Wikibooks:Reading room/Archives/2013/November

Monitoring book talk pages
Hello,

Without centralized notifications of edits to book talk pages it is very easy for reader comments to go unnoticed for months, or even years. The only workaround to that problem I can picture is using "Related changes" on either a category of talk pages or a "main-talk" page which mirrors the structure of the entry page of the book. Is there any easier or at least less fragile alternative? Duplode (discuss • contribs) 20:17, 27 October 2013 (UTC)


 * We've long wished the wiki software would support watching an entire book. I had an idea on that, once upon a time, that I thought would be valuable for all sisters including Wikipedia (and would therefore stand a non-zero chance of ever happening &mdash; since things that don't benefit Wikipedia don't get done).  The idea was, one identifies certain pages as having special watch status; for discussion, let's call it "prefix watch".  When you put a page on prefix watch, at that moment it and all of its descendants at that time are put on your watchlist.  Then, in the future, whenever a descendant of that page is created, it automatically goes on your watchlist.  You can remove these pages from your watchlist, individually; it's just that all the ones that exist when you first prefix-watch the page, and all the ones created while you're prefix-watching it, are watched until and unless you individually unwatch them.


 * I'm not nearly familiar-enough with the political process to try to make it happen, though. (Well, except I do know someone I could ask...)  My experience of politics at that level consists of giving up completely on ever getting anyone to do anything, and going off and spending about two years, now, developing a major set of tools for Wikinews entirely outside the process (using javascript).  --Pi zero (discuss • contribs) 13:15, 28 October 2013 (UTC)


 * Wikidata managed to get a lot of stuff developed for them, but then again it was a major project with significant benefits to Wikipedia. Getting even simple tools developed to support some highly visible problems (e.g., crosswiki spam) has been really difficult albeit some slow progress has been made on things like the global abuse filter. I'd hold out no hope of getting a book specific tool developed until such time as Wikipedia finds a need for it. QuiteUnusual (discuss • contribs) 13:53, 28 October 2013 (UTC)


 * One could argue this would be of benefit to Wikipedia, since they use hierarchical structure for administrative stuff like nominations (privs, deletions, whatever); one could prefix-watch a whole class of discussions, and then selectively unwatch the ones one wasn't interested in. --Pi zero (discuss • contribs) 21:07, 28 October 2013 (UTC)


 * Smart watchlists in the way you describe would be useful for a host of purposes. Another scenario in which that would make a lot of sense are WikiProjects. Speaking of Wikipedia, I just found w:Help:Public watchlist, which is depressingly similar to our present discussion. Duplode (discuss • contribs) 03:01, 29 October 2013 (UTC)


 * Couldn't one get a list of all current pages of a book via and then paste that into the raw watchlist without too much hassle? I assume the talk pages are automatically watched with their corresponding book pages? --Martin Kraus (discuss • contribs) 19:08, 28 October 2013 (UTC)


 * Yes, one could do that. I've done that once or twice.  It's not too much of a hassle, but it is a hassle; another drawback is, it doesn't cover the creation of new pages in the book.  --Pi zero (discuss • contribs) 21:07, 28 October 2013 (UTC)


 * AllPages is a nice suggestion; it will help a lot with setting up any of the workarounds. Thanks! Duplode (discuss • contribs) 03:13, 29 October 2013 (UTC)


 * As of a few hours ago, there is a related experimental wiki extension (no, not exactly what I described above). Since that's in the realm of proposals rather than technical assistance, I've started a new thread for it in the proposals reading room, here.  --Pi zero (discuss • contribs) 20:48, 1 November 2013 (UTC)

Introducting Beta Features
(Apologies for writing in English. Please translate if necessary)

We would like to let you know about Beta Features, a new program from the Wikimedia Foundation that lets you try out new features before they are released for everyone.

Think of it as a digital laboratory where community members can preview upcoming software and give feedback to help improve them. This special preference page lets designers and engineers experiment with new features on a broad scale, but in a way that's not disruptive.

Beta Features is now ready for testing on MediaWiki.org. It will also be released on Wikimedia Commons and MetaWiki this Thursday, 7 November. Based on test results, the plan is to release it on all wikis worldwide on 21 November, 2013.

Here are the first features you can test this week:
 * Media Viewer — view images in large size or full screen
 * VisualEditor Formulæ (for wikis with VisualEditor) — edit algebra or equations on your pages
 * Typography Refresh — make text more readable (coming Thursday)

Would you like to try out Beta Features now? After you log in on MediaWiki.org, a small 'Beta' link will appear next to your 'Preferences'. Click on it to see features you can test, check the ones you want, then click 'Save'. Learn more on the Beta Features page.

