Wikibooks:Reading room/Archives/2007/January

Featured Books, Revamp

 * See earlier related discussion: --Iamunknown 18:30, 12 December 2006 (UTC)

I would like to propose some basic changes to the Featured Book process, some of which are sweeping and are worth serious consideration. It is my opinion that the BOTM and COTM projects, while nice originally, have failed on a number of fronts. I won't list my perceived failures of those projects here, but I have listed them previously on staff lounge discussions.


 * 1) I would like to completely abandon the BOTM and COTM initiatives. After this month, I don't think we should have any more BOTM or COTM voting, no more winners for either project, etc.
 * 2) I would like to see instead, an improvement of the Featured books page. Books can become featured books at any time, without a vote, by satisfying a few basic criteria.
 * 3) The featured books could be separated into "Featured Books" and "Featured Collaborations", as rough analogs to the current BOTM and COTM projects. Featured books should be good books, that statisfy strict criteria (must have a print version, must have consistant formatting and/or an LMOS, must be properly organized, properly categorized, must have inter-page navigation, etc). "Featured collaborations" should be books that satisfy less-stringent criteria (defined organizational structure, proper scope and definition, properly bookshelved and categorized, etc).
 * 4) The mainpage could be updated to randomly display (or display in a particular order) books from the featured books and featured collaborations lists. These could be cycled more often then once a month, but less often then once per day (like wikipedia's "article of the day").
 * 5) Links to "Featured Books", and "Featured Collaborations" could be installed into the sidebar, so they are more visible then simply being on the main page.

These are my ideas on the topic, and I think the general premise of updating the BOTM and COTM projects with more fluid versions of them is a good idea. What do people think of making these kinds of changes? --Whiteknight (talk) (projects) 16:56, 12 December 2006 (UTC)


 * I like your ideas but I think the 'Book of the Month' should be continued. To be honest though I have no idea what the difference is between botm and cotm.  Xania 21:14, 12 December 2006 (UTC)


 * I personally like both the book of the month and the collaboration of the month, and think that should still be continued. I dislike the idea that featured books should move from voting to a set of criteria.  Thus I am opposed to changes 1 and 2.  I do see, however, the need for change.  I think that
 * A set of criteria should define what we call a "good book"
 * A voting process should remain in place for featured book candidates, but should be more like Wikipedia's process. Specifically, a book can come up for vote at any time, and if it is approved, it is in a queue to be featured [this is a change] for a full week. No more month-long feautures.
 * I also dislike the liberal use of the adjective "featured." I think we should continue collaborations, but continue to call them "collaboration of the month."
 * I agree that the main page should cycle through the good books.
 * And I tentatively agree with the sidebar idea. I may rescind my support depending on how it turns out.
 * Those are my thoughts. --Iamunknown 02:14, 14 December 2006 (UTC)


 * A BotM implies that we are chugging out a good book once every month. Clearly, that is NOT the case here on Wikibooks. Maybe in a year if this place gets more popular. I agree with Whiteknight here. The specifics need to be worked out (maybe a community consensus on what constitutes a good book, maybe a vote will still work). --Dragontamer 02:47, 14 December 2006 (UTC)


 * I agree with most of what User:Iamunknown said, except that I think the collaborations (whatever they are called) should be handled in the same way as the "good books" (a set of criteria, a vote, put in a queue, displayed for a week at a time). We should bring focus to as many new books as possible, to try and drum up support. --Whiteknight (talk) (projects) 02:50, 14 December 2006 (UTC)


 * Whats the point in getting rid of BOTM and COTM, if all thats going to happen is Featured Books is split into two like BOTM and COTM? I agree that BOTM and COTM should be discontinued, but not if Featured Books is going be turned into its substitute for them. I think Feature Books, should just be updated with some criteria thats, half way or a mix between what BOTM and COTM were, and as was suggested have a list of books that are cycled through during the time period. Keep it simple and see how it works out, if in the future there is more activity, then discuss making furthor changes. --dark [[Image:Yin yang.svg|12px]] lama 19:49, 14 December 2006 (UTC)


 * That probably makes the most sense, the COTM thing really acted more like a cleanup task then anything. We could lower the bar a little bit, and make it easier for a book to become "featured", we could then take books that need to be cleaned up into a category "Books needing collaborative help". or something like that. --Whiteknight (talk) (projects) 19:51, 14 December 2006 (UTC)


 * I have to agree with Whiteknight because it has become obvious books worthy of the BOTM award are not being produced, rather we are forced to adhere to a rule that makes us produce mediocre books to satisfy the front page. If we were to implement 'featured article' categorisation as our main structure of allowing users to clearly identify high quality books we would only see a difference if we were to place a strict criteria to filter those that should improve to pass their next ‘test’ thought this criteria would have to be aggred upon by the majority of administrators and editors. --Herraotic 18:17, 15 December 2006 (UTC)

(reset) I also do not agree that we should rescind the vote, because if there is no vote, who would choose when and what books should go up? I do agree that COTM has not worked out, I know I myself often have been unable to contribute to them because I know little to nothing about the topics in the books, so I could do little more than check grammar and spelling. I think this is the case with the general public as well. BOTM, I think it is a good idea to replace with "featured books", we'll have to carefully and individually decide which books should go on and which books don't go; don't just go by the current list, because it probably will change a lot with the new criteria. I have a question as well: does this mean we'll get rid of the "completed books" and/or the "hot picks" page as well? If we're going to have a featured books page it should, in my opinion, be at the most three categories, somewhat like the ones that are up now but with more explicit criteria and a more explicit method of listing and unlisting books there. Oh yes, I didn't notice the featured books on the sidebar before but I think it would be useful to have the link there, especially since the list on the main page doesn't (and can't really) list ALL of them. Regards, Mattb112885 04:53, 4 January 2007 (UTC)

Openness of Editability
Is everything as editable as it appears? I clicked on the edit box for different wikibooks, and it appeared to give me full control of the article. Is this correct? Are there backup copies made, incase someone maliciously tries to delete the text that others have written? Are there any people who overlook and approve content before it goes public? Perhaps this should be made more clear to people when they click on the "Edit" button. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Virgeh (talk • contribs) 19:30, 27 Dec 2006 (UTC)


 * Welcome - it is that open! Edit what you like (tho the Sandbox would be a good place to start).  If you look at the "history" tab on each page you will find it contains the full page history.  You can look at each edit and equally "revert" the page to a previous edit.  Therefore nothing gets lost (unless the page is deleted and not too many people can do that!).  If you have questions - ask and feel free to edit.  Regards -- Herby  talk thyme 19:50, 27 December 2006 (UTC)


 * (edit conflict) Any person, on most pages, can edit Wikibooks. On some pages, anonymous users (i.e. users who are not signed in) cannot edit them. This is generally in order to prevent vandalism. An example is the main page. On other pages (and these are few), no one except administrators can edit them.
 * These edits do immediately go live, but there are article histories (to the right of the edit button) with which other users can revert edits. Fortunately, just about every action on Wikibooks is somehow reversible, though it may be tedious. So vandalism can be cleaned up, but it is unfortunately kept in the article history.
 * I think that your suggestion is a great idea. Right now the edit page does not really prominently tell people what they are doing by editing a page or by creating a page. Thanks for the suggestion. --Iamunknown 19:55, 27 December 2006 (UTC)


 * Just to clarify, the pages that are protected are policy and other pages that are part of the wikibooks project space, not the actual books. -- SB_Johnny | talk 12:32, 28 December 2006 (UTC)


 * Virgeh is not alone in being astonished that there are NO stable, reviewed editions of Wikibooks see The need for fixed and verified editions of Wikibooks. We must provide approved versions of core textbooks or fail to be credible to the world at large. RobinH 16:26, 9 January 2007 (UTC)

Cleanup help needed
Category:Images with unknown copyright status has a very large number of images that need to be deleted, but should not be deleted before the links are removed.

At the bottom of each page, under the heading "Links", is a list of pages used by a particular image. These images need to be removed from those pages before they are deleted, to avoid a red "Image:blah" appearing on the pages. Once the links are removed, the image can be deleted by an admin (manually or via bot). If we can get at least a few done per day, we can eventually clear the log on this. -- SB_Johnny | talk 18:04, 28 December 2006 (UTC)


 * I have removed the links to 60+ images and they are ready to be deleted. I know its not alot, but this is my main priority right now. Tannersf 02:08, 29 December 2006 (UTC)

Would it not be possible to get a bot to remove all of the links to the images as well? (Forgive me if this is a silly question, I am relatively new here and don't really know how bots work.) Just thinking this would save a lot of manual effort if we could automate this process. --AdRiley 11:26, 29 December 2006 (UTC)


 * The links I might be able to take care of with my bot. Actual deletion is another issue as admin rights are required for that and getting an "admin bot" of the ground has proved hard so far.  I'm planning some bot running for Sunday I hope so I'll look a little more then -- Herby  talk thyme 12:29, 29 December 2006 (UTC)


 * I know it sounds repetitive, but I have just removed the links from 55+ images and they are ready to be deleted. Tannersf 00:33, 30 December 2006 (UTC)


 * Thanks, Tannersf. I'm shocked by the headway we've made in the past day! -- SB_Johnny | talk 00:50, 30 December 2006 (UTC)


 * All of the images on the first page of Category:Images with unknown copyright status are ready to be deleted. Tannersf 12:15, 30 December 2006 (UTC)

Deleting all of the links to images, especially from things like talk pages is a bad idea and should (I'm sorry) probably be reversed. Kellen T 13:46, 30 December 2006 (UTC)


 * All the images being delinked for deletion have no copyright license on them. This is due to a backlog of almost 3 years of neglect of requiring that images have a proper copyright license on them. We even had a warning that such actions would take place very soon on the site notice before the fundraising began again for over a month. Some admins also took the time to inform users that had a lot of images without a license on there talk page about the issue. I believe all approperiate notice that can be expected to be given has been done. This is simply carring out actions previouslly warned about. --dark [[Image:Yin yang.svg|12px]] lama 14:08, 30 December 2006 (UTC)


 * You didn't understand my concern. I support the image removal. What I do not support is the removal of the links to the images, especially when these are on talk pages, as this is essentially rewriting history. Kellen T 16:30, 30 December 2006 (UTC)


 * I understand the concern... it's just some growing pains we need to go through right now. Keeping the images around without copyright info is a bad idea for us, because it opens us (and anyone else who downloads and mocifies our documents) up to legal problems. What we need to keep on top of now is the upload logs, making sure no new images are unlicensed.
 * The delinking is just a common practice we took from commons. The policy there is to remove links to any image before deleting it (including links from every wikimedia project... the backlog is stunning). -- SB_Johnny | talk 14:49, 30 December 2006 (UTC)


 * Delinking in many contexts makes sense, but does not at all for talk pages where the subject may have been the image itself or template in which the image is used. Kellen T 16:30, 30 December 2006 (UTC)


 * Kinda agree with Kellen in some circumstances. I "saw" one link go that was almost certainly the user's own photo - yes the photo should go, but the link?  Of course it is not rewriting history as the history is still there - go back and there will be a redlink to the image surely -- Herby  talk thyme 16:35, 30 December 2006 (UTC)


 * Oh, I agree... no need to remove them from talk pages. I suspect that was being done to allow the bot to do a clean run, but in those cases we should just manually delete the images if they're only linked on talks. I'd say just leave a not for whomever it was that was doing that, and rollback delinking edits that were on talk pages. -- SB_Johnny | talk 16:56, 30 December 2006 (UTC)

G'day, please don't take this the wrong way, but - don't throw the baby out with the bath water. Ripping images out left, right and centre does not solve the problem, which is image licensing. It can in fact be hard to differentiate such "cleanup" action from simple vandalism. Better would be to look at the image, and work out how to fix it if possible. Fixing could be contacting the original author and asking them to provide license information. It could also be simply recreating anew, as I just had to do for Image:Seasonality3.gif - simple enough with almost any graphical editing tool. Alternatively, please look for a replacement image before ripping out the unlicensed one. Please help to make Wikibooks a richer, not poorer, project. Webaware 02:23, 31 December 2006 (UTC)


 * Further comment: removing links to images without licenses makes the problem worse. It means that when the license problem has been resolved (by licensing, replacement, substitution, or other means), the pages that used to link to the image in question cannot easily be updated to reflect any changes. It should be remembered that the problem is the licensing of the image, not the fact that there are pages linking to it. Please fix the image license, and don't break the pages instead. Webaware 01:57, 1 January 2007 (UTC)


 * One more thing - please stop. There are images now missing, with no links saying that they're even missing, and for no better reason than that they had no licensing information. I don't have the time to pick over long lists of contribs for users who are removing these images and any links to them, so please desist for now.


 * At least some of these images are either in existence on Wiki Commons or are easy to recreate (e.g. maths formulas). It would be far better for the project if these images were replaced, substituted, or fixed rather than deleted along with any reference to them. For just a couple of examples, please check out these pages (current, and edit history):


 * Engineering Acoustics/Piezoelectric Transducers
 * Swahili


 * The Engineering Acoustics page has had graphic images of formulas removed. I've recovered a couple as maths formulas, now embedded as templates (see Acoustics/formulas for templates), but others are missing and someone will need to recover them. I found this page by reviewing the contribs of someone performing image cleanup, and checking out the page history. Otherwise, I'm buggered if I know how anyone would know that there were even formulas missing from this page! How many others are like this now? Looks to me like some serious "undoing" needs to be done.


 * The Swahili page has an image that has been uploaded to Wikibooks without license information. However, the image exists on Wiki Commons with license information. I've requested a speedy delete on the local copy. Simple - no need to break the page. How many others are like this now?


 * If you need some help converting any formula graphics that you recover, let me know and I'll be happy to help. In the meantime, please stop throwing out images and image links just because they have missing license information. Webaware 13:40, 1 January 2007 (UTC)

Since this is for the benefit of the community all bots that are misbehaving even after this requests that raise some very valid points should be blocked ASAP, to preserve the books. Until a solution is found --Panic 01:48, 3 January 2007 (UTC)


 * This is a very difficult issue. On one hand, This is the way commons operates, and to a degree I think that we should try to make our own image management policies to be more like that of commons. I'm of the opinion that we should ban all local uploads of images, and force everybody to to upload all images to commons. There is some precedent for this (although I can't remember which projects have done it). I won't push that issue any further, at this point in time. Deleting an image, while leaving links to an image serve as an encouragement for people to simply upload the images again, possibly with no proper copyright information attached. A book is better off having no images, then to rely on images that might infringe on copyright. I think the best thing to do at this point is to reconfigure any deletion bots to leave messages on the corresponding talk pages whenever they remove an image link. Leaving a message would be much better then leaving a red link on a page.
 * To another point, I dont think that we should be trying to fix all these images. There are literally hundreds of these images (or there were when the process started), and it's absurd to think that any team of volunteers is going to try and find appropriate solutions to every single image copyright problem that we have here. The problem is two-fold: Our administrative predecessors didn't manage the situation appropriately at the beginning of our project, and too many users have uploaded all sorts untagged images. Combine this with the fact that many authors who have uploaded images in the past are no longer active (and some are impossible to contact: I've tried).
 * In short, I dont see any problem with deleting book links. I think we should leave notes when we do delete such links, but I dont want to make that manditory. --Whiteknight (talk) (projects) 02:55, 3 January 2007 (UTC)


 * You seem to be missing the point. Some of these images are in Commons. Deleting the links to the local copies simply because they are tagged as having unknown copyright status means that when the local copies are deleted, there is no easy way to know which pages used to point to them. Leaving the links there allows those pages to pick up the images from Commons when the local copies are deleted. There are now a bunch of images that have no links to them, and I have no way of knowing whether they have been orphans for some time or whether links to them have been removed as part of "image cleanup". As Iamunknown pointed out to me only today, there is in fact a template for tagging such images without causing harm to Wikibooks: &#123;{NowCommons}}.


 * Also, some of the images being deleted are simple maths formulas, extended character-set characters, and simple shapes. Whoever is deleting these images is apparently not looking to see what they are, and thus that they can be very simply replaced or substituted without breaking the pages linking to them. Breaking pages is bad and should be avoided! This is especially true when the images are maths formulas, as the pages become next to useless without this information.


 * I don't think I'm suggesting anything radical here, simply that a functioning brain be passed across images before they are deleted, and that links to images are not removed simply because the images have licensing issues. First and foremost, it should be recognised that the image is often not a problem, merely its lack of licensing information. Webaware 03:27, 3 January 2007 (UTC)


 * I will concede one point, and strongly refute the other. If you are absolutely dead-set against deleting the links, I wont argue that point any further. I dont feel strongly enough in either direction to fight it. However, I dont think at this point that any more consideration should be applied in deleting untagged images. If any of the authors would contact us, we have bots that could automatically tag images. Unfortunately, the number of authors who have taken advantage of this is very small. Images with unknown copyright status pose an immediate legal threat to our project, and I doubt highly that wikibooks would be able to survive an infringement lawsuit. The probability of such an occurance might be small, but whatever the odds, I am not going to gamble with the future of this project. I've invested far too much time and energy to help this project to see it get shut down because of lawsuits and other legal nonsense. Compared to the potential legal problems we could get ourselves into, the inconveniences of book authors and readers who don't have images in their books is a minor issue. --Whiteknight (talk) (projects) 03:38, 3 January 2007 (UTC)


 * That sounds a little extreme. I can't see anyone suing over [[Image:Arrow.png|this]], nor the image now replaced by this. A bot would delete these images without a second's thought (and if the links had been removed, there'd be no way to easily fix the page without possessing the knowledge of the original author). A brain easily sees that there is no copyright issue at all, and that a scientific formula in mathematical notation can be easily represented another (better) way in Wikibooks without reducing the value of the project into which you (and others, including me) have invested much time and sweat.


 * But I guess I shouldn't really care what happens to pages that other people have created here on Wikibooks, when I have my own pages to tend to. Oh, wait, that's the point of wikis. Webaware 03:58, 3 January 2007 (UTC)

Simultaneous Editing Query
I wondered if somebody could tell me what happens if two people try to edit the same page at the same time? Does just whoever saves the page last, overwrite the changes of the other user? Or does something more clever happen? --AdRiley 11:35, 29 December 2006 (UTC)


 * You will actually get a message saying that there is a conflict and two boxes (IIRC) one with the new current text in and one with your version. When it does happen it is pretty clear and frankly on this Wiki is not that common - regards -- Herby  talk thyme 12:30, 29 December 2006 (UTC)


 * Exactly as herby said. Two boxes appear, the top box contains the current text of the page, and the bottom box contains the text that you tried to save. When you see such a conflict, you should copy+paste your text from the bottom box into the top box (if it is still needed), and then click "save". --Whiteknight (talk) (projects) 02:57, 3 January 2007 (UTC)

Skins
Some people have been having issues with printing out textbooks and certain pieces of information showing up that shouldn't. From a quick look I believe the issue is due to the fact that the stylesheet information to hide that information was in monobook.css rather then in common.css, which meant that only people using the default monobook skin were having these things hiden from print versions. I went ahead and moved those styles to the common.css stylesheet so that no mater what skin is being used it will work, unless someone overrides it in their own skin. I did the same for a few other styles that seemed to be intended for everyone and not just monobook skin users. --dark lama  17:57, 30 December 2006 (UTC)
 * Hi Darklama - I've got a monobook.css file I created but it only works when I'm logged in. If I were to create a User:Harriska2/common.css file would it then allow all users to see the style settings?  Any help would be greatly appreciated. Harriska2 16:56, 1 January 2007 (UTC)
 * In short, no. User:Harriska2/common.css, or any other skin file in the "User:Harriska2/..." namespace will only appear to you when you log in. --Whiteknight (talk) (projects) 03:02, 3 January 2007 (UTC)
 * Doh! Then how might I be able to get my style added so that others can see it? This style is important to the book as it defines the scripted curriculum. Any ideas are highly welcome! Harriska2 18:30, 8 January 2007 (UTC)

Stubs
Would it be alright if I was to create coverpages for books that are in the requests list but are not yet created? They might include an attractive image, a title, and a more or less completed TOC. --Remi0o 04:17, 30 December 2006 (UTC)
 * For me I guess it depends how stubby and how long they remain stubby? If not for long fine but otherwise I would suggest using your own user space as a good way of getting stuff started (own sandbox) that way you can get it reasonable before "release" while still asking anyone to take a look if you want to?  Cheers -- Herby  talk thyme 08:21, 30 December 2006 (UTC)
 * Wow, you're more than welcome to spiff up any of the Free Direct Instruction books! Free_Direct_Instruction_Curriculum_and_Training or Free_Direct_Instruction_Reading_1 or Free_Direct_Instruction_Science_1 and more Harriska2 16:47, 1 January 2007 (UTC)


 * The single most important part of a new book is planning. Fancy cover images aside, if the book isn't well-planned, then it will fail (any likely be deleted). If you absolutely would like to start creating cover images, I would suggest:
 * Create cover images for books that already exist
 * Take some time to plan (i will help if you like) your books, and then create a good TOC and cover image, etc.
 * Help is always appreciated, but please ensure that the things you contribute dont get ignored or deleted. --Whiteknight (talk) (projects) 03:00, 3 January 2007 (UTC)

Addendum to Wikibooks language portal

 * See original discussion

I researched into how to change the Wikibooks language portal. The live portal at meta is, of course, locked so that only Meta sysops can edit it. We will need to get consensus at the talk page, and then can request help at meta:Meta:requests for help from a sysop or bureaucrat. There is a test page we can edit.

