Wikibooks:Reading room/Archives/2012/March

Good point people for WikiBooks to help new editors from Wikipedia?
Hi everyone. I'm looking to gather 1-3 contacts for WikiBooks who would be interested in serving as point people for new editors from Wikipedia. I don't expect that it'll be too time consuming, but, just in case we have a new editor stop by the Teahouse who expresses interest in participating in media contributions and you can be friendly and welcome them and perhaps direct them to an area that might interest them. You're welcome to respond here, or even better, on my talk page if you're interested in being added to this list. Thanks :D SarahStierch (discuss • contribs) 15:53, 1 March 2012 (UTC)

Merging many pages into one
Hello everybody, I am editing the Graph Theory book.

I'd like to know how is it possible to merge different pages, such as:
 * 1) Nodes and Edges
 * 2) Traversals and Paths
 * 3) Connectivity
 * 4) Isomorphic
 * 5) Complement graphs
 * 6) Complete graphs
 * 7) Bipartite graphs

Into the page Graph Theory\Definitions

Do you agree that it is a good thing to do?

Thanks in advance,

--vitalij (discuss • contribs) 17:40, 4 March 2012 (UTC)
 * Merging has to be done by hand by copying the content between the pages. Once the merging is complete then a history merge can be performed by an administrator to ensure the attribution to the original authors remains in place. QU TalkQu 18:09, 4 March 2012 (UTC)


 * Ok, I have copied by hand the content. Now I need an administrator for the history merge and deletion of old pages. --vitalij (discuss • contribs) 18:29, 4 March 2012 (UTC)
 * All done, thanks QU TalkQu 20:38, 4 March 2012 (UTC)

Survey invitation
The Wikimedia Foundation would like to invite you to take part in a brief survey.

With this survey, the Foundation hopes to figure out which resources Wikimedians want and need (some may require funding), and how to prioritize them. Not all Foundation programs will be on here (core operations are specifically excluded) – just resources that individual contributors or Wikimedia-affiliated organizations such as chapters might ask for.

The goal here is to identify what YOU (or groups, such as chapters or clubs) might be interested in, ranking the options by preference. We have not included on this list things like “keep the servers running”, because they’re not a responsibility of individual contributors or volunteer organizations. This survey is intended to tell us what funding priorities contributors agree and disagree on.

To read more about the survey, and to take part, please visit the survey page. You may select the language in which to take the survey with the pull-down menu at the top.

This invitation is being sent only to those projects where the survey has been translated in full or in majority into your language. It is, however, open to any contributor from any project. Please feel free to share the link with other Wikimedians and to invite their participation.

If you have any questions for me, please address them to my talk page, since I won’t be able to keep an eye at every point where I place the notice.

Thank you! Slaporte (WMF) (discuss • contribs) 22:19, 5 March 2012 (UTC)

Created new category, Freedom of speech
Created new category, for Freedom of speech. This is in conjunction with crosswiki sister project coordination at Commons:Category:Freedom of speech. Please feel free to help populate it, that'd be most appreciated. ;) Cheers, &mdash; Cirt (talk) 06:05, 17 February 2012 (UTC)
 * Category:Freedom of speech
 * If would be nice if it is sister project coordination that someone came here and discussed the purpose of the initiative and asked the community here if they wanted to get involved. As it stands it isn't clear if having that category at Wikibooks makes sense to this project or conflicts with the norms here. It also isn't clear what information would be appropriate for the category. Who / where is this coordination being discussed? Thanks QU TalkQu 07:58, 17 February 2012 (UTC)
 * I've removed a couple of the +cats - my view is that they aren't necessarily appropriate here given the category structure in use. Let's have a community discussion here first before adding any more please - thanks QU TalkQu 08:12, 17 February 2012 (UTC)
 * Thanks so much for the response and the questions! :) The purpose of the initiative is to collate and organize within categories across all Wikimedia sister sites, pages relating to the topic of Freedom of speech. This is done most easily by:

&mdash; Cirt (talk) 09:40, 17 February 2012 (UTC)
 * 1) Categorizing pages locally on each project into Category:Freedom of speech
 * 2) Listing the appropriate link to that category at Commons:Category:Freedom of speech (see the template displayed at the top right of that page)
 * 3) Assessing the need to create new pages related to the topic, locally, on each project, that would be relevant to Category:Freedom of speech.
 * Thanks. Where is the initiative being discussed / coordinated, or is it your own personal project? QU TalkQu 11:46, 17 February 2012 (UTC)
 * In addition to QU's well-chosen questions, I'll add a comment about Wikibooks. Our categorization system here doesn't work the same way as on (in my experience) most sisters.  Our categories treat books as a whole, and those that don't simply identify all the pages associated with a book, are mostly intended to be subordinate to our subjects; see also Using Wikibooks/Subjects, Categories, and Classifications.  (The subordination of categories to subjects is something we're still fighting the wiki software on, just as Wikinews continually combats the encyclopedic bent of the wiki software for its news purposes.)
 * Although it's possible a subject might be useful to you here, it's also possible what you want is something we don't really have here atm, but that I've long had in mind to attempt &mdash; keywords/tags. (I actually roughed out how to make that happen, but as you may be aware I'm pouring all the software-development time I have these days into Wikinews.)  --Pi zero (discuss • contribs) 13:36, 17 February 2012 (UTC)
 * It's just started, but discussion and coordination can take place at Commons:Category talk:Freedom of speech. I think it's also very useful locally for this project, here, to have categorization on this particular subject of Freedom of speech, within various books, to see which different books are analyzing the subject, and how so. :) &mdash; Cirt (talk) 17:29, 17 February 2012 (UTC)
 * How various books analyze a subject is outside the scope of Wikibooks and could also be considered original research. --dark lama  13:42, 8 March 2012 (UTC)

Hit counters again
Hi there,

I maintain the A-Level Computing wikibook and I'm looking to raise a little funding to get some more text books made. One of the areas I'm lacking information in is around how popular my work has been so far. Ideally I'd like to throw some usage figures at them but I realise that this is currently difficult in wikibooks. Is there any way that I could embed some javascript to use an external hit counter such as google analytics (I know this might not be in the spirit of wikibooks)?

Pluke (discuss • contribs) 11:01, 18 February 2012 (UTC)


 * In fact, it's not in the spirit of the Wikimedia Foundation. While we could get away with it without anyone noticing, it's a strict violation of the Foundation's privacy policy and has been shot down hard when I saw someone try to implement it on Commons.  – Adrignola discuss 15:11, 18 February 2012 (UTC)


 * Fair enough.  It's just a shame you can't have a report of most popular books or pages.  I'm not really interested in the location data, browser version etc, just the raw hits. Pluke (discuss • contribs) 11:12, 19 February 2012 (UTC)


 * It should be possible to get something like most popular books or pages without requiring that a click by the user initiate an off-site action. Wikinews has a most-popular-articles template that's updated once an hour by a bot, for example; viewing that template is a purely on-wiki activity, so by my understanding it is not a privacy violation.  --Pi zero (discuss • contribs) 12:09, 19 February 2012 (UTC)


 * I read it's something to do with the squid servers serving cached versions of the pages, not allowing the mediawiki counter plugin to function correctly. I wonder how wikinews got around this and could we implement what they use here? Pluke (discuss • contribs) 13:58, 19 February 2012 (UTC)


 * I'll inquire more closely into it at the next opportunity, and report back. :-) --Pi zero (discuss • contribs) 14:37, 19 February 2012 (UTC)
 * I followed some links on Wikinews and came across via the  page. --ЗAНИA [[Image:Flag_of_Italy.svg|15px]]talk 23:43, 22 February 2012 (UTC)


 * I take it that wikibooks is using a script on those files or the live database, can we steal it? Pluke (discuss • contribs) 16:36, 13 March 2012 (UTC)
 * Wikinews is using a script that takes those stats from dumps.wikimedia.org and generates a top ten list, The script is really crappy and lives on the toolserver (see n:User:Bawolff bot). The raw counts from dumps.wikimedia.org also powers tools like http://stats.grok.se/en.b/201203/A-level_Computing/AQA which may be of interest to you guys. Bawolff (discuss • contribs) 00:17, 14 March 2012 (UTC)

bigs not rendering correctly in template
Hi,

I had this working a few months back, but it seems to have broken:

To make it a little more manageable I created some templates so I could globally update the heading1 and 2 tags:

replacing the bigs with style=font-size info.

