Wikibooks:Reading room/Archives/2016/June

Translation of Le Petit Prince by Saint-Exupéry
In many countries the Little Prince fell into public domain last year. Since it's such a famous and wonderful work, wouldn't it be nice with an English translation under creative commons? Also, an English translation could be a basis for other open translations. There is not much text, but unfortunately I don't know any French (nor am I fluent in English), but will happily assist in the ways I can. What du you think of such an idea? Is wikibooks the right arena? --80.244.77.13 (discuss) 13:57, 14 June 2016 (UTC)
 * See WB:Annotated texts. --Pi zero (discuss • contribs) 14:18, 14 June 2016 (UTC)

I see, then it seems this project belongs in wikisource rather than wikibooks. Thanks! --80.244.77.13 (discuss) 19:00, 14 June 2016 (UTC)

Compact Language Links enabled in this wiki today


Compact Language Links has been available as a beta-feature on all Wikimedia wikis since 2014. With compact language links enabled, users are shown a much shorter list of languages on the interlanguage link section of an article (see image). Based on several factors, this shorter list of languages is expected to be more relevant for them and valuable for finding similar content in a language known to them. More information about compact language links can be found in the documentation.

From today onwards, compact language links has been enabled as the default listing of interlanguage links on this wiki. Using the button at the bottom, you will be able to see a longer list of all the languages the article has been written in. The setting for this compact list can be changed by using the checkbox under User Preferences -> Appearance -> Languages

The compact language links feature has been tested extensively by the Wikimedia Language team, which developed it. However, in case there are any problems or other feedback please let us know on the project talk page. It is to be noted that on some wikis the presence of an existing older gadget that was used for a similar purpose may cause an interference for compact language list. We would like to bring this to the attention of the admins of this wiki. Full details are on this phabricator ticket. Thank you. On behalf of the Wikimedia Language team:--Runa Bhattacharjee (WMF) (discuss • contribs) 07:26, 24 June 2016 (UTC)


 * It's hard to believe this feature can be what it sounds like. Providing more language links, more carefully customized to be useful, is a basic way for projects to support each other by providing more links to each other; this is why farming out such links to wikidata is so fundamentally damaging to all projects (the least damaged being Wikipedias, which can most easily rearrange their articles to use all exactly the same headings as the biggest Wikipedias).  But to deliberately further reduce the number of language links &mdash; this sounds like deliberate sabotage of the entire sisterhood.  --Pi zero (discuss • contribs) 10:30, 24 June 2016 (UTC)

User:ShakespeareFan00/Rail Transport in Britan/Before the Railways
I was plannning on developing the parent book in my user space, but would need some assistance in making it more readable for a more capable Wikijunior reader. I;d been trying in style to mirror that used in Ladybird books. Essentialy, I'm needing someone to fact check the sample page I've allready written. I appreciate Wikibooks doesn't use Citations like Wikipedia does, but it would be nice to know if I am going off on something that is complete invention. ShakespeareFan00 (discuss • contribs) 19:21, 5 June 2016 (UTC)

Suggesting major changes to "Old Norse"
The book Old Norse had its last and only major edit on November 2015. Since then a categorization error was fixed by an administrator, then there were no more edits. I consider the original author (1) only focused on explaining the grammar of the Old Norse language, and (2) not doing so in a way beginners can understand. Therefore I suggested in Talk:Old_Norse that we write that book into a "reference grammar". Thus the previously mentioned 2 observations will become acceptable. If there could be more attention to the book and my suggestion, I can start editing right away, while taking potential further suggestions into consideration. Greek Fellows (discuss • contribs) 13:38, 30 June 2016 (UTC)
 * I left a note on the user talk of the earlier editor of the book, since they're much more likely to notice an edit there. --Pi zero (discuss • contribs) 14:25, 30 June 2016 (UTC)