I encourage you all to look at the live Wikipedia portal. I think we will have a much easier time if we follow the established protocol. In the meantime, I will go the Wikibooks embassies and tell them of our interest in updating the main page. Whiteknight or another active user on the textbook-l mailing list, could you advertise our interest there as well? Thanks. &mdash; User:Iamunknown 06:31, 31 December 2006 (UTC)
 * The  image "WikipediA" is uploaded to meta. While I don't support converting LadyofHats' "WikibookS"   to , I think that we should localise the image to meta.
 * The image will need to be included as a normal  tag. The text format to directly access uploaded images from http://upload.wikimedia.org/ is:
 * http&#58;//upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia//thumb/<(arbitrary?) technical text from the link directly below the image>/<#1 filename as you would include it in a module>/-<#2 filename as you would include it in a module>
 * Actually, strike out that last part. I feel a little uncomfortable advertising this when it hasn't really been planned out. I don't think I should feel uncomfortable. But I do. &mdash; User:Iamunknown 07:06, 31 December 2006 (UTC)
 * Unstrike. I'll do it. I'll just emphasize that this has not been thought out particularly carefully, and all their input would be very helpful! &mdash; User:Iamunknown 07:10, 31 December 2006 (UTC)

I don't understand the importance of changing last "s" letter to capital. If you want to change only this, why bother to inform all the languages? I thought we will be discussing something more serious. --Derbeth talk 14:20, 31 December 2006 (UTC)
 * I bothered to inform all the languages since there was no other process I could find, even after asking a meta admin and reading a ton of talk page archives spanning across different wikis, that would be appropriate. Thanks for your support. User:Iamunknown 20:03, 31 December 2006 (UTC)

For myself, I'm still not completely sure that moving the portal to Meta from Wikibooks portal was necessarily a good idea. While we have substituted one group of admins with another, the exact community procedure for updating the portal still hasn't been defined. That we have to go through a process like advertising on textbook-l that the portal needs updating, or the much neglected Wikibooks embassy shows that there are problems with this semi-recent change. Don't make me say "see I told you so" about this issue. --Rob Horning 17:37, 31 December 2006 (UTC)
 * I agree with you &mdash; kind of. I did all this canvassing precisely because of lack of established process. My major fear is that if canvassing is done too often for minutiae like this proposed change, people might begin to ignore the advertisements like the village began to ignore the boy who cries "wolf." (Yes I know that is a terrible simile.) I think it might be good to have it on meta, but at the same time, it was not good to move it there (apparently) whimsically without any forethought, established convention, or means of communication. &mdash; User:Iamunknown 20:03, 31 December 2006 (UTC)
 * At the time the swtich happened, I was actually voicing some concerns about the change, arguing that the admins here on en.wikibooks were doing a pretty good job of maintaining the page and that there didn't seem to be a compelling rationale to warrent the move to Meta other than "That's how Wikipedia is doing it". Certainly there didn't seem to be any huge objections from the other Wikibooks projects, at least what I was aware of.  The page here on en.wikibooks was actively maintained with nearly constant updates including suggestions from some of the other language Wikibooks projects that were rolled into the design.  And by hosting the page here, we at least had a strong stake in keeping it maintained, something that the meta admins don't have BTW.


 * All this said, there are some (very minor) advantages to doing it on Meta, as there are slightly more admins on meta than here and there is a stronger international langauge pool on Meta to deal directly with some of the multi-lingual issues that may come up. The side issue of having a page entirely in HTML instead of Wiki markup language obscured the issue that really had to do with where all this was going to be hosted.  I'll also note that the switch occured in spite of objections like mine, and I don't think the issue had been fully vetted before it occured.  Switching back now, however, is more an admission that the whole thing was a mistake.  --Rob Horning 22:15, 31 December 2006 (UTC)


 * Rob's rant aside (whether the page should have been moved to meta or not isn't really up for discussion, even if it does cause a problem here), I dont necessarily think we should be updating the "Wikibooks" to say "WikibookS". The change is certainly small, but I dont like change for the sake of change. If we are going to go through the trouble of altering the image on the portal, I think we should be aiming for a significant improvement, not just an altered formatting. --Whiteknight (talk) (projects) 03:07, 3 January 2007 (UTC)

Math and Escher Book
Hi -

My name is Bryan Clair. I’m a professor of math & computer science at Saint Louis University. My collaborator on this project is Anneke Bart, also a math prof. here at SLU.

We have been teaching an innovative freshman mathematics course “Mathematics and the Art of M.C. Escher” since 2000. It’s a mature course in the sense that the material and topics have mostly stabilized, enough so that other SLU professors have taken over sections. The course fulfuills a core qualititative reasoning requirement for SLU students, and is a popular alternative to college algebra for art, humanities, and social science majors. Prerequisites are light - a little knowledge of plane geometry, angle measure but not trig, basic algebra (adding fractions, solving linear equations).

The course covers a variety of mathematical topics, mostly related to geometry. It includes symmetries and symmetry groups, tessellations, non-euclidean geometry, fractals, topology, and the 4th dimension. Of course, there’s lots of connections to Escher and his work.

It’s an innovative course in terms of pedagogy - the classes are capped at 19 students and it’s almost entirely based on group work and discovery. There is little formal lecturing.

Because of the novelty of the material and the pedagogical layout of the course, we’ve begun writing a textbook for the course. Our text (more of a “reader”, really) is supplemented by an art book of Escher’s work and another general interest book about Escher’s life and tessellations. Our text is currently about 200 pages, although much of that is workbook-like group projects. We’ve used it for a few semesters in its current form, but it is badly in need of considerable work.

We don’t feel that the traditional bound and printed college textbook model is appropriate for this material. Some reasons:
 * The group projects constitute a sort of student workbook, but they are essential to the flow of the course.
 * So much related information is available on the web that we would like to allow for copious hyperlinking.
 * The text is intended to be supplemented with other resources. In particular, Escher’s artwork would be referenced heavily but probably not included.
 * Different instructors take different paths through the course and we would like to allow for non-linear progress through the text.
 * Parts the text (group projects, particularly) should be customizable to better fit class skill level and available time.

A wiki based solution is appealing. We can easily collaborate. We get web presentation, with the ability to create a passable printed version. We get semantic markup. We get LaTeX. We get professional looking design. The students get it free, no paper. Others may learn something, or even adopt it for their courses.

We’re seriously considering creating a WikiBook, which is why I’m posting this long letter. We’re hoping to get feedback as to whether this is a good idea, and what problems to expect. We have some specific concerns, but would value any encouragement, suggestions and/or warnings.

At the moment, I’m working on wiki-fying the book on my own computer, on which I’ve recently installed MediaWiki. Hopefully, I’ll have enough of it moved over in the next month that I can demo it.

Specific questions:
 * 1) Has anyone ever taught a college course using a WikiBook for a required text?  If so, which book and can we chat?
 * 2) The main concern we have is stability.  Using a WikiBook for teaching a course seems problematic.  The text needs to be essentially static while being used, at least to some extent.  As the most extreme example, if I assign homework problems, I need assurance that, for example, the numbers won’t change - even for an hour or two.  I never want to hear “well, that’s not how it looked when I read it” as an excuse.  I think my ideal solution would be to have a “release”, much like open source software.  At some point in time (the start of the semester?) a snapshot of the book is taken and the students can access that snapshot.  I tell the students “we’re using Release 1.3 as our official text - read that version”.  Pages that have changed would have a prominent note that there is a more recent version of the changed page, and students could read the more recent (probably better) version.  I believe that the usual Wiki way is to always show the most recent version, allowing users to actively seek out an older version if they desire.  Knowing students, that’s not going to work - the versioning needs to be somewhat coherent so once they make the initial choice to see an older version, they stay in that version across the entire book.
 * 3) Many of our images are .eps or .pdf files, which are vector based and so look good at any scale.  It appears that inlined images in a WikiBook are required to be in a raster graphics format such as .gif or .jpg.  It also appears that there is a single namespace for all images?
 * 4) Just to double check.. the licensing is set up so that nobody can grab the book, change it a bit and then sell it to a publisher, right?

Bryanclair 09:02, 31 December 2006 (UTC)


 * Firstly, welcome! Your course does sound rather innovative and interesting. I always encourage inter-disciplinary courses. I am into math and science, but have always felt that art, music, philosophy, and the humanities in general are entirely appropriate and exciting areas of study.
 * I would seriously encourage you to consider writing this as a WikiBook. There are, however, some points I would like to make.
 * The licensing is set up so that anyone can grab the book, change it a bit and then sell it to a publisher. This is the nature of the GNU Free Documentation License. They cannot, however, do it legally without attribution.
 * There is a single namespace for all media &mdash; that is, raster and vector images, music / sound, video, pdfs, OpenOffice documents, whatever. Most music / sound and videos are generally uploaded in .ogg (Vorbis and Theora) / .flac, as they are open source. Vector images are generally uploaded in .svg, which the MediaWiki software can (I think) natively rasterise. I do not know about rasterisation of .pdfs or .epses
 * If you want users to see a specific version, you can add links from the module to specific revisions in the history. Or you could provide on static HTML (on your course website, for example) or in an e-mail a link to the specific revisions. This would become tedious, however, if you were to need many modules from different parts of the book.
 * You could, however, relatively easily do a "snapshot" version, either off-wiki, or as a .pdf uploaded to the wiki.
 * I'm sorry for not addressing all of your concerns and questions. I hope, though, this helps you with your options. Cheers, User:Iamunknown 10:36, 31 December 2006 (UTC)


 * Welcome! Yes, it does sound like a Wikibook is what you need. #4 is probably the most important issue for you, but the GFDL does allow a publisher to do that. I hope that won't be too big a problem. :-/
 * I'm not too sure about vector images in eps or pdf files, but I'm pretty sure that svg files are allowed (another vector file format). Maybe ImageMagick could convert the files to svg format for you? [[Image:Flag of Germany.svg | 50px]] is an example of how you can use a svg (or png, or jpeg) image.
 * For your #2 question, you can provide "stable" links that never change to your students. Make the page, then hit "permanent version" on the left side of the webpage (it is under "toolbox"). That sends you to the page that will never change.
 * And I'm not sure if there are any wikitext -> LaTeX programs. If you know of any, I'd be interested :-p --Dragontamer 19:43, 31 December 2006 (UTC)

Problems and issues to look at
I absolutely am thrilled to see somebody like yourself becoming involved with the development of a formal textbook here on Wikibooks. Having edited here and participating with many Wikibooks projects, I can certainly understand some of your concerns. Some replies to what you are talking about:

As far as a university course using a Wikibook as a textbook, I am not aware of any. However, there are several high school textbooks that are being used within the curriculum of South Africa (see FHSST Physics), and several of the Wikijunior books have been used on the elementary school level.

The best example of a collge level textbook following the Wikibooks model that I can think of is Light and Matter, which was written by Ben Crowell and is in use at Fullton College in California, as well as a few other smaller colleges. It should be noted that this textbook was written several years before Wikibooks was started, where Dr. Crowell had to come with from scratch much of what is now given through the Wikibooks environment.

BTW, Dr. Crowell is semi-active currently on Wikibooks as well, even though this particular textbook is not hosted by Wikibooks. He certainly can give you some insight into some of the issues/complications that have arisen with the use of the GFDL in a textbook, and his content information can be found here.

One thing you do need to be aware of is that all images must be available under terms compatable with the GNU Free Document License if they are used here. I do know that much of Ecsher's work is still largly under copyright and won't enter the public domain until the year 2042 at the earliest (if further copyright extensions aren't enacted through legislation). This doesn't apply to all of what he did, but it is something to consider. The current proposed Wikibooks Fair Use Policy would make using the images found on the Wikipedia article improper to be used here on Wikibooks. In fact, I'm very much surprised that they havn't been deleted on Wikipedia as a copyright violation. Keep in mind that educational fair-use does not apply to Wikibooks, even though our intention here is to use these materials for educational purposes. That area is filled with so many legal land mines that I strongly suggest you don't even go there.

On the other hand, if you are able to somehow persuade the estate of M. C. Escher that they would be willing to donate some of these images under terms of the GFDL or other copyleft licenses, there is certainly a place to have them here on Wikibooks. I'm just giving strong caution before you get too far on this. BTW, this would also be an issue for a commercially published book, but image licensing is a bit more straight forward in that situation and would require royalty payments to Mr. Escher's estate. It may be possible that some of the famous images could also be in the public domain, but I highly doubt you will find many, if at all.

Artwork that follows the themes of M.C. Escher but are produced independently may be also available, so don't consider having the artwork in this Wikibook to be a completely lost cause either.

One other item you ought to consider is support for the book once you have completed the course. In this situation, it appears as though you intend this to be something that is for an ongoing course, which is a bit different than what has been done in the past. There are some Wikibooks like Instructional Technology that have been developed by the students themselves as a part of an organized class project. What I've seen usually is a very good initial push to add a huge amount of content, but it tends to languish for some time before somebody else "adopts" the content and fixes some of the short comings. Of course that tends to be typical for almost all Wikibooks as well, but these tend to be topics that are very specific and don't have a more general interest that tends to keep some of the Wikibooks (like the Cookbook) more fresh with new content on a regular basis. --Rob Horning 10:03, 1 January 2007 (UTC)

Some more thoughts
The problem of licensing Escher's work is actually not that daunting. The fact is, his work is all over the internet, although not typically at high quality resolutions. I do doubt that his copyright holders would free any of his images, but I think that could be worked around with creative linking.

I am somewhat dismayed to hear that one can resell GPL licensed stuff, although thinking of companies like Red Hat, of course it makes sense. With OSS, the resellers add value through ease of installation and support services. With a book, the reseller adds value through materials and convenience. In addition, with software, companies like Red Hat have been hugely influential and helpful to the quality of Linux. On the other hand, I'm not sure there's such a direct comparison between free software and free books. I don't purchase free software, because it's easy enough (for me anyway) to download and install/maintain it myself. However, I've purchased free books ( Hatcher's [Topology] and Raymond's [Art of Unix Programming] ) because I find it's really much better to own the paper volume than to have to use the net.

Neither Anneke nor I feel like we're doing this to make a buck, so it's not that we're concerned about getting paid. But it would bother me if a publisher grabbed the wiki book, typeset it, and sold it as a text.
 * Would this be likely to happen? Maybe not - the free availability on the net is a deterrent.
 * Would this be helpful to the wikibook? I don't know.  This seems like a place where the difference between software and books is significant.
 * Maybe it's not even feasible, if the book is really, truly meant to be a wiki.

Finally, I'm still worried about the lack of stability over a semester for a book that's intended as a textbook. Creating a pdf, though useful, defeats the purpose of a linked, hypertext book. Creating links (from where?) to a fixed version page-at-a-time would be infeasible. Maybe only the exercises need to be stable, which would make things a little easier.

Related to this, we've got (lots of) worksheets for in-class use. I may still print these out before class and distribute them to students as I've done in the past. But if not, then these must be stable, too - at least for the time they're in use. In addition, depending on how much time I've got to spare, I'll customize the worksheets from one semester to the next. I don't see any real mechanism for creating a custom, personal version of a wiki page, except by changing the public version. These versioning/forking issues seem to be a striking difference between open source software and wikibook. Admittedly, you can't customize a printed book much at all.

Anyway, we're still mulling it over. Thanks for the good feedback, and I'll still keep an eye on this discussion.

Bryanclair 04:27, 4 January 2007 (UTC)


 * One thing you should note about a commercial publisher grabbing GFDL content is that they don't have an exclusive right to the content, which really is a very different situation compared to more traditional textbook publishing where a contract is signed and exclusive publication rights are granted to a specific publishing house. In fact, if at that point you don't like the contract you are out of luck and can be sued into submission to even publish the book even if you decide it is an awful situation and not worth the effort.


 * As bad as that gets, including trying to go into a legal fight to even obtain royalties due and other similar issues, some real slimeball publishers will grab some public domain text and then slap on a copyright reasserting copyright on something that has been previously in the public domain, claiming exclusive publication rights when there is no reason to believe they have that right legally. Unfortunately you have to directly challenge that in court and most often these publishers get away with that tactic.


 * You should note that with the GFDL, this sort of brazen abuse of the Public Domain is stopped cold. If you republish content that has been licensed under the GFDL, you must conform to the term of that license, including citing the original authors as well as granting non-exclusive republication rights to anybody who purchases that content.  If they remove the GFDL notices or claim independent copyright, that publisher is in direct violation of copyright laws and can be sued for statutory damages.  In the USA that is up to $750,000 per incident (aka the infamous FBI warnings on the beginning of movies also apply here).  Clearly that is worth your time as an author to go after these creeps too.


 * As a practical matter, any commercial republication of GFDL content will only cover the basic cost of the printing itself and a modest overhead to help pay for the effort. And in a really strange twist of events, as a professor you are certainly within your means to take everything down to Kinko's (or other "on demand" publisher/photo copy business) and have your students purchase the stuff there, as was done ages ago until some of the commercial textbook publishers started to complain and filed a lawsuit against Kinkos.  Here at Wikibooks we do perform copyright vetting of the content and have established procedures to remove content that is in violation of copyright, whatever that reason might be.  This is perfectly legal, although your local Kinko's may be a bit perplexed at the suggestion and may have a manager that doesn't understand free content like this.  Or you can put a book on "reserve" and allow students to copy it at the college library.  This is not only legal but encouraged.  I promise that any commercial publishing will be considerably cheaper than going to the copy center.


 * As far as maintaining a static version that is stable for the duration of a semister or other similar situation, we have some tools available to help with that. In addition to "fixing" the content on PDF files and other such work-arounds, we can also block editing on a page for the purpose of making a stable version.  This has been talked about in the past, and is something that has been seriously considered for our sister project, Wikipedia, that would gave a more stable version for public consumption and an unstable version that is being edited and proofread that would then be moved to the "stable" version after it has been accepted, however that process is decided.  For example, this move from the "unstable" to "stable" version of the page can happen once a semister.  There are other tools available, and it is just a matter of what you want to have done here.  Having a stable version is very much in keeping with general Wikibooks philosophies.  --Rob Horning 16:45, 4 January 2007 (UTC)


 * Rob - That's a very encouraging response. The licensing stuff didn't worry me overmuch, but it's nice to hear your confidence.  The possibility of a stable version that updates periodically is, I think, pretty essential to using a text for an active course.


 * I've given this project plenty of thought over the last couple of weeks (and really for over a year). Right now, I've got a full MediaWiki server running on my own machine.  I'm going to teach the course this semester, and slowly move the book to that private server as we go.  This way I avoid artist rights issues, unstable course material, and licensing issues for the time being.  During the spring or start of summer, we'll come back and invite Rob, whiteknight, and other kind souls who've offered assistance to take a look at what we've got.  That will give us some time to resolve these issues without the pressure of student use, and I think that seeing what this "book" looks like will help you guys as well.  Since it's already going to be set up for MediaWiki, it shouldn't be too hard to bring it over at that point.
 * Bryanclair 22:07, 8 January 2007 (UTC)

Discussion on consensus
Wanting to archive the RfA that this was attached to I'm copying the discussion here so that it can be seen and continued if desired -- Herby talk thyme 13:18, 1 January 2007 (UTC)

Humm this should probably be posted on Whiteknight talk page but here it goes as it may be important to the other users...

I start by stating that I don't object to the Az1568 being made an administrator (not since the input from Swift, txs), but I think the method is laking, since there was a vote against, no consensus was reached "This user is now a sysop. 7 votes for, 1 against, 1 abstain. Objections not withstanding" this is plainly wrong, or am I missing something ? (btw sysop = system operator is not equal to administrator as an user with "some" administrative rights, to be true co-sysop would approximate better the status update) --Panic 18:21, 29 December 2006 (UTC)
 * I don't understand what you said regarding the word "sysop", but consensus can happen even without 100% approval. An opposition was made, a sufficient rebuttal provided, and no further objection was received. Dropping a single vote in can't be a show-stopper and the amount of positive, supporting input outweighed it. -within focus 01:04, 1 January 2007 (UTC)
 * I'll explain the sysop part in your talk. But on the "consensus" bit, can you point me to definition of "consensus" that doesn't state it as the complete agreement of all parties ?!? (100% in favor or against something), even if a sufficient rebuttal is given that doesn't end the discussion process until all voters/participants agree in all points, in this particular case, until I declare agreement and change my vote. if you don't agree please move this discussion (my posts and yours to Wikibooks_talk:Decision_making/Unstable, txs). --Panic 02:10, 1 January 2007 (UTC)
 * You have raised an interesting point. The definition of consensus is that all parties agree and one disenting vote means it fails.  Until now though it had generally been understood that a good majority was all that was needed.  I suggest that voting rules be updated to show that a high majority is needed rather than consensus. Xania [[Image:Flag_of_Poland_2.svg|15px]]talk 04:06, 1 January 2007 (UTC)
 * We really should move this talk to the proper forum, I agree that there needs to be a more clear use of Wikibooks policies and guidelines (it his my view that a large percentage of people don't understand some and don't particularly care, I'll put it bluntly, basic concepts or have even problems interpreting the GFDL). I'll strongly object for a change of that nature, consensus is a very good policy, especially in a situation like we have here at Wikibooks (or other Wikimedia projects), some people with more time and more diplomatic skill could create a power base and control the community evolution, this has already occurred in the past, even to me, so I can't agree with that solution. (Haven't you seen Survivor ?!?, with decisions based on consensus they would probably starve but this method here provides a voice to every one and there are problems with user identification and people voting more than one time). --Panic 04:30, 1 January 2007 (UTC)
 * No need to reply, but if you move it, please copy and paste; don't "move". &mdash; User:Iamunknown 04:43, 1 January 2007 (UTC)
 * Consensus is not the same thing as unanimous agreement. The definition in Wiktionary is only one definition (and not a correct one IMHO.) A single individual should not be able to prevent arrival at consensus. In arriving at consensus all points of view are thoughtfully considered. Then individuals agree to take action based on the discussion. (See consensus) has consideration been given to the objection? Yes. --xixtas 13:13, 1 January 2007 (UTC)
 * xixtas said this correctly with a slight modification. Parties must be agreement, but that does not mean that all votes need to read Support by them. For instance, you raised an objection and it was addressed. I personally found the response satisfactory and you did not return in a timely manner to continue your objection. It's not fair to throw a wrench in and then take however long you want to respond. The bureaucrat that takes action must make a decision if consensus is achieved. Perhaps it is labeled a bit misleadingly, but the one oppose vote here had been countered and then discontinued, so I personally see that as consensus. Making everyone re-write votes to say Support is not helpful and unnecessary when agreement can be judged by a trusted bureaucrat of the project. -within focus 15:01, 1 January 2007 (UTC)


 * I find myself in agreement with the ideas of xixtas and Withinfocus here and the link to Wikipedia is useful too. In practice no organisation that wishes to grow and evolve will be able to get full agreement for changes (and change is necessary).  I would even take the point about bureaucrats making the judgment a little further.  Any user can make judgments - similarly those judgments can be reversed.  I was closing VfDs for some time before becoming an admin - anyone can do it but they must be prepared to justify their actions.  Indeed I read on WP very recently that (with AfDs there) an admin is not looking just at the number of votes but also the quality of the arguments.  I closed a VfD as delete recently where there was not an overwhelming majority of votes for delete.  However - in my view - that was the correct decision BUT I will happily listen to anyone with other views - that is working towards consensus which is vital for a community.  However, while I would prefer everyone to be happy with any decisions, a single vote cannot prevent that consensus.  My 0.02 -- Herby  talk thyme 15:31, 1 January 2007 (UTC)

The process of arriving at formal consensus can be found at Decision_making. Consensus is not strictly 100% agreement. Kellen T 15:20, 1 January 2007 (UTC)


 * Consensus isn't the same thing as unanimity... it's unlikely to have a bunch of human beings agree totally on any particular point. Quakers have long used consensus, and an interesting bit from that article:
 * "A decision is reached when the Meeting as a whole feels that the "way forward" has been discerned (also called "coming to unity") or there is a concensus. Occasionally, some members of the Meeting will "stand aside" on an issue, meaning that these members do not share in the general sense of the meeting but are willing to allow the group to move forward."
 * Sometimes meetings even "split" because 2 groups of opinions cannot be reconciled... just as there are other meetings, there are other wikis. If a minority view is unwilling to go in the direction the community wishes to go in, the community goes forward anyway (easier for quakers of course, we don't have a "mystical understanding to guide us). -- SB_Johnny | talk 16:03, 1 January 2007 (UTC)


 * Consensus isn't the same thing as unanimity, since unanimity doesn't support neutral votes (as per your example), consensus also conveys a sense of discussion, and don't particularly calls for a vote, debate, unanimity deals only with votes and the final result.


