was slightly sparse for a Wikibook, but not significantly so.  For a Wikipedia entry it was more than comprehensive, and indeed a featured article because of how comprehensive it had become.


 * In addition, the argument that you shouldn't post content here on Wikibooks until you have the whole book written is also unjustified. Most Wikibooks start out as stubs that are substantially shorter than even the Wikipedia articles they supposedly are related to.  The whole point of using a Wiki here is to collaboratively build content.  Yes, if you let a Wikibook sit and languish its content will go stale, and there are numerous examples of that here as well.  Based on this standard, more than a 1/3rd of all the Wikibooks should be deleted right now, including some that I occasionally contribute to.


 * As far as keeping a Wikibook up to date with content on Wikipedia, I think that over time (and enough eyeballs) that will happen. This is mainly an issue for how much will Wikibooks as a project mature over time and how many people will be participating here.


 * Again, in this situation, there was hardly any time between when it was posted on Wikibooks and when it was deleted. This certainly was not a Wikibook that languish for months on end waiting for somebody else to add content to it.  Indeed, this whole episode is befitting the life story of Nikola Tesla as somebody who just doesn't get any respect and is considered a fringe lunatic.


 * Wikibooks is not Wikipedia. It is a totally separante project with a different community of users.  That some cross-pollination between Wikipedia and Wikibooks does occur, it is not necessarily completely identical even on the user level.  There is no reason at all to delete Wikipedia content simply because a Wikibook has been created, nor am I advocating that approach.  I'm simply suggesting that it would be reasonable and prudent to permit in some cases a legitimate forking of Wikipedia content to become a more comprehensive Wikibook on a subject.  I am also strongly suggesting that a bias against biographies is unjustified in general, and that as a textbook it has a legitimate use in education.  It can be written in a NPOV fashion, as befits a Wikimedia project, or at least have biases that any historical subject would have.


 * There is also a strange viewpoint that Wikipedia "owns" Wikibooks. While I admit the user community at Wikipedia is larger and the editorial policies at Wikipedia more firmly established, there is no reason why Wikibooks always has to follow their lead.  The goals and aims of Wikibooks is quite a bit different, and even the medium in a sense is different.  Wikibooks is a lot more laid-back, where decisions take weeks or months to totally mull over.  Even the staff talk here is not culled nearly as often as it is for Wikipedia Watercooler discussions.  The #1 problem I see with people used to the rules at Wikipedia that come to Wikibooks is that they tend to write Wikibook modules like they would a Wikipedia article.


 * Finally, when deleting content the rule on the Deletion policy page should be followed: "5. When in doubt, don't delete."  I don't think this policy was followed too closely in this case, and there are many other pages that should have been deleted instead.  There is enough outright vandalism and problems from new users creating unusable stubs to clean up that killing a valid Wikibook like this biography of Nikola Tesla was, IMHO, unjustified.


 * Rob Horning 8 July 2005 10:52 (UTC)


 * It's getting late so I'll maybe respond to all that tomorrow. Basically I think you should request the undeletion of this Wikibook, referring to your explanations here, and hopefully get some notice for your interpretation of forking. You must remember that Wikibooks is very small compared to WP, there are only a few sysops "ruling the roost", so there's likely less likelihood of one spotting and/or correcting another's decision. Master Thief Garrett 8 July 2005 11:46 (UTC)


 * I understand what you're saying, my previous reply was actually a justification for why I think you're right. I don't think anyone's just gonna start a book about Tesla on here, but a Wikipedia article is a good starting point for a book. If people want to cull parts of the article on Wikipedia, then I think it's perfectly justified to fork it to Wikibooks to avoid losing content. I guess it depends if they want to cull substantial parts of it, or just summarize the existing content without losing information. Either way, it seems as if a policy to delete forks of Wikipedia articles placed on Wikibooks will mean that no subject which has an article on Wikipedia could ever have a book on Wikibooks. This is just daft. I think the solution here is to get the book undeleted, and make it VERY clear in the Wikipedia article that the article is considered complete, and all subsequent info should go to the book. Let me know if you file an undelete request. I will support it. Aya 8 July 2005 14:33 (UTC)


