Wikibooks:Reading room/Archives/2017/November

Template
Hi. Is there any templates for counting number of subpages in a Wikibook? --Doostdar (discuss • contribs) 18:27, 8 November 2017 (UTC)
 * Not that I know of. If a book doesn't use deep filing, and if the book is one of the half of our collection that has been fully shifted to the new naming scheme for book-categories, then all the pages should be in the book category.  Did you have a particular book in mind?  --User:Pi zero (discuss • contribs) 19:50, 8 November 2017 (UTC)
 * For example this book. How many pages does it have? Can it be shown on the first page? --Doostdar (discuss • contribs) 19:59, 8 November 2017 (UTC)
 * That particular book has 15 pages and 2 subcategories of its book category (images and templates). In that particular case, the number 15 can be extracted using markup
 * which gives
 * However, as I mentioned, that markup only works if the book does not use deep filing, and its book category has been fully migrated to the new naming scheme. --Pi zero (discuss • contribs) 23:26, 8 November 2017 (UTC)
 * However, as I mentioned, that markup only works if the book does not use deep filing, and its book category has been fully migrated to the new naming scheme. --Pi zero (discuss • contribs) 23:26, 8 November 2017 (UTC)
 * However, as I mentioned, that markup only works if the book does not use deep filing, and its book category has been fully migrated to the new naming scheme. --Pi zero (discuss • contribs) 23:26, 8 November 2017 (UTC)

The Community Wishlist Survey 2017
Hey everyone,

The Community Wishlist Survey is the process when the Wikimedia communities decide what the Wikimedia Foundation Community Tech should work on over the next year.

The Community Tech team is focused on tools for experienced Wikimedia editors. You can post technical proposals from now until November 20. The communities will vote on the proposals between November 28 and December 12. You can read more on the 2017 wishlist survey page. /Johan (WMF) (discuss • contribs) 20:15, 6 November 2017 (UTC)

Changes to the global ban policy
Hello. Some changes to the community global ban policy have been proposed. Your comments are welcome at m:Requests for comment/Improvement of global ban policy. Please translate this message to your language, if needed. Cordially. Matiia (Matiia) 00:34, 12 November 2017 (UTC)

New print to pdf feature for mobile web readers
New print to pdf feature for mobile web readers

The Readers web team will be deploying a new feature this week to make it easier to download PDF versions of articles on the mobile website.

Providing better offline functionality was one of the highlighted areas from the research done by the New Readers team in Mexico, Nigeria, and India. The teams created a prototype for mobile PDFs which was evaluated by user research and community feedback. The prototype evaluation received positive feedback and results, so development continued.

For the initial deployment, the feature will be available to Google Chrome browsers on Android. Support for other mobile browsers to come in the future. For Chrome, the feature will use the native Android print functionality. Users can choose to download a webpage as a PDF. Mobile print styles will be used for these PDFs to ensure optimal readability for smaller screens.

The feature is available starting Wednesday, Nov 15. For more information, see the project page on MediaWiki.org.

CKoerner (WMF) (talk) 22:07, 20 November 2017 (UTC)