 * When one says a decision was reached by consensus, one should understand it that after a debate a point won with no one objecting.


 * Example, in the discussions about proposals to give administrators rights, the proposal should only need objecting votes, as "I propose this and that, does any one object" if a person objects then a discussion is proper (but may not reach consensus), a voting may only be useful to demonstrate to the debating parties how the rest of the community feels about the topic.


 * When one says a decision was reached by unanimity, one understands that all parties voted yes or no on a given topic. --Panic 16:52, 1 January 2007 (UTC)


 * Of interest: Honeybees use a consensus process when choosing a new nest.


 * I would agree that consensus hasn't really been reached until all objections have been addressed -- to the satisfaction of the people who raised them -- or objectors have acquiesced to the consensus. But a key part of the consensus process is that people who see that their preference has no support do eventually acquiesce. I don't think we can have a bona fide consensus process here at Wikibooks because we have just too many people with a "my way or the highway" mindset. The rules we have come really close to it, though, and the practical result is the same as long as the discussion is allowed to continue long enough. Brian Brondel 23:36, 1 January 2007 (UTC)


 * Yup, the main problem here using consensus as a method is the lack of general interest most discussions get here, this can easily lead to a stale mate (with in itself is not really a problem, this will only lead to less innovation and a default resistance to changes), if we had more people expressing their views it would be easier to get all parties to agree as it is, specific interest groups are generated that try to push they own agendas and most prefer doing that without other having a change to make objections. I would like the interpretation of consensus to be stated on the decision policy, and I take this change of referring to my proposal to reduce the scope of those involved on discussions, like the proper definition of book communities etc... (see the talk page). --Panic 03:55, 2 January 2007 (UTC)


 * In concensus decision-making, not only the quantity of votes but also the quality of votes must be considered. 7 to 1 is a very strong majority, but a majority alone doesnt make concensus. Current policy lays out certain requirements to become a sysop (and admittedly those requirements are vague). Votes that say "This user meets the requirements in the policy" are more powerful votes then people who say "This user is awesome, i like him". Likewise, a vote that says "This user doesnt meet certain requirements and is unlikely to be a good admin" is more powerful then a vote that says "I don't like this user for some arbitrary reason", or even "I dont think we should have (more) admins", or whatever. your objection aside, Panic, Az had 7 votes in favor (which is more then many admins have when they are elected), he does meet the requirements in the policy, and I dont think there have been any good reasons set forth why he shouldnt have been promoted. If you would like to discuss my actions or my decisions in the future, please do so on my user talk page. --Whiteknight (talk) (projects) 02:01, 3 January 2007 (UTC)

Sysop Status
This whole issue regarding a "sysop" is something that was perpetuated by the MediaWiki developers. The idea that administrator == sysop is something that has historical roots, and is a cause of a huge amount of confusion, particuarly if you start to dig into the MediaWiki documentation.

Typically somebody with "sysop" privileges would be somebody who has root access to the computer equipment... or more likely a "system operator" who is physically present in front of the computer itself and has the ultimate authority on the computer... mainly the ability to yank out the power cord and reboot the computer. On older mainframe systems this was generally considered a person of privilege as well, as a sysop in this context had the ability to control content on the system by deleting content and changing user privileges. Keep in mind that once upon a time there was only three levels of users for Wikimedia projects: anon user, "regular" registered users, and sysops. And for a time many of the "sysops" were also hard core software developers who indeed had at least software level access to the Wikimedia computers who are now termed "developers" instead in the grand heirarchy.

Unfortunately the current "keyword" that establishes user categories on Wikimedia projects and granting access to "administrator" tools is currently called "sysop". Yes, this can cause confusion to no end and is something that unfortunately is very poorly documented. No, when you become what we call an "admin" you don't get sysop privileges (or root acess) to the Wikimedia server farm, but you certainly have the ability to make some significant changes that other more ordinary users don't have access to.

Really, a much better term (had it been established back elsewhen) would have been the term "moderator" instead of "administrator" or "sysop". On Wikiversity the term has been changed to "Custodian", which in some ways really fits better than the term "administrator". That is BTW one of my contributions to Wikiversity that I'm actually proud of. There is historical inertia to changing the name here on Wikibooks, and really gets things confused when talking to people on other projects (especially Wikipedia) if you started to change the terminology here on Wikibooks.

While the term "sysop" is very quick shorthand for those who are long-time users on Wikimedia projects (I understand the context, for example), we need to be mindful that not everybody here understand what is going on. This is something I was very confused with myself... even when I was made an administrator back elsewhen. --Rob Horning 17:46, 1 January 2007 (UTC)


 * We've been (half-jokingly) discussing this on IRC... "Librarian" might be better for us. -- SB_Johnny | talk 17:52, 1 January 2007 (UTC)


 * Tanks, for the historic background, I didn't know about that.
 * We should avoid to use terms that aren't "defined" on Wikibooks, with especial care to policies and guidelines...
 * Btw are you (User:Robert Horning or User talk:SBJohnny) proposing a change to the term "administrator" here also ? --Panic 17:59, 1 January 2007 (UTC)


 * No proposal as of this date, as far as I know. -- SB_Johnny | talk 18:04, 1 January 2007 (UTC)

Regarding the selective archival schema at the Staff lounge
As I was comparing comparing the staff lounge archives to the staff lounge history page – merely out of curiosity – I noticed that the current practice ends up with a lot of posts being de-contextualised. They end up out of order specifically because some discussions go longer than others, and those short-lived ones get archived before the long-lived ones do. I really don't think that this is appropriate. Some comments are posted here specifically because of a previous post, and for an interested user, shuffling the texts around is not helpful. I copied the page headings to the current archive and pasted three conversations in there for starters. I hope this continues. &mdash; User:Iamunknown 07:39, 2 January 2007 (UTC)


 * Something needs to be done. I no longer read or watch the Staff lounge because it's a mess and impossible to follow.  My suggestion would be to have a central Staff section which links off to other pages like 'Administrators Talk', 'Policy Talk', 'General Talk' and provides links to every important section so that users can report vandalism in the correct place rather than on this page.  Any ideas?  Xania [[Image:Flag_of_Poland_2.svg|15px]]talk 14:01, 2 January 2007 (UTC)


 * This might be a good idea. Discussion does abound on this page and it could make it easier to follow and find topics if it were split up. I'm not sure what the proper split should be, though. It seems that the topics are many and overlapping, but I think we should avoid breaking it up too much in order to keep it simple.
 * I recently redefined the scope of the Study help desk and think we could even solve some of our problems by directing general inquiries about WB practices there, leaving the SL for in-house discussions (i.e. policy + general) &mdash; for admin talk, there is already the Administrators'_noticeboard. --Swift 22:15, 2 January 2007 (UTC)


 * How about archiving discussions in order of their start-date? --Swift 22:15, 2 January 2007 (UTC)
 * herr, Wouldn't this force the archiving of still running discussions ? I agree with User:Swift that a fragmentation of this page based on topics (on the scope of the discussion) will have to occur sooner or later... It will also provide a history for already debated topics (not based only on dates)--Panic 00:05, 3 January 2007 (UTC)


 * No. What I meant was that discussions could be placed in the archives depending on their start-date, not based on when they are archived. The archiver would thus not append the archived topic to the current archive, but place according to a time order &mdash; following topics with earlier original posts in that archive, and preceding later ones. --Swift 01:04, 3 January 2007 (UTC)


 * In that case I'm not against nor in favor, but this seems a task that over a time only bots would have the time to perform, the acceptance of such policy should depend on the bot source to be publicly available, this also seem to imply that no archiving may be done by humans (prone to errors and with a high level of difficulty to cross check) --Panic 01:11, 3 January 2007 (UTC)


 * That's what I had in mind, Swift. I copied all the headings from the this version of the lounge to the current archive and pasted three convos in there. Of course, right now there are way too many headings in there, and they will have to be moved to a new archive when the time comes, but I hope it is a start.
 * Panic: It would be very nice to have a bot to archive the conversations. But a bot could not know when a conversation is finished. Even if it scraped the page history to see when the last time a conversation was added to, some conversations die down a little and then flare up. But if it were an semi-automatic bot operated by a user, that would be nice. :)
 * What would be the most convenient, though, would be if each conversation were created as a sub-page and then added to everyone's watchlist that elected to do so. That would, however, require a new feature. I imagine if all of the English Wikibooks went to Bugzilla and voted for the bug, then the developers would do it. But that would be a ways off. &mdash; User:Iamunknown 17:34, 3 January 2007 (UTC)

Here's a thought, what if we simply just stop archiving? Just delete old discussions from the page as they are finished. Provide a link to the FAQs to the top of this page and update that list as questions become more frequent and suggest people read the FAQs first before asking any questions. --dark lama  01:24, 3 January 2007 (UTC)


 * That would be great but the problem is that history pages can't (at the moment) be searched (I think this is the only justification for archival). --Panic 01:38, 3 January 2007 (UTC)


 * I think that a major issue is getting folk pointed to the places they need to go - if they can't find anywhere they ask here. Admin notice board is not used much and there are places where policy dicussion takes place.  I don't find the "sidebox" at the top informative or appealing (and when you get there the stuff is somewhat out of date by and large even by WB standards!) - better signposting might help? -- Herby  talk thyme 08:13, 3 January 2007 (UTC)


 * The best way I can see to go about it is to split this page in several subtopics (reusing existing and related pages if and when possible), people that think very strongly or are having troubles dealing with the length this page can reach can and should probably do a mockup for a proposal, as examples, we can use this location for a simple menu where other pages are selected or we can even use a top menu to subpages and transclude all pages to here so people may use both solutions and provide equal visibility to all subpages, just some ideas... --Panic 19:50, 3 January 2007 (UTC)

SVG → PNG bug?
G'day, I just created a few simple SVG files using code on this page, to replace the PNG versions of the examples. All OK, except for the text example - Image:XML example text.svg - which doesn't render. The image itself will download and display just fine on Firefox 2.0 but nothing shows on pages with this image embedded in them. I'm picking that this is a bug in the SVG → PNG rendering software - can anyone confirm? Is it being addressed, or do I need to simply work around it? cheers, Webaware 02:54, 3 January 2007 (UTC)


 * While I cannot point you to any bug listing at Bugzilla or a specific page at Commons, I do distinctly remember reading that fonts are not really supported by the MediaWiki SVG renderer. Many SVG artists on Commons do not use fonts at all, but instead convert them to paths. As evidence (of lack of support in general), please look at this page where it says that "The servers cannot render all types of SVG features, so the generated PNGs are sometimes not as the author intended." &mdash; User:Iamunknown 17:37, 3 January 2007 (UTC)


 * Thanks for chasing that up, I hadn't seen that page. It sounds like it should be able to do it (it handles more complex images with text) but appears to have some problem with some SVG images with text, including this simple one. I've resurrected the PNG version for now as it isn't really a problem that needs solving at present. cheers, Webaware 01:34, 4 January 2007 (UTC)

"Final Word" clause (proposal)
(discussion copied from Wikibooks talk:What is Wikibooks/Unstable)

There was one previously, but it appears to have been removed. I want to reinstitute the "final word" clause into this document. Wikibooks policy and guidelines are fragmented, as in it is distributed among multiple documents. It is very possible for one policy to disagree with another policy. Considering the amount of change that has happened in terms of policy recently, and considering the massive age disparities between some of our newest and some of our oldest policy documents, I think it's important that we have something that is the "final word", that is something that trumps any other document in the event of a contradiction. I propose therefore the addition of the following text (barring revision) to the "Enforcement" section of this policy:
 * Any clause in a policy or guideline on the English Wikibooks that contradicts this policy is null and void.

I think this is an important addition. --Whiteknight (talk) (projects) 02:31, 3 January 2007 (UTC)

Best to change it to Any policy or guideline on the English Wikibooks, approved before this one, that contradicts it will be null and void on the conflicting point(s) and should be marked for revision., since we rarely (I can't remember once) did vote a police clause/point by point. This should probably be added not only to this policy but to any policy we adopt/change in the future, this should cover all bases. --Panic 02:39, 3 January 2007 (UTC)


 * I dont think we need to specify only policies that are approved beforehand. We could very easily approve a new policy that contradicts this one, and we still need some kind of final authority when a contradiction occurs. --Whiteknight (talk) (projects) 03:59, 3 January 2007 (UTC)


 * So... The changes I propose to the phrase clearly state that only the points in conflict will be void (as in the ones that should be fallowed are on the present policy), that's basically the same as in you proposal, the change also states priority, the last approved changes/policy will have an higher priority. (the last text discussed and approved might if conflicts arise be taken as the final word of the community, it goes even further proposing for a new discussion on that specific problematic point, I can't see how more complete it can be made.) --Panic 04:11, 3 January 2007 (UTC)

Just to be clear, I propose extending the idea of User:Whiteknight so that all new policies get the information added from now on. This will resolve any future interpretation problems on the specific case of conflicting rules in general. --Panic 05:13, 3 January 2007 (UTC)

As an addendum to the proposal, I ask that next to that phrase, the close date of the discussion that validated the text should be included (policy texts are often changed due to the Be_bold rule without changing the policy in itself but making the text history confusing).

Policy discussion closed by , if the policy was closed before as Revised Policy discussion closed by , this is important also for historical reasons. --Panic 05:28, 3 January 2007 (UTC)

Any objections or counter proposal ? --Panic 01:00, 8 January 2007 (UTC)


 * While your point makes some sense, from what I've seen I disagree your phrasing is clear about what is invalidated, there is also the matter of interpretation that could be the source of disagreements if we allow some parts to be valid while other parts to no longer be so. I believe it would be better to make an entire policy invalid rather then leaving room for personal interpretation of whats policy still and whats not. I don't have any issue that I can think of with the idea of including from now on the date of when a proposal became a policy or guideline and who turned it into one, if that is what your suggesting. --<font color="midnightblue">dark [[Image:Yin yang.svg|12px]] lama 01:41, 8 January 2007 (UTC)


 * A few points. First off, a discussion is never truely "closed" in the sense that a decision made is final. All discussions can be continued ad infinitem, or they can be picked up again at any time by any user. My point with the final word clause in the policy is that different documents change at different rates. WB:WIW, for instance, is a policy that has historically been very slow to change (perhaps because of it's importance). That's part of the reason why the current discussion on it appears to be going nowhere (or going somewhere painfully slowly). Consider (just as an example), that the deletion policy is expanded to allow for the deletion of videogame guides. In this case, the WB:WIW policy wouldn't be in agreement with the deletion policy, and we would be in a worse situation. To solve this problem, we make certain documents more important then other documents. As an analog (and forgive me that it's a strictly american analog), the US constitution is the final word in US law, but there are plenty of other law documents that are produced to deal with the fine points. If we set up WB:WIW to be our "constitution", then it will be the final word, and all other policy documents will be ancillary to it. That's my rationale for this clause. --Whiteknight (talk) (projects) 22:03, 11 January 2007 (UTC)


 * Yup User:Darklama as it is, it falls to the disagreeing party (the one that thinks there is a conflict) to initiate discussion of the conflict on the oldest page (as it is anyone can ask for any policy to be re-analyzed) so in that regard we are safe. --Panic 07:08, 22 January 2007 (UTC)

I have added the proposed and still not objected wording, with a small modification (changed the objected "discussion close" to "stage finished") to cover User:Whiteknight point to the Deletion policy/Unstable if there is still any divergence lets continue this discussion there. Txs. --Panic 07:08, 22 January 2007 (UTC)

Arabic verbs
Dear Sirs,

I am studying Arabic and I am looking for books on Arabic verb conjugation. Can you help?

Thanks —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Dampa (talk • contribs) 11:07, 3 January 2007 (UTC)


 * Welcome to Wikibooks, Dampa. First of all, this type of question goes in the Reference desk. Please take the time to read the instructions at the top of the discussion pages before posting. It may sometimes take a little while to find, but pretty much everything here is documented.
 * Secondly, you can start by using the search function: there is a little text field, by default on the left hand side of your browser window, where you can enter search terms. Entering "Arabic" and hitting "Go" will take you to the Arabic book, but hitting "Search" will give you a number of search results. You can also try other queries, such as "Arabic conjugation". --Swift 12:26, 3 January 2007 (UTC)

Urantia United
Shouldn’t your main page be changed? It states: “Welcome to Wikibooks, a collection of free content textbooks that you can edit”. Free content encompasses all works in the public domain (Wikipedia). I edited every page of the Urantia Book (now in the public domain) with the approval of The International Urantia Assn., and called it Urantia United so it would appeal to all religions. It is not my own original work, but the Urantia Book was credited.(authors unknown) Why is it up for deletion? I read your contradictory requirements and intended to comply. It is a work in progress. Kkawohl 00:13, 4 January 2007 (UTC)kkawohl


 * Wikibooks is a collection of free-content textbooks. One argument, as I see by reading the section at WB:VFD, is that this text reads not as a textbook would and should, but as a personal essay. While this reason alone does not discredit the text in any way, it is a reason to not include it on Wikibooks. As you said, Wikibooks is for textbooks.
 * Also, concerns have been raised that, if you are the founder of Transcendentalism Today, Org., that you may have a conflict of interest in writing this Wikibook. Furthermore, this material appears to have been deleted twice before. While consensus can change, any person reposting deleted content should probably counsel with an experienced user before they recreate to ensure that it is distinctly different and appropriate.
 * Also, while it is appropriate to post texts when one has person from their copyright owner, you must have proof. And if this text is a source text (which I infer from your comment that it is) then it should go on Wikisource.
 * All that being said, you may be right in identifying our policies as contradictory. That we are trying to work on right now. And I hope that you understand that whatever happens to the text, you are still welcome around here. :) Cheers, User:Iamunknown 01:10, 4 January 2007 (UTC)


 * One of the major issues with this content that you are adding is that it is, unfortunately, unverifiable. I know that is a fuzzy standard to apply, but one of the key premises that we have to content here on Wikibooks is that it must be verifiable in some fashion.  We do have a standard here that relates to what we call "Original Research".  Our current guidelines are found here:  Original research  It should also be noted that this is based off of the Wikipedia policy with a similar general philosophy:  w:Wikipedia:No original research


 * This policy is currently being debated, with some thoughts about how much we should allow on this project in terms of allowing some original thoughts within a Wikibook. Philosophical books such as yours are particularly vague in reference to this policy, especially very new philosophies like yours that don't have anything even resembling a wide body of literature about the topic.


 * I should also note here that Wikibooks is not a vanity publisher. While you are certainly free to edit and add content here, there are some basic standards that we are trying to achieve.  Keep in mind that the primary emphasis of Wikibooks, particularly over this past year, is to work in creating standards-based textbooks.  In particular we would like to cover things that would involve secondary education and collegete level textbooks, but other instructional materials are strongly encouraged.  It is particularly important if you want to see content remain here on Wikibooks that you provide a rationale related to these sort of textbooks as to why your content should be compared favorably to that sort of content.  Describe what sort of school would be using a book about Urantia United?  --Rob Horning 17:36, 4 January 2007 (UTC)

User Arbitration
Due to some issues between a few users and some apparent edit wars going on, I've decided to take on the whole situation as an arbitration "case".

In many ways, this is very unfortunate, but it is starting to spill over into the rest of Wikibooks and has raised the stress level for just about everybody who is involved with developing Wikibooks in general. I had hoped that this could be resolved in a less formal atmosphere, but that apparently is no longer a reasonable option. Instead, it is now taking place on this page:

Arbitration/Panic2k4 vs. SBJohnny

This is a preceedent setting situation here on Wikibooks, and I hope that once this particular situation is resolved that we can more calmly come up with a formal process similar to what I've outlined to deal with these situations in the future. This is being added here to the Staff Lounge mainly as a notice that this arbitration is happening, particularly because we have never done something like this before.