 * I'm with you, Aya. As long as there is a clear connection between a wikibook module and the related wikipedia articles/projects -- for instance, with a little sidebar or footnote from the module to suitable articles and vice versa -- the 'forking' condition should not be a problem.  The original issue with forking, as I understand it, is that a wikibook should not be created as a way to have an 'alternate version' of a wikipedia article. Sj 06:20, 14 July 2005 (UTC)


 * Finally. Someone understands what I'm talking about. To those who didn't "get it", I might suggest reading some texts on the philosophy of language and related meaning. - Aya 12:24, 14 July 2005 (UTC)

Many users here do not understand that the main objective of Wikibooks is to provide instructional material. It doesn't matter whether you have a single page or a book that encompasses 1000 modules - the point is that if it does not intend to teach the reader, then it doesn't belong in Wikibooks. End of story. A lot of Wikipedians do not understand it, nor do Wiktionarians (we have had forks of their content before) and guys on Meta. Also consider that, as of the time I write this, we only have 25 sysops and 2 bureaucrats for just under 9000 users (of which say 1000 is active on en, let's say). The numbers game clearly shows that action takes a long time to accomplish. Also, for Rob, perhaps you should talk to User:Gentgeen, who deleted the modules (Wikibookians never say article as an article is not instructional material...) and see his insights as to why he believed there was a consensus. As for biographies, the VFD consensus seems to indicate biographies are alone not considered to be instructional material, although they can be part of one (I have a textbook on abstract algebra where short paragraph-long bios are sidebars). KelvSYC 04:59, 14 July 2005 (UTC)


 * Oh I see. So a guide to cheap Japanese toys like Pokemon is more educational that a biography of a famous scientist (ideal for those studying Physics)? On which planet is this the case? - Aya 12:24, 14 July 2005 (UTC)


 * There are actually only 1500 users who have ever made over 10 edits, across all languages. Only 450 made more than 5 edits in June; of those, 200 were editing the English wikibooks. Considering this, 21 admins doesn't seem out of proportion; that's 1 admin for ever 10 people actively editing this month.  Sj 06:20, 14 July 2005 (UTC)
 * The comparable stats for Wikipedia : 57,000 users with over 10 edits, 19,000 with over 5 edits in May; 9000 of those editing the English Wikipedia. 464 active administrators.  That's twice as many editors per administrator.  Sj

Point taken on the user ratios. Still, you cited 464 active admins in Wikipedia. How many admins are being active admins in Wikibooks (rather, how many are considered to be active)? 10 admins? 5? Just me? Or do you consider all 25 active? KelvSYC 06:31, 14 July 2005 (UTC)


 * Personally, I don't consider any of them particularly active, at least in the sense of their administrative duties. The speedy deletions are not being speedily deleted, the VfD contains information beyond its scope, and requests for page protections are going un-noticed. There's some talk on Meta at the moment about a new deletion system which would mostly remove the need for admins anyway. The concept of admins is flawed, since wiki is too ephemeral for these systems to work. See also User:Aya/Wikibooks/A critique of Wikibooks. Back to the original point, this request has been added to Votes for undeletion. I would suggest that is the proper place to discuss the book in question. As for this discussion: as long as the policy is as vague and self-contradictory as it currently stands, this debate will go on forever. - Aya 12:24, 14 July 2005 (UTC)

Perhaps I'm missing something. I think I'm thinking of the reverse of Wikipedia forking in that I have a concern that there are cases where much effort could be saved by "citing" and linking to Wikipedia articles. Is there a problem with doing so as I see a number of cases here where texts could be improved and expanded quickly and easily by linking to a Wikipedia article.

If this is a topic that is being or has been discussed elsewhere, please let me know. Thanks. erraunt 20:38, 4 October 2005 (UTC)


 * I think the Wikipedia is a great source to start chapter- and section-stubs. But primarily a book's module and an encyclopedia article serve two different purposes. A book's purpose is to teach one specific thing very well. That means extra background information is covered in previous chapters, and only certain details are given. An encyclopedia article's purpose is to teach many topics. That means the article has a high degree of linkage and little or no emphasis for "what is already known" verus "what isn't already known." I think the two complement each other well. You can browse many subjects on the Wikipedia to determine a specific subject you'd like to know in depth (so you read the book), or you can read a wikibook and then learn about all of the related subjects in the wikipedia.


