Wikibooks:Reading room/Archives/2012/October

Can I actually use this content...
Hi,

I am brand new to wikibooks and was just wondering if I can actually use the content found here and in the books to build my website if I attribute it properly and license the site appropriately? Yosef Karo (discuss • contribs) 10:04, 30 September 2012 (UTC)
 * Yes, you can QU TalkQu 09:11, 1 October 2012 (UTC)

NEW BOOK?
I was wondering if a new book should be created called "BEYOND BLENDER RENDER: A GUIDE TO THE BLENDER GAME ENGINE". I know about "NOOB TO PRO" but that is for an earlier version of Blender (2.49 I believe). This would be for 2.63 (a). Downdate (discuss • contribs) 16:36, 8 October 2012 (UTC)


 * Would this be taking the existing content of Noob to Pro and simply updating it? If so, then it might be better to simply update Noob to Pro and note any discussions that require a particular version to make use of, with Template:B3D:N2P/ForVersion.  If it'd be drastically different, there are already several books on Blender 3D, so I don't see why you couldn't begin another, should you have an inclination to see it through.  Please see Help:Contents for tips on getting started. – Adrignola discuss 04:32, 14 October 2012 (UTC)

Upcoming software changes - please report any problems
(Apologies if this message isn't in your language. Please consider translating it)

All Wikimedia wikis - including this one - will soon be upgraded with new and possibly disruptive code. This process starts today and finishes on October 24 (see the upgrade schedule & code details).

Please watch for problems with:
 * revision diffs
 * templates
 * CSS and JavaScript pages (like user scripts)
 * bots
 * PDF export
 * images, video, and sound, especially scaling sizes
 * the CologneBlue skin

If you notice any problems, please report problems at our defect tracker site. You can test for possible problems at test2.wikipedia.org and mediawiki.org, which have already been updated.

Thanks! With your help we can find problems fast and get them fixed faster.

Sumana Harihareswara, Wikimedia Foundation Engineering Community Manager (talk) 02:49, 16 October 2012 (UTC)

P.S.: For the regular, smaller MediaWiki updates every two weeks, please watch this schedule.

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

Fundraising localization: volunteers from outside the USA needed
Please translate for your local community

Hello All,

The Wikimedia Foundation's Fundraising team have begun our 'User Experience' project, with the goal of understanding the donation experience in different countries outside the USA and enhancing the localization of our donation pages. I am searching for volunteers to spend 30 minutes on a Skype chat with me, reviewing their own country's donation pages. It will be done on a 'usability' format (I will ask you to read the text and go through the donation flow) and will be asking your feedback in the meanwhile.

The only pre-requisite is for the volunteer to actually live in the country and to have access to at least one donation method that we offer for that country (mainly credit/debit card, but also real-time banking like IDEAL, E-wallets, etc...) so we can do a live test and see if the donation goes through. All volunteers will be reimbursed of the donations that eventually succeed (and they will be low amounts, like 1-2 dollars)

By helping us you are actually helping thousands of people to support our mission of free knowledge across the world. Please sing up and help us with our 'User Experience' project! :) If you are interested (or know of anyone who could be) please email ppena@wikimedia.org. All countries needed (excepting USA)!

Thanks!

Pats Pena

Global Fundraising Operations Manager, Wikimedia Foundation

Sent using Global message delivery, 16:54, 17 October 2012 (UTC)

Open textbook hacking
A few groups are doing great work producing open texts. Siyavula is building them from scratch, Saylor Foundation is doing both de novo and compilation work, combining anything freely readable online. Boundless is doing compilation work, combining freely-licensed texts.

Siyavula focuses on K-12 books for South Africa. They are amazing, but not all here on Wikibooks yet!

The Saylor Foundation is compiling college texts in a number of fields, matching the core courses needed, from existing materials that are free to use (online or in educational purposes). Again, they're not all here yet; I'm not sure they are all cc-sa compatible. See their Open Textbook Challenge.

Boundless is doing the same thing, as a for-profit that hopes to add extra services on top of OER texts in the future. They are starting a series of book hackathons to pull together existing open materials into more coherent books (say, of Light & Matter quality). cf. boundless.com

Finally, Light and Matter is the best single-author set of OER texts ever written; thanks to Ben Crowell. Who also wrote a lot of Modern Greek :) We should talk more with him about how to better support and replicate that work.