The alternative really is that Jimbo comes in here and makes a mess out of everything, banning several users from this project and creating a considerable degree of ill will. I hope this can be something that will eventually help out Wikibooks in the long run, and air out some long standing issues that do in fact need to be resolved with Wikibooks. --Rob Horning 20:54, 4 January 2007 (UTC)

template links
Hello, why when i edit a page, i don't have the links to the templates which are included in the page ? Is it a bug or a feature of en.wikibooks ? 83.179.44.120 21:34, 4 January 2007 (UTC)

Oversight permission
A useful permission called oversight does not have any users here at en.wikibooks. I find this to be a very useful permission to have here and would like to request that all three Bureaucrats here gain that right. Does anyone see any problems with this or have other users who would like such a tool? Thanks. -<font color="#000000">within <font color="#7A7A7A">focus 01:25, 6 January 2007 (UTC)
 * I'd looked at this myself. Brief thoughts - would it actually be needed at all often?  Certainly if we are looking for one I would favour two so that there is a checker.  If others were reluctant due to time commitments it would not worry me to have the permission -- Herby  talk thyme 08:11, 6 January 2007 (UTC)
 * I think there's plenty of names and other personal information being written in multiple places as well as other vandalism that should go. It wouldn't hurt to have this as vandalism has definitely ramped up here in the past few months. -<font color="#000000">within <font color="#7A7A7A">focus 21:14, 6 January 2007 (UTC)


 * According to Hiding revisions
 * "This feature is approved for use in three cases:
 * "Removal of nonpublic personal information such as phone numbers, home addresses, workplaces or identities of pseudonymous or anonymous individuals who have not made their identity public, or of public individuals who have not made that personal information public.
 * "Removal of potentially libellous information either: a) on the advice of Wikimedia Foundation counsel or b) when the subject has specifically asked for the information to be expunged from the history, the case is clear, and there is no editorial reason to keep the revision.
 * "Removal of copyright violations on the advice of Wikimedia Foundation counsel"
 * And I agree with this. Oversight should be used only in a very select number of situations. I do not think that it should be used to remove vandalism from history or remove names and other personal information written about people by themselves, though it would be appropriate to remove personally identifiable information written about people without their permission.
 * I also would like to point out the pros and cons of having multiple users with oversight permission. At first I thought we would not need three. But thinking more, it might be appropriate to have three. That way, the users can check on what the other two are doing. This is necessary because the oversight logs are not public. Only other oversight users can see them. I don't know, though, what I support – yet &mdash; User:Iamunknown 00:42, 7 January 2007 (UTC)
 * I still think I would consider using oversight when a user writes personal information about him/herself here. Listing your address, phone number, etc. really isn't appropriate on our site I would think since I don't really know its usefulness. We're not writing personal works here that we hold copyright over and need to be linked to. I am not sure if any Wikimedia policies specifically allow or forbid this listing of personal information, but it seems dangerous to do to me. -<font color="#000000">within <font color="#7A7A7A">focus 17:17, 7 January 2007 (UTC)

You obviously have not looked at a number of pages that contain adverts with personal information on that we are "hosting" here. Not a comment on "oversight" but on personal information -- Herby talk thyme 17:20, 7 January 2007 (UTC)
 * reset
 * What sort of information is being displayed then? I frown at putting those kinds of things online. Do we as users here need to handle the protection of users that put this sort of stuff online? There is WB:WIW that touches on that and I would think we need to remove that sort of information here. -<font color="#000000">within <font color="#7A7A7A">focus 17:28, 7 January 2007 (UTC)

I still think I would consider using oversight when a user writes personal information about him/herself here. For one thing, that is explicitly against wikimedia policy. "'Removal of nonpublic personal information' such as phone numbers, home addresses, workplaces or identities of pseudonymous or anonymous individuals 1) who have not made their identity public, or 2) of public individuals who have not made that personal information public." People, whether working under pseudonyms or working in public, who post their own personal information online are making their identity public. Secondly, personally identifiable information is necessary to establish ownership of copyright. While you may work under a pseudonym, you must, at some point, establish your true identity so that you can claim ownership of your works. And you have to be able to contacted so that said supplied information is verifiable. I am now getting wary about letting giving oversight permission to anyone &mdash; User:Iamunknown 01:17, 8 January 2007 (UTC)


 * As I view on the problem.
 * 1) is there a guideline that details what personal informations a user may or may not use in references to another?
 * (if not one should be created)
 * 2) has anyone requested that personal information to be removed permanently from pages ?
 * 3) author pages and userpages should be protected from removal of personal information (unless requested by the subject or after ownership of the data is verified).
 * 4) before giving the rights a guideline should be created and adopted here on how users with "oversight" rights should exert their function.


 * I don't see a need for the granting of "oversight" rights to more than a user, this user should have a good record of being active on Wikibooks and should have CheckUser rights (should accumulate both rights), if a problem arises that such function is needed then we should see if there is a need for having more people with the "oversight" right and a more evolved definition for the problem, this will be a preventive action that would solve an immediate problem if it arises. --Panic 01:44, 8 January 2007 (UTC)


 * I find some of that to be a poor decision since there are plenty of people who list way too much about their personal lives online, but oh well. -<font color="#000000">within <font color="#7A7A7A">focus 17:29, 8 January 2007 (UTC)


 * Who are we to impose limits or restrictions of how a person want to disclose that kind of data if not in a abusive way?
 * This falls under personal rights and we should educate but let people do as they wish if not in violation of other users rights, I don't like treating people like ignorants we should first try to enlighten users about a possible problem, the solution I gave would do all that if you have a better way to go about it, please extend your comments on it... --Panic 17:47, 8 January 2007 (UTC)
 * That seems fine to me. I think that was mostly part of the plan anyway, but attaching Checkuser onto it could prove helpful. Having more than one oversight user can't hurt anything if we trust him/her. -<font color="#000000">within <font color="#7A7A7A">focus 00:20, 9 January 2007 (UTC)


 * Let me make a few points about this. First off, there are people with oversight, just none on this project. For instance, any of the stewards could be asked to come in here and use oversight on our project, after a private request. This means, essentially, that whether we vote to allow users with the permission here, there are people who can do it anyway. With that in mind, it's not an issue as to whether we want people to use oversight, but whether or not we want the people who do use it to be members of our project (and not outsiders).
 * If we want to have the permissions at all, it would be wise to have more then one. Given the nature of oversight, when it is time to use it (hopefully a rare occasion), it should probably be used immediately. If sensitive information is on our server, it should be removed quickly to prevent too many people reading it. I propose therefore that people who get oversight should be active at different times of day (likely live in different time zones), and that they should be very active. The current active bureaucrats might be a good pool to choose from initially, but I personally won't accept any new permissions without the community voting on them individually (ie, they would have to vote to give me specifically the permissions, not just "active bureaucrats").
 * Finally, bureaucrats can rename users, an ability that isn't used frequently, but that has been used in the past. Occasionally, a person may use their real name as their screenname ("user:John smith"), not realizing that this name is going to be used all over the internet, and everybody is going to know that person's real name. In these cases, users typically ask to be renamed to something more cryptic, but some references to that person's real name will still exist in the database. Without oversight, there is nothing we can do to remove it.
 * As to the issue with publishing and copyright, i think it's a moot point: we currently dont publish, and we dont defend copyright. Even if we did, we can't force people to have their real names and contact information available for public reading. Some people would rather not list their real names then try to defend their copyrights here. --Whiteknight (talk) (projects) 00:49, 9 January 2007 (UTC)


 * As to the issue with publishing and copyright, i think it's a moot point I think that's a moot point. You missed my stated objective: to point out a case where publishing personally identifiable information is necessary.
 * I think your point that we (the project) should be able to react quickly to cases where oversight is a good point. Given your logic, we should have multiple users with oversight permission. As long as users with oversight agree to abide by Wikimedia policy and not hide conciously added personally identifiable information or vandalism, I will support this. Though I guess I'll never know if they hide these things or if they break policy. Maybe we should create a soft redirect from &#91;[Wikipdia:Oversight]] to Hiding revisions &mdash; User:Iamunknown 05:20, 9 January 2007 (UTC)

Pressing need for this ability
I am again disappointed by some individuals who come up with a policy governing all Wikipedia projects, particularly when it is poorly written, such as these oversight policies seem to be. And they seem to come from some individuals very paranoid about privacy issues, thinking you can legislate privacy.

A key part of this "oversight" privilege is really quite simple. It allows the user to permanently delete content. Nothing more, and nothing less. It is recommended that the purpose of doing this is for protecting privacy and culling permanently copyright violations, and that this ability should be given to the most trusted members of the community, making sure that it is not inappropriately used for something like an edit war.

As far as the policy to "Remove copyright violations on the advice of Wikimedia Foundation counsel", I think that is patently absurd. Projects like Wikibooks already have copyright violation policies, and a notice that content will be deleted if you can't document that you in fact have copyright permission for using that content. At the moment, I can only find one instance that w:WP:OFFICE has been invoked here on Wikibooks, and even that I find somewhat dubious. As admins we certainly don't have regular access to Brad Patrick or any other legal counsel, unless there is a barrister or attorney lurking here somewhere? Certainly nobody that would be willing to stick their neck out legally even for the most eggregious and blatant copyright violations. Nor should we be expected to either.

At the same time, I think it is very reasonable for somebody to be able to permanently delete these copyright violations that we do find from time to time on Wikibooks. As has been frequently mentioned in the past on mailing lists and other fora about this topic, the current admin "delete" action really doesn't remove the content. This oversight ability would allow for these sort of very permanent deletions that would completely get rid of the illegal content.

On a more general note, and perhaps something instead to throw up on Bugzilla: I, as an administrator, would really appreciate a simplier method to selectively delete some edits from a page. Particularly to cull out blatant vandalism (they need no credit on page histories, for instance), but again also to remove copyright violations that are only on a portion of the page and not the whole thing. In theory this is possible with current admin privileges, but it is a pain to do so right now. It appears as though the oversight privilege also gives an easier time to selectively delete specific edits.

As far as culling private information such as a government ID number (aka SSN), birthdate, or other information from the edit history (when requested by the user who is so identified or because of inadvertant disclosure), that is a totally seperate policy issue. I think there are valid reasons to want to have some information like this removed, but it would generally be a rare circumstance. There are also some very valid reasons why some personally identifying information can be voluntarily published, particularly for copyright enforcement, so a blanket prohibition of publishing personally identifiable information is not necessarily needed or should even be wanted.

While the privacy issue may be something that is time-critical, it isn't so much for copyright violations. Various common carrier laws (applying to ISPs like the Wikimedia Foundation in this case) allow for a "reasonable length of time" to be used before the content is removed. The current Wikibooks policies in WB:DP is more than sufficient to cover these cases. --Rob Horning 22:04, 11 January 2007 (UTC)


 * I, as an administrator, would really appreciate a simplier method to selectively delete some edits from a page. &larr; Well said. Recently, a user was asking for imports of wp articles related to the Holocaust... some of them had hundreds of vandal edits (to the point where the import tool couldn't work!), which don't belong in the history of those articles. Even just a "select all" button for page restoration would be a step in the right direction, so we could just unselect the vandal edits rather than having to select every version we want restored (for example, if someone vandalizes the Staff Lounge, there's no reasonable way to remove that edit as it stands now). Something like this would be an excellent addition to the B'crats' toolboxes. -- SB_Johnny  | talk 23:53, 14 January 2007 (UTC)

Possibly continuing this?
Requests_for_adminship although I see this as seeking clarification prior to voting. That said based on Meta I'm not sure this will go ahead -- Herby talk thyme 17:50, 16 January 2007 (UTC)

Wikibooks portal searchbox leads to Wikipedia
Is it just me, or did this get broken recently? When I go to http://wikibooks.org and type a query in the search box, I get taken to a Wikipedia page, not a Wikibooks page. This makes no sense at all to me. Hope it's corrected ASAP. --Everlong 01:35, 6 January 2007 (UTC)


 * No, it is not just you. It's an annoying problem that we've had for a while and which I dont think is going to get fixed any time soon. sorry. --Whiteknight (talk) (projects) 00:31, 9 January 2007 (UTC)


 * In that case, shouldn't the search box be removed from the portal page until a remedy is found? It's misleading to visitors to leave the search box there unless it works as they'll assume it should. The portals for Wikiquote, Wikisource, etc use the same layout as the Wikibooks portal, just minus the search box. --Everlong 04:56, 11 January 2007 (UTC)


 * The portal page unfortunately is not under the control of people here. The portal page is maintained by people at Meta, and communication between us and them is sparce. --Whiteknight (talk) (projects) 22:13, 11 January 2007 (UTC)

Wikibooks for DUMMIES?
I find all of the instructions here extremely complicated and confusing. I have been unable to accomplish what should probably be two easy tasks, and I am quite frustrated because of the amount of time I have spent trying to figure them out. In both cases, I have read all the instructions and tried and retried the procedures several times and in several ways.

I cannot figure out how to put my new book American Literature on a book shelf. The instuctions basically tell you just to do it. I have gone to the bookshelves page and clicked on every possible link but cannot find a way to add a book title to the list.

I have also tried and tried to put a picture from the Commons on a page, and it just won't work. I would love to have a picture of Robert Frost on the American Literature/20th Century/Robert Frost page and a picture of Langston Hughes on the American Literature/20th Century/Langston Hughes page. I have folowed the instructions and even cut and pasted the command from other Wikibooks and Wikipedia pages, but nothing worked. Instead of a picture I get a box with the file name in it and a request for the license information.

So could somebody tell me in simple and clear English how to do these things or do them for me? Logophile 08:41, 6 January 2007 (UTC)


 * I agree, our help pages are rather unhelpful. I'll take care of the bookshelf issue (and the images if possible... Commons would almost certainly have those). -- SB_Johnny | talk 19:15, 7 January 2007 (UTC)


 * To link an image from Commons you don't have to do anything except put the image name between double square brackets.
 * [[Image:Commons-logo.png]]
 * [[Image:Commons-logo.png]]


 * More information can be found at Help Editing Images --xixtas 19:27, 7 January 2007 (UTC)

Moving Text
How can i space text out so that it matches position with corresponding text on the page?

View My problem Gears of War/The Cogs Basejumper123 23:44, 6 January 2007 (UTC)

Game guides
Just noticed the elephant sitting in the corner of the room!!

Firstly Panic drew this one to my attention Ghost_Online/Monster as copyvio etc etc (I agree). Then Gears_of_War_Guide/Table_of_Contents this one from Panic, Az1568 (&I'd already watchlisted it). However I notice that Final Fantasy 1, VII, X and XI have all been "transwiki'd according to policy" (tho not all tagged the same). BUT IV, VI and VII (at the very least) are all still being worked on (and redlinks exist for others). Frankly "daft" is the politest I get here.

I am not a "policy" person but this does needs sorting for users, admins and people interested in contributing. I shall get grumpy if it isn't - you have been warned -- Herby talk thyme 12:22, 7 January 2007 (UTC)


 * Yes, I have come across those quite a lot. I think we should have one single template for all the Wikibooks that have been moved out of here so that the template can be standardised and so that we can have one category instead of four ones.
 * And frankly, I dislike the "according to policy" clause because the policies (as we have been seeing lately) are open for interpretation. And I also think that we should create a link (in the template I hope is created) from the word "transwiki." It's not exactly a common word, and it would be appropriate to define.
 * Furthermore, if you're asking that we should either delete all games guides now or let them all remain here, I am somewhat opposed to that. (That is how I interpret your post. Please correct me if I am wrong.) It appears that many of the guides move by the will of their contributors. I generally dislike brutally pushing the texts through process.
 * Those are some of my thoughts. User:Iamunknown 13:10, 7 January 2007 (UTC)


 * Regarding the gaming guides, there still is no "official" policy on Wikibooks that governs this sort of content, including WB:WIW. I tried to push the development of the proposed policy Game textbook guidelines, but that policy has been strongly suggested that is simply be deleted due to the fact that "game guides" are no longer on Wikibooks.  I did point out that there certainly were legitimate Wikibooks that could be perhaps added to this project covering games (Chess is a noted example), but it would have to cover much more than simply a walk-through of the game and a macropedia of topics in the game.  It really is something more about the quality of the content rather than a specific ban of the content.


 * As for left over remains like what you have shown that was moved to the Strategy Wiki, perhaps some of that need to go. Most of these images are a copyvio as well, even though fair-use is being claimed on them, which was also a significant problem with many of the video game Wikibooks in the past.  --Rob Horning 22:23, 7 January 2007 (UTC)


 * There really isnt any kind of policy on this matter to help us out either way. The general feeling of the community i think (and my personal opinion on the matter) is to generally let the sleeping dogs lay. However, we need to remember that these "dogs" are in a precarious position, and they very well could be forced out of the wikibooks project in the future if we dont all just ignore them. The problem is that we have had problems in the past, especially a notable one where Jimbo himself left a message saying that videogame guides needed to be deleted. Because of all the drama, many of the videogame guides have been moving, of their own volition, out of wikibooks, and the ones that do move (to prepare for a videogame guideless future) are deleted here. If all the guides leave voluntarily, it is less likely they will need to be removed by force. --Whiteknight (talk) (projects) 23:46, 8 January 2007 (UTC)

rank beginner needs help on start up with Xcode
Following the Wiki tutorial, Programming Mac OS X with Cocoa for beginners:

I installed the developer tools I read the Wiki instructions to do this I selected New Project I selected Cocoa Application Then Next I named the Project I choose a Project Directory I selected Finish and the following message came up

(I took a screen shot of this message)

'Uncaught Exception
 * -[PBXToolbar -notificationPostingREnabled]: selector not recognized [self =0x64c6b10]

Stack Backtrace The stack backtrace has been logged to the console.'

Can someone help me get past this hurdle. I cannot name a prject hence I am unable to proceed.

Thank you, Rolf Christophersen

Need Help: Infobox not working on local version of WikiBooks
I've copied over what looked like all the templates required and followed instructions for setting up an Infobox. However, after creating my "Infobox/xyz" and  , the resulting refresh is all messed up. The  {{#if ...  coding shows up as if it's not reading it correctly.

Any ideas on how to fix this for my local copy (e.g. http://totalbalance_work1/wiki) TotalBalance 03:00, 8 January 2007 (UTC)


 * You also need &#123;{Infobox}} for it to work. You may need more...I'm not sure, as it is the whole infobox implementation schema is rather complicated. Reply back if you have more questions. I'll try to help out. Best wishes, User:Iamunknown 04:10, 8 January 2007 (UTC)


 * Thanks for your offer to help and very quick response!

I solved one issue -- didn't have the ParserFunctions extension set-up. Once done, situation improved but not resolved.

Now the "Infobox/xyz" works but even filing in the req. fields and a few others, the page is blank. Here's a list of all the templates I'd previously added and show up on the Infobox page.

Templates used on this page:

* Template:Botm Winner * Template:Click * Template:Infobox * Template:Qif * Template:Stage short * Template:Switch

Other templates installed referenced from the Infobox Project:
 * Infobox
 * Template:Bi
 * Template:Infobox/Parameters

What do you recommend I try next? Again, thx. for your help. TotalBalance 04:46, 8 January 2007 (UTC)

possible Haskell wikibook move
Some of us working on the Haskell book are contemplating a move to the haskell.org server (see the Talk:Haskell page for details). Does anybody have experience with these kinds of decisions, i.e. where we have a community wiki "competing" with wikibooks? What's the best approach to these kinds of situation?
 * Moving to haskell.org gives us much better Haskell syntax support (we get highlighting for the Haskell language), and more importantly, brings us closer to the community.
 * Staying here lets us stay closer to the general textbook-making community of wikibooks and gives us access to resources such as commons (then again, we could just move our images to the haskell.org server, and share them between different language versions of the book, for example)
 * Forking the wikibook would likely involve lots of bots/people running around keeping things in synch.

Some specific questions:
 * Would it be possible to have the same plugin on wikibooks that haskell.org (mediawiki) use for Haskell syntax highlighting?
 * If the Haskell book authors established consensus that we should move, would wikibooks accept to delete this version here to avoid a fork? The Haskell page could just point to haskell.org
 * Are there any alternatives, any ideas for getting the best of both worlds?

Otherwise, any comments, advice? Thanks, -- Kowey 18:10, 8 January 2007 (UTC)


 * I like the idea of having syntax highlighting not just for Haskell, but for all programming languages. I doubt the book would be deleted, since its an approperiate book for Wikibooks and there may be people who may wish to continue to develope it here. Keeping books here in synch with another website is discouraged and can be a source of conflict, and issues of licensing and acknowleding people who contributed to the work. The only alternative I can think of, would be to invite and get the haskell.org community involved here and work on the book, but that may not work. If the people working on the Haskell book decide to move to haskell.org I think it would be best to just continue the work there and not worrying about what happens to the book here. --<span style="font: bold 10pt 'courier new', comic, sans, ms;"><font color="midnightblue">dark [[Image:Yin yang.svg|12px]] lama 18:53, 8 January 2007 (UTC)


 * I don't share many of User:Darklama views and I will not pretend to speak for the whole community and so will give only my view on the problem, when you say move you are probably referring to the authors moving to another version (a fork) and requesting a deletion of the book here, as I see it the deletion would be almost impossible but the authors are free to propose it, I myself will vote against any deletion on those bases, as for copying the book and moving the authors there as it is I think its the best option if you wish to enforce a greater control of the book structure, as keeping the books in sync will be very hard (you can try to), but you will probably get into trouble as User:Darklama stated, please see discussion on the policy for proposal approval, I have proposed the clarification of book communities and the possibility of establishing book specific policies and that some restrictions should be passed to the be bold guideline (you are free and should participate on the debate), I will also be involved in the discussion of the local forking policy in the future as a solution for similar book control disputes (within some limitations) that would avoid a major part of similar conflicts.
 * I think that yet another way you can go is to within the actual rules to get specific book guidelines approved and continue to work here, this is not against Wikibooks policies and I'm also fighting a similar problem, but proper policies need yet to be discussed by the general community as I stated above, but you will get an higher visibility and even collaboration from other user that are not only interested on this specific book subject, you can even fork the book to another site later if you do get into heavy conflict and which to avoid it.
 * As for the plugin I don't see a major problem you just have to get it approved, it would indeed be great if it could be extended to other languages. --Panic 19:27, 8 January 2007 (UTC)
 * Regarding your question about syntax highlighting, there is the Syntax Highlighting Extension for Mediawiki. Right now it is not installed on any mediawiki server (that I know of), though there is an outstanding feature request for it to be installed. The extension apparently requires Beautifier to be installed. Haskell is supported. (See .) It would very beneficial for the different programming-language textbooks to have the various languages installed and, with a real-live request (as opposed to just a, "It'd be nice to have" request), I think we could get it installed.
 * All said, it would take a lot of work. Typically, to get bugs speedily processed, you must provide an implementation and, I imagine in this case, an off-wiki demonstration. The developers have their own interests that they are working on, so unless something is in critically urgent in the utmost extreme, they will  work on it occassionally and spend their time on their own projects. I do not intend to be critical; indeed, they are volunteers and cannot be expected to everything we request. You may wish to take this into consideration before trying to get syntax highlighting implemented at Wikibooks &mdash; User:Iamunknown 20:27, 8 January 2007 (UTC)


 * Interesting concept. Wikibooks is about the authoring of textbooks, not just textbooks that don't appear somewhere else, or textbooks without competitors, or textbooks for which there are no forks. In the end, the authors here are free to leave or project for greener pastures (i would hope they would stay), but there is no reason why the book here would have to be deleted. Also, remember that the content here is released under the GFDL, so you need to ensure that Haskell.org has a compatible license or else it is technically illegal for you to copy the material from here to there (I doubt this will be a problem, but still...) --Whiteknight (talk) (projects) 20:45, 8 January 2007 (UTC)


 * Thanks for the comments, everyone!


 * The Haskell syntax highlighting is working for us (I have no idea how, but it is some kind of MediaWiki plugin), so we do have a working demonstraction, one that is a alive and well. For an example, see the Simple Unix tools tutorial on the Haskell wiki.
 * Two more questions:
 * Is there anybody in particular that I could contact re: getting this implemented in Wikibooks? Taking care of the syntax highlighting would at least equalise this aspect of the debate; we'd only have the community aspect to consider.
 * Also, (Forgive my ignorance on such matters) how feasible is it to have a situation where a site, like, say http://book.haskell.org resolves directly to http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Haskell. I gather that if anything, it'd be something for the haskell.org folk to implement, but if such a thing were possible, is there any reason not to do it?
 * I am not surprised that Wikibooks finds itself unwilling to delete content :-) Thanks for clarifying that... it gives us one more point to consider when debating the move (or the fork). The Haskell wiki runs under a Simple Permissive License; by analogy to us, they are BSD and we are GPL.  Clearly, we won't be able to import the wikibook directly into Haskell wiki because their license is too permissive wrt ours. What would likely happen, if anything, is that we create a sub page under the wiki, under which all content will be GFDL.


 * Anyway, I will re-read your comments and report back to the Haskell folks. -- Kowey 23:36, 8 January 2007 (UTC)


 * Is there anybody in particular that I could contact re: getting this implemented in Wikibooks?' Anyone at Bugzilla. Specifically, you should post at bug #7163 &mdash; a request to install the Syntax Highlighting Extension on the Wikimedia servers. The current request is very vague, saying "This will be an enormous value to WikiBooks as well as Wikipedia itself," yet failing to specify how and why it will be of enormous value. It doesn't even say for which books it could be implemented or which community wants it to be implemented. If you and the community started pushing and shoving (but only politely ), then I think you could feasibly get the extension installed on the servers.
 * Also ... how feasible is it to have a situation where ... http://book.haskell.org [#1] resolves directly to http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Haskell [#2]. It would be feasible with Apache although I do not know the specifics. But one difficulty may be that, though #1 resolves to #2, users redirected to #2 (Wikibooks) would be unable to get back to #1 (Haskell.org). This could be resolved with extensive hyperlinking between Haskell Wikibooks pages to Haskell.org, but that might raise issues in itself, specifically regarding (possible) accusations of link spam. I would judge to those to be specious, specifically because (in my own opinion) the authors' (you and the Haskell community) consensus to systematically add the links is of greater weight than others' ideas &mdash; User:Iamunknown 05:30, 9 January 2007 (UTC)

Proposal for a minor change of nomenclature
Following the lead of our "little sister" project (Wikiversity), I'd like to propose that we change our nomenclature a bit to reflect what "admins" really do.

In short: let's rename "administrator", and call those in the "sysop" usergroup "librarians".

I think "Librarian" is a nice word with nice connotations. Librarians are the ones who say "shhh!", keep people from bothering other people, tell the guy with the markers to stop vandalizing books (and perhaps ban him from the library), and help people find what they need.

It's also just something different from our "big sister" project (Wikipedia), where "admin" has over time accrued connotations that don't apply on wikibooks. The extra tools "admins" have aren't meant to be for bossing people around, but rather for being helpful for making the "library experience" a good one for all who wish to make good use of the library.

It's just a word, and a rose (or flea) is a rose (or flea) by any other name. But words do make a difference sometimes. -- SB_Johnny | talk 22:50, 8 January 2007 (UTC)


 * I agree. I think librarians is also less intimidating and confusing than "administrator" for new users and people who associate administrator with "boss", "network administrator", etc. Librarians generally help people find what they are looking for, enjoy helping people and enjoy reading. Qualities that are positive and I think are a good reflection of what Wikibooks encourages; creativity, cooperation and helping one another create books. --<span style="font: bold 10pt 'courier new', comic, sans, ms;"><font color="midnightblue">dark [[Image:Yin yang.svg|12px]] lama 23:09, 8 January 2007 (UTC)


 * Strongly Disagree - I don't have a problem with the name change per-se but in the logic presented for the name selection, I don't think we should focus on shushing people up, this is not the focus and the principal task of an administrator, administrators are just normal users with a bit more of rights to perform some specific tasks, this rights at the moment are, well, given in a way that the major factor is only the need to have the rights, there is no special evaluation of the administrator, most have more a technical knowledge about the Wikibooks infrastructure than a broad social involvement in the community, there isn't an age limit or sanity check and most are almost given as to politicians you do a certain amount of community work, do as you are told, don't create waves and you probably get a few votes to get you in the club, etc... as it is, without first fixing the opened policy/guidelines discussions, redoing and rethinking the task of an administrator and it's limits I don't see this as an urgent need and in particular don't like the thinking behind the proposal. --Panic 23:29, 8 January 2007 (UTC)


 * To be fair johnny, we are less like librarians and more like janitors. I don't really like the term "librarian" so much, but I wont go into a long explanation of why right now. --Whiteknight (talk) (projects) 23:35, 8 January 2007 (UTC)


 * Massive Support - I love this idea. Administrator has a negative ring to it and makes us seem not dissimilar to Wikipedia.  Librarian is fun and a bit more appropriate to how we'd like to be perceived.  Administrator is also a bit inaccurate because the differences between them and regular users are not great enough for such a name.  Xania [[Image:Flag_of_Poland_2.svg|15px]]talk 00:18, 9 January 2007 (UTC)


 * Apples - If people wanted to start calling sysops librarians then whatever, but I think I would still call them administrators because we administrate. It may be like other projects, but I think a rename is a bit silly. It will cause more confusion than enjoyment in my opinion. -<font color="#000000">within <font color="#7A7A7A">focus 02:58, 9 January 2007 (UTC)


 * What about System Optimizers :) to give a more proper designation to the sysop rights. --Panic 03:12, 9 January 2007 (UTC)


 * World Controllers. -<font color="#000000">within <font color="#7A7A7A">focus 03:18, 9 January 2007 (UTC)


 * bhaa why limit ourselves, Masters of the Universe, or we could give it a more positive connotation like The Mary Bunch or similar :) --Panic 03:20, 9 January 2007 (UTC)


 * Even Oompa Loompas might work, and we could all have a little picture of their faces in our signatures kinda like Darklama's. -<font color="#000000">within <font color="#7A7A7A">focus 03:25, 9 January 2007 (UTC)


 * Quinces - I agree with Withinfocus - not a useful exercise. How about putting that effort into some of the cleanup tasks that need doing, instead of worrying about titles and badges? (I'm not suggesting that you aren't already doing that, just that rebadging isn't a worthwhile exercise when there's so much tangible work to be done) Webaware 03:26, 9 January 2007 (UTC)


 * Plenty to do in Category:Wikibooks cleanup if folks are bored and if they are admins then there are all the open proxies to block. If you really can't sleep try some Policy. -- Herby  talk thyme 08:09, 9 January 2007 (UTC) (aka Grumpy)


 * I know there's lots to be done but a name change could be useful but you're right it's not exactly that important. I am trying to do lots but unfortunately I'm not willing to help with the open proxies blocks as this is one Wiki policy that I can't enforce as I believe there is a need for using open proxies in many countries and that most open proxies are not misused.  Xania [[Image:Flag_of_Poland_2.svg|15px]]talk 20:30, 9 January 2007 (UTC)


 * Agree somewhat - A little, maybe. Librarian is better than Admin for sure, but there has to be a better name than librarian. Lol. --Dragontamer 03:08, 9 January 2007 (UTC)


 * I appreciate your desire to clarify the role of administrators. But I disagree with this proposed change. I firmly believe that, if we appropriately define the word "administrator" as we intend to use in the context of Wikibooks, then we will not run into problems. Since we have appropriately defined what the word "administrator" means in context, I fail to see the need for this. To my knowledge, no fundamnetal misunderstandings have really occured User:Iamunknown 05:48, 9 January 2007 (UTC) Addendum: I am open for debate. If someone would like to point out a flaw in my reasoning or a situation that is directly etiologically associated with our current choice of semantics, please do &mdash; User:Iamunknown 23:38, 9 January 2007 (UTC)


 * Disagree I'm not a librarian, and do not take on any functions of one. I do, sometimes, do administrative chores. Administrator is therefore more accurate, plus it is better understood in Wikiworld. Jguk 19:53, 11 January 2007 (UTC)

The need for fixed and verified editions of textbooks
I was just idly searching google for references to Wikibooks and came across a persistent and obvious comment: Wikibooks is no good for textbooks because the editions are not stable and verified.

'''The argument that "what's OK on Wikipedia should be OK here" does not apply because Wikibooks are supposed to be textbooks. By definition a textbook is a stable and verified companion text for a course of study.'''

The solution to this problem has been around in the world of publishing for centuries:


 * 1) The publisher has an editorial board to vet content.
 * 2) There are fixed editions that can be used as stable references in other publications.

We could do the same. Each category of books could have an editorial board. Before PDF editions of books are created the editorial board would review the content and advise the author(s) on accuracy, impartiality etc. The usual process that occurs on publication of books would then occur. The editorial board and authors would need a single guideline to "publishing a Wikibook" to help them deal consistently and fairly with the process. Wikiversity could help here by contributing members of the editorial board and only recommending reviewed texts to students.

Some representative examples of comments about Wikimedia (there are hundreds more):

By Daniel Terdiman Staff Writer, CNET News.com Published: September 28, 2005, http://news.com.com/Wikibooks+takes+on+textbook+industry/2100-1025_3-5884291.html?tag=st.prev

"Certainly, Wikibooks has several shortcomings. One is its open nature, in which any registered user can edit existing entries. That means that any entry can be defaced or, more benignly, modified by someone who doesn't know what they're talking about."

Wikinews And The Growing Wikimedia Empire

By Eloquence in Internet Sun Dec 05, 2004 http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2004/12/3/163158/922

"Perhaps the biggest issue facing Wikimedia today is the lack of credibility of the content created by its world-wide community of volunteers. Wikimedians point to recent quality reviews which have found Wikipedia articles to be frequently superior to those in traditional encyclopedias, but the simple fact that an entry may have been turned into rubbish a minute before you have decided to look at it does not inspire much confidence. For this reason, lots of energy and thought has been spent on finding and implementing review methodologies."

http://www.riehlworldview.com/carnivorous_conservative/2005/12/watch_your_wiki.html "I would never use or cite Wikipedia in any article or paper that I wrote. It is often not accurate and VERY often biased. When anyone can write and or edit something into an entry, the "definitions" can change from day to day."

Suggested guidelines
1. There should be several types of textbooks "study guides", "textbooks", "complementary texts" and these terms should be used in the book's subtitle.

2. The editorial board should insist on either removal of POV or, if appropriate ringfencing POV with a heading such as "the following represents a particular point of view held by a minority". (Guides and textbooks should have little POV, complementary texts may have some POV for stimulation of debate)

3. References must be given.

4. Format must be followed.(TOC, Author list, GDFL licence etc.).

5. Verified books should have a seal of approval and the edition should be clearly stated.

This suggestion only applies to PDF editions (or similar fixed editions), not to the online editing interface.

RobinH 11:22, 9 January 2007 (UTC)


 * Taking point 4 a little further, all included media (images, sounds, movies, PDF and other documents) would require appropriate licensing (as per current Wikibooks policy anyway). I mention this because a number of pages have recently been broken because they included media that did not specify copyright status, thus image links were removed and images deleted. This sort of thing would be undesirable for fixed and verified editions. Webaware 11:35, 9 January 2007 (UTC)


 * Perhaps, yes. To my knowledge however, there is only one published PDF (I'm sure there are more on the way, but they aren't announced or have been talked about). Each wikibook is kind of a personal project anyway. I agree though, there should be some official version with a nice stylebook. I just don't think wikibookians in general would want such restrictions put on them. Perhaps if it was given as a "gold star" to nicely done books. More of a reward than a necessary procedure. But then again; it would feel as if we were rewarding the bear minimum, nicely written books should be well organized, easy to read, have plenty of pictures and somewhat low text density (Newspapers and magazines go so far to achieve the goal of low text density, that they take quotes from the middle of a page, blow it up, and make it into a "picture" of sorts). --Dragontamer 15:53, 9 January 2007 (UTC)


 * What I meant by "publishing" was the production of a PDF file from the online text that is placed in a special area that is locked from further editing or updating. The reason the PDF version should be chosen as definitive is that it cannot be edited and so constitutes a stable version.


 * A gold star might make the authors feel good but we need to go further to fulfill the objectives of this site. Wikibooks is not Wikipedia. It is a serious effort to provide quality textbooks at no charge to the whole world. Having reviewed comments on the web about Wikibooks it is very clear that we will not be a respected source of textbooks until we offer books that have been vetted by an editorial board and offer these in stable editions.


 * This proposal is not a restriction. Books that are too personalised for school or college use can be left as they are. However, we should offer verified and stable editions of textbooks for the core curriculum in schools and universities and display these prominently. If this is not done the project will, in the long run, have failed to fulfill its primary objective. RobinH 16:16, 9 January 2007 (UTC)


 * I see, I agree then. Basically, do what Wikipedia 1.0 is trying to do. I have no problem with that, we just need the manpower to do it. --Dragontamer 18:26, 9 January 2007 (UTC)


 * Something that had received lots of hype in the past, but which is all but forgotten now is the concept of "stable versioning". Stable versioning was the ability to maintain two versions of a page, the "stable version" (a version that looks good and was checked), and a "working version" (where people make edits). If i remember correctly, only an admin could designate a stable version of a page, and new comers to the site would see the stable version first and then they would be given an option to see the working version. In the software world, this is analogous to software with a "stable version" and a "beta version", where the beta version may contain more errors, but represented the most current code base.
 * Something that we could do is implement some basic types of stable versions here. Each book could have a page "Book Name/Stable Version", that would contain a list of permanent links to known good versions of the pages. These stable version pages could be protected and edited only by admins.
 * It's something to think about, perhaps, but it would certainly increase the workload of admins around here. --Whiteknight (talk) (projects) 20:43, 9 January 2007 (UTC)


 * There is another way, one that IMO is a little easier in one form at least. PDF versions lag behind the wikibooks version already. Why not take advantage of that fact and make the PDF versions the stable fork? Like software, an official stable version doesn't exist for newly found projects, or even some older projects. Just like print versions here on Wikibooks. Its harder because making a print version is pretty much "outside the wiki" work. I'm kind of experimenting by uploading the LaTeX sources for Ada to sourceforge as I'm making them, but I seriously doubt any "open collaboration" with hurdles like Subversion in the way. Ada Programming is an exception, programmers in general should be familiar with versioning tools, but asking the wikibooks community to use programming tools may cause problems.


 * Not saying that subversion is ill-suited for the task. It keeps track of the history and all the files better than history pages do here on Wikibooks. But the learning curve involved in that... and then the curve in learning LaTeX to collaborate... I'm not sure how far it would go. --Dragontamer 01:23, 10 January 2007 (UTC)


 * I had thought about using PDF versions for this purpose, but I have a few issues with that:
 * Not all books have PDF versions. Not all authors are capable of creating them.
 * PDF versions that are created are not necessarily read over, edited, or checked in any way. These versions may not be faithful reproductions of the actual book content
 * PDF versions, when uploaded, completely replace the previous version (no history for PDF files). In other words, the PDF version is only "stable" until it is next updated. Students who are relying on a partcular version of a PDF may wake up one day to a new file, with no trace of the old one.
 * For all these reasons, I dont think PDFs are a good or acceptable solution to the problem. --Whiteknight (talk) (projects) 02:40, 10 January 2007 (UTC)


 * Why not use a naming convention for authorised PDFs? Suppose the Biology textbook were ready for an approved version, the authors would signal this fact to the editorial board and ask the board to read the current biology.pdf.  When the biology.pdf is approved it would be uploaded as Appr_biology_edition1.pdf.  This process is simple and answers all of Whiteknight's points except the first; but authors can ask for help on PDF creation - "Open Office" has really cracked PDF generation in the latest release.


 * The provision of vetted and fixed versions would be as follows:


 * * An editorial board is established.
 * * A symbol or colour is chosen to mark approved PDFs ie: links to an approved biology text might always be green.
 * * Authors approach the editorial board with a perfected PDF when they want a book approved.
 * * The editorial board vet the book and provide feedback. Authors resubmit etc. etc.
 * * On approval the main page of the book's PDF should say something like "Wikibooks Approved Text"
 * * Once approved the PDF is uploaded as Appr_(bookname)_ed(edition no).PDF
 * * All links to PDFs for this book should then be changed to point to the approved version.

RobinH 10:53, 10 January 2007 (UTC)

Problems with editorial board
I don't think an editorial board is such a good idea. Consistentcy between two very different subjects is generally not realistic. For example, books about cooking are not going to use the same styling, format, etc. as a book on computer programming and expecting them to look the same would create problems that have already been solved by applying solutions that work for the specific problem. I would rather see each book try to live up to quality based whatever established standards exist for writing books in a specific field that are used to make them look good, easy to follow and read. There is also the issue there are more than one standard typically and who decides which one is best? At any rate an editorial board would need to be made up of a large range of people with experience with book publishing on different subjects in order to have some idea of what works and should be used to make a print version its best.

An editorial board would be made up of volunteers and this seems like it would take a lot of time and effort from the volunteers to work out differences in POV over what works and is best. Perhaps more than anyone would be willing to do? Book writers are also volunteers and may not have the time or desire to put a lot of energy into perfecting the book to some standard that involves more effort than they have time to do or believe is necessary. I think most people are probably more interesting in having fun and enjoying the energy they put into contributing to books than they are in worring about what other people may think of it and getting involved in other tasks and processes. The exception to that rule I believe are probably anyone who reads the staff lounge. Thats why I believe things here are relatively relaxed and there is not much interest in doing more than what people came here to do. Wikibooks relatively few policies and guidelinesm and the nature of them are a reflection of a desire to have the freedom to just do it and reflect what the community does rather than trying to impose changes on the community.

I hope this hasn't discouraged you, just trying to point out the difficulty involved trying to get things to change and the problems involved in a project like Wikibooks where everyone is a volunteer. Hopefully I've also made it clear why I think its unrealistic. I believe for something like this to work will require some rethinking that doesn't involve much change, time and effort by the community. --<span style="font: bold 10pt 'courier new', comic, sans, ms;"><font color="midnightblue">dark lama  14:52, 10 January 2007 (UTC)


 * Yes, you do bring up good points. But all you have to do is look at a "For Dummies" book, and realize, they have a consistant formatting for all their books, from cooking, to sports, to computers, to literature, to whatever. Similarly, newspapers have similar formatting for all their sections. (or at least, the Washington Post does) Consistant formatting across subjects is completly possible, though not without the effort. Additionally, consistant style has its advantages. Whenever you pickup a "For Dummies" book, it feels like all the other books, even if authors are totally different people (as is the case in the dummies series). O'Reilly also has that advantage. Not all publishers are like that of course, but it is something that should be considered. Should the community like this idea, then Wikibooks should build its own identity through layout, a complete stylebook and a board that will review books and modify them so that they are consistant.
 * And at the risk of "giving an idea without the will to follow through" :-), there is the possibility that a publishing group is made at Wikibooks. A group of people who are interested in making such consistancies and so forth. I'm not sure if enough people exist to make such a group possible, but, it is an idea nonetheless that doesn't involve forcing authors to "comply with the standards". Basically, we don't need "reviewers" as much as we need "workers who review and revise". Not too many books are reaching the publishing phase, and I'm sure if we started, we would run out of books to reviewe and revise before other books are made. --Dragontamer 15:39, 10 January 2007 (UTC)


 * The idea of an editorial board is not designed as a hindrance to the creation of books in general. It is a response to the copious comments on the net which say that Wikibooks is not a credible source for academic textbooks.  This criticism does not apply to the cookbook and doesn't apply to presentation.  It applies to the content of academic textbooks.


 * What I am proposing is a voluntary scheme for mature books. When a textbook becomes mature the authors may wish that it should be vetted and issued in fixed editions so that it is credible and can be referenced. In these circumstances it should be possible to engage the services of an editorial board to provide a stamp of approval and to lodge the book in a special way on Wikibooks so that it can be a fixed and credible source for academic study.  If the Special relativity book is ever finished I would be keen for it to become an approved reference work and would happily go along with the necessary changes to make it acceptable.


 * In the case of books where authors do not want the work to be approved I can see no reason why these books should not continue to exist and be developed as they do at present. Similarly, the online version of approved textbooks should be changed by authors in the normal way and, when appropriate, the authors might ask for a second edition to be approved (the first edition would be kept for reference and the approved second edition given pride of place).


 * This idea may come to a head this year as several books reach a sufficient state of maturity. I would suggest that we put in place a "beta" system for creating editorial boards, lodging PDFs of approved versions and highlighting which books have passed the approval process.


 * Dragontamer makes some good points, especially about the lack of books that are mature enough at present. Perhaps only 1 or 2 books would be sufficiently mature this year. RobinH 15:52, 10 January 2007 (UTC)
 * I'll put a toe in just to say that it would be very good indeed to see a focus on quality. Quantity we have plenty of but ...  A watching RC patroller! -- Herby  talk thyme 15:57, 10 January 2007 (UTC)

Process for creating verifed, stable editions
I would suggest that when authors decide that they have a book that is good enough to serve as a reference work they should contact an editorial board and start the process described in the "guidelines above". However, to do this we need:


 * 1) A book that is good enough
 * 2) An editorial board
 * 3) An accepted guideline for stable versions.
 * 4) A separate folder for approved books
 * 5) A symbol to be used with approved PDFs

I would guess that there are several books (3 or 4) that are good enough to start the process. Any volunteers? RobinH 17:38, 9 January 2007 (UTC)


 * Before we start taking names, I think it would be a better idea to lay out the criteria of what specifically a "good" book should have, and what specifically are the legal requirements for having a distributable or even a publishable book? The GFDL is a copyright (or "copyleft", if i must use the terminology) license, and to enforce that license, all contributors to a book are going to need to provide personal information: Real name, date of birth, verifiable phone number or email address, etc. All books are going to need to include a copy of the GFDL, but if the book contains images that use other licenses (CC images are a common example), the book is going to need to include a copy of that license as well. It might also be good/necessary for the book to include a listing of individual images that use which license.
 * If we aren't working to publish, we dont need all that information, but it would still be nice to have for future use. An editorial board would be a good thing, but that's a job that every joe-schmoe off the street could do. I for one don't have the time, patience, or motivation to be part of such an enterprise (assuming i was even qualified for it, which I am likely not). I think alot of these things could be implemented as a replacement program for the BOTM thing. --Whiteknight (talk) (projects) 02:50, 10 January 2007 (UTC)


 * In the first instance I think we should only consider online publishing ie: using a distinctive symbol or colour for links to the approved PDF for a book.


 * The guidelines for a "good" book will need to be developed but should be able to use existing guidelines for format.


 * As you point out, the editorial board is the biggest problem. Possibly the editorial board should have 3 members, the lead editor being qualified in the field covered by the book and at least one of the other editors being peripherally qualified. For example, to approve an undergraduate physics book the lead editor should have a PhD in a closely related discipline (Physics, engineering, biophysics etc), one subsidiary editor should have a degree in a related discipline and the other subsidiary editor should be experienced on editorial boards. To approve a high school book the lead editor should have a degree in a closely related discipline (ie: a botany/physiology/zoology/microbiology/biochemistry degree for a biology textbook) and one subsidiary editor should have a science degree for a science book, arts degree for an arts book etc. and the other experience of editorial boards. RobinH 11:15, 10 January 2007 (UTC)


 * An immediate problem that I see with this idea is that we would create a system where wikibookians would be qualified based on their external merits (degrees, education, etc). While this might make the most logical sense, I am highly against creating a hierarchy among users, or saying that certain users are more qualified or more desirable for certain topics. Beyond that, I would say that we simply dont have enough people with educational backgrounds in all areas to implement such a system. In essence, we would be limiting the kinds of books that could become "good" by the types of people we have on the editorial board. I would say that people who want to be part of an editorial board should be accepted without qualification, and we can blindly trust the authors of the particular book to have gotten the facts straight (a gamble, to be sure).
 * We could create an "Editorial Board" wikiproject, where people could volunteer to read books and proof/read and properly format them. --Whiteknight (talk) (projects) 21:09, 10 January 2007 (UTC)


 * Good points - I would favour using either qualifications or previous contribution record. There needs to be some basic level of expertise for the board to be sufficiently expert for this task. RobinH 12:10, 11 January 2007 (UTC)

Related Wikiprojects
I have created two new wikiproject pages for use with this idea: These projects will consist of volunteer members who find good books, proofread them, and work to make them publishable (if not actually publish them). If those pages look interesting, hopefully we can move this discussion to the respective talk pages, and continue from there. --Whiteknight (talk) (projects) 21:18, 10 January 2007 (UTC)
 * Editorial board
 * Wikipublish

Shouldn't those both be Wikiproject Editorial board and Wikiproject Wikipublish, or to keep things organized, Wikiprojects/Wikipublish and Wikiprojects/Wikipublish/Editorial board? So as not to be confused with policies and guidelines to make clear its a Wikiproject. --<span style="font: bold 10pt 'courier new', comic, sans, ms;"><font color="midnightblue">dark lama  21:23, 10 January 2007 (UTC)


 * It's my opinion that brevity in this matter is a big benefit over clarity. Pages in the "Wikibooks:" namespace are not all policies and guidelines, we have templates that are used to make the distinction between different types of pages. We can worry about moving/renaming these pages if we dont end up deleting them (which could happen if nobody wants to participate). --Whiteknight (talk) (projects) 21:26, 10 January 2007 (UTC)


 * Cool, I'll watch the second page at least, as I'm interested in the publication process. I'm no where knowledgable enough for an "Editorial Board" Bah, if it is just revision and other minor editing tasks, maybe I'll sign up too. --Dragontamer 02:48, 11 January 2007 (UTC)


 * I support Whiteknight's proposal entirely. I have added a guideline that I was preparing yesterday. RobinH 10:40, 11 January 2007 (UTC)


 * Let's close this discussion here then (and stop making the staff lounge any longer then necessary). We can move the discussion to the talk pages of the wikiprojects now. --Whiteknight (talk) (projects) 22:16, 11 January 2007 (UTC)

Advertising Wikibooks
Why not send emails to your teachers (and ex teachers) with a link to Wikibooks as an aid to teaching ( http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Wikibooks_as_an_aid_to_teaching ). The more schools and colleges that contribute the better. RobinH 12:10, 9 January 2007 (UTC)

Programming bookshelf locked
I am trying to put together a wikibook targeted to a sophomore level special topics course in C with Unix. I am wanting my students to be the primary contributers during the semester, with a view to merging the content back into existing books where the content has some value. I want it to differ from the existing C programming book in a couple of germane ways, first the collaborating authors (at least my students are the ones I am primarily interested in) will have had a minimum of 2 semesters of Java. As a result a lot of the structural and syntactic issues common between Java and C only need to be addressed in a relatively superficial manner. In addition, some advanced topics such as embedded assembly language code, interprocess communication and database connectivity can be handled. Finally, as part of an attempt to make our students more aware of platform issues we are insisting on ANSI C on Unix. The results of this decision is that we need to incorporate shell management, scripting and make.

Having begun the process of establishing the contents page, the help pages indicate that I should add the new book to a bookshelf. However the programming Languages bookshelf is locked. Am I supposed to add the book to the Miscellaneous shelf and wait for someone to notice it is in the wrong place? Is there a reason why that particualr bookshelf is locked?

Peter Cooper Petercooper 21:31, 9 January 2007 (UTC)


 * Programming languages bookshelf is set so that users have to log on to edit it and need to be admins to move it. If you are logged on when you try to make the adjustments you want to make, you should be ok. Alternatively, it may be that you tried to do that whilst the database was temporarily locked to everyone earlier this evening - if so, this is a temporary problem that happens from time to time. Trying a little bit later normally works.

You also might like to look at Guidelines for class projects if you haven't already done so. Although it's only at "proposal" stage, it offers good advice, and is likely to become an official guideline shortly. All the best with your book. Jguk 21:43, 9 January 2007 (UTC)

,,,,,,,,, Thanks jguk. I had read the Guidelines for class projects. Some good advice in there. I was logged on when I tried to add the book. The Programming Languages bookshelf is the only one that is locked to me. All the others in the CS section seem to be available but there are no other approriate sections other than miscellaneous. I'll try again later (tomorrow probably) but this has been an issue since 1800 UTC. Petercooper 22:12, 9 January 2007 (UTC)


 * Can you provide a direct link, just to make sure I'm looking at the right page? I'll try removing and then reinstating the intended protection criteria to see if that helps. Jguk 22:34, 9 January 2007 (UTC)

It is my understand that blocking a page from editing by unregistered users also effects newly registered users for a time as well. --<span style="font: bold 10pt 'courier new', comic, sans, ms;"><font color="midnightblue">dark lama  00:30, 10 January 2007 (UTC)

Metric/English units
In my project there are a lot of places where we have been using both metric and English measurements. Sometimes we put the metric first with the English in parenthesis, and sometimes vice versa. We think this is ugly, and are exploring alternatives. If we just switched to metric and dropped English, I fear we would not be serving our readers, most of whom use the English system. My first stab was to make a template that would diplay the default units and show the alternate when the mouse hovered over a calculator icon, just like the short_stage template does:


 * The speed of light is.

I would like it better if the reader could express a preference and have whatever units he prefers show up and have the other suppressed, or perhaps swap the default and alternates in the template. Is that possible?

Jim Thomas 18:53, 10 January 2007 (UTC)


 * It might be possible if you wrap each unit with a span element and a specific class. You could then use a custom monobook.js to hide all elements with that particular class. Kellen T 19:32, 10 January 2007 (UTC)

Just use metric. I presume that by 'English' measurements you mean 'imperial' measurements. Calling them 'English' is a bit much considering the UK, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand and most other English-speaking countries use metric measurements. The USA is one of only 3 countries in the world which still use imperial measurements (the others are Libya and Burma/Myanmar). Metric measurements are also the only measurements used by scientists even in the USA (as it's much easier to do calculations with a base of 10 and if everyone uses the same system less errors will be made). Sorry, I don't have any great solutions to your problem but if you find one please let me know as I'm trying to convert the cookbook recipes to show measurements in both systems. Xania talk 19:54, 10 January 2007 (UTC)


 * A few points to make here:
 * This isn't the first time somebody has asked for this kind of feature. It's a common request here on wikibooks, and also at other projects (en.wikipedia gets it alot). Unfortunately, there is no good way to solve the problem (unless we do implement something in site-wide javascript). Unless somebody has the knowledge/ability to do this locally, it's not going to get done.
 * Jim is correct in that a large number of readers of this site are american, and therefore are more familiar with the imperial units. Regardless of the merits of one system or another, we need to speak to people in a language that the audience can understand. If we need to cross-reference every metric unit with an equivalent imperial one (or vice-versa), then that's what we should do. I won't pick one set of units over the other, it does a disservice to our readers.
 * Scientists and engineers may use metric, but the children reading the youth honors book are not likely to be professional scientists nor engineers. Again, we need to consider audience.
 * We could probably get together and write up a bunch of templates to handle conversions like this. Anybody want to take a stab at such a thing? --Whiteknight (talk) (projects) 21:03, 10 January 2007 (UTC)


 * Sorry that is false, the children have been learning Metric in school for at least the last ten years. You have been out of school too long. There are .3 billion Americans vs. 6.4 billion Metric Users (talk) 16:56, 19 December 2009 (UTC)Metric Cook


 * If I get time, I'll look at it, but first I'd like to point out that a JavaScript solution is probably not optimal. Better would be to do it as CSS, using the :hover selector. Then it will work in browsers with JavaScript disabled. Additionally, the print version of the CSS can display the hidden text, much like external link URLs are (print-preview this page and look at the External links section). As I said, I'll look at it if I get time, but if someone else wants to jump on it in the meantime... Webaware 23:45, 10 January 2007 (UTC)


 * Or we could just do what Wikipedia does . Webaware 23:50, 10 January 2007 (UTC)


 * And we even already have the template for it: &#123;{H:title}}. Like this: 100°C.

100°C


 * Will that do? It won't show in print version, but that's not so much of a problem. Let me know if the print behaviour is required, and I'll look at a two-media CSS solution. Webaware 23:56, 10 January 2007 (UTC)


 * That's pretty good, but I can imagine something better. Ideally, the reader should be able to click a link at the top of the page that would switch the units from metric to Imperial, and that would carry over to the print version. The monobook.js suggestion is probably beyond the capabilities of most who would want to switch from metric to Imperial (that is, not engineers or scientists), so though that is intriguing, I don't think it would work.  Instead, I'd hafta make Imperial the default and assume the metric crowd possessed sufficient web-aptitude to switch to metric.  But then the default is... imperial .  If I were doing this in php, I would set a cookie and switch on it in the code.  But this is not php, and I am fluent in neither CSS nor Javascript (nor in php for that matter, but I can get by).  I may well adopt the 100°C solution in the meanwhile.  Jim Thomas 00:17, 11 January 2007 (UTC)


 * I think kids come with less baggage, and if we gave them metric and allowed conversion they might just come away from this better off. I think the problem is that for too many years in the United States, we have tried to make life easy by printing both units on signs, or in books, but that makes people think that metric units are some type of alien torture device because I need to remember strange conversion factors 2.2 kg= 1 pound ~39" = Meter etc. (I don't know why I even remember this number of digits of conversion accuracy) We all know what a 2 liter bottle is now because that is what they call it. It would take about a month to get used to gas prices in $ per liter (the transition would be painful for some) but once every pump was measured this way you could rapidly know which was the better deal, and know if price is going up or down. If we are approaching this with the idea that only scientist and engineers can understand it, then I think we are missing the boat. Kids are flexible, and rapidly learn what a meter, cm, liter, kilogram, etc are. They will master it before the Adults do, and might be the generation to finally get us to move to the metric system. Maybe, just maybe, we won't have to suffer another Mars explorer.

--Rodney 00:45, 11 January 2007 (UTC)

I've just made a template, using existing classes in the stylesheets:
 * (reset)

This combines the title attribute trick with printing the explanation within parentheses. It's a little inelegant (as I'm not hacking the stylesheets, and besides, MSIE6 don't do CSS2 stuff like :after), but it works. It won't allow your readers to switch between SI and imperial, but it will allow them to see imperial if they can't be bothered joining the rest of us in SI units ;-)

→

I hope that this helps. Webaware 03:16, 11 January 2007 (UTC)


 * One more thing - this might be a useful tool to apply to maths, physics and engineering texts, and the like, but I would not like to see it used in, say, the Cookbook. I agree with Whiteknight that Wikibooks should address its audiences, and the Cookbook audience probably doesn't want to have to learn SI units just to make it through a recipe (just as I don't want to learn imperial units so that I can cook a "pound cake", whatever that is!) Webaware 03:25, 11 January 2007 (UTC)


 * I wish you stop this flips-flopping, more people use Metric than Imperial, Metric should always come first. There are .3 billion Americans vs. 6.4 billion Metric Users (talk) 16:56, 19 December 2009 (UTC)MetricCook

A trivial appication of Javascript could be readily applicable to address the issue. I designed an incomplete implementation at User:Iamunknown/jstest which is readable by users who do not have Javascript but does not includes Javascript in the actual document. It does not yet, however, use native Wiki Javascript functions (as I was testing it off-wiki) or test whether or not the browser will support the functions used. Furthermore, it does not yet allow the user to pick which units they want to view; indeed, they can only pick metric. I will address this and other issues further.

I would like to express my support for both units. I think that a selection process can be elegantly and discreetly executed. You will likely, however, have to choose between either  or. But either way, the user may, by way of Javascript or by way of CSS (if they are registered) pick either  or.

Finally, I would encourage other users to mess around with my JavaScript code and suggest improvements on the talk page. We could all learn a lot from this. Cheers, User:Iamunknown 05:19, 11 January 2007 (UTC)


 * I think we could create a set of templates for "weight", "mass", "volume", "distance", and other types of measurement with common imperial/metric equivalents. Each template would create a span HTML object with the class "span_conv_mass", or equivalent. The site javascript could be expanded to search for these spans and automatically convert the contents. A link could easily be added in the sidebar to take care of this conversion process, so that it wouldnt take the time to convert when the page is trying to load. I think that Darklama and myself could figure this situation out, if anybody is interested in seeing the results. --Whiteknight (talk) (projects) 22:22, 11 January 2007 (UTC)


 * Put me down as "interested" - this sounds very close to what I was asking for, and I think it could possibly work in the cookbook as well. I think the authors should be able to choose the units (i.e., cm, m, km vs in, ft, miles).  I also think temperature should be included, but I'd need two different types - absolute and differential.  To illustrate, I'll just note that a temperature rise of 32°F is not the same as a rise of 0°, even though 32°F = 0°.


 * Let me see what I can put together, it wont be immediate, but i should have something by early next week. --Whiteknight (talk) (projects) 03:04, 12 January 2007 (UTC)


 * Okay, I've been working on this for a while, and I think I have a pretty decent solution to the problem (barring future improvements). I've written some javascript at User:Whiteknight/convert.js. People who would like to use this javascript can either copy+paste it to their own local monobook.js files, or simply include my script into yours with a link. My monobook javascript includes an example of such a link. The javascript includes a link into the toolbox (on the sidebar) that says "Convert Units". When you click the link, the javascript will search through the page for spans with certain classnames, and perform the conversions as necessary. I've created a test template,, which is a mass template. To use the template, write:  (for 120 kilograms). Clicking the link will cause the number to change to say "264Lbs". Clicking the link again will cause the number to change back (actually, the roundoff error causes the number to say 119.999).
 * At the moment, the script only covers mass conversions from Kg to Lbs. However, i've made it extensible so that other units can be added by only adding in a single line of code. We can therefore add lots of other convertable units by creating the necessary templates, and adding a single line of javascript. At the moment, the code is only tested to work in firefox. If people are interested in this script, I would like to get people to test it out for me. Let me know. --Whiteknight (talk) (projects) 03:11, 16 January 2007 (UTC)

What is Wikibooks/Unstable
I'd be interested to know whether anyone has any remaining major issues that would lead them to oppose making this text live. If anyone does, we will look to address them. In the absence of any such issues arising, I will shortly formally propose adopting it. Jguk 20:15, 11 January 2007 (UTC)


 * I resent that you propose it now when there are so many other issues occupying users' time: the arbitration, the mailing list, proxy blocking, and general Wikibooks maintenance for starters. I have been neglecting talking at Wikibooks policy pages in lieu of other pressing tasks. And I presume that some others may be doing that as well &mdash; User:Iamunknown 01:52, 12 January 2007 (UTC)


 * I'm highlighting the page here so that people who are interested are aware of it, and the page has been going since May, so most, though clearly not all, things have settled down now. I don't intend proposing it until remaining major issues have been addressed, and I hope no-one else would propose it until then either. Jguk 08:40, 13 January 2007 (UTC)

Hi From WikiCast..
Hi,

Any admin equivlants around, I need to clarfiy something in relation to WikiBooks cookbook recipes.

One of them is planned for conversion on WikiCast, but WikiCast uses CC-By-SA not GFDL. One option is to make the specfic script page GFDL (if this is possible)

Your advice welcomed. ShakespeareFan00 01:38, 12 January 2007 (UTC)

Thinksheet on community definitions
I put down some notes on Community_Definitions, it would be nice to try to hammer these down (and other jargon we use).-- SB_Johnny | talk 16:08, 13 January 2007 (UTC)


 * There was a similar page somewhere, although I dont remember where, precisely. I'll see if i can find a link. --Whiteknight (talk) (projects) 01:24, 16 January 2007 (UTC)


 * That page is Help:Glossary of Wikibooks jargon. It's poorly named, and hasn't been updated in a while, but there is still a good amount of information here. --Whiteknight (talk) (projects) 01:26, 16 January 2007 (UTC)

reusing modules across textbooks
i am working on an animal behavior textbook Animal Behavior. in this i am including a summary of neuroscience and what we know about the physiological mechanisms that control and coordinate behaviors. a similar section is included in the intro psychology textbook.


 * 1) Biological basis of behavior

given the overlab in scope i think it would make most sense if contributors would work on improving one set of files that can be used in both books - at least initially. branching out would just double the effort at this point. alternatively, i would start a separate project, reinvent the wheel and spend much effort on coordinating the material in these sections across the two projects. i guess a "see also" approach could be included but really does not work well for textbooks. i could copy the content that is currently in the psych book as a startiing point, but that probably would be a no-no - right? i could link to the chapter from my table of content, but then all included navigation would be to the psych book instead of back to the animal behavior one. i could try to do an import with WB:RFI but that would only copy the current status of the file.

now, a great solution would be via aliases in the folder hierarchy. if the original chapter resides in the psych book, i could place an alias for the chapter into my folder structure and call the alias instead of the original. navigation would be intact as long as the authors coordinate how they use page navigation across the textbooks, this ought to work but i havent seen any mention of aliases. - sorry, just trying to be bold :-)

are there any collective thoughts on how to handle such situations? any input and help greatly appreciated, Robert Huber


 * That's a tough call. Books sharing modules doesn't seem a good idea at all. The best option would be to somehow "import" the page from one book to the other, then integrate it into it's now home. I've thought about something like having reciprocal import functions between here and wikiversity for that, but it seems awfully complicated. -- SB_Johnny | talk 14:29, 14 January 2007 (UTC)


 * You can include content from another module like this:
 * I do this in my Adventist Youth Honors Answer Book a lot, but that's a slightly different case. Most of my chapters are meant to stand alone, but information is shared between chapters.  For instance, a lot of the First Aid stuff is needed in multiple places - not only in the first aid chapters, but also in some of the camping/wilderness chapters as well.  I would hesitate before including content from an entirely different book though, but if that's what you want to do, this is one way to do it (within the Wikibooks project anyhow). Jim Thomas 14:48, 14 January 2007 (UTC)
 * I do this in my Adventist Youth Honors Answer Book a lot, but that's a slightly different case. Most of my chapters are meant to stand alone, but information is shared between chapters.  For instance, a lot of the First Aid stuff is needed in multiple places - not only in the first aid chapters, but also in some of the camping/wilderness chapters as well.  I would hesitate before including content from an entirely different book though, but if that's what you want to do, this is one way to do it (within the Wikibooks project anyhow). Jim Thomas 14:48, 14 January 2007 (UTC)


 * That works for some purposes, but if you were writing a science textbook for a UK curriculum, you might want to use a modified version of a US or Australia book on the same subject. They'd be similar, but not absolutely the same approach (and of course the spelling difference problems). It would be nice not to have to reinvent the wheel every time you're discussing Aluminum (oops, I mean Aluminium). -- SB_Johnny | talk 16:29, 14 January 2007 (UTC)


 * To use another book's pages in a book, one must be aware of some facts, both books communities (or if you wish since there isn't a definition) people working on those books must agree in having shared pages, you have to give credits to the original work on the book that will be importing the page(s) (as per GFDL) you probably should use transclusions as stated by User:Jomegat since it reduces duplicated of content and permits collaboration of both book communities on the same page (probably a notice on that book talk page wouldn't be a bad idea also), this is the best option but the evolution and subject matter of books tend may tend to diverge and with time the evolution of the page that is shared will make it difficult to keep the shared.
 * I personally don't like to refer to book pages as modules, books are modules of Wikibooks, book pages are part of a book. It is my view that this is a result of the limitations of the Wikimedia software, in Wikipedia each article has a single page, not here. --Panic 17:35, 14 January 2007 (UTC)


 * reset

folks, thanks, i really appreciate your thoughts on this and i perfectly agree that in its final version each book should have its particular version of covering a specific area of interest. my main concern is that it will be a bear of time to get the community to contribute a concise summary on a highly complex field with contributors in different areas of academia who rarely talk to each other. Wouldn't it be great if a couple of different book communities (which will share about 99% of the material on the subject eventually) would actually have to rough it out during the early stages. i bet the final result would be infinitely better and the effort to arrive there would be a lot less. - just a thought. so, i take it that it is neither encouraged nor particularly feasible :-) thanks, ciao, Robert Huber


 * Well, it's certainly not discouraged, it's just a new idea. The authors of the two books wouldn't necessarily have to "formally agree" to share, but if a module from one book is to be signifigantly altered to fit into the other, it would be nice if we had some way of making an attributed copy for use in the derivative version. There might be some way of creating an import space on meta or perhaps wikiversity, where the module could be uploaded as a copy, then re-imported to wikibooks as a second copy with the edit history intact. The other way would be to just do things as we used to transwiki in the past, namely copying the content to a new page, and placing a copy of the edit history on the talk page for reference. -- SB_Johnny | talk 20:43, 14 January 2007 (UTC)


 * Wouldn't that be only for "finished" books, Wikibooks books aren't never, well, finished (they can reach a "usable" version), the need to keep the attributed copy isn't a imposition to use content (it is a nice concept) but can be problematic as books have in the past been merged without giving credit to the original work, as for single or even multiple pages if the content is to remain shared on both books a simple trasnclusion would suffice, if content were to diverge, a simple copy and resync of history logs would suffice, we should probably work out some sort of guideline. I think I saw several books talking about similar proposal, if I'm not mistaken the last one I took notice was between the Vi and Vim books. --Panic 21:15, 14 January 2007 (UTC)

reusing modules across textbooks, section break
(break added because the edit button was too far up!)

Well, the problem in the past was because no-one knew that histories could be merged (I'm afraid I'm mostly responsible for introducing the laborious yet advisable history-merging thing... I sort of came across it by accident). I think the best option by far would to use export/import to make 2 *full* copies (each with a version of the history). This might be easy to set up actually, because wikiversity has the same need (forks are actively encouraged there). I'll scribble up a proposal on both projects.