 * In that light, I think it's more appropriate for books to include "further reading" sections that include Wikipedia links. I don't think it's generally useful to include links as a primary means to writing a book. Instead, what is said at the link should be said in the book itself! A lot of the information can be removed (i.e., that which is not important) and it resolves the questions "if I follow this link, do I need to follow what it links to too?" and "do I need to follow this link, or can I understand the book without it?" by making them moot. It also allows people to print out the books and have them be completely independent. --MShonle 05:27, 5 October 2005 (UTC)


 * Thank you for your thoughts on this. Yes, I've been getting that impression: better to move things into a book to make it complete rather than link.

So I'll do that with the things I've been planning to contribute too (if I can ever find the administrator to double check my plans).

As an asside, I'm of two minds, and my thinking is based on pragmatism. There are some subjects, like history, or the book I started on Blacksmithing where moving articles into a Wikibook makes a lot of sense as the information is fairly static and there is good reason for readers to make hard copies on occasion. However, with other topics I could see where using links extensively would make more sense, where the material was subject to frequent revision. Some of that could be taken care of with a "for further information" section. As an example, if I were working on a more technical book, where several of the components might have revision cycles measured in weeks or months, my inclination would be to build modules around a link or links to the pertinent information and in the module give the context and concepts necessary to interpret the more volatile information found at the link.

I'll admit one of the reasons why linking is attractive is the 32kb limit. There are times it seems like one is back in the '80s writing a book on Wordstar and running into the 64kb maximum file size. You have to link anyway, so the inclination is to link to something already there. FWIW. erraunt 18:20, 5 October 2005 (UTC)


 * Eventually books can and should be broken up into chapters, and even subchapters, if the content gets too long. But using transclusion you can make an uberpage where if you visit it you can see all of the modules as a single page (this is great for printing or for saving as HTML to be imported into OpenOffice). Editing the uberpage would just show what is effectively a list of links to the modules, but instead of being a link the content at the link is "transcluded" in place. An example can be found here. Click on the top "edit this page" tab to see how it was done.


 * As for technical books, I think the primary reason someone would read it is to learn the subject. In those cases, it's much more important to teach the basics and then fundamentals first before discussing the latest fad. The goal should be that after the material is understood, the reader could then go and read the documentation for, say, the latest library changes and understand how to use it. But providing high-quality links is hard too: the content at links can change, and you need to be aware if some concept is no longer discussed, or a more difficult concept is discussed where background would be neccessary. Personally I think a heavily-linked organization is great for some kinds of information, but it is very poor for learning, which instead of heavy-linking more requires a very linear explaination. (Some textbooks are only somewhat linear, in that they include chapters that aren't required, or allow some chapters to be read in any order, but even then the prereqs are spelled out.) Perhaps if there was an equivalent of footnotes it would be better to include links there, because then it's clearer the link is only tangental (and if it wasn't tangental, then it should be part of the book itself, or part of another book that's required reading first). --MShonle 20:45, 5 October 2005 (UTC)

A proposal to unite the C++ books?
I posted this on the forking policy discussion page but got no replies, so I'll post here. If this has been suggested already then pardon me for proposing it again.

My idea is to have the two books to share a front page asking the user whether or not he/she wants to have a C++ textbook broken down into parts or learn from one single page (or however you want to phrase it, it's all up to you). Two links could then be posted on the page, one to a subsection that has the contents of the textbook now known as "C Plus Plus" and one to a subsection has the contents of the book now known as "C -/- -/-" (making the current textbooks subsections to a single book is key here). This way, development can continue into two separate directions, the book can be found using one search term, the end user has more choice, and most of all, you can heal the fork.

