Wikibooks:Reading room/Archives/2015/August

Help with creating a large physics books funded by the National Science Foundation
Oskar Vafek, a physics professor at Florida State University received a grant to create a wiki physics book. I emailed him and suggested uploading it to Wikibooks, and he asked for some suggestions on how to do this given the large number of pages in the book. I am unsure what the answer is. How do the writers here suggest uploading hundreds of pages of information? Thank you. Waters.Justin (discuss • contribs)
 * Thanks for suggesting Wikibooks. We would be happy to accept such a monumental project and will likely add it to our featured books if this happens. ^^ I don't know of a way to transfer the pages here directly at present. Perhaps Special:Import could be set up to accept pages from the book's original wiki, though we'll probably need community consensus and ask at Phabricator for that (and I'm not sure if it's actually possible). Another possibility is to copy-and-paste everything here, and then put up a link to the original page in our discussion page here. This may be very time-consuming, though if every active member of the community moved something here, it's definitely possible.
 * There's one important concern before we do anything, though. Is the licence compatible with Wikibooks' CC-BY-SA licence? (I've tried looking for the licence on their About page, but login is required to view it.) Kayau (talk · contribs) 00:11, 6 August 2015 (UTC)
 * There are great examples about large and complex topics like mathematical analysis (as one part of a series of lectures). It might help to study such examples and the way they are created. --Kelti (discuss • contribs) 07:33, 6 August 2015 (UTC)
 * That Wiki is running MediaWiki. We can almost certainly import it here, without a Phab ticket - someone with an account there can export it to XML and then it can be imported here by a Steward. It'll probably need some testing first though just to be sure it'll work properly. QuiteUnusual (discuss • contribs) 08:09, 6 August 2015 (UTC)

ResourceLoader
As of, apparently, sometime in the past few hours, gadgets that don't use ResourceLoader won't load. Or at least, ones that involve javascript and don't use ResourceLoader. Mostly that means adding "[ResourceLoader]" to the appropriate line in MediaWiki:Gadgets-definition; but, when you do that it doesn't take effect immediately, so afaict you just have to wait around for five or ten minutes before judging whether it worked. --Pi zero (discuss • contribs) 04:34, 7 August 2015 (UTC)
 * I've updated and migrated a number of the more common scripts to the new system. As for the rest, someone will need to take the legacy scripts on as a project to re-write them to comply with the new Resource Loader requirements, or we could simply remove them if they appear to not work anymore. I also made a note in each of the affected descriptions for gadgets that are now non-functional. --Az1568 (discuss • contribs) 11:29, 15 August 2015 (UTC)

How can we improve Wikimedia grants to support you better?
Hello,

The Wikimedia Foundation would like your feedback about how we can reimagine Wikimedia Foundation grants, to better support people and ideas in your Wikimedia project. Ways to participate:

Feedback is welcome in any language.
 * Respond to questions on the discussion page of the idea.
 * Join a small group conversation.
 * Learn more about this consultation.

With thanks,

I JethroBT (WMF), Community Resources, Wikimedia Foundation. 05:17, 19 August 2015 (UTC)

VisualEditor News #4—2015
Read this in another language •  Subscription list for this multilingual newsletter

 Did you know? You can add quotations marks before and after a title or phrase with a single click.

Select the relevant text. Find the correct quotations marks in the special character inserter tool (marked as Ω in the toolbar). Click the button. VisualEditor will add the quotation marks on either side of the text you selected. You can read and help translate the user guide, which has more information about how to use VisualEditor.

Since the last newsletter, the Editing Team have been working on mobile phone support. They have fixed many bugs and improved language support. They post weekly status reports on mediawiki.org. Their workboard is available in Phabricator. Their current priorities are improving language support and functionality on mobile devices.

Wikimania
The team attended Wikimania 2015 in Mexico City. There they participated in the Hackathon and met with individuals and groups of users. They also made several presentations about and the future of editing.

Following Wikimania, we announced winners for the VisualEditor 2015 Translathon. Our thanks and congratulations to users Halan-tul, Renessaince,  जनक राज भट्ट (Janak Bhatta), Vahe Gharakhanyan, Warrakkk, and Eduardogobi.

For interface messages (translated at translatewiki.net), we saw the initiative affecting 42 languages. The average progress in translations across all languages was 56.5% before the translathon, and 78.2% after (+21.7%). In particular, Sakha improved from 12.2% to 94.2%; Brazilian Portuguese went from 50.6% to 100%; Taraškievica went from 44.9% to 85.3%; Doteli went from 1.3% to 41.2%. Also, while 1.7% of the messages were outdated across all languages before the translathon, the percentage dropped to 0.8% afterwards (-0.9%).

For documentation messages (on mediawiki.org), we saw the initiative affecting 24 languages. The average progress in translations across all languages was 26.6% before translathon, and 46.9% after (+20.3%). There were particularly notable achievements for three languages. Armenian improved from 1% to 99%; Swedish, from 21% to 99%, and Brazilian Portuguese, from 34% to 83%. Outdated translations across all languages were reduced from 8.4% before translathon to 4.8% afterwards (-3.6%).