Unless the module served the exact same purpose in the two (or more!) books planning to share it, it's probably a better idea to just duplicate the module (and it's history) so that it can be developed independently on both. I guess the best way to explain it would be to use a gardening page as an example (the subject I know best).


 * I mostly work on a book about gardening. The chapters in that book are fairly specific in their audience though, in that they deal with issues for temperate-climate gardening. When I started working on the book, I thought it could be of universal scope (for all gardens, everywhere), but I've come to realize that there's just no way. A horticulturist in Panama might want to talk about the same plant, but what applies to that plant in a temperate climate won't apply to it in a tropical climate. Or a greenhouse. And how a Farmer treats the plant won't be the same as how a gardener treats it.
 * In other words, this book can't cover all the bases for everyone, but the individual chapters come pretty close. If someone came along later and wanted to write a book on tropical gardening, they should have some mechanism for making a copy of the chapters they want, and then modifying them to be relevant for tropical horticulture.
 * The original chapter in the temperate garden book might change over time as new methods are developed or more contributors add to it. The tropical version would change too. After a few years, they might not resemble each other much, but they'd share a common deep history.

I think Robert Huber's project runs along similar lines... one book is about zoology, the other about evolutionary human biology (and psychology?). Very similar, but different, and the work that's already been done can be brought in two directions in the two books. -- SB_Johnny | talk 23:36, 14 January 2007 (UTC)


 * OK, here's the proposals:


 * Forking proposal
 * Wikiversity:Forking proposal
 * -- SB_Johnny | talk 13:17, 15 January 2007 (UTC)


 * I am a pretty firm believer that we don't always need to copy the history pages, or even go to great lengths to copy pages (and thus their histories). A simple footnote that says "The orignal text of this page came from another place" should suffice as the necessary attribution. Also, I would far prefer the use of page transclusions to solve the problem over any sort of content copying. Beyond even the transclusions, It would be the absolute best thing for you to include a hyperling that says "For more information about this topic, see module X", or even, "As module X will show, there are a number of points about neurology that are common between animals and humans. We will summarize those similiaries here:". Copying material between two different books should be avoided, because it's a practice that simply isn't used (and generally isnt legal) in the world of real textbook. A textbook should be self-contained, and if it can't include all the information it needs, then it should be able to reference outside sources. --Whiteknight (talk) (projects) 01:23, 16 January 2007 (UTC)


 * I think there are circumstances where this might be very useful. In Wikijunior The Elements, there are these very interesting and extensive articles on basic chemistry. They, in fact, would be a good foundation for a Wikijunior "Chemistry" book. But I strongly feel that the information should be pared back extensively for the purpose of "The Elements". If we could fork in this way, then both copies could keep the history, we'd have good material for two different books and each would be able to evolve in it's own way. I don't think it's the best solution for every situation, but it seems like a good idea in some circumstances to me. --xixtas 04:02, 16 January 2007 (UTC)


 * I agree with User talk:Whiteknight, It is clear that we don't need to copy the history page (unless the authors of the works chose to use trasclusion from pages into different namespaces, what would be good as this would keep low the need for duplicated pages), the only imposition to make references to the other works comes from the license we use, several books already have acknowledgments to other works or/and authors (the authors page is probably the best place for it as it has already a special status inside a work), but there is several issues on the use of the GFDL and Wikibooks I don't see eye to eye with many of you so please take this only as a statement of my opinion and not as initiating a discussion on that. --Panic 04:55, 16 January 2007 (UTC)


 * A book on "Wikijunior Chemistry" can build off the material from "Wikijunior The Elements", without having to duplicate that material. The two projects should be asked to work together, so that the elements book will contain all the information necessary in the chemistry book. The chemistry book would contain discussion about the elements book that is necessary for chemistry, but is not necessary in the elements text. Page transclusions could be used in this situation as well, but i don't think it would be useful or even beneficial. A statement of prerequisite at the start of the book should grease the wheels: "Readers of this book are assumed to have a basic working knowledge of the periodic table and the elements. Wikijunior's The Elements is a good book to read to gain this knowledge". Also, another statement will help ensure that readers will keep both books in their list of bookmarks: "This book will make frequent use of information from the Wikijunior The Elements book. That book should be viewed as a companion text to this text." Remember, wiki isn't paper, and it is completely acceptable (if not expectable) for people to have two books open in different browers (or different tabs of the same browser). --Whiteknight (talk) (projects) 14:56, 16 January 2007 (UTC)


 * I think you've missed the point. The reason you'd copy from one book to another is to make use of the work that's already been done, without having to start from zero and without doing an unattributed copy-pasteed new page. Books and modules are GFDL documents, and the reason we use those kinds of licences is so that a book can be stripped down and rewritten for another purpose, while at the same time honoring the contributions of past contributors. It's the same thing as what we do with wikipedia articles when we import&rarr;strip&rarr;expand them, this just lets us do that within one project. -- SB_Johnny | talk 15:02, 16 January 2007 (UTC)


 * I understand the possibilities. Typically articles are imported from a place where they are less appropriate to a place that is more appropriate. I would think that information is rarely suitable for two projects simultaneously, and only under condition that the two copies become sufficiently divergent within a set timeframe. Besides the fact that it is theoretically possible, I suppose I can't think of a single instance where duplication of a book or book module is preferable or even necessary. In general, it is always better to maintain a single copy of information, and therefore maintain a single pool of potential contributors. duplicating the material only serves to divide the number of people willing and able to contribute to each module, and this is something that wikibooks cannot afford with it's low population. --Whiteknight (talk) (projects) 15:19, 16 January 2007 (UTC)


 * Transclusion would increase collaboration and should be given a chance before we make any action against it's use, we should have a project or two using it with other projects to see if there are problems or even a source for conflict, the number of works that could benefit from another book's pages is not that big, authors interested into getting into it would be even less, as for dividing the number of people by the duplication of content across projects it is a fact that can't be avoided but as we know the ratio of number of active authors (not contributors) to any project is pretty small, the real problem would be resynchronization of content that was intended to be equal in several works but we should leave this up for the people working on the books as it will not affect the community in general. --Panic 15:34, 16 January 2007 (UTC)


 * In this situation I think it would be appropriate to *remove* (permanently) about 2/3 of the material from the Introductory sections in the book. The primary reason I haven't done this yet is because I see that material as being very valuable in a different context. Transclusion would not be an effective way of dealing with this situation because the content (though related) would be dissimilar and have different aims. While I understand that Wikibooks is not paper, the goal of Wikijunior has always been to develop books *for print*.


 * Our options are to (a)Leave the large amount of content in the introductory sections. (currently there are more words in the "introduction" than all the other articles combined.) (b) Pare down that content that someone worked hard and well to create without regard for its usefulness in another context. (c) Copy it with limited attribution. (d) Fork it, leaving a copy in both contexts that can be reworked to fit the new context. (The Chemistry fork expanded and the Elements fork contracted.)


 * To my mind, it's not even close as to what is the best course of action in this situation. The fork solves every problem and creates only a limited number of workable problems in place. The primary downside, that we would have duplicate content for a short time, and overlapping content for a longer time doesn't seem like that big a deal to me, especially since there would be no reason or need to keep them synchronized. --xixtas 17:55, 16 January 2007 (UTC)

reusing modules across textbooks, section break 2

 * in my specific case, transclusion would be the best solution in the short term, and once the basic material is far enough developed, it should go through forking. the chapter is a good start but needs a lot of fleshing out of elements before it can really be called useful for the readers of either book. i rather do the fleshing out instead of starting over. i will probably run out of effort, time, or whatever when i get to the same place where the psyc chapter is right now :-)


 * so how can i transclude (or request transclusion of) the page # Biological basis of behavior into the textbook Animal Behavior? i have the empty entry for it in chapter 3 (Intro to neurscience). i assume that i can keep editing and adding to transcluded text like normal? where do i go to have the chapter forked lateron when i have the material fleshed out? much obliged ... Robert Huber


 * First you should post a message in both books talk pages to see if anyone objects with the idea and give them some time to comment on it and later remember to give the credit to the original book on the destination book. As for transclusion you use as for the fork you best be involved on the debate that is still active on that point, but  simple pages reuse doesn't fall under the fork definition, to fork a work you must copy all the content (or a very significant part of it).
 * If the book communities later later decide to remove the trasclusion, just ask any administrator to copy the page and the history as replacement for the trasclusion. --Panic 19:16, 16 January 2007 (UTC)


 * "Typically articles are imported from a place where they are less appropriate to a place that is more appropriate." &larr; that's one reason, but there are others. The cookbook, gardening book, some dance books, and now the Holocaust book all are in part transwiki-built, taking Wikipedia articles and adapting them for another use. The wikibooks versions and wikipedia versions often link to one another, but there's no need to keep them "synchronized"... each copy develops in a different direction independently sharing only the history up to the particular historical version that was duplicated. Transclusion is a very awkward solution, because it creates an inflexible element that can't be altered for the use of one book or the other (in a way, an invariant section), limiting the creative flexibility of both projects. It might be different if you could just transclude paragraphs or even sentences which could be couched with other stuff, but this seems to be making a lot of work (it's also harder to edit if you can't "see" all the text in the actual edit window). It seems to me that if a contributor wants to take a text on one subject and use it as a basis of a text on a similar subject, we should be helping them, not making them jump through transclusion hoops :-).
 * They don't need permission to make a new book out of an old one... the fork (is "branch" a better term, perhaps?) would be a separate project, and have no effect whatsoever on the first book. "...just ask any administrator to copy the page and the history as replacement for the trasclusion" &larr; that's precisely what I'd like to be able to do, upon request (and perhaps even some approval process). But there's no way currently to make a copy like that, which is why I'm proposing the bugzilla request. -- SB_Johnny  | talk 19:32, 16 January 2007 (UTC)


 * Well, so how is that for a plan, you guys help me copy the text and history into the respective chapter in the book that i am working on. i will flesh it out into a formal chapter and if there is interest from the original psych book then they newly fleshed out version can be transfer from my side back into theirs. i think there will be little overlap given that there hasn't been anybody working on the pages since nov.. so if you can make this work, then i will happily propose that solution on the psych book pages. ciao and thanks, Robert Huber


 * Perhaps we should submit a request to bugzilla asking for a "copy" feature, where we can copy the text and history of a page to another page with a different name. If both wikibooks and wikiversity ask for this feature, i'm sure the developers would go for it. --Whiteknight (talk) (projects) 00:43, 26 January 2007 (UTC)

New language project: Freistil
Hi, I have just started a language project for those learning German as a second language: Freistil, a loose collection of actual texts with annotations. Feel free to contribute. --Bitbert 16:25, 15 January 2007 (UTC)
 * I love this idea - learning the language from real texts together with promoting our sister project Wikinews. The book looks great and I like the idea of "tooltips" with translation and boxes with important information. Also interesting information is provided. I only think that every article should go to a separate subpage so that they may be archived properly (you can "paste" these subpages to main page of book just like you use templates). Oh, and perhaps these boxes should also be templates. --Derbeth talk 18:56, 15 January 2007 (UTC)

Yep, you're right in every single aspect. Unfortunately, I didn't have the time to initiate it all in one rush. Also, I'm not sure how to deal with the boxes as templates (my experience in layouting wikis is limited). So if you can spare a thought, feel free to contribute ;-) --Bitbert 20:12, 15 January 2007 (UTC)

The technical details have been settled. The book is on the air and can be used. Since this is a loose collection of texts there will be no indication of progress such as xx% finished. Before long, printable PDFs will be available. Hopefully, soon the texts will be available as audio, too. Spread the news for this exhilerating new tool for foreign language acquisition. --Bitbert 15:01, 17 January 2007 (UTC)

Wikijunior New_Title_Policy/Unstable
I have created an unstable branch of the new title policy for Wikijunior so that it conforms to what I understand the existing practice related to new titles to be. Please review and comment. --xixtas 18:07, 16 January 2007 (UTC)

ISBN for Wikibooks
Completed Wikibooks should have an ISBN number. ISBN numbers are globally accepted (part of ISO) and not solely a US standard. As a US based organisation we would need to obtain ISBN's from http://www.isbn-international.org/en/agencies/usa.html unfortunately it will cost a couple of hundred dollars for a 100 ISBNs.

One advantage of ISBNs, amongst others, is that Wikibooks might be advertised for free on Google Books http://www.google.co.uk/books?hl=en. RobinH 22:14, 16 January 2007 (UTC)


 * Can't Wikimedia come to a deal with Google that will remove a need to spend money registering ISBNs ? (in a later date if books do get published on paper) will probably get an ISBN. --Panic 19:12, 17 January 2007 (UTC)


 * I definitely think that we an ISBN number should be on our to-do list. Currently, however, that is not the goal of Wikibooks, nor do we have an infrastructure set up to become a free-content publishing house. It would require a lot more commitment than I am currently giving and (I assume) than some others are also giving.
 * Regarding infrastructure, I would like to point out to the special pages. There is quite a bit of clean-up to be done (especially with categorisation) and I would immensely appreciate any help I can get there. It would be nice to take inventory of what we have here. I am unsure whether categorisation is appropriate, but until we can find out what we have, we can (as far as I am able to discern) not feasibly begin on larger projects of professional typesetting and publication. --User:Iamunknown 19:49, 17 January 2007 (UTC)


 * From what I have read about ISBN it would be up to Wikibooks to decide which books should be given ISBNs and the format of such books. ISBNs can be given to ebooks where there is no printed edition so the ISBN could be applied immediately to any Wikibook.  My suggestion is, if Wikibooks obtains, say, 10 ISBNs these are applied to books that pass through Wikipublish and Editorial board and lodged with Google Books. RobinH 20:06, 17 January 2007 (UTC)

Problems with ISBNs
Just as an FYI, several Wikibooks have already been issued an ISBN number... under a Canadian registry interestingly enough, but we are still trying to work out the details on this.

The primary issue with obtaining an ISBN number is that it is registered to a "publisher" who is able and willing to provide copies of the published material (usually dead-tree format) that can then be ordered by book retailers. The infrastructure that needs to be set up here is that we need to establish some organization, for profit or not for profit, that is going to be handling this sort of situation.

I have a few suggestions on how to get such a project going, and I've deliberately tried to go slow on getting this going mainly to avoid getting too many people pissed at me. If Jimbo's reaction to the publication of the Wikijunior Big Cats book is any indication, this is going to cause explosively negative feelings if any substantial amounts of money are earned off of these books. It is also very unclear how and when logos and mentions of Wikimedia registered trademarks (aka "Wikibooks", "Wikijunior" and the associated logos) can be used.

I will note that another very famous trademark, "Linux", is a regsitered trademark by Linus Torvalds (he got it from somebody else a while back) and is held by him for and in behalf of the community to make sure that mainly nobody else can claim trademark status on that name. I wish that the WMF felt the same way about the use of the name Wikibooks, but unfortunately they want to use the WMF trademarks for some kind of future fundraising efforts.

I'll have to add some notes on how I would like to proceed, but there is obviously some interest in trying to get a formal publishing group put together. I certainly want to be involved with that, and make sure that such a group is made up of Wikibooks users and volunteers. This does not have to be run by the WMF (or certainly approved by them), but the stronger the spirit of volunteerism and cooperation between those doing the publishing and those creating the content here on Wikibooks, the better off both projects would be for each other. --Rob Horning 21:30, 17 January 2007 (UTC)


 * I wasn't aware that some books already had an ISBN number. Which books? How easy was it to obtain such numbers from this canadian company? This information would likely be a great help to the new wikiprojects that have been established. --Whiteknight (talk) (projects) 23:41, 17 January 2007 (UTC)


 * The Canadian government offers this to Canadian nationals for free, but there are some exceptions and there are some other rules involved here. As an American, it is not directly within my ability to do this, but I've been working with User:Munchkinguy, who is a Canadian national.  I'll have to post what ISBN numbers have been assigned once everything gets settled down.--Rob Horning 17:18, 18 January 2007 (UTC)


 * Rob, thanks for this info. Are you absolutely sure about the need for "dead tree format"? I cant find any reference to an absolute requirement for paper copy. RobinH 15:16, 18 January 2007 (UTC)
 * I think it has to be on some sort of "tangible" medium, but I may be mistaken. The whole ISBN numbering system was mainly set up by book retailers to help coordinate publication of material, and is in the format of - - - .  That is where the dashes come into the number, BTW.  As an interesting point too, once you have done a formal registration of the content with a government agency (we are doing that right now with the Wikijunior Big Cats book), it also gets assigned a Dewey decimal/card catalog number as well.  That might get interesting where some of these books actually end up.  --Rob Horning 17:18, 18 January 2007 (UTC)

Featured Books
I think this is the time when we need to decide what to do about the BOTM and the COTM projects. It's my opinion that both should be replaced, but i know some people have suggested keeping COTM and replacing BOTM. These are my suggestions for what to do next, I would like to get some more input on these: These suggestions are aimed at performing a number of tasks. First, they improve the old BOTM and COTM ideas, without completely abandoning the ideas of "good books", or "books needing help". Also, it helps to strengthen the "Wikiproject" initiative, which is something that i think will really help the wikibooks community in the long run. Any comments/suggestions? --Whiteknight (talk) (projects) 22:15, 16 January 2007 (UTC)
 * 1) Disband BOTM and COTM projects permanently
 * 2) Use Featured books as the new mechanism for promoting books that are "good". Good books can be listed as such on a continuous basis (more or less then one book per month).
 * 3) Come up with some kind of set requirements for a book to be listed as "good" (perhaps give the job of good book selection to a wikiproject)
 * 4) Create a wikiproject to replace the functionality of COTM. This wikiproject would select books in need of help on a continuous basis (as need and resources allow), and work as a group to improve these books.
 * 5) Place prominent links on the main page to Featured books, and Wikiprojects, as well (perhaps) links to the most active wikiprojects.


 * There is a difference between good, completed or nearly completed books and books that have made good progress or are worth an edit or two. BOTM has always seemed to be about "nice" books rather than good, nearly complete books.


 * That said, featured books need more attention, particularly an effort to push them forward to being completed, published e-books. Other books also need to be encouraged towards featured status. As a first step the project that you are proposing could produce a set of phases that books should complete to go from an idea to an approved and published ebook. RobinH 22:24, 16 January 2007 (UTC)


 * Having a set process and dedicated volunteers that will move "good" books to the status of "better" books, and eventually "great" books is something that we need to establish. The use of wikiprojects will be, i think, a good way to accomplish this, and the wikiprojects themselves will constitute the stages in this process:
 * Books that are decent are found and listed by the Featured books mechanism (based on a forthcoming set of criteria).
 * The Editorial board wikiproject will see these good books, review, edit, and revise them. The good books become "better" books.
 * The Wikipublish wikiproject will find the "better" books, create printable versions, PDF versions, and work to make them publishable. The books become "great" books, and we can work to distribute our great books (print them, distribute CDs, have them hosted on other websites, etc).
 * The best part of this pipeline process is that people can participate in the process at any point they want. I could help to edit a book, but not feel obligated to create a PDF for it (or vice-versa). Also, people who dont know what to do or how to help can be given tasks to work on. I think it's the best solution to the problem. --Whiteknight (talk) (projects) 23:36, 17 January 2007 (UTC)

Captcha Problem / Can't create new account
No matter how many times I solve the simple math problem I can't seem to create a new account for myself. I am correct answering the math problem yet I keep getting the error message: "Login error:Incorrect or missing confirmation code" —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 24.151.97.23 (talk • contribs) 13:59, 17 Jan 2007  (UTC)
 * No idea if there is a tech problem but I suggest you keep on trying - if the problem persist try here again and we will see what we can do (hum - as I am getting a database locked message it may well not be you!) - regards -- Herby talk thyme 14:20, 17 January 2007 (UTC)
 * I don't know if it is still an issue, but historically people using IE have had more problems with the captcha then people using other browsers. I've been able to create accounts with multiple browsers, but other people haven't been so lucky. Try it in a different browser, if you can. --Whiteknight (talk) (projects) 23:37, 17 January 2007 (UTC)

Images with unknown copyright status
I am in need of some guidance,

What is the policy for dealing with the images with unknown copyright statuses? The copyright tag clearly states that:

"This image does not have information on its copyright status. Unless the copyright status is provided, the image will be deleted seven days after this template was added (Date). Once a copyright tag has been added, this template may be removed."

I know that copyrighted images are not allowed on wikibooks. What is the best practice for removing these images? After how many days of the tag being attached to an image should the links to such a file on pages be removed?

Is there any specific reason, in general, why images are not deleted on time, as there are over 500 images currently with unknown copyright statuses. Is this due to a lack of people who have enough time to deal with deleting all of the images?

Urbane User (Talk)   (Contributions)  18:47, 17 January 2007 (UTC)

Please note, this is in no way a derogatory set of questions, no matter how they are read.


 * The only people who can delete images (or any pages for that matter) are admins. The number of admins that we do have is preciously small, and of them few want to take the time to delete 500 images outright. There has been some progress made (a month or two ago there were over 3000 images in this category), but this is also a continuous problem and new images are uploaded all the time with improper copyright status. In short, we will get to it when we get to it. While we might not delete the images within the 5 day timelimit, rest assured that we will do it eventually. --Whiteknight (talk) (projects) 23:27, 17 January 2007 (UTC)


 * Whiteknight's answer is pretty much what I would have said. Despite there being a numerical quantity of admins the active ones are rare on the ground and there is a fair amount of housekeeping to do.  That said there is really quite a lot that folks other than admins can do.  Watch Recent Changes (great insight to what is going on).  This means you will see when someone uploads images and you are welcome to tag any that are unlicensed and inform the user - templates are here.  Another place that is worth a look is Wikibooks maintenance - there is work to be done and it helps in getting to know the place.  I do hope that these comments help you to understand some of the issues involved and that you may consider assisting where you can.  The deletions will get done but time here is a little different (how often was I told that!). -- Herby  talk thyme 13:16, 18 January 2007 (UTC)


 * I would like to add that it is far more important to actually identify those items that may have some problems. If you see something that may be a copyright violation or where it certainly should be questioned, please mark it up with the appropriate tags from Template messages/Cleanup, Template messages/Deletion or some other notification message.  Adding these notification messages on a page automatically add it to a category and I promise that eventually action will occur.  Adding messages like this is something that any Wikibooks contributor can perform, and it will certainly be something reviewed carefully by others in the Wikibooks community, especially administrators.  Far too often some content will simply be added that nobody is even aware of, as it was missed by those who have performed a routine review of the project, but with over 20,000 pages to review, we don't always get to everything.  I certainly have not seen every page on Wikibooks (although I've done a pretty good job of seeing most of it).