I look forward to hearing your opinions on this. --64.231.220.14 00:42, 26 August 2005 (UTC)


 * Page naming aside, that solution is basically what we've got already. I would rather see a true merge done. Until someone can give me a single and undisputable convincing reason why you can't have them as one book and make the "all on one page" view using transclusions, I'm afraid I will still stand by my belief that they ought to be completely merged sooner than later, even forcibly if it must come to that. GarrettTalk 01:17, 26 August 2005 (UTC)


 * There doesn't need to be a separate page to ask the reader if they want a single page or a set of buckets. Simply do what the Computer Science:Data Structures book does and provide the list of chapters, but include a link to an all chapters view too. Take a look at the source to see how the transclusions are done. Why was this forked in the first place? MShonle 03:46, 26 August 2005 (UTC)


 * From what I've been able to gather (it's discussed in like ten places) the one author wanted to write a single page uber tome and the other wanted shorter descriptions on individual pages. Or something like that. They were just unable to reach an agreement on the organisation of the book so he suddenly forked it off so he could do things his way. GarrettTalk 11:07, 26 August 2005 (UTC)


 * But isnt the idea of chapter-sized modules the de facto wikibooks standard? I thought the idea of a single-topic "uber-page" was more of a wikipedia concept, and less of a wikibooks concept. Uber-pages take long to load, and are more difficult to navigate. Also, i can't think of a single reason why we would need 2 books on C++. I vote that we begin a process of forced-merge on these articals, working to create a more "wikibooks friendly" chapter format.--Whiteknight 13:55, 13 October 2005 (UTC)

Babel
I think that we should use the improved language templates from Wikipedia:Babel. Currently at Wikibooks three levels are used (from 1-basic to 3-fluent), but including a specific tag for native speakers is a good idea. Also, I've just created the babel templates (see Wikipedia:Babel): If somebody speaks more than four languages feel free to add additional templates. --surueña 15:58, August 31, 2005 (UTC)
 * Template:Babel-1
 * Template:Babel-2
 * Template:Babel-3
 * Template:Babel-4
 * I think it would be a good idea to have a separate page for babel, where we can discuss it, and where we can list the templates that are usable with it. Wikipedia has alot of little babel templates for different languages, but also for different computer languages, web browsers, etc... The babel format could be used to express a very large amount of information about a user, and we should probably have a centralized resource for babel. --Whiteknight 14:56, 11 October 2005 (UTC)

Game manual @ Wikibooks?
I'm currently working on a game manual for the computer simulation Live for Speed. I've set up my own LFS Manual Wiki but I'm thinking about publishing the whole manual at Wikibooks to open it to a wider audience. So my question is, whether a game manual is suited for Wikibooks or not? --Florian Jesse


 * In the past, such manuals have been accepted on Wikibooks, but I get the impression that this may change shortly. Try http://gameinfo.wikicities.com/ - Aya T E C 15:52, 1 September 2005 (UTC)


 * Out of curiosity.... who is complaining about game books on Wikibooks? While they are not textbooks in a normal sense, shy of creating a whole new Wikimedia project I don't see any other place to put them either.  There is a half-started attempt to create a Wikimedia project for game books, but I don't see it going anywhere at the moment, particularly with the flack that seems to be coming about Wikiversity.  See Proposals for new projects for the few details about the idea.  --Rob Horning 00:03, 3 September 2005 (UTC)


 * Hi Rob. I'm not complaining how game books perse, but I think wikicities would be a better location for them. Here's why: (1) the books are very popular and generate a lot of hits, hosting them on WC will generate more revenue for them, which indirectly helps WB. (2) while they are how-tos on computer software, they aren't exactly a guide on how to use Open Office, so the "textbook" interpretation of it is really stretching it. (3) It would probably give WC a good boost in the arm, by increasing the number of attractive and interesting things on it. So, we don't need a whole new wikimedia project for it, WC is fine (which technically isn't part of wikimedia as a understand it, though the software and some of the people are the same). MShonle 00:43, 3 September 2005 (UTC)


 * I'm personally very conflicted on the idea of having game manuals on wikibooks. On one hand, a game manual would definately benefit from the "book environment" of wikibooks, as opposed to the "anything goes" attitude at WC. Having items about popular culture here would also increase WB readership and participation. However, Game manuals are certainly not textbooks. They are only instructive to the players of that particular game, and will not teach greater lessons, in the way that other "classic instructional" wikibooks will. --Whiteknight 15:02, 11 October 2005 (UTC)

Please delete moved material (admins).
Hello. The Mishnah texts have been moved to English Wikisource.