After you've tested Beta Features, please let the developers know what you think on this discussion page -- or report any bugs here on Bugzilla. You're also welcome to join this IRC office hours chat on Friday, 8 November at 18:30 UTC.

Beta Features was developed by the Wikimedia Foundation's Design, Multimedia and VisualEditor teams. Along with other developers, they will be adding new features to this experimental program every few weeks. They are very grateful to all the community members who helped create this project — and look forward to many more productive collaborations in the future.

Enjoy, and don't forget to let developers know what you think! Keegan (WMF) (talk) 19:47, 5 November 2013 (UTC)
 * Distributed via Global message delivery (wrong page? Correct it here), 19:47, 5 November 2013 (UTC)

Twinkle not working
Just tried installing Twinkle, but the Twinkle rollback button didn't work. Is this a known error? --Jakob (Scream about the things I've broken) 19:21, 8 November 2013 (UTC)

Twinkle not working
I tried installing Twinkle, but none of the rollback buttons work. --Jakob (Scream about the things I've broken) 02:06, 9 November 2013 (UTC)

LaTeX Export
 —Preceding unsigned comment added by 5.147.70.36 (discuss • contribs) 15:49, 1 March 2013

Open source PDF creation of Wikibooks using LaTeX is now part of the current release of Ubuntu. See for details. Binaries for Windows are also available. See  --Dirk Hünniger (discuss • contribs) 13:44, 3 November 2013 (UTC)

I put it online on a server

http://mediawiki2latex.mooo.com/

--Dirk Hünniger (discuss • contribs) 16:10, 18 November 2013 (UTC)

Literate programming with Wikibooks?
… While I do not entirely believe in the literate programming cause, it seems like an apt approach in certain cases, which makes me wonder if anyone has tried it on Wikibooks (or perhaps the other Wikimedia projects, of which Wikiversity seems like the only other sensible choice for such a kind of work)?

Essentially, literate programming means that instead of writing a program as a description and instruction for a computer to follow, one writes such a description in a natural language, with the code for computer embedded in the text. A separate program (which could be external to the MediaWiki engine) is then used to extract the code and present it as one or more source code files.

While I would hesitate to use literate programming for most of the software I work on, it seems particularly useful for writing guides for the software which follow the code as configuration approach (such as GNU Emacs, for instance), allowing for such a guide, or selected parts thereof, to be instantly “converted” into a configuration file for the reader.

— Ivan Shmakov (d ▞ c) 07:47, 20 November 2013 (UTC)


 * When I finally get my interactivity tools working on Wikinews, and have some experience using them to build cool stuff like an article wizard, I've had in mind to propose introducing those tools here. Because building a book is a task requiring expertise &mdash; in fact, building any one particular book is an expert task that may differ somewhat from the task of building any other book.  Wikibooks isn't just one project; it's really hundreds of projects, each of them very very small, and all banding together for common cause.  With, in effect, another small project concerned with administrating the collection of them as a whole.  (My understanding of how to successfully conduct a small project &mdash;understanding which I apply day-to-day at Wikinews&mdash; comes in part from what I've learned by watching indivudal books at Wikibooks; because most individual books at Wikibooks are projects so small that they make Wikinews look enormous.)


 * One has to be careful, when introducing tools on top of existing infrastructure, not to make it harder to work without the tools. I've seen this already, for example, with the translation mechanism on Meta:  I actually found an error on a page, and tried to fix it, and was able to fix it for every language except English; I was prevented from fixing the English version because on one hand I was told it was a translation, and on the other hand when I tried to treat it as a translation I was told I wasn't allowed to do so because I couldn't translate from English into English.  --Pi zero (discuss • contribs) 14:52, 20 November 2013 (UTC)

Color coding of user contributions
I couldn't find any documentation on Wikibooks for the yellow/blue/green/etc. color-coding of user contributions, but I found this guide on the "Help:Extension:FlaggedRevs" page. I'd like to add that information to Help:Tracking changes, but an inline comment on the FlaggedRevs page says "Found these colors on www.mediawiki.org, and guessed the respective meanings based on a user's contribution list. Don't know if they are the extension's default or a custom version of them specific of that site." - so I don't know if those are the real meanings for the colors. It would be great to figure that out and document these in the right place. Dreamyshade (discuss • contribs) 07:46, 28 November 2013 (UTC)


 * Yes the colors should be correct or at least there was no discussion regarding changing them from the default. I see no trouble in having the information mentioned but note that on Wikibooks we only see a subset of the color due to our specific use of what the extension permits in any case a simple link to the extension should suffice. --Panic (discuss • contribs) 02:46, 30 November 2013 (UTC)