This seems to get around it but any idea what happened? Pluke (discuss • contribs) 14:30, 19 February 2012 (UTC)


 * My understanding is MediaWiki is moving towards HTML5 compliance. HTML4 deprecated many style tags like big, small, b, and i. HTML5 drops those deprecated tags completely. In other words, all those tags will need to be replaced with CSS style attributes to continue to function. Wikibooks was updated to 1.19 today I think. I expect this will be one in a long line of things we will need to fix/address. --dark lama  15:41, 19 February 2012 (UTC)
 * Which might explain some of the minor problems I've been having as well, oh well QU TalkQu 18:06, 19 February 2012 (UTC)
 * Note, while its true we're moving to html5, we're not planning to break backwards compatibility with presentational tags used in wikitext any time soon. If something like that stopped working during the upgrade to 1.19, it would be considered a bug. Bawolff (discuss • contribs) 00:22, 14 March 2012 (UTC)

Templates not working
Hi There,

I'm trying to build a college level wikibook catering for several programming languages. The idea is that a teacher could then choose to print off a python, vb.net, pascal or java version of the book. To do this I've decided to write some templates when I can wrap up any code examples. Then hide the templates not needed when I come to printing the book. The templates I've made are:


 * Template:CPTCodeVB -

However, when I try to use it, the second tag breaks

dim this as integer

I want it to look like: Any idea why this is? Pluke (discuss • contribs) 16:28, 13 March 2012 (UTC)


 * Only a general observation. <tt>syntaxhighlight</tt> isn't really an html tag.  Html tags aren't processed until after template expansion, consequently templates can generate html tags in a rather free-form way.  However, tags like <tt>syntaxhightlight</tt> are actually syntax invoking mediawiki extensions, and consequently they don't play well with templates.  (See mw:Extension:SyntaxHighlight GeSHi.)  Some problems of this kind have workarounds, if one can figure out what the workaround is; for example, a different problem with <tt>DynamicPageList</tt> tags versus templates can be worked around using a technique... that I know of only because I've seen it done, and having seen it I've been able to imitate it for use elsewhere.  --Pi zero (discuss • contribs) 18:37, 13 March 2012 (UTC)


 * I tried some ideas, but none seem to make a difference. Looks like splitting the code across two separate templates might not be possible. --<span style="font: bold 10pt 'courier new', comic, sans, ms;"><font color="midnightblue">dark lama  19:30, 13 March 2012 (UTC)


 * I'd noticed you were trying some of the same things I'd been wondering if might work. And since it didn't work out for you I've tried a few experiments, also without luck.  Oddly, the code I tired last actually works when viewed through Special:ExpandTemplates, but not when actually put on a page.  --Pi zero (discuss • contribs) 22:52, 13 March 2012 (UTC)


 * Update: We're pretty sure at this point, there's no way to split the start and end between two templates.  The anomaly of things that work in Special:ExpandTemplates, but don't work when actually deployed on a page, occurs because Special:ExpandTemplates actually runs the preprocessor twice.  So you can either use the explicit syntaxhighlight tags without indirection via templates, or you can have a single template with the code as a parameter; sending the code in as a parameter might be bothersome, if the code has any pipe characters or double-braces in it.  --Pi zero (discuss • contribs) 04:20, 14 March 2012 (UTC)

Geography of France
I am new to WikiBooks, and I was thinking of starting a book about the Geography of France. I searched for a couple of variations of that title, and could not find any books related to that, but I am worried that I might be duplicating an existing topic. I'm going to start the book anyway, but if this topic is already covered please stop me before I get to far! Thanks, Liam987 ( talk ) 08:37, 17 March 2012 (UTC)


 * I think you are okay. If you search Subject:Geography you'll find all the material that's likely to cover this field. Even if you are duplicating a book that's not a problem here although if there was an existing book it might be an idea to extend that one but some people prefer to start a new one. <font color="#E66C2C">QU <font color="#306754">TalkQu 10:42, 17 March 2012 (UTC)

Class Project
I'm having trouble getting my students to create log in accounts. The system said we were creating too many accounts from the same IP address. Is there a way to work around this? --EconTeacherMaryB (discuss • contribs) 16:26, 19 March 2012 (UTC)EconTeacherMaryB
 * Not easily no - this is a core feature of the Mediawiki software that prevents potential abuse and the daily rate limit is configured in the Wikibooks main settings, so can't be varied by the users of the site (including the administrators). How many accounts in total do you need to create? There is a way for an admin to create accounts for your students but whether it is feasible depends on the number involved. If there are less than, say, 50 accounts, then please send an email to info@wikibooks.org with the account name the student wants and their email address. This will keep their information safe (the email address goes to the Wikimedia Open Ticket Response System). Once logged in OTRS an OTRS agent should be able to process the requests for you (it might end up being me who does it, but I'd rather you put the request in via email as above). <font color="#E66C2C">QU <font color="#306754">TalkQu 16:34, 19 March 2012 (UTC)