We published some graphs showing the effect of the event on the Translathon page. We thank the translators for participating and the translatewiki.net staff for facilitating this initiative.

Recent improvements
Auto-fill features for citations can be enabled on each Wikipedia. The tool uses the citoid service to convert a URL or DOI into a pre-filled, pre-formatted bibliographic citation. You can see an animated GIF of the quick, simple process at mediawiki.org. So far, about a dozen Wikipedias have enabled the auto-citation tool. To enable it for your wiki, follow the instructions at mediawiki.org.

Your wiki can customize the first section of the special character inserter in VisualEditor. Please follow the instructions at mediawiki.org to put the characters you want at the top. In other changes, if you need to fill in a CAPTCHA and get it wrong, then you can click to get a new one to complete. VisualEditor can now display and edit Vega-based graphs. If you use the Monobook skin, VisualEditor's appearance is now more consistent with other software.

Future changes
The team will be changing the appearance of selected links inside VisualEditor. The purpose is to make it easy to see whether your cursor is inside or outside the link. When you select a link, the link label (the words shown on the page) will be enclosed in a faint box. If you place your cursor inside the box, then your changes to the link label will be part of the link. If you place your cursor outside the box, then it will not. This will make it easy to know when new characters will be added to the link and when they will not.

On the English Wikipedia, 10% of newly created accounts are now offered both the visual and the wikitext editors. A recent controlled trial showed no significant difference in survival or productivity for new users in the short term. New users with access to VisualEditor were very slightly less likely to produce results that needed reverting. You can learn more about this by watching a video of the July 2015 Wikimedia Research Showcase. The proportion of new accounts with access to both editing environments will be gradually increased over time. Eventually all new users have the choice between the two editing environments.

Let's work together

 * Share your ideas and ask questions at mw:VisualEditor/Feedback. This feedback page is now using Flow instead of LiquidThreads.
 * Can you read and type in Korean or Japanese? Language engineer David Chan needs people who know which tools people use to type in some languages. If you speak Japanese or Korean, you can help him test support for these languages. Please see the instructions at mediawiki.org if you can help.
 * If your wiki would like VisualEditor enabled on another namespace, you can file a request in Phabricator. Please include a link to a community discussion about the requested change.
 * Please file requests for language-appropriate "" and "" icons for the styling menu in Phabricator.
 * The design research team wants to see how real editors work. Please sign up for their research program.
 * The weekly task triage meetings continue to be open to volunteers, usually on Tuesdays at 12:00 (noon) PDT (19:00 UTC). Learn how to join the meetings and how to nominate bugs at mw:VisualEditor/Weekly triage meetings.  You do not need to attend the meeting to nominate a bug for consideration as a Q1 blocker, though.  Instead, go to Phabricator and "associate" the main VisualEditor project with the bug.

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), 22:28, 14 August 2015 (UTC)


 * Why not stop developing these white elephants toys like VE, Flow, and MV? Let's go back to basic editing, old-style talk pages, and file pages that didn't impose themselves. 46.254.186.36 (discuss) 00:42, 30 August 2015 (UTC)

New Wikibook-Text to glossary linking
Hi there,I wonder if anyone could give me some advice. I am collaborating on a wikibook for university and we were wondering how to mark words in the main text to let the readers know that they are further explained in the glossary Below? I was thinking, is it possible to link the word itself where they can just click on it and be taken to it's definition in the glossary while they read? Thanks for any help. JordanFerguson93 (discuss • contribs) 01:29, 24 February 2015 (UTC)
 * It looks like you're working on Perspectives in Digital Culture, right? You can have text like the following:
 * And now I will explain cookies: blah, blah, blah
 * Using anchors just like in HTML, you can link to a part of a document. Please let me know if you need more help. —Justin ( koavf ) ❤T☮C☺M☯ 01:39, 24 February 2015 (UTC)


 * Hi Koavf,thank you for your help,I'll have a look about and try a few things to see what works best JordanFerguson93 (discuss • contribs) 22:30, 24 February 2015 (UTC)


 * You can link the glossary section, such as Wikijunior:Asia/Sri Lanka#Where is Sri Lanka, which links to the specific section. Is that what you were looking for? --atcovi (talk) 01:40, 24 February 2015 (UTC)
 * I use a similar method, without the need to create sections in the glossary, in Castles of England. If you look at Castles of England/The Development of the Castle you'll see a link to the Glossary for "Feudal system" that uses what appears to be a section link (Castles of England/English Castle Glossary). In the glossary itself this isn't a section - it's an anchor to a section coded like this  to provide the target for the link. QuiteUnusual (discuss • contribs) 09:17, 24 February 2015 (UTC)

Great thanks for your help,don't quite have the hang of it yet but I'll try again tommorow. JordanFerguson93 (discuss • contribs) 22:30, 24 February 2015 (UTC)
 * Time to archive this section? 46.254.186.36 (discuss) 00:00, 30 August 2015 (UTC)