Wikibooks:Reading room/Archives/2012/July

Naming convention for contributors' pages
Hi, I'm wondering if there is any convention currently used in projects for those internal pages/categories that are just meant for contributors. For example, at Ada Programming we have used talk pages to avoid polluting the wikibook chapters with that kind of pages: This has the disadvantage that forced to place the "actual" discussion pages to other talk pages: Categories are different, and some categories internal to the wikibook are mixed with categories intended for readers. For example, category:Ada Programming/Maintenance has nothing to do with software maintenance as many readers would think, but with the maintenance of the wikibook itself. And category:Ada Programming/Templates has nothing to do with "Ada generic programming" but with the specific wikibook templates. We are planning to rename those internal categories so they are clearly separated from the actual contents of the wikibook.
 * Talk:Ada Programming/Contributing
 * Talk:Ada Programming/Contributing/Discussion
 * Talk:Ada Programming
 * Talk:Ada Programming/Contributors lounge

If other wikibooks are not following any convention to overcome these problems, we propose different conventions:
 * 1) Move all those pages to subpages within the "Wikibook" chapter at each book, e.g. to Ada Programming/Wikibook/Contributing, Talk:Ada Programming/Wikibook/Contributing, category:Ada Programming/Wikibook/Templates
 * 2) Same approach as #1, but use the pseudo-namespace "Wikibook:" for similarity with the "Wikibooks:" namespace (but in singular form, it's just for a wikibook), e.g. to Ada Programming/Wikibook:Contributing, Talk:Ada Programming/Wikibook:Contributing, category:Ada Programming/Wikibook:Templates
 * 3) Move all these pages and categories to the actual "Wikibooks:" namespace, one subpage per project, e.g. to Ada Programming/Contributing, Wikibooks talk:Ada Programming/Contributing, category:Wikibooks/Ada Programming/Templates

I personally prefer the first or the second naming convention, but other options and new opinions are very welcome before we perform the changes in this wikibook! Thank you. &mdash;surueña 14:16, 30 June 2012 (UTC)


 * There are interlocking automated mechanisms on Wikibooks that cooperatively use the name Category:Book Name/Templates. Such categories are all gathered together in (automatically populated) Category:Book-specific templates.  At this moment, there are 329 of 'em.


 * Tbh, it doesn't make sense to me to undertake massive work to produce longer, unwieldy category names across about ten percent of the books on the project merely because a few books want nonstandard names for their template categories due to ambiguity caused by the interaction of the topic of the book with the standard names. If a book is about history, say, it seems unlikely anyone would mistake what the subcategory called "Templates" is for; nor am I familiar with any situation in which such subcategory names are looked at much, diminishing the importance of overriding the standard name in particular cases.  At any rate, if it is really necessarily to use a nonstandard name for the templates category for one particular book, well, such special cases can be manually arranged, at some cost in uniformity of project-wide administration.  --Pi zero (discuss • contribs) 17:16, 30 June 2012 (UTC)


 * You could create Category:Ada Programming/Contributing for all pages meant for contributors. Category:Ada Programming/Templates and Category:Ada Programming/Maintenance can then be placed in the Contributing category. A notice can be placed at the top of /Templates pointing to Ada Programming/Generics for readers that might be looking for information about generic programming.
 * You could create an Ada WikiProject at WikiProject Ada for coordinating collaboration across all Ada books that exist now and may be created in the future, making the project independent of a specific book in the process. See Category:WikiProjects. --dark lama  21:16, 30 June 2012 (UTC)


 * Thank you very much for your help, certainly those approaches were better than our original proposals (and much less work!). So finally we've:
 * created new category:Ada Programming/Wikibook to organize the internal templates and maintenance categories, instead of being placed into the main category:Ada Programming
 * Talk:Ada Programming/Contributing moved to WikiProject Ada
 * Talk:Ada Programming/Contributors lounge moved to Wikibooks talk:WikiProject Ada
 * Cheers &mdash;surueña 19:43, 3 July 2012 (UTC)

Ask me to edit!
Hey everyone, just introducing myself to the Wikibooks community. I can edit pages that fall into the categories listed below;


 * 1) Korean language: Hangul, Beginner, Second level beginner.


 * 1) Using Excel: Formulas, logging data.


 * 1) Mathematics: You'll have to request what the page topic is about for me to tell you whether or not I can do it.

If you would like anything else to be edited then ask me and I'll state if I can do it or not. These are the ones that I'll be much more likely to complete quicker!

So, that's it.