New Wikimedia Shop feedback/help requested
Hey all,

Some of you may already know that we've opened a shop at http://shop.wikimedia.org to sell Wikimedia Merchandise. We're now entering our "Community Launch" allowing us to hopefully get as much feedback from the community about the store, it's products and everything else involved. For those that are interested we've set up an FAQ/information page, feedback page and design page. We also have a 10% discount up for at least the next 2 weeks (CLAUNCH or 'Wikimedia Community Launch' in the discount box at checkout) and a $10 maximum shipping fee world wide for most orders.

However the big thing I wanted to ask you about was Wikibooks gear. Right now everything on there is Wikipedia related but we want to make sure we have merch from all of the projects as well. So far we have a couple things on order:
 * Stickers from all of the projects
 * 1" buttons (or 'badges' ) from all of the projects
 * Are in the design and digital mockup phase of lapel pins for all of the projects to both go independently and as a set. Right now we're getting mockups to see how they look and to see if we want to go with the Pewter look that we have right now for the globe (this new set will have an interlocked v W for the wikipedia piece) or the full color enamel look like This Strike Command pin.

We want to have more though both soon and in the future and I wanted to know what you thought. One of my thoughts for something early on was a series similar to the I Edit Wikipedia shirts (we have two versions right now) on the shop for each project. If we did something like that should we just use Edit or adjust the verb for wikibooks? Other ideas for products? Jalexander (discuss • contribs) 00:28, 20 March 2012 (UTC)


 * "Edit" for Wikibooks seems fine to me personally. A Wikibooks bookmark might be delightfully ironic to have.  But thinking pragmatically, mugs are always a common merchandising item to have. – Adrignola discuss 14:31, 21 March 2012 (UTC)

Pending review feature
This is my first Wiki Book, I am wondering how I get the pending revision off. I made an edit to my own book and the latest version is still up. How do I move my final copy to the read button? --75.162.136.4 (discuss) 23:23, 31 March 2012 (UTC)
 * You can't. Only a reviewer can accept revisions. Someone will probably review your changes soon. I say that but as far as I can see you've made no edits here anyway...? <font color="#E66C2C">QU <font color="#306754">TalkQu 23:44, 31 March 2012 (UTC)

Hobbyist CNC Machining
I am building a CNC Machine. I am a beginner at this. I have found a lot of material on this subject, but it is poorly organized. I tend to create a personal "build log" of any project I start. I think that a wikibook on this subject would be useful, so I think that I should do this "build log" as a wikibook that can be generalized for and by others.

The book would have two major subdivisions: "build" and "use". The Build subdivisions would have multiple sections, one general and multiple specific, where the initial specific section is my personal experience with a specific CNC machine and other contributors may contribute their experience as separate sections using the same overall framework.

The "use" section would describe various projects that can be built using a CNC machine. These projects can be related back to specific CNC machines, either "as built" (described in this wikibook) or as available in the real world, hobbyist or professional.

So, colleagues, here is the question: is this a good idea? -Arch dude (discuss • contribs) 01:16, 29 February 2012 (UTC)
 * Well I think it is an excellent idea. If you want any advice on structuring the book, organising it, etc., please ask. My advice though is to get going in the way you suggest then other people can pitch in and help out if needed <font color="#E66C2C">QU <font color="#306754">TalkQu 14:02, 29 February 2012 (UTC)
 * OK, I will start with it linked only from my homepage until I have a decent outline. -Arch dude (discuss • contribs) 22:52, 3 March 2012 (UTC)

Add ChapNav to category Exclude in print
When A book is printed as pdf; There are two chapter navigation boxes at end of each chapter. In my opinion, they are not required. Why not add Navigation to Exclude in print Category? I guess that should solve the problem. Phanimahesh (discuss • contribs) 11:23, 29 March 2012 (UTC)
 * It should be in that category now. – Adrignola discuss 12:09, 29 March 2012 (UTC)