Wikibooks:Reading room/Archives/2015/April

Physics-related pending change
There's been a pending change to OCR A-Level Physics/Fields, Particles and Frontiers of Physics/Medical Physics for 24 days now, which I haven't reviewed because I have no idea wether the change is correct. The only other editor of the page (Benjamin.doe) hasn't edited for almost a year, so is there anyone else around here who has enough of an understanding of Medical Physics to tell if the change is legitimate? Liam987 talk 16:06, 24 April 2015 (UTC)
 * Nope, it is not correct and thus I've rejected it. Medical physics is not required here , a close look at the equation means that only some maths work is required to find out whether the final step is equal to the third step(as is the case with derivations).--Leaderboard (discuss • contribs) 16:14, 24 April 2015 (UTC)
 * Oh yes, I see that know. I had just looked at the changes to the code, from which I did not see that it was just simple calculus. Thanks, Leaderboard. Liam987  talk 16:25, 24 April 2015 (UTC)

Possibility of a "Sister projects" report in the Wikipedia Signpost
Hello, all I'm a volunteer at the Wikipedia Signpost, the Wikimedia movement's biggest internal newspaper. Almost all of our coverage focuses on Wikipedia, with occasional coverage of Commons, the Meta-Wiki, MediaWiki, Wikidata, the the Wikimedia Labs; we have little to nothing to say about Wiktionary, Wikiquote, Wikibooks, Wikisource, Wikispecies, Wikinews, Wikiversity, or Wikivoyage. I'm interested in writing a special long-form "sister projects" report to try and address this shortfall. Is there anyone experienced in the Wikibooks project with whom I can speak with, perhaps over Skype, about the mission, organization, history, successes, troubles, and foibles of being a contributor to this project? If so, please drop me a line at my English Wikipedia talk page. Thanks! Res Mar 21:04, 5 April 2015 (UTC)


 * Did you mean to customize this message for each project, or did you really mean to ask at multiple sisters "Is there anyone experienced in the Wikiversity project..."? --Pi zero (discuss • contribs) 23:58, 5 April 2015 (UTC)
 * I wish I had the excuse that I was tired, but no, I left the computer, went to eat lunch, came back, forgot I had to change that bit, and cross-posted. Well, I've fixed it now. Time to navigate around, again. Tut. Resident Mario (discuss • contribs) 00:27, 6 April 2015 (UTC)
 * Do you figure on getting one person to talk to about a project, or getting a broader perspective on a given project by talking to more than one person per? Obviously, talking to multiple people per project there's the challenge of rendering the material into a coherent report, while talking to just one person there's the likelihood of idiosyncracies in the interviwee's view of the project.  --Pi zero (discuss • contribs) 12:48, 6 April 2015 (UTC)
 * Because there's a lot of individual interviews that need to happen, I hope that if I get comments from one prominent contributor per wiki I can get a sufficiently clear picture of that wiki's activities from that alone, as long as the interview is of sufficient length. I do, however, want to speak with multiple people when possible, and I will post the draft here for community input before publication. Resident Mario (discuss • contribs) 02:16, 7 April 2015 (UTC)


 * Taking myself as an example, I know I have some ideas about Wikibooks that come from my peculiar personal history: I started on Wikipedia, then branched out to Wikibooks, then branched out to Wikinews, and have spent years medidating on the comarisons and contrasts between those three. If you interviewed me, it's a good bet you'd get a different impression of the elephant than speaking to some else.  I can think of at least one other active long-term Wikibookian who'd be likely to give you an atypical view.  Based on my own experiences with these projects, I expect I'd have to be active in a project for at least a year before I'd start to get a feel for it, several years for deeper insight (I got major insights into Wikipedia about once a years for several years, and even though I've slowed down at lot there, I feel I've got some further deep insights into it since).


 * I don't mean to discourage you, honestly; I'm just encouraging you to be aware of the pitfalls.