Newby questions
I'm new to Wikimedia (2 months) and I'm just getting to know a bit about Wikimedia's strategy and projects. In Wikibooks, I just took a look at some 'in progress' books on photography (sub-categories of 'visual arts'). Photography is one of my hobbies so I was drawn to the books. Since there are already very many excellent and free resources (on-line courses, articles) available on the web, I wondered why Wikibooks saw the need to develop and maintain it's own books. Browsing through the current Wikibooks contents, my impression is that the contents are author-determined rather than by the intended audience. On Wikipedia, there are reasonably clear guidelines on what is - and what is not - relevant for inclusion, information sources, etc. I wonder what the equivalent is for Wikibooks. Who decides - and how - whether there is a real need for a Wikibook? Who decides - and how - to which audience (infomation needs, competences, etc.) a book should be targeted? And how are well-intended but non-sustainable books culled? It seems to me that in some knowledge domains (such as photography, Wikibooks could have the greatest value by 'curating' existing webcontent rather than trying to (sustainably) replicate it. Mikemorrell49 (discuss • contribs) 15:24, 19 November 2017 (UTC)
 * These are good questions. Wikibooks exists as a free equivalent of expensive and inaccessible textbooks, written at any educational level. For what it's worth, I think that many of your--legitimate--concerns are addressed by just having more editors. And there have been some real-life uses of Wikibooks; I think we should have more data on how well that works... —Justin ( koavf ) ❤T☮C☺M☯ 20:01, 19 November 2017 (UTC)
 * Thanks for your kind response, . You helped me better understand the goal of Wikibooks (which I support). I agree that the more people that contribute to generating/reviewing proposals for Wikibooks and writing Wikibooks, the better. I'll continue to learn more about Wikibooks and the foundation's other projects. Regards, Mikemorrell49 (discuss • contribs) 10:07, 20 November 2017 (UTC)
 * Mike, thank you for wanting to help. Let me know if there's anything I can do. —Justin ( koavf ) ❤T☮C☺M☯ 10:11, 20 November 2017 (UTC)
 * Hi and welcome. I'll offer a few of my own ravings thoughts on the big picture of wikimedia and Wikibooks.
 * This first point may sound kind of deep, but perhaps it'll give you something to think about, and whether you agree with, as you explore the wikimedian sisterhood. I think there's a mismatch between what motivates the volunteers to contribute to the wikimedian sisterhood, and what the Wikimedia Foundation thinks its mission is.  The Foundation says its mission is to enable the volunteers to provide educational material; and they apparently think (that is, they collectively behave as if) their mission is actually to provide information, treating the volunteers as unpaid labor.  Don't let that discourage you, though; I sure don't.  Volunteer projects thrive on passionate idealism, and the visceral idealism that volunteers across the entire wikimedian sisterhood share, imo, is that the ordinary citizenry of the Internet should have a voice in information providing.  I see educational material as the output consequence of that idealism.
 * Wikimedian sister projects are of varying size; in English, at least, Wikipedia is the largest and Wikinews is arguably the smallest, but Wikibooks complicates this picture. Based straightforwardly on activity at Special:RecentChanges, Wikibooks is between those extremes in size; but in a sense, one might think of each book on Wikibooks as a sort of microproject (or nanoproject), and Wikibooks as a whole as a confederation of several thousand of these microprojects banding together to share a common administrative infrastructure.  They have some common properties that make shared administration possible, but there's also a great deal of variation between them, and most of them are so small they make Wikinews look huge.  It's not uncommon for a book to have, in effect, only one active contributor in a given month, or even in a given year; adopting a book is a common pattern of behavior here.  Wikis work by collaboration, and very small projects have to get their collaboration by distributing over time, to the point where on very small projects (such as a single wikibook) a current contributor acts as if past contributors are semi-participants in current "consensus" discussions; respect for past contributors tends to increase as project size decreases.
 * My own working theory (fwiw) is that what the sister projects need in order to grow (even Wikipedia) is support for wiki communities to nurture their own local project-managing expertise. The Foundation can't possibly do this for the various wikimedian sisters, let alone for the individual microprojects/books here, because it's the contributors who have the expertise.  I figure to build on the idea of ordinary netizens as information providers by allowing them to provide not only end content but also provide their own semi-automated assistants &mdash; software wizards and the like.  (This becomes trickier because it conflicts with the well-meaning-but-misdirected software development efforts of the Foundation; but I do have a plan.)
 * --Pi zero (discuss • contribs) 14:52, 20 November 2017 (UTC)
 * Hi and thank you for taking the time to give such a considered and detailed response. Much appreciated! The points you make here and on your user page help me think more clearly about how the WMF and the community work in practice and how this perhaps might be improved. Your comments have also deepened my understanding of collaboration within the community. At the moment, I don't know nearly enough about this to weigh in. But I do value and appreciate your 'food for thought'. I agree that the various programs and projects (big and small) need to be initiated, managed and supported by collaborative groups in the community, whether these are content-related or not. It'll be interesting to learn more about how different initiatives (content, tools, ways of working) are proposed, supported/resisted/modified and are sustained (or not). At the moment, I'm in awe of the vast scope and ambition of the various projects and of the ways in which so many people freely contribute to these. I hope to make small contributions where and when I can. Kind regards,

Mikemorrell49 (discuss • contribs) 11:55, 21 November 2017 (UTC)