Admins - the current Mishnah page has links to exact lists of all related pages. All of these have been copied and all of them can be deleted.

If its OK, the best thing would be to leave the current Mishnah page as a redirect to Wikisource.Dovi 08:37, 26 September 2005 (UTC)


 * Interwiki redirects are bad. The user clicks what looks like an internal link, yet ends up on another project.  They're also hard to find later. Gentgeen 08:44, 26 September 2005 (UTC)


 * Not that important. Main thing is that the pages be deleted.Dovi 10:26, 30 September 2005 (UTC)


 * Note that the canonical way to get pages deleted is to add the  tag to the top of them. See Deletion policy for details. - Aya T E C 18:40, 6 October 2005 (UTC)

Table of Contents
Is it possible to have a section heading which does not appear in the table of contents. If not then I guess I have to maintain the TOC manually?

I ask because in the calculus book there are a lot of examples, and the TOC gets too long.

Thanks Juliusross 15:09, 22 October 2005 (UTC)


 * There's no way to exclude headers from the TOC as yet, so you'll have to turn it off completely and make your own. Just type  somewhere on the page to remove it. GarrettTalk 00:57, 26 October 2005 (UTC)

No no no, for god sake just use HTML. Bold the header, and make it header 4 or header 3 " " "< b >" after the header write "< /b >" (by the way, write all of those without the spaces i put in) - it won't appear in the table of contents, and it WILL be bold and larger. Turning the table of contents off makes your books very hard to use. Fresheneesz

Request for comment
I've posted this request here as I haven't located a Wikibooks RfC page. Apologies if I've managed to miss it somehow.

I have for a while now been engaged in a discussion - well, it feels more like an exchange - with Metric1000 as regards the nature of the About gravity, mass, and weight module in the Wikijunior Solar System book. I think the time has been ripe for comments, suggestions and advice from other people, so would appreciate it if people would pay it and our discussion a visit to help resolve what I fear may become an impasse. Thank you.

David Kernow 01:55, 23 October 2005 (UTC)

Missing article
Ok -- I'm new here.

To practice, I put comments into a Travel Guide about Costa Rica. I forgot to sign in before I did that, so I can't check my history. Now I can't find any travel guide on Costa Rica. I'm 61 years old and maybe I'm getting senile but I'm not hallucinating. Maybe this was in a different wiki project, but I can't find it there, either. I checked deletions to see if someone tossed it, but no luck.

Ok you experienced people please tell me what I am missing here. I hope it is not my brain.

Thanks

--Frog One 02:56, 25 October 2005 (UTC)


 * COuld you possibly have been editing wikitravel? They have one for Costa Rica at wikitravel.org/en/Costa_Rica --Gabe Sechan 16:33, 25 October 2005 (UTC)


 * No, you are not going senile. There is a group of editors here that feel it is inappropriate for travel guides to be on Wikibooks.  I am of a different opinion on the subject, but that is something that should be debated elsewhere for now.  If you can remember the name of the section or travel guide that was deleted, you can put up a request with the Votes for undeletion section.  The text you wrote is still in the database, but has been removed due to some cleanup.  I can even undelete it if necessary.


 * Please, continue to contribute to Wikibooks, and I'm glad that you have gone the extra effort to try and find out what happened. We are all mere mortals and sometimes get carried away deleting stuff that perhaps should be kept.  There are quite a few pages here on Wikibooks that havn't seen activity in years, and sometimes those get deleted when they don't seem to be "important" or don't seem to have much content.  In order to delete content, you must be an "administrator" here, which really only implies that it is somebody who has made some significant contributions over some time and can be trusted to help out the community.  Otherwise, it is just opinion over what should be kept and what is removed.


