Wikibooks:Reading room/Archives/2019/February

Most prominent institutional partnerships?
Is there any particular example of a large organization curating any book or collection in Wikibooks? For example, maybe there was an institutional partnership to bring a set of textbooks or training manuals here. Thanks for any project anyone can highlight.  Blue Rasberry   (talk)   17:05, 16 February 2019 (UTC)
 * While Wikibooks does not explicitly partner with any universities as far as I know, it is not uncommon for instructors for a module to curate books here. Examples include University of Virginia (Lentis) and UCL (Issues in Interