Wikibooks:Reading room/Archives/2011/November

Font use in template
Hi,

I'm building a book to revise A-Level Computing. I have created a template to demonstrate the web pages produced by HTML, called Webpage. It works fine until I try and throw it a as a parameter. In writing this I found the solution so I thought I best share it with you:

doesn't work due to the = and the lack of speech marks

- this version works fine Pluke (discuss • contribs) 22:14, 7 November 2011 (UTC)


 * Should also work:
 * --Pi zero (discuss • contribs) 00:57, 8 November 2011 (UTC)
 * Thanks, that's far easier Pluke (discuss • contribs) 14:31, 8 November 2011 (UTC)
 * Thanks, that's far easier Pluke (discuss • contribs) 14:31, 8 November 2011 (UTC)

Policy for Citing Sources
Would you please clarify what the wikibooks policy is for citing sources? I'm an instructor, and my online students have enjoyed posting to one of the wikibooks that applies to the discipline I teach. Their posts have been summaries of some of the topics we've covered in class in their own words. However, they've learned the material by reading the textbook for the course. Do they need to cite the textbook as a source when they post?


 * There are no requirements for citations on Wikibooks. Citations are welcomed and improve the quality of the content but if the project is intended for printing their usefulness can degrade if no further consideration is given.
 * You may wish to establish a local convention to your book if you feel a need to apply a stricter policy for contributions. Propose the policy on that book talk, discuss it in conformity with Wikibook's discussion process and apply the conclusion. --Panic (discuss • contribs) 02:13, 30 November 2011 (UTC)

Main Page
The main page has template problems, it's not showing the featured recipes properly. Instead of actual recipes it's showing 'Template:Featured recipe/'. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Hethrir (discuss • contribs) 19:36, 19 October 2011‎


 * This is not happening. I wonder if it could be a Browser issue.  As a first step I would try a hard reload of the page, Some description of how to do this for various browsers is at w:Wikipedia:Bypass your cache.  Does that clear up the problem? Thenub314 (talk) 19:45, 19 October 2011 (UTC)


 * It is also happening for me.  I'm using Opera, version 11.51.  Hadn't noticed this problem before but then again I rarely visit the main page.--ЗAНИA [[Image:Flag_of_Italy.svg|15px]]talk 19:48, 19 October 2011 (UTC)


 * Also if I click on the link that says "Template:Featured recipe.." I am taken to the standard "this page does not exist" page. Tried clearing / bypassing my cache.--ЗAНИA [[Image:Flag_of_Italy.svg|15px]]talk 19:50, 19 October 2011 (UTC)


 * The main page problem happened for me, so I purged the page and the problem went away (for me, of course). --Pi zero (discuss • contribs) 19:52, 19 October 2011 (UTC)


 * It's working now. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Hethrir (discuss • contribs) 20:00, 19 October 2011‎


 * Same here. Was about to re-purge but didn't need to.--ЗAНИA [[Image:Flag_of_Italy.svg|15px]]talk 21:20, 19 October 2011 (UTC)


 * Refresh = client side.
 * Purge = server side. --Pi zero (discuss • contribs) 23:17, 19 October 2011 (UTC)


 * A topic finally worthy of Talk:Main Page rather than the usual vandalism on that page, and it was posted here. Sad. – Adrignola discuss 00:06, 20 October 2011 (UTC)

I'm looking at the same problem again. Presumably a purge will fix it, temporarily, but the question is what's causing it. --Pi zero (discuss • contribs) 19:29, 22 October 2011 (UTC)
 * Another citing of this bug. I purged it went away... but I still have no idea.  Is it always the recipes that have this problem? Thenub314 (talk) 02:49, 1 November 2011 (UTC)
 * I think I figured out what may be the problem. Checking out the templates, Template:Random number had a recent update at en.wiki that resolved an issue where it returned −1.  Expected values are 0 through the maximum integer specified, so the code used for the main page always adds 1.  If the random number returned was a −1 and then 1 was added to get 0, then no value would be chosen from the list of recipes and nothing would be appended to Template:Featured recipe/ for proper transclusion.  This is why it was not always showing up and why it went away upon purge (since another random value was chosen). – Adrignola discuss 13:53, 1 November 2011 (UTC)

Class project marking template?
I have had students creating a wikibook on Exercise as it relates to Disease, as part of the assessment I am getting students to do some of the assessment on the peers work. I was hoping I could use a template to do this online, on the pages concerned, similar to what can be seen on the right-hand side of this wikiversity page: http://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/User:Rhiannon_Stephens/The_Effect_of_Animal_Cruelty_Allegations_in_Sport

I don't have the expertise to create a template but was hoping someone may be able to help me out, which may be useful for other class projects. Specifically, I wanted to do the following:

Fact sheet has: A title: No = 0 marks, Yes = 1 mark. Provides background information: No = 0 marks, Yes = 1 mark. Fits on an A4 page (double-sided when print to PDF): No = 0 marks, Yes = 1 mark. Links physical activity with a health condition(s): No = 0 marks, Yes = 1 mark. All claims are supported by acceptable evidence (source material identified - e.g. peer reviewed research (primary) for content claims, source identified for quotes etc): No = 0 marks, Yes = 2 marks. Identifies further reading: No = 0 marks, Yes = 1 mark. Provides recommendations: No = 0 marks, Yes = 2 mark. TOTAL of 10 marks

Thanks --Benrattray (discuss • contribs) 23:42, 2 November 2011 (UTC)


 * Found something on wikiversity, am developing it now.

--Benrattray (discuss • contribs) 00:51, 4 November 2011 (UTC)

Does Wikibooks really have no completed books?
A family member told me today that Wikibooks is useless because it doesn't yet have any books. I was surprised and said "show me". Sure enough if you go to books on Science or Computing it has a blank under "Completed books". In many of the other categories of book this is also the case even though there are numerous completed books. RobinH (discuss • contribs) 19:56, 13 November 2011 (UTC)


 * Define a finished book in a media that permits continued edit, as you define it you will find projects that match that definition. I like to think that no project will ever be finished, others like to see a usable project as finished... --Panic (discuss • contribs) 19:59, 13 November 2011 (UTC)


 * Given the number of subject areas we cover, the number of completed books we have is spread out thin and so you rarely see one for a particular subject. We have 137 completed books (most of them subjectively determined by yours truly, based on whether the scope as defined by the authors was covered and whether there were any red links in the contents listing).  The breakdown can be seen at Category:Books by completion status. – Adrignola discuss 14:58, 14 November 2011 (UTC)


 * I can attest personally that the Linear Algebra text a complete usable text. But then your comment about being to find them is well taken.  I hadn't visited Subject:Mathematics in a while and I was surprised to see I didn't know anything was.  When I finally located it it was a few levels down.  Mathematics->Pure Mathematics->Algebra.  So I can see the issue.  Thenub314 (talk) 20:24, 14 November 2011 (UTC)


 * I think some of this could be resolved by including books from more specific subject areas on the more general subject pages too when there aren't enough books for people to be overwhelmed yet when looking at a more general subject page. The more specific subject pages can than act as a filter. --dark lama  22:22, 14 November 2011 (UTC)


 * A system like you see on Amazon, where you can click various filters on the left-hand side to filter results would be very nice. This also may be something that can't be supported by the software (or developers, given the effort that went into getting the DynamicPageList extension implemented).  This is a good idea, though, if it's actually possible to do. – Adrignola discuss 14:40, 15 November 2011 (UTC)

We may be able to work out a clever way of getting what we want with the tools available. The first step, though, is to understand the limitations we'd have to work around.

DPL does not support union, only intersection; and there's also a fairly small upper bound on the number of cats that can be used, I think it's around six or so. (Iirc there's a third-party variant of DPL that does support unions, so that part at least is theoretically possible, but I generally treat anything not already supported by the devs as practically impossible.)

On Wikinews, at least with the geocats (continents, countries, provinces, cities), when we add something to a subcat we always add it to all the supercats &mdash; so anything in Cat:Paris is also in Cat:France and Cat:Europe. That way, union is taken care of by membership in the ancestor cat. Unfortunately, because a parent cat is likely to have lots of children, you can't readily ask for all pages that belong to the parent but not to any of its children &mdash; and even if you could, there'd still be no way to say that a particular article relates to, say, Europe as a whole and also relates to certain particular countries within Europe.

A possibility I've considered, but that would probably require a bot to maintain it (and I know from nothing about bots), is to have a parallel hierarchy of "union cats", and instead of things in the children automatically going in the parent, they automatically go in the union-shadow (transitive closure?) of the parent. So that Cat:Europe contains only pages related to Europe as a whole, but it's also possible to ask for all pages related to either Cat:Europe or any of its descendants. One would want to think through carefully how to provide maximal functionality with the minimum number of extra cats, and of course the user interface to it all would have to hide the complexity. --Pi zero (discuss • contribs) 15:09, 15 November 2011 (UTC)


 * What I had in mind is to either include everything that is in Category:B in Category:A too when Category:B is in Category:A, or use DPL multiple times on a page to achieve the same result. --dark lama  16:43, 15 November 2011 (UTC)


 * Let's say Cat:A has subcats B1, B2, ... B9.
 * Questions:
 * Are there things that will belong to A without belonging to any of the B*?
 * If so, do we want to be able to list them (i.e., list things that are in A but not any B*)?
 * If the answer to either of these questions is "no", then it suffices to guarantee that everything belonging to any B* also belongs to A. It might still be advisable, then, to use some automated trick to guarantee that everything in the B* belongs to A &mdash; either a bot, or perhaps (and probably better) something involving templates and magic words.


 * My guess was that the answer to both questions would be "yes", and that is the scenario for which I was saying one could have a shadow category, call it Category:Closure:A, which contains everything that belongs to A or any Category:Closure:B*. It would then be essential to provide some automated means to populate the closure categories.  --Pi zero (discuss • contribs) 19:16, 15 November 2011 (UTC)
 * I think the answer is "no". I can't think of any scenario right now where a narrow subject isn't related to the broader subject. --dark lama  19:26, 15 November 2011 (UTC)
 * I'm being too abstract for my own good. I'll be more concrete.


 * Category:Pure mathematics has ten subcategories. Right now, Subject:Pure mathematics doesn't list books that belong to the subcategories.  We want it to list all books that belong to the cat or any of its descendants.


 * But, would it be desirable that, within each level of completion listed on Subject:Pure mathematics, those books that do not belong to any subcategory are listed first? --Pi zero (discuss • contribs) 20:25, 15 November 2011 (UTC)
 * I've now framed this as a proposal, at WB:Reading room/Proposals. --Pi zero (discuss • contribs) 14:58, 16 November 2011 (UTC)

An automated filter system like Amazon would be nice, but that isn't what I mean. Most subject pages are a filter for Y books with a focus on X. Like Subject:Algebra is a filter for math books with a focus on algebra. Put another way all algebra books are math books, but not all math books are algebra books. People probably expect this is be consistently true for all subject pages, but it isn't true for pages like Subject:Mathematics. I think they should be consistently true, and pages like Subject:Algebra would still be useful when people want to know from a quick glance what algebra books are available. If B and C are A, A should list B and C, and a list of B and C should be maintained too. --dark lama  16:31, 15 November 2011 (UTC)

Prosciutto spelling
There is a Cookbook recipe titled Cookbook:Pork_Tenderloin_with_Asparagus_and_Proscuitto. The correct spelling of the word is "prosciutto". I am unable to move pages, so could someone please move it to Cookbook:Pork_Tenderloin_with_Asparagus_and_Prosciutto? Cilantrohead (discuss • contribs) 11:01, 17 November 2011 (UTC)
 * You should be able to move pages, as far as I can see. (I've heard that in the vector skin, the page move control is hard to find; could that be the difficulty?)  --Pi zero (discuss • contribs) 11:56, 17 November 2011 (UTC)
 * The move option is hidden within a menu after the star in vector skin. --dark lama  12:45, 17 November 2011 (UTC)
 * Mr Zero has done the move.--ЗAНИA [[Image:Flag_of_Italy.svg|15px]]talk 22:06, 17 November 2011 (UTC)
 * I've just corrected all misspellings of the word within the recipe as well.--ЗAНИA [[Image:Flag_of_Italy.svg|15px]]talk 22:07, 17 November 2011 (UTC)

PDF Versions
I made a tool for making PDF Versions and applied it to the following Wikibooks:


 * Relationships
 * General Biology
 * General Chemistry
 * JPEG - Idea and Practice
 * General Mechanics
 * Statistics
 * This Quantum World
 * Communication Systems
 * Calculus
 * Probability
 * Java Programming

The tool is fully automated an uses the LaTeX typesetting system. It is available under an open source license and my be downloaded from.

Yours Dirk Hünniger (discuss • contribs) 09:38, 2 November 2011 (UTC)


 * Any reason to prefer this over the Collection extension, which also produces PDFs and doesn't require editors to upload new versions of PDFs every time a book is changed? – Adrignola discuss 12:57, 2 November 2011 (UTC)

Dirk Hünniger (discuss • contribs) 13:54, 2 November 2011 (UTC)
 * You got a LaTeX source file, which is extremely useful. Nearly every book or journal on math or physics is written with LaTeX. So if you take the time understand LaTeX you will understand why this is useful.
 * You can have vector graphics, which the installed generator can not do, since it uses the report lab toolkit and thus will very likely never do.

And most importantly, it looks better, like a really posh and expensive book. Dirk Hünniger (discuss • contribs) 07:27, 4 November 2011 (UTC)

Furthermore document internal links are not rendered as weblinks starting a browser when clicked, but rather as footnotes referring to chapter/section and page causing the pdf viewer to jump to the desired page when clicked. Dirk Hünniger (discuss • contribs) 14:00, 10 November 2011 (UTC)

New Books
Canadian History should be added. I would personally start it, but I am not a registered user. I propose that this book be started. As with any other Wikibook about history, I noticed they all flow chronologically, unlike school textbooks that go all over the timeline. mitchturn


 * Are you suggesting another one? --dark lama  00:02, 9 November 2011 (UTC)

I hadn't realized that one had already been made, thanks! mitchturn