 * For mainstream insights into Wikibooks, the first name that pops into my head is QuiteUnusual, which may of course just mean I'm unaware of the peculiarities of QU's view of the project :-). I've no clue whether QU would even entertain the possibility of an interview (I imagine some folks would be happy to give an interview, some would flat-out refuse; I'm ambivalent, myself).  --Pi zero (discuss • contribs) 11:45, 7 April 2015 (UTC)
 * I have one perspective, sure, but there are others like Chazz, Jomegat, Panic, etc., who are very content focused whereas these days I'm quite administration focused. Depends what you want really. QuiteUnusual (discuss • contribs) 12:46, 7 April 2015 (UTC)
 * Perhaps one of each, then? Resident Mario (discuss • contribs) 15:24, 7 April 2015 (UTC)
 * I had no idea that such a activity even existed here. Probably a good idea I think. I could probably help here.--Leaderboard (discuss • contribs) 16:30, 7 April 2015 (UTC)
 * Ok, I will contact the people that have responded in this thread at a later date, a little buried at the moment. Thanks all! Resident Mario (discuss • contribs) 03:35, 9 April 2015 (UTC)

Wikidata
How can we make use of Wikidata here at Wikibooks? It occurred to me that all the data stored there could be used to keep books up to date. For example, property P1098 is "number of speakers" (of a language), which could be used in language learning books to keep number of speakers claims up to date. However, as far as I can tell, there is no way to access any of this data on a Wikibooks. Supposedly,  should access the data for this property stored at the Wikidata page for that item, but I tried it on Breton, which is linked to the Wikidata page for the Breton language, which has P1098, but it didn't work. Not implemented for Wikibooks yet, maybe. Even if it worked here, the #property tag only allows accessing data from the Wikidata page for the current page. So there's no way, as I understand, to access any data for the Breton language on a subpage of that book, nor is it possible to access population data for Germany on Wikijunior:Europe/Germany. This essentially negates the usefulness of any Wikidata data on Wikibooks. This really bothers me. All this useful data collected in a systematic way, but for all intents and purposes not useful for any project but Wikipedia! I don't even see it being used at Wikipedia much, except for the interlanguage links. What makes this worse, is this appears to be a software thing, not something the people at Wikidata can fix. Then there's the whole problem of the interwiki links being forced on us, and not being organised in a way that is useful to our project. The Wikimedia Foundation is notoriously unresponsive to requests from the community, so I feel we, the Wikibooks community, possibly with the other sister projects, need to get the Foundation's attention, and let them know we are annoyed that Wikidata and the Wikidata software is being implemented in such a top-down, undemocratic way, and that is sidelining other projects and is not designed in a way that benefits any of the sister projects. I'm not sure how we'd go about this, but I think it's an issue the community should discuss. Liam987 talk 00:52, 8 April 2015 (UTC)


 * Have you listened to Lila's address at last year's Wikimania? One of the earlier points &mdash; translated from politician-speak &mdash; was, the Foundation doesn't give a &lt;several choices here, of varying rudeness&gt; about the non-Wikipedian sisters.


 * Anyway, about Wikidata. I don't think I'd trust Wikidata's material to be automatically imported to Wikibooks (or any other sister, really, not even a Wikipedia), but I'm interested in the possibility of some sort of semi-automated checks against Wikidata that would make it easy to compare the current state of things here to the current state of things there, and update here for automatic use when things look right.


 * I thought Wikidata stuff was supposed to be made available through Lua? At the very least, it should be possible to get at it through javascript &mdash; but we'd want to work out a super-general tool, so we'd only have to write it once and then wouldn't have to be constantly changing it every time we want some slight variation.  The trick is to create a tool that's enormously general but also carefully limited in power so that it can't be used for large-scale vandalism (indeed, that's one of the key design blunders with Wikidata, that it doesn't minimize the consequences of vandalism).  --Pi zero (discuss • contribs) 02:50, 8 April 2015 (UTC)


 * I understood that Lua could be used for that too, but it seems not. w:Template:Wikidata has a thread on the talk page from 2013 about wether it was possible to access Wikidata data for a page other than the current one, and it was found to be impossible. Nothing seems to have changed since. I really seems such a waste to have these people collecting endless data in a way that isn't useful to anyone. Liam987  talk 02:25, 9 April 2015 (UTC)