Bye! Mairi101 (discuss • contribs) 20:55, 4 July 2012 (UTC)


 * You could try looking into pages on the Category:Wikibooks maintenance and see if you can manage some of that pending work. --Panic (discuss • contribs) 21:47, 4 July 2012 (UTC)

Downloading
I'm new to Wikibooks so forgive me if my question does not appear on the correct forum. I would like to know the following: Can books be downloaded from this site? (Law student (discuss • contribs) 09:41, 11 July 2012 (UTC))
 * Yes they can. In the sidebar menu in the section "print/export" is an option to download as a PDF. You should see this link when you are on the main page of any book. QU TalkQu 13:27, 11 July 2012 (UTC)

Help decide about more than $10 million of Wikimedia donations in the coming year
(Apologies if this message isn't in your language. Please consider translating it)

Hi,

As many of you are aware, the Wikimedia Board of Trustees recently initiated important changes in the way that money is being distributed within the Wikimedia movement. As part of this, a new community-led "Funds Dissemination Committee" (FDC) is currently being set up. Already in 2012-13, its recommendations will guide the decisions about the distribution of over 10 million US dollars among the Foundation, chapters and other eligible entities.

Now, seven capable, knowledgeable and trustworthy community members are sought to volunteer on the initial Funds Dissemination Committee. It is expected to take up its work in September. In addition, a community member is sought to be the Ombudsperson for the FDC process. If you are interested in joining the committee, read the call for volunteers. Nominations are planned to close on August 15.

--Anasuya Sengupta, Director of Global Learning and Grantmaking, Wikimedia Foundation 20:00, 19 July 2012 (UTC)

Distributed via Global message delivery. (Wrong page? Fix here.)

Q. about removing categories
A dumb question perhaps, but Categories doesn't seem to mention how I go about deleting a category that I created and subsequently decided not to use. I could detach it from the category tree, but then it would be sitting out there unused. Do those floating categories get automatically captured and cleaned up? Thank you. Regards, RJHall (discuss • contribs) 15:21, 27 July 2012 (UTC)
 * Edit the category to add and an admin will delete it QU TalkQu 16:37, 27 July 2012 (UTC)
 * Thanks!!! Regards, RJHall (discuss • contribs) 22:38, 27 July 2012 (UTC)

Thematic categories
I would like to add into the first paragraph of Categories: ''4. Categories draws some thematic lists, gathering all the pages from different books which are treating a topic.''

This system is already practiced here with he categories, but not with the pages. While on the other wikis it's done, for example please see fr:Catégorie:Alphabets: the around 30 different alphabets can be checked alphabetically in one second, to study particularly them, place some interwiki links or choose between the Wikiversity content which can be redundant, or even find some doubles, as I did yesterday when I created Category:Alphabets with around 70 pages (seeing Bahasa Indonesia I've created Bahasa Indonesia/Phonology and Alphabet but it would deserve a merging).

As I didn't find [//en.wikibooks.org/w/index.php?title=Special%3ASearch&profile=advanced&search=categories+-deletion&fulltext=Search&ns4=1&redirs=1&profile=advanced this debate at a glance], please see a summary of User talk:JackPotte here:
 * 1) Two years ago I've found exactly 22 pages explaining the colors vocabulary (eg: Romanian/Numbers and colors, Spanish/Vocabulary/Colors, Portuguese/Contents/Colors). But Adrignola reverted me because it wasn't in our local policy (whereas it's in the global one).
 * 2) Yesterday QuiteUnusual invited me to explicit this concept, saying that it's quite unusual to refer to some other books in the middle of one, so he suggested to put their summary pages instead. But personally I don't consider categories as a link, even more if we put __HIDDENCAT__ inside.

In conclusion I can ensure that it would be more coherent to avoid to forbid the pages in the thematic categories because this exception is difficult to preview coming from the sister projects, and to treat them as the maintenance categories (eg: Category:Chapter stubs). JackPotte (discuss • contribs) 07:47, 27 July 2012 (UTC)


 * I think a linguistic book for studying the vocabulary of many languages is a good way to go. English Wikibooks uses categories for thematic lists for all books which treat a topic. A page's treatment of a topic depends entirely on a book's context. I think a list of pages from various books which treat a topic is outside the intended scope of Wikibooks, because it is a form of synthesis research that involves the equivalent of creating a work whose purpose is to quote other works or cite the specific page numbers for books that mention a specific topic (similar in purpose to Dominant group). I think one of the purposes of Wikiversity is to list various resources available elsewhere on a topic that people can use to study a topic, which is where a list of pages from all books that mention a topic is more likely to be appropriate. --dark lama  00:47, 29 July 2012 (UTC)