 * As I said, we do make mistakes, and I apologize on behalf of this community if you feel this content was deleted by mistake. If you are pretty certain that it was on Wikibooks, I'll try to dig around and see if I can find the content.  --Rob Horning 17:32, 25 October 2005 (UTC)

Book Count for Wikibooks
I have increasingly seen a number of newspaper/magazine/blog articles about Wikibooks that seem to have mistaken the module count for the number of Wikibooks that we have here. Numbers like 12,000 Wikibooks are thrown around when in fact I think we would be hard pressed to count more than about 100 books that are more than stubs. And only a couple dozen books are even close to a "publishable" state.

For the sake of accuracy for media articles of this nature, as well as an indicator of the effectiveness of this project, I would like to see some "metric" that could be developed to count the number of actual Wikibooks we have on this project. Counting the number of books on Main Page is one way to do it, but even that seems to not be accurate. Another issue to consider is how would we be able to automate that calculation? That certainly would be an interesting statistic to keep updated on the main page as well. I'm not proposing MediaWiki software changes here, although that could also be a possibility. --Rob Horning 07:23, 26 October 2005 (UTC)


 * Well, if people are using those % finished images, you could have a perl script read the bookshelves, and count the number with each image after them. That would give you a rough count of how many and what stage.  Pseudocode looks like this:

read list of bookshelves from a config file foreach bookshelf read in the bookshelf text from cur table foreach line in text check if there is a link to a wikibooks book if so, check if there is an image link after it. record book name and image in a hash table. For quick counts, add it to some running totals we now have a list of all books and their image percent. Script needs to report this somehow- mail an admin or post it on the front page maybe?

That might be good enough for a rough estimate.--Gabe Sechan 09:10, 26 October 2005 (UTC)


 * Well, if people were using the Naming policy, the statistics would show a correct list. Currently, there are over 290 Books larger than 10 Kb and more than one chapter, but it is clear there are false books in the list and other books are not been counted because they don't follow any naming convention, e.g. Linux Guide (I regard this book as broken) or followed the bookshelf convention, e.g. Programming:C Plus Plus and consequently were counted as pages, not books. ManuelGR 01:45, 5 November 2005 (UTC)


 * True - the stats will find any book which follows the naming convention and if you don't follow: tuff luck. I too would say that the stats are the way to go --Krischik T 15:14, 5 November 2005 (UTC)

Internet Server Directory and Wikibooks of lists
I was thinking of making this a VfD discussion, and it may end up becoming that shortly, but I wanted to put this into a forum that was less threatening to start with. This Wikibook, Internet Server Directory, is a list of links to servers for various resources on the internet. This Wikibook is making me eat my words I wrote on Wikibooks talk:What is Wikibooks but I'm willing to suggest I spoke in haste.

The real question I'm placing before Wikibooks contributors and the community at large is this: Is it appropriate to have a repository of links or a bunch of lists on Wikibooks?

I think a module that has a bunch of links at the end for "further reading" is very useful. For example, Wikijunior Solar System has a bunch of links at the end of the main page for gathering content and to use for bibliographic references. Where I have a problem with this is when the sole purpose of the Wikibook is just to make a collection of links or a list of topics. I know Wikipedia has been kicking those type of articles off of Wikipedia and they have been going elsewhere on the Wikimedia projects, so I guess Wikibooks is the next target to try.

Should What is Wikibooks be changed to stop lists and Wikibooks that are just links to other places? This Wikibook about Internet servers is now forcing the issue and will require us to decide one way or the other. --Rob Horning 23:05, 27 October 2005 (UTC)


 * There is, of course, a fine line to be drawn here. For instance the book on free software (which looks quite good) is based around a collection of links.  The value of the book, of course, is the organisation.  In the case of the server directory it seems the organisation is sparse but then again the book is quite new.  Just my 2 cents Juliusross 03:24, 28 October 2005 (UTC)


 * This is not a book, nor does it appear to aspire to become one. Unless the author can explain that its purpose is something other than as a web directory, we will have to delete it. GarrettTalk 13:29, 28 October 2005 (UTC)

Is this legal?
Emulation:All_Mame_Roms is it? 81.218.224.11 14:36, 28 October 2005 (UTC)

I'm having some strong doubts on this. Discussing how to burn ROMs for games is not strictly illegal, nor is talking about bit torrent archives. Where it crosses the line is to provide a list of commercial software that is under propritary licenses and suggesting that you can copy that software freely as well. That is where this turns into advocacy that commits a crime that can land you in prison. I would not personally want to be the "author" of this Wikibook, nor touch it so far as that goes as it could result in legal liability, particularly if it can be proven that somebody followed these steps.

I'm moving this to a VfD discussion right now. --Rob Horning 16:15, 28 October 2005 (UTC)

How do I ...?
How do I put an inset or a box with show/hide options onto a new page?

Tom Croke Frog One 21:43, 29 October 2005 (UTC)


 * You mean you want to create something that can be opened and closed like the Table of Contents? That's Javascript-powered so it might not be possible to make your own, but I can look into it if you like. GarrettTalk 00:13, 30 October 2005 (UTC)

licking elbows
http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Useless_Information

"It is impossible to lick your elbow." i can! and i know someone else that also can.

Elad

Download books as PDF
Hi there.

I (that's Manuel Strehl from the German WB) proposed in the German WB a possibility for allowing people to download complete books in PDF format and wanted it to come up to discussion in a broader scope.

Proposal
Use XSL-FO and Apache's Open Source FOP to produce PDFs out of Wikibook's raw data. Provide a link for visitors to allow them to download the complete book they're currently reading.

Following procedure:
 * Read the MySQL data of the current page, add the data of all pages of the same book.
 * parse it into a XSL-FO file (this isn't very different from parsing into XHTML) in the order they appear online
 * create a PDF out of the XSL-FO using Apache's FOP
 * this is achievable by clicking on a link provided on each page of the current book.

Disadvantages:
 * one-time effort to create the PHP file and a standard XSL-FO file
 * server strain

Advantages:
 * create the PDF automatically out of the raw MySQL data
 * complete wikibooks for download

If you want to contact me, please visit my German Wikipedia discussion page

--Manuel, 22:18, 30 October 2005 (UTC)


 * Looks like a good idea. Certainly something like it needs to be done.  How do you get the pages in the right order?  Some of the books are not structured as linear narratives and many (most?) have three or more hierarchical levels of sections and sub-sections.  In the Programming:Visual Basic Classic book I have tried to add a navigation template to each page which links them all in printed page order but it is only a local convention.  I would discuss this on your German talk page but my German is next to non-existent so it would be a rather painful process for all concerned. --kwhitefoot 12:03, 31 October 2005 (UTC)

Herewith thou get thy special permission to write english text to my german discussion page ;-) To the problems: Actually I have no idea. There are some books in linear order that would be easily transformed. Others won't, that's true. There could be a user interface to allow one to sort them himself, but this is no really good solution. Actually, this is one of the points that must be discussed.

Other Question: Is there any other page where a similar discussion is open? At the German WB I just initialized a page for this purpose, for the discussion was led on three different pages. --Manuel, 20:32, 31 October 2005 (UTC)


 * We have a Textbook planning page, but few users are now there.


 * Apparently FOP uses Java, but I have no idea whether this server runs Java. Wikibooks might be Linux-Apache-MySQL-PHP, but I am not sure. Any placement of Java on any non-x86 Linux or BSD machine is difficult; I know not what this server is.


 * Assuming server can run FOP, a problem is the determination of whether a module belongs to a book. For example, Guide to UNIX links to several parts of itself, but it also has several links to other Wikibooks. A solution is to always use slash convention (Guide to UNIX/Introduction) or colon convention (de:Linux-Kompendium) as recommended in the proposed naming policy, but many books (Linux Guide) use neither. Also, what is the order of the chapters? The Guide to UNIX page suggests that Guide to UNIX/Explanations is before Guide to UNIX/Commands, but the software might follow the Commands link in the first paragraph, or the one in the introduction, and put Commands early instead of the back of the book! --Kernigh 22:05, 31 October 2005 (UTC)