 * I'll put "accessing Wikidata" on my list of things to add to my dialog tools. The tools &mdash; which I do mean to import to Wikibooks once I've gotten one more round of upgrades implemented (in progress) &mdash; are designed to be extensible without modifying the existing code, by creating new actions, which are wiki pages with associated javascript.  So we can write javascript for querying Wikidata, and then a dialog can send a request to the Wikidata-query action which fetches the requested data and sends the results to another dialog page for further processing.  That will be, frankly, slow; probably at least four seconds, all told, and that's when neither the server nor the internet is being sluggish; but if we arrange for Wikidata queries to be an infrequent, manually initiated maintenance action, it should be tolerable.  Eventually, once we've got the query facility working smoothly and are sure it's what we want it to be, we can integrate the Wikidata query facility into the general do action, where most dialog facilities are all kept together to avoid the time overhead of switching between actions; that should cut out two or three out of those four seconds.  --Pi zero (discuss • contribs) 14:09, 9 April 2015 (UTC)
 * There is some stuff implemented at Wikipedia that compares, for example, the date of death recorded on Wikipedia to the Wikidata equivalent and then adds the article to a hidden category if they differ. No idea how this is done (because I haven't bothered to look). QuiteUnusual (discuss • contribs) 16:26, 9 April 2015 (UTC)
 * Sounds like a good place to start for an example of how to query Wikidata. --Pi zero (discuss • contribs) 16:51, 9 April 2015 (UTC)
 * You're referring to, I think, w:Template:WikidataCheck. The problem with this is the same as I mentioned for the tag: it can only access data for the current page. If we were to create a Wikidata page for every page on Wikibooks, we could use this but the data would still have to be updated there.  Liam987  talk 22:29, 9 April 2015 (UTC)

Stewards confirmation rules
Hello, I made a proposal on Meta to change the rules for the steward confirmations. Currently consensus to remove is required for a steward to lose his status, however I think it's fairer to the community if every steward needed the consensus to keep. As this is an issue that affects all WMF wikis, I'm sending this notification to let people know & be able to participate. Best regards, -- MF-W 16:12, 10 April 2015 (UTC)

VisualEditor News #2—2015


Did you know? With Citoid in VisualEditor, you click the 'book with bookmark' icon and paste in the URL for a reliable source:



Citoid looks up the source for you and returns the citation results. Click the green "Insert" button to accept its results and add them to the article:



After inserting the citation, you can change it. Select the reference, and click the "Edit" button in the context menu to make changes.

The user guide has more information about how to use VisualEditor. Since the last newsletter, the Editing Team has fixed many bugs and worked on VisualEditor's performance, the Citoid reference service, and support for languages with complex input requirements. Status reports are posted on Mediawiki.org. The worklist for April through June is available in Phabricator.

The weekly task triage meetings continue to be open to volunteers, each Wednesday at 11:00 (noon) PDT (18:00 UTC). You do not need to attend the meeting to nominate a bug for consideration as a Q4 blocker. Instead, go to Phabricator and "associate" the Editing team's Q4 blocker project with the bug. Learn how to join the meetings and how to nominate bugs at mw:Talk:VisualEditor/Portal.

Recent improvements
VisualEditor is now substantially faster. In many cases, opening the page in VisualEditor is now faster than opening it in the wikitext editor. The new system has improved the code speed by 37% and network speed by almost 40%.

The Editing team is slowly adding auto-fill features for citations. This is currently available only at the French, Italian, and English Wikipedias. The Citoid service takes a URL or DOI for a reliable source, and returns a pre-filled, pre-formatted bibliographic citation. After creating it, you will be able to change or add information to the citation, in the same way that you edit any other pre-existing citation in VisualEditor. Support for ISBNs, PMIDs, and other identifiers is planned. Later, editors will be able to improve precision and reduce the need for manual corrections by contributing to the Citoid service's definitions for each website.

Citoid requires good TemplateData for your citation templates. If you would like to request this feature for your wiki, please post a request in the Citoid project on Phabricator. Include links to the TemplateData for the most important citation templates on your wiki.

The special character inserter has been improved, based upon feedback from active users. After this, VisualEditor was made available to all users of Wikipedias on the Phase 5 list on 30 March. This affected 53 mid-size and smaller Wikipedias, including Afrikaans, Azerbaijani, Breton, Kyrgyz, Macedonian, Mongolian, Tatar, and Welsh.

Work continues to support languages with complex requirements, such as Korean and Japanese. These languages use input method editors ("IMEs”). Recent improvements to cursoring, backspace, and delete behavior will simplify typing in VisualEditor for these users.

The design for the image selection process is now using a "masonry fit" model. Images in the search results are displayed at the same height but at variable widths, similar to bricks of different sizes in a masonry wall, or the "packed" mode in image galleries. This style helps you find the right image by making it easier to see more details in images.