Physics textbook hackathon
A physics textbook booksprint is taking place in Boston (and online) Nov 2-4, hosted by Boundless. You can rsvp to attend in person on eventbrite. I'll be there along with some of the boston-area wikipedians and text-hackers. Perhaps we could organize online remote hacking here on wikibooks? Let me know if this sounds interesting. Or if you have subject areasd you'd like to see such a hackathon cover: the topic scope is yet to be decided. Clearly we should expand and improve on what Light and Matter already offer [again, not all entirely replicated here on WB!] Sj (discuss • contribs) 01:07, 19 October 2012 (UTC)

Information systems in the consumer industry
Hello, there's a new book Information systems in the consumer industry authored by user Fmiotto and splitted by me into multiple chapters. Any review is welcome. I am a newbie on en.wikibooks, sorry if I have done anything wrong. --LoStrangolatore (discuss • contribs) 13:22, 21 October 2012 (UTC)

Android
Hi folks. I've been contributing to the book Android for a while, adding a chapter on testing, but I'm wanting to edit some of the rest of it now, and the user user:Fishpi who seems to have started the book doesn't have a user page... so has presumably vanished. Is it acceptable protocol for me to take the book over and expand the bits that aren't mine, like Wikipedia? I'd prefer to collude with Fishpi.

I'm also confused about who's reviewing the text and setting the quality 'minimal' - makes it sound like I'm not doing a very good job. :)

SleekWeasel (discuss • contribs) 10:49, 22 October 2012 (UTC)


 * Hi!


 * Fishpi has been around moderately recently; see Special:Contributions/Fishpi.


 * To check for lurking past contributors to a book before "adopting" it for major changes, it's common to put an inquiry on the book's main talk page saying what you have in mind and asking for advice/help/etc. In this case, that would be Talk:Android.  Also, if there is a more-or-less-single author one can also inquire at their user talk page, in this case User talk:Fishpi.  Depending on how extreme the change is going to be, one might wait as much as a week before proceeding, but it really does depend on the whole context of the situation, like how "big" the change you have in mind is.  It looks like there's a related chapter, Using Wikibooks/Contributing To An Existing Wikibook, in the Featured Book Using Wikibooks.


 * Our textbooks are collaborative; so don't be shy about helping out with them, especially if what you have in mind really isn't destructive to the content or organization of what's already there. You seem to be very respectful of past contribution to the book, so I suspect you'll be fine.  --Pi zero (discuss • contribs) 13:00, 22 October 2012 (UTC)

Improving communication between your wiki and "tech people"
Hi. I'm posting this as part of my job for the WMF, where I currently work on technical communications.

As you'll probably agree, communication between Wikipedia contributors and "tech people" (primarily MediaWiki developers, but also designers and other engineers) hasn't always been ideal. In recent years, Wikimedia employees have made efforts to become more transparent, for example by writing monthly activity reports, by providing hubs listing current activities, and by maintaining "activity pages" for each significant activity. Furthermore, the yearly engineering goals for the WMF were developed publicly, and the more granular Roadmap is updated weekly.

Now, that's all well and such, but what I'd rather like to discuss is how we can better engage in true collaboration and 2-way discussion, not just reports and announcements. It's easy to post a link to a new feature that's already been implemented, and tell users "Please provide feedback!". It's much more difficult to truly collaborate every step of the way, from the early planning to deployment.

Some "big" tech projects sponsored by the WMF are lucky enough to have Oliver Keyes who can spend a lot of time discussing with editors, basically incarnating this 2-way communication channel between users and engineering staff. But Oliver can only do so much: he has to focus on a handful of features, and primarily discusses with the English Wikipedia community. We want to be able to do this for dozens of engineering projects with hundreds of wikis, in many languages, and truly collaborate to build new features together. Hiring hundreds of Community Liaisons isn't really a viable option.

There are probably things in the way we do tech stuff (e.g. new software features and deployments) that drive you insane. You probably have lots of ideas about what the ideal situation should be, and how to get there: What can the developer community (staff and volunteers) do to get there? (in the short term, medium term, long term?) What can users do to get there?

I certainly don't claim to have all the answers, and I can't do a proper job to improve things without your help. So please help me help make your lives easier, and speak up.

