Wikibooks:Reading room/Archives/2016/November

Should I move my question to here?
Hi~ I asked a question on Cookbook_talk:Policy, but I'm not sure if it was the right place? I'm not in any hurry, just trying to figure out if I should move the post to here/somewhere instead. Zeniff (discuss • contribs) 02:30, 29 November 2016 (UTC)

Textbook for Portland Public Schools
I'm looking for a place to host an open textbook about Portland, Oregon. All third grade students must study the history of Portland but there are no appropriate resources.

Is this a good place for such project?

The main contributors would be teachers and (hopefully) the local historical society. The main audience would be third grade students with a supporting teachers' guide. If a conventional publisher was willing, it could be converted to a print version.

Thoughts, anyone? Advice? Are you aware of a similar open book I could use for a model?

Craig H.

Media Specialist, Portland Public Schools

Cahpcc (discuss • contribs) 02:25, 2 November 2016 (UTC)
 * This would be perfectly appropriate for Wikijunior. This is a sub-project of Wikibooks which is fairly small but intended for younger readers. I'd be delighted if you pursued this course. —Justin ( koavf ) ❤T☮C☺M☯ 06:44, 2 November 2016 (UTC)


 * I went over to WikiJunior and it does seem like a good place for this project.  I feel like I need to do some "community organizing" before I start the project.

I'm still looking for an example of where this has been done before. It's a common situation -- a localized curriculum where thousands of students need a book but not enough to attract a textbook publisher.
 * Wikijunior can host material for several age groups, including third graders. But it is fairly low-traffic. How can I help? —Justin ( koavf ) ❤T☮C☺M☯ 01:37, 5 November 2016 (UTC)


 * Thanks for the offer of help. I'm sure I'll need some!   The low traffic doesn't matter since this will be required reading ;-)  My job now is to get involvement by teachers.   I'm also doing my own homework.  I will message you when I have a question.  Thanks!

Deletion of a chapter from Lentis ( https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Lentis ): need help restoring
Hello! I need assistance restoring a chapter that was deleted from Lentis ( Lentis ). This book is a class project, and marked as such. A student team added a chapter called "The U.S. Presidential Election of 1992: Media, Public Opinion, and Politics." The chapter was deleted, apparently without explanation. (At least, the students didn't find an explanation.) Can the chapter be restored as soon as possible please? Any assistance will be very greatly appreciated! Norton (discuss • contribs) 18:47, 29 November 2016 (UTC)
 * I see a page
 * Lentis/The US Presidential Election of 1992: Media, Public Opinion, and Politics
 * It's never been deleted. Is that the page you're looking for?  (I changed your link to the book to use wiki markup; I hope you don't mind.)  --Pi zero (discuss • contribs) 20:18, 29 November 2016 (UTC)


 * Thank you so much, Pi zero! (And thank you also for fixing the link to the book).  This is very helpful.  If you can advise us about how to add the chapter title to the book's table of contents (at Lentis ), this would be greatly appreciated.  I tell students to create the page by adding it to the table of contents, but the team seems to have done it another way. Norton (discuss • contribs) 20:29, 29 November 2016 (UTC)


 * Adding to the table of contents? That should be quite easy (provided you don't use VisualEditor; I would strongly advise never touching VE).  If you edit the "Table of Contents" section of the page, it's mostly several long lists of entries, so you can see how the ones already there are done, and just add a line doing the same thing for this chapter that you want to add.  Perhaps I'm misunderstanding something about your situation, though; it can be really easy, when trying to explain how to do something like this, to accidentally assume something one shouldn't have and thus end up giving advice that doesn't help.  Please ask again if my comments haven't helped (and do what you can to explain how my comments don't fit your situation).  --Pi zero (discuss • contribs) 20:36, 29 November 2016 (UTC)


 * Thank you so much, Pi zero. You're super helpful.  The tricky part (for a beginner like me) is not adding just the chapter title to the table of contents, but adding it so that the title is a live link to the whole chapter, like all the other titles are.  If you can explain that, that'd be lovely!  Norton (discuss • contribs) 22:21, 29 November 2016 (UTC)


 * Well, how about this. I'll describe what the process should look like, if you're using a software interface that's sufficiently similar to mine.  If this doesn't match what you see, we'll have to figure out why not. Looking at the page Lentis, about one screen down from the top (I'm using a laptop) is the section-header for the page section called Table of Contents.  There should be a link next to the section heading that says "[ edit ]".  If you click on the word "edit", you should get a basic edit panel for the section.  After a second or two of twitching around while various parts of the edit-panel are set up, you should be looking at a big multi-line text editing box, in which is the wiki markup for the section.  To see that edit box and also see what the typeset page looks like, below the edit box click on the "show preview" button.  (I'm always careful, when using an edit panel like that, to keep my mouse cursor carefully far away from the "save changes" button, so that I can't accidentally click that button before I'm really sure I want to.)  Looking at the markup and comparing it to the typeset page, you can see that each of the live-linked bulleted items is marked up by a line that starts with one or more asterisks (depending on how indented it is) followed by the chapter name, in double-square-brackets, prefixed and suffixed by a slash.  For example, here's one of the lines: * /The Organic Foods Movement/  The double-square-brackets make it a live link, the slash before the chapter name makes it a page name relative to the name of the current page (which is  ), and the trailing slash causes the leading slash to not appear in the typeset text.  So to produce a live link to a chapter called "Narfling the Garthok", you'd add a line (in whatever is the appropriate place in the section) * /Narfling the Garthok/  Then you use the "show preview" button to make sure it looks the way you want it to, and then use the "save changes" button to commit it to the publicly visible page.  --Pi zero (discuss • contribs) 00:23, 30 November 2016 (UTC)


 * This is fantastically helpful, Pi zero. The students and I are forever in your debt!  Norton (discuss • contribs) 14:57, 30 November 2016 (UTC)

Password reset
''I apologise that this message is in English. ''

We are having a problem with attackers taking over wiki accounts with privileged user rights (for example, admins, bureaucrats, oversighters, checkusers). It appears that this may be because of weak or reused passwords.

Community members are working along with members of multiple teams at the Wikimedia Foundation to address this issue.

In the meantime, we ask that everyone takes a look at the passwords they have chosen for their wiki accounts. If you know that you've chosen a weak password, or if you've chosen a password that you are using somewhere else, please change those passwords.

Select strong passwords – eight or more characters long, and containing letters, numbers, and punctuation. Joe Sutherland (m:User talk:JSutherland (WMF)) / MediaWiki message delivery (discuss • contribs) 23:59, 13 November 2016 (UTC)

Adding to the above section (Password reset)
Please accept my apologies - that first line should read "Help with translations!". Joe Sutherland (WMF) (talk) / MediaWiki message delivery (discuss • contribs) 00:11, 14 November 2016 (UTC)

Help test offline Wikipedia
Hello! The Reading team at the Foundation is looking to support readers who want to take articles offline to read and share later on their phones - a use case we learned about from deep research earlier this year. We’ve built a few prototypes and are looking for people who would be interested in testing them. If you’d like to learn more and give us feedback, check out the page on Meta! Joe Sutherland (WMF) (talk) 20:08, 29 November 2016 (UTC)