You can now drag and drop categories to re-arrange their order of appearance ​on the page.

The pop-up window that appears when you click on a reference, image, link, or other element, is called the "context menu". It now displays additional useful information, such as the destination of the link or the image's filename. The team has also added an explicit "Edit" button in the context menu, which helps new editors open the tool to change the item.

Invisible templates are marked by a puzzle piece icon so they can be interacted with. Users also will be able to see and edit HTML anchors now in section headings.

Users of the TemplateData GUI editor can now set a string as an optional text for the 'deprecated' property in addition to boolean value, which lets you tell users of the template what they should do instead. (T90734)

Looking ahead
The special character inserter in VisualEditor will soon use the same special character list as the wikitext editor. Admins at each wiki will also have the option of creating a custom section for frequently used characters at the top of the list. Instructions for customizing the list will be posted at mediawiki.org.

The team is discussing a test of VisualEditor with new users at the English Wikipedia, to see whether they have met their goals of making VisualEditor suitable for those editors. The timing is unknown, but might be relatively soon. (T90666)

Let's work together

 * Share your ideas and ask questions at mw:VisualEditor/Feedback.
 * Can you translate from English into any other language? Please check this list to see whether more interface translations are needed for your language.  Contact us to get an account if you want to help!
 * The design research team wants to see how real editors work. Please sign up for their research program.
 * File requests for language-appropriate "" and "" icons for the character formatting menu in Phabricator.

Subscribe, unsubscribe or change the page where this newsletter is delivered at Meta. If you aren't reading this in your favorite language, then please help us with translations! Subscribe to the Translators mailing list or contact us directly, so that we can notify you when the next issue is ready. Thank you!

— Elitre (WMF)

19:48, 10 April 2015 (UTC)

https://wikibooks.org
Just a quick note to inform that wikibooks.org and wikibooks.com now leads to https://www.wikibooks.org. wikibooks.org/wiki/Page links would continue to redirect to English Wikibooks for backward compatibility. See T87039. Glaisher (discuss • contribs) 08:05, 11 April 2015 (UTC)

TOC in sidebar?
Wikibooks usually have a TOC and people love to navigate thru the book via this TOC. But in most cases the TOC is a page of its own. So you always have to toggle between TOC-page and your actual page (or the author adds one of the navigation-templates, which is ugly, uncomplete and error-prone). Shall we have a sidebar like in the documentation of mediawiki to visualise the TOC? Additionally to the actual sidebar or as a replacement? --Kelti (discuss • contribs) 11:45, 17 April 2015 (UTC)
 * That sort of stylistic preference varies by book. Some books have a side navigation box, for example WJ:Big Cats.  (Easily adjusting the style of such things is one of the targets I had in mind in Reading room/Proposals.)  --Pi zero (discuss • contribs) 12:22, 17 April 2015 (UTC)

Nominations are being accepted for 2015 Wikimedia Foundation elections
''This is a message from the 2015 Wikimedia Foundation Elections Committee. Translations are available.'' Greetings,

I am pleased to announce that nominations are now being accepted for the 2015 Wikimedia Foundation Elections. This year the Board and the FDC Staff are looking for a diverse set of candidates from regions and projects that are traditionally under-represented on the board and in the movement as well as candidates with experience in technology, product or finance. To this end they have published letters describing what they think is needed and, recognizing that those who know the community the best are the community themselves, the election committee is accepting nominations for community members you think should run and will reach out to those nominated to provide them with information about the job and the election process.

This year, elections are being held for the following roles:

Board of Trustees The Board of Trustees is the decision-making body that is ultimately responsible for the long term sustainability of the Foundation, so we value wide input into its selection. There are three positions being filled. More information about this role can be found at the board elections page.

Funds Dissemination Committee (FDC) The Funds Dissemination Committee (FDC) makes recommendations about how to allocate Wikimedia movement funds to eligible entities. There are five positions being filled. More information about this role can be found at the FDC elections page.

Funds Dissemination Committee (FDC) Ombud The FDC Ombud receives complaints and feedback about the FDC process, investigates complaints at the request of the Board of Trustees, and summarizes the investigations and feedback for the Board of Trustees on an annual basis. One position is being filled. More information about this role can be found at the FDC Ombudsperson elections page.