This is intended to be a very open discussion. Unapologetic complaining is fine; suggestions are also welcome. Stock of ponies is limited. guillom (discuss • contribs) 14:40, 23 October 2012 (UTC)


 * I would suggest having a central page that summarizes requests for the inclusion of extensions and the reasons for not including these extensions. And it would be good to have someone checking whether the reasons still apply on a periodic basis. (Twice a year or something like that.) --Martin Kraus (discuss • contribs) 20:41, 23 October 2012 (UTC)
 * That's a really nice idea, thanks for bringing this up. It's the first time I've heard this suggestion; I'll make a note of it. Do you have any other thoughts on how to facilitate dialogue between editors and developers? guillom (discuss • contribs) 12:11, 25 October 2012 (UTC)

University professor concerned about the use of plagiarism detection tools
I am a professor at a university in Washington State. My concern is how to detect plagiarism in university papers. I have discovered a clever pattern my MBA students are using to avoid detection of their use of plagiarism (such as from Wikipedia). After cobbling together content (direct and indirect quotations) from various sources, the students use a plagiarism detection tool to identify which parts of their paper need to be modified to avoid detection of lack of any attribution.

I discovered that the student used without attribution a Log Normal Probability density function on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Log-normal_distribution that has the caption: "Some log-normal density functions with identical location parameter μ but differing scale parameters."

I very much need your help in identifying the unattributed source for the following description (of the above log-normal distribution).

For example: “Figure 6, presented below, illustrates several log-normal distribution shapes as an example of how distributions can vary widely depending on the nature of the process. Looking at the highly skewed example, it is easy to see how an assumption of normality could greatly under-predict defect rates in the direction counter to the skew.”

DrBillPMP Professor bill.warner@comcast.net

DrBillPMP (discuss • contribs) 18:27, 27 October 2012 (UTC)


 * I'm not a lawyer...
 * Using content for specific articles from Wikipedia is not a clear cut copyright infringement, since encyclopedic articles do not get copyright protection, only the aggregate work (collection). It still would constitute plagiarism (claiming other people work) in some of the more complex articles (some do go beyond being simple encyclopedic articles) but it would be disputable if they have any creative content, since the objective is to report facts.
 * Note that images have their own copyright and some do require direct attribution. Tables and data collections do not have copyright protection unless they go beyond factual information and use creative content or reflect the result of some specific work (for example statistics and not absolutes, having a table without providing source information would serve no purpose).
 * In the example you provide the first part is a simple description and the second part would not constitute a copyright infringement alone. It depends on the scale of the used content from the same source that has been used to create the new work.
 * Plagiarism is not strictly linked to copyright infringement (it relates well but is not the same), most institutions have their own clear definition of what constitutes plagiarism. Plagiarism is about the morality of an action that may even not be illegal. --Panic (discuss • contribs) 20:06, 27 October 2012 (UTC)


 * This is a very useful essay on Wikipedia - Close Paraphrasing. It contains advice on how to detect plagiarism, even if the words have been changed. It isn't something that is easy to do though. However, for an expert in the field (which I presume you are) it should be relatively easy to list down the articles and sources a student is likely to have plagiarised and then use the structural tests. With a little practice you'll find before too long that you can spot a problem very quickly. Taken from that essay (attribution:

QU TalkQu 20:28, 27 October 2012 (UTC)
 * Look for disjointed and sudden changes in the tone, vocabulary, and style of content introduced by the same contributor. For example, "The cat is a small predatory carnivorous species of crepuscular mammal. Housecats like to kill mice and bats."
 * Look for redundant content; this may be a sign that two or more sources were closely paraphrased. For example, "The cat is a small predatory carnivorous species of crepuscular mammal. Like many pets, domestic cats are carnivorous."
 * Look for content that resembles content included in a quotation.
 * Examine the talk pages of major contributors and other pages where they have written in their own words, and determine if their article contributions substantially differ in tone, structure, and vocabulary from these discussions.
 * Take short phrases from the article and put them in a search engine. Take a look at the results and see if they closely resemble the article.

Problem with compiling math
I am getting "Failed to parse (Missing texvc executable" whenever I edit an equation now, at Fundamentals of Transportation/Queueing. This did not used to be a problem. Please fix. Thanks dml (discuss • contribs) 17:58, 18 October 2012 (UTC)
 * This no longer appears to be an issue. – Adrignola discuss 03:24, 30 October 2012 (UTC)