 * BTW, as a general suggestion, if you want to help out Wikibooks and eventually serve as an administrator to help clean out this backlog of problems, I would strongly suggest that you help with marking up pages you might see on Wikibooks with these template messages. It is a very good way to let others know what sorts of content that you value, and if you seem to be making good decisions.  Don't worry about trying to "overload" the other administrators with work to do in terms of cleanup on these messages, as you may likely get the job yourself to help with the cleanup.  --Rob Horning 17:10, 18 January 2007 (UTC)


 * Just a side note here in response to a comment rob made, The current administrators around here typically do a good job of avoiding "overload". While this means that some jobs don't get handled in a timely manner, it also means that our staff can stay energized and enthusiastic about the project. I personally value keeping our administrators happy and productive over getting all those work backlogs cleaned out. --Whiteknight (talk) (projects) 00:06, 19 January 2007 (UTC)


 * And something else for non-admins (like me) to do: look at the images with unknown copyright status and see if you can do something constructive about them. For example:
 * Find an equivalent image on Commons to replace the image, change linked pages to use that image, and tag the local image with &#123;{NowCommons}}
 * If the image is trivial (like, say, a green circle or a simple chart), build a new one and donate it to Commons or Wikibooks
 * If the image is something that could be replaced with wiki markup, then do so - e.g. formulas, tables (see m:Help:Displaying a formula, m:Help:Table for more information)
 * Incidentally, could one of the admins please resurrect the deleted images that this page links to, so that the above process can be applied? I asked about this on 1 January, but haven't had any response to the request. Webaware talk 01:02, 19 January 2007 (UTC)

Wikibooks Merchandise
I dont know if anybody knows about this, but there has been a shop created to sell wikibooks merchandise. I think this shop is relatively new, because it didnt exist last time i went looking for it. I am certainly not trying to advertise this stuff, and I have no idea where the profits from these sales go. However, there are some interesting things in this store, and since they contain the original wikibooks logo (considering that the official logo is going to change eventually) they might be partly nostalgic for people who have grown accustomed to the old logo. --Whiteknight (talk) (projects) 00:03, 19 January 2007 (UTC)


 * Do you have a URL? I highly doubt that they have permission to use the logo, as I've tried persistantly to get those permissions.  The only place that has "permissions" to sell Wikibooks-related merchandise is:

http://www.cafepress.com/wikipedia/529053


 * The profits from the sale of this merchandise goes directly to the Wikimedia Foundation, and is used to support Wikibooks specifically, even if it is to help out with the server farm in general. If you see anything else, I would strongly recommend that you notify the Wikimedia Foundation at the following address:

board at wikimedia dot org (to keep the spam bots from killing this e-mail address)


 * Or simply post a message on Foundation-l about the issue.


 * There are some logo licensing options being discussed on Meta, but those are very preliminary and I've been trying desperately to stay on top of any changes to those discussions. Certainly nothing official has been issued by the WMF about the topic.  --Rob Horning 00:52, 19 January 2007 (UTC)


 * That cafepress address is the shop I was talking about, sorry i didnt include a link. I had been to the cafepress shop some time ago, and they didnt have anything wikibooks at all. I was pleasantly surprised to see the wikibooks logo being used, and I might be buying something from there for myself soon. I just wanted to know if other people know about it. --Whiteknight (talk) (projects) 02:02, 21 January 2007 (UTC)


 * Just thinking out loud here, but I wonder if it might be possible to have a link to this Cafepress website from somewhere here on Wikibooks, in terms of "fundraising" and such. I was thinking mainly something simple and discrete, and certainly not a "banner ad" or anything as obtrusive.  The side bar may be over the top, but something on the "main page" might be reasonable.  Any ideas?  --Rob Horning 22:20, 25 January 2007 (UTC)


 * I agree but as User:Whiteknight said, it should be clearly stated to users where the profits from these sales go. --Panic 22:23, 25 January 2007 (UTC)


 * If the merchandise benefits the WMF as Rob mentioned, then maybe we should post a link to it somewhere? How cool would it be to see people walking down the street wearing wikibooks clothes? I know that I would feel good about that (even if it is unlikely). I think the new logo would look better on those clothes then the old logo, but that's just me. --Whiteknight (talk) (projects) 00:37, 26 January 2007 (UTC)

Adopt-A-User
I don't know how many of you will have seen/been involved in the adopt-a-user programme on wikipedia, but i believe that it may possibly be a useful project to setup here on wikibooks.

For those of you who may not know about the adopt-a-user programme, it is a way of formally pairing new users who know little about the site, and pairing them with an experienced editor in order to help them learn how to work with the site. There is no formal selection process for being an adoptee or adopter, but rather the system works through volunteering.

What do people think of the idea of perhaps implementing such a programme here at wikibooks? —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Urbane User (talk • contribs).


 * It's an interesting concept, but I dont know how it would work. Do new users ask for a mentor, or do mentors ask for the mentee? --Whiteknight (talk) (projects) 02:06, 21 January 2007 (UTC)


 * New users will ask for a mentor by placing an 'Adopt Me' template on their user page. The mentors will then search through those pages which have this template and will assign themselves to one of the adoptees. For a better explaination, see here |Official Page
 * Urbane User (Talk)   (Contributions)  08:53, 21 January 2007 (UTC)
 * I find placing welcome templates tends to mean I adopt some whether I want to or not <g>. That isn't a complaint btw.  I do think that those who seek help will (I hope) find someone - those who don't may well be the ones who need it tho.  I guess in the end I was adopted (!) and I have adopted some (or they me) and I am unsure formalising it will help -- Herby  talk thyme 09:35, 21 January 2007 (UTC)
 * I see, so it may actaully be better to continue the informal mentorship that is currently in action.Urbane User (Talk)   (Contributions)  10:34, 21 January 2007 (UTC)


 * I would agree with Herbythyme, it's my experiance that the first user who leaves a friendly message and offers to help becomes an unofficial mentor to the new user. That user will then go to the first familiar user to ask questions. An "Adopt Me" template might be a nice idea, but I would feel pretty bad if somebody put that template on their page, and nobody ever responded to it. --Whiteknight (talk) (projects) 22:16, 21 January 2007 (UTC)

I'm happy to be a part of wikibooks
I'm so new to Wikibook and I'd appreciate all suggestions. Thank You.

Lolit cbls 04:56, 21 January 2007 (UTC)Talitz25549 21January2007
 * You are part of it - you are here! Really it is up to you to take a look around and see if there are aspects that you want to know more about or help with.  Folks are friendly and it is good to have you here -- Herby  talk thyme 09:36, 21 January 2007 (UTC)
 * G'day, and welcome! Best thing I can suggest is that you read everything in sight. But that will take too long, so instead, check out some really good help files: m:Help:Editor. They're the help files on "Meta", and are more up-to-date than the ones here. Also check out WB:PAG, to see how Wikibooks likes things done. Webaware talk 13:50, 21 January 2007 (UTC)

Note on Deletion policy/Unstable
Just to inform you that the policy is up for discussion. Action initiated on 22 January 2007 by user:Whiteknight main purpose is to provide support for transwiki nominated pages --Panic 05:34, 22 January 2007 (UTC)


 * The deletion policy is an older policy document, and I think it could stand some basic upgrades. Basically, i want to improve the readability of the policy, and update it to include several of the de facto rules that we already abide by. I did not create the unstable branch to propose any major changes. --Whiteknight (talk) (projects) 19:14, 22 January 2007 (UTC)

Influx of copyright violations
Look at the upload log. We are getting a massive influx of images with copyright tags, without sources, or with totally wrong tags. I've tried to tag and notify some uploaders, but for other images, I'm totally unsure how to go about it. I'd like to start developing more user-warning templates, but I don't know enough legal jargon. For example, on my sub-page User:Iamunknown/Cleanup/Image tags, I'm trying to identify the copyright status of the OSI Adaptive Public License, which is the license for images a user [ uploaded] the SwisTrack wikibook. Any help or ideas would be very appreciated. I'm going to Commons to ask about the OSIAPL now. I have so many questions about everything. --Iamunknown 19:48, 31 January 2007 (UTC)


 * I'm just on for a few minutes, but maybe have a look at commons:Commons:Templates, which are mostly image-related. If you see any we need here, just copy them.
 * If it's the same users and they have ignored your warnings, please list the users on WB:AN... I strongly suggest we block them until they answer the queries (that's what's done on commons).
 * Thanks for keeping a good eye out! -- SB_Johnny | talk 20:18, 31 January 2007 (UTC)


 * If you find a user who is uploading copyright images repeatedly, the legal jargon that you should use is: "Knock it the heck off or you will be banned!". If you find somebody who needs to be banned, you can mention it here, on WB:AN, or you can even tell me about it on my talk page. --Whiteknight (talk) (projects) 00:45, 1 February 2007 (UTC)

Manifestation of Wikiprojects
Does anyone know of a page where the two Wikiproject portals, Wikiprojects and WikiProject are being discussed?, it seems to me that this should be resolved as the former is a meagre manifestation of the latter. --Herraotic 19:31, 19 January 2007 (UTC)


 * I've redirected the latter to the former as the former is currently being developed and it much more useful. -<font color="#000000">within <font color="#7A7A7A">focus 21:49, 20 January 2007 (UTC)


 * I created Wikiprojects because I wasn't able to find the original WikiProjects page in a search. It's my personal opinion that pages should be named in such a manner that they can quickly and easily be found in a search, and i didn't think that the mid-word capitalization lent it self particularly well to searches. People tend not to capitalize in their searches, or else they tend to use title-capitalizations (first letter of each major word). Nobody is going to type the word "WikiProject" into the search box unless they know beforehand that the page is named as such. --Whiteknight (talk) (projects) 01:45, 21 January 2007 (UTC)

Mathematics series of textbooks
I have recently been thinking of creating a series of mathematics textbooks that don't conform to any particular curriculum, but just progresses at the rate of one's learning and organised with adherence to one's prerequisites. My current thoughts for the textbooks are for them to be used from the introduction of a toddler/child learning how to write numbers to pre-university. This obviously will be a big task to undertake but I think its importance will most definitely attract many editors from other wiki's and society in general. What I have written is only an inspiration for other thoughts and I expect many constructive criticisms. --Herraotic 20:20, 19 January 2007 (UTC)


 * This sounds like it would be an excellent task for the Mathematics wikiproject. The first thing that we need to do is prepare an outline of the various subjects. We should be able to break the whole of "mathematics" into various sub-disciplines in a logical way. A number of books already exist for Arithmetic, and Algebra, and Trigonometry, for instance, and they already contain TOCs that include logical amounts of information. Using these books as a starting point, we can use our outline to identify gaps in our "curriculum", and start to prepare books to fill those gaps. For instance, we could set up a general progression as such:
 * Numbers and Counting (being a first course for pre-school and kindergarten)
 * Elementary Arithmetic (basic arithmetic operations using pictures and diagrams, for elementary students)
 * Arithmetic Problem solving (introduction to word-problems, pre-algebra, long division)
 * Algebra
 * And we would go on from there. I do know that many school curricula break "algebra" into a number of numbered segments such as "algebra 1", or "algebra 2". We would have to decide whether to segment our algebra books in a similar way, or to have only a single book with different sections, etc. But, we can worry about that problem much later. --Whiteknight (talk) (projects) 02:00, 21 January 2007 (UTC)

Future of Cingular Wireless FAQ
As a result of the merger between AT&T (formerly SBC) and BellSouth, Cingular Wireless is now a wholly-owned subsidiary of AT&T and is being rebranded as wireless from AT&T, whereupon the Cingular name will be retired. When that happens, the Cingular Wireless FAQ will have to be moved/renamed and substantially reworked. Before undertaking that effort, and because of my bad experience with my former Wireless book here (which was summarily deleted without warning or even notice, forcing me into a painful crash move to Wireless Wikia), I'd like some substantial reassurance that my reworked Cingular/AT&T book will continue to be welcome and hosted at Wikibooks. Otherwise I'll probably move my reworked content to Wikia. Thank you. --John Navas 20:45, 19 January 2007 (UTC)


 * Having a FAQ doesn't seem much like Wikibooks material to me, but a book about working with a Cingular/AT&T phone definitely could be. I wouldn't title the book to be a FAQ but something more book-like. By the looks of its content, this is much more than a FAQ. I would say your content is safe here but if you find a more helpful wireless community at Wikia then that may be a better move. Your choice (as well as other active authors of the book here) of course. -<font color="#000000">within <font color="#7A7A7A">focus 22:21, 20 January 2007 (UTC)


 * Semantics aside, this book has been deemed in the past to be acceptable for wikibooks, and even though the name of the book may change, the book doesnt need to be reconsidered for deletion. As a simple suggestion, when you come up with a new title for your book, you may want to omit the word "FAQ" from the title, so that we dn't raise any eyebrows over inclusion criteria. --Whiteknight (talk) (projects) 01:42, 21 January 2007 (UTC)

Sister project for Freistil
Freistil, launched on January 15th 2007, offers actual German texts adapted from Wikinews or written from scratch by native speakers with English comments and explanations. I'd simply love to launch a mirror project de:Freestyle in German wikibooks offering the reverse, i. e. actual English texts with German annotations.

If you are interested in participating in such a project, please let me know. Although advantageous, knowledge of the German language is not required. Things you might want to do include: I will offer help in any stages of the project, including the setup, translations and interlanguage cooperation in between the sister projects. --Bitbert 16:46, 20 January 2007 (UTC)
 * writing short English texts of about 100 to 300 words about actual topics, either once or on a regular basis,
 * annotating articles with vocabulary translations or in-detail boxes,
 * layouting existing articles on the web or for printing via PDF,
 * reading existing texts aloud and making OGG recordings,
 * finding and recruiting potential writers for singular or regular participation,

Some more details: The basic idea is this: a native speaker writes a short article on an actual topic for foreign language learners. The text is then enriched with vocabulary translations that show up on hovering the mouse cursor over words in the text and provided with one of the grades beginner, intermediate or advanced. Other annotations may be provided as well, such as "What's worth learning?" boxes that compile the vocabulary of the text that is of daily use, "In detail" boxes that explain surroundings of the topic in the learner's own language and activities known from common language books. Eventually, an audio recording of a native speaker reading the text aloud is attached to the article. And finally, the article is provided as a one or two page PDF optimized for printout.

There is also administrative work to be done: taking care of the project's layout and templates, administrating the archive of existing articles, strolling the grounds looking for people that will contribute an article or two or will read one aloud, ...

You're free in choosing your favorite task or tasks in this process. The tasks vary in requiring the ability to speak German: as can easily be seen, writing an English article or reading an article aloud does not require any knowledge of a foreign language whatsoever. You're welcome, no matter whether you want to contribute on a regular, once-in-a-while or once-and-never-again basis.

My request is also listed in the German Wikibooks. If some more people show interest I will launch the project including technics and templates. The projects here and there will then be linked for interlingual collaboration and all cooperative pages will be offerd in English as well as German. --Bitbert 10:41, 21 January 2007 (UTC)
 * I would certainly be interested in writing some of the articles for such a project. Urbane User (Talk)   (Contributions)  11:27, 21 January 2007 (UTC)

Update: The project has been launched. --Bitbert 22:05, 21 January 2007 (UTC)

Development Page
Is it acceptable to create a temporary page to do development in? I want to rework the Monoploy book contents page, but want to spend a few days trying different things out. Is it acceptable to create a page for this purpose and where should I create it? Can I create sub pages to my user page? Or add it as a sub page to the monopoly book? --AdRiley 09:57, 21 January 2007 (UTC)
 * You can create 'sandbox' sub pages on your user page for this purpose. These are ordinary sub pages that are usually used for testing and development of other pages. I myself have used them myself for the development of other pages, specifically the main Wikijunior Bugs page. This method is perfcetly acceptable. Urbane User (Talk)   (Contributions)  10:02, 21 January 2007 (UTC)
 * My view (similar to Urbane User) would be a time based one. Own sandbox is fine and would normally be my answer.  The only thing might be how quickly you get it done.  If others contribute not know you are working on it there could be confusion.  If that might be the case a subpage in mainspace with a pointer to "work in progress" might be useful?  Cheers -- Herby  talk thyme 10:07, 21 January 2007 (UTC)

Thanks. --AdRiley 10:10, 21 January 2007 (UTC)

Completion-o-meter
I've started to edit the Welsh language wikibook, but was wondering how the completion-o-meter can be updated on the languages bookshelf? When I have added enough, is there a review mechanism I have to submit it to? Also, this is an appeal for any welsh-speakers to come and contribute! Kijog 15:19, 23 January 2007 (UTC)


 * The completion-o-meters (also known as the "Stage template") can be updated by anybody, even yourself. At the moment, we don't have a good set of criteria for what qualfies a book for different levels of completion, so you have to use your best judgement. I would recommend that you don't give your book a status of "100%" unless you are absolutely certain that it doesnt need any additional contributions (and most books need more contributions). If you think your book is really good, and worthy of some recognition, then you can submit it to the Good Books Wikiproject, and eventually your book may end up on the list at Featured books. --Whiteknight (talk) (projects) 16:07, 23 January 2007 (UTC)
 * Thanks for your quick reponse, I think my confusion might have arose from the fact I might not have logged in when looking at the bookshelf, I couldn't edit it, could only look at the source so rushed in and thought it was a peer/admin thing. As for criteria, I suppose it's a question of how long is a piece of string - is a Wikibook ever complete?.... Kijog 19:30, 23 January 2007 (UTC)
 * That confusion is common, several new users are confused by the protection on the bookshelves. Unfortunately, it's needed because of the spam and vandalism that we get here. Good luck with your project. --Whiteknight (talk) (projects) 20:21, 23 January 2007 (UTC)

Edittools
G'day, could a superbeing type please take a look at the request at MediaWiki talk:Edittools and either comment or action? It would be just a bit easier than having to pull up the Windows character map when I need ⅓ or ⅛ (used too infrequently to remember arcane magical key manoeuvres). thanks, Webaware talk 13:40, 21 January 2007 (UTC)
 * I added those into the template for you, they should take effect nexttime the cache updates, or whatever it does. I can't see a reason not to add them. If any other admins disagree, let me know. --Whiteknight (talk) (projects) 22:20, 21 January 2007 (UTC)
 * Thanks mate, much appreciated. Webaware talk 22:21, 21 January 2007 (UTC)

help
I need help, I have a SanDisk Sansa mp3 player and I dumped my computer, now I cannot find the sever or whatever I need to transfer my music,the spot were it was before now sais remove hardware..what do I do?

Editing Wikibooks
I am a new user that just discovered wikibooks. I was reading through an ancient history book and there are many gaps in the information. Sections that the author has left out. I have studied a little bit in this area and would like to do some research and fill in some of those gaps, is there any way I could go about doing that?

Muffiner 16:16, 25 January 2007 (UTC)Doug January 25, 2007


 * G'day Muffiner, just click the link that says "edit this page", and start filling in those gaps! I'm sure that what you have to offer will be most welcome. Click on the Editing help link below the edit box, to find out how to write and format a page. You might also want to check out our policies and guidelines, to see what is and isn't acceptable. Webaware talk 06:45, 26 January 2007 (UTC)

Software configuration
It's a bit weird seeing in the block log examples like the one below:
 * 11:12, 25 January 2007 Herbythyme (Talk | contribs) blocked "193.60.223.142 (contribs)" with an expiry time of 1 day (anonymous users only, account creation disabled, autoblocker enabled) (warned vandal).

Looks too similar to Special:Ipblocklist rather than a block log. This looks a bit confusing to some people.... it should revert back to the original way it was (like in MediaWiki 1.8)

I preferred the original, which was:
 * 11:12, 25 January 2007 Herbythyme (Talk | contribs) blocked "193.60.223.142 (contribs)" with an expiry time of 1 day (warned vandal).

anyone else agree this should be changed?? --82.42.237.84 16:47, 25 January 2007 (UTC)


 * The change represents an update to the software where admins are given a large number of options when performing a block. The block log needs to make explicit mention of those options. Also, we don't have any kind of control over the source code of mediawiki, for that you need to go complain at meta. --Whiteknight (talk) (projects) 18:00, 25 January 2007 (UTC)


 * I'll leave a note at meta. I just thought it looked too confusing! --82.42.237.84 18:09, 25 January 2007 (UTC)

On another software configuration note, Wikipedia now has a javascript trick in Common.js that allows editors to manipulate the way a page title is displayed. If you have javascript, try E (mathematical constant). This would be great for us. Any chance we could get something like this? --Brian Brondel 21:33, 25 January 2007 (UTC)

copy feature
(talk) started a discussion to implement a "copy" feature, where we can request to copy text together with its history to another page with a different name. man, it would be great to have that tool. you could use some elements as starting points and go from there without reinventing the wheel. how far did this proposal go?

if this is not available, i would like to request a forking of Biological basis of behavior so i can tailor it to the animal behavior book, this fork should be called Animal Behavior/Neuroscience. i had proposed it about 2 weeks back on both books - with no objections. your help is greatly appreciated. Robert Huber 12:21, 27 January 2007 (UTC)


 * OK, I made a copy following the old (pre-import) transwiki protocol. If we get the import stuff enabled at a later date, we can duplicate the history after the fact (feel free to modify it now). -- SB_Johnny | talk 14:41, 29 January 2007 (UTC)

Wikitables
I'm looking add some format to the table of contents of the Welsh wikibook. I can use a simple 'wikitable' but could anyone point me in the right direction to a 'How to' guide for tables so I can find out the correct syntax for more complex stuff such as borders, alignment etc.? Kijog 17:09, 27 January 2007 (UTC)
 * G'day, your best bet for wikitable syntax is m:Help:Table. However, if you want to play with stuff like custom borders, you'll need to know some CSS. Take a look at what I did with the logic truth tables here. Drop me a line on my talk page if you need a hand. Webaware talk 23:45, 27 January 2007 (UTC)

Bot needed for printouts...
I'm wondering if any of our local scripting gurus could help me come up with a bot for making semi-automated author lists using edit counts. I'd also like to know how to make some slight modifications to the css (or maybe js?) to hide links to the parent directory and categories, since those aren't useful in print versions.

See User:SBJohnny/Print version thinksheet for details... the boldface stuff is what I need help with. -- SB_Johnny | talk 17:45, 28 January 2007 (UTC)


 * I'll take a look at it. It sounds like the kind of thing that I could probably take care of, especially considering all the massive amounts of wiki-related source code that I have lying around on my computer. --Whiteknight (talk) (projects) 23:05, 28 January 2007 (UTC)