The candidacy submission phase lasts from 00:00 UTC April 20 to 23:59 UTC May 5 for the Board and from 00:00 UTCApril 20 to 23:59 UTC April 30 for the FDC and FDC Ombudsperson. This year, we are accepting both self-nominations and nominations of others. More information on this election and the nomination process can be found on the 2015 Wikimedia elections page on Meta-Wiki.

Please feel free to post a note about the election on your project's village pump. Any questions related to the election can be posted on the talk page on Meta, or sent to the election committee's mailing list, board-elections -at- wikimedia.org

On behalf of the Elections Committee, -Gregory Varnum (User:Varnent) Coordinator, 2015 Wikimedia Foundation Elections Committee

''Posted by the MediaWiki message delivery on behalf of the 2015 Wikimedia Foundation Elections Committee, 05:03, 21 April 2015 (UTC) • Translate • Get help

Mechanical work
Hello! When filling images of stamps on the Commons there is a need for a set of cross references. Perhaps, they can be divided into 3 groups: 1) galleries of versions; 2) templates of series; 3) archives and miniatures. It is purely mechanical work. With pleasure I will look after the volunteer, temporary or constant. --Matsievsky (discuss • contribs) 12:51, 29 April 2015 (UTC)

A+ Certification
Hello everyone,

I have come into a job role that includes mentoring individuals for A+ Certification, and have begun contributing to the A+ Certification wikibook as part of this. I came across the material some time ago, but the information was sparse and in a monolithic format. Given the size of the task, I'm not surpised that several people have contributed, then abandoned the book. Is it common for a large project to have just one editor for some time, or do you see that large projects eventually pick up steam?

Although I've been a registered user from quite some time, I had been hesitant to edit anything or step into the project. I doubt I would have been the saving grace of the project, but I realize that not contributing is exactly why the book is where it is right now. Just recently, I have begun to rearrange the information into a more hierarchical format centered around the exam objectives. Before I create too many pages that link back to the objectives, I was wondering if anyone had any advice about the current structure or what I can do to improve from here. SweBers (discuss • contribs) 13:01, 22 April 2015 (UTC)


 * Hi, SweBers. It's not uncommon, I think, for a book to have only one active contributor at a time.  It seems to me Wikibookians have more respect for contributors not now present, for this reason; I've got the impression Wikipedians tend to figure if somebody's not there now they don't get a say in what happens, but our project culture at Wikibooks is stronger on continuity.  We do adopt books, make major changes, etc.; we just do it with more advanced notice, more consideration.  It's happened to me twice.  I slowly got more involved in, and eventually made some significant adjustments to, the Conlang Wikibook, and later on I cautiously, with advance notice, did a major overhaul of Wikijunior:World Religions, a book that had been started years before and had just failed to spark.  With the religions book, I rewrote the list of questions to be answered for each religion, to make it easy to describe religions of very different kinds.  Since the overhaul, we now get folks coming by from time to time and adding content to one or another page, which just never used to happen because it wasn't easy enough to do; even though there's not a whole lot of activity, the book is now alive in a way it wasn't before, which I admit gives me a good feeling.  --Pi zero (discuss • contribs) 14:00, 22 April 2015 (UTC)


 * Where is the best place to ask for bot assistance? I'm not even sure if there is a bot that can do what I need.  If you look at the main list of objectives for this book, I want to make a page for each of these items, link each item to the page, and then add navigation from one page to the next, as you see at the bottom of the page.  I have been doing it by hand, so someone would have to pick it up mid-stream and finish it.  Theoretically, I would think a bot could handle this, but this is pretty specific.SweBers (discuss • contribs) 20:51, 27 April 2015 (UTC)

Geodesic Grids
Hello, everyone. I've been working on a Wikibook about geodesic grids. Geodesic grids are the way to go if you've ever wanted to put a triangular grid over the surface of a sphere. (You're in a pretty exclusive club if you have, but that's neither here nor there.)

I've reached a state where at least the basics are all there, and I'd appreciate a review from someone who knows what Wikibooks idioms I might be unwittingly violating. There are a lot of &lt;math&gt; statements too, so if you're any good at TeX, I'd appreciate another set of eyes on that. Thank you! -Apocheir (discuss • contribs) 00:17, 30 April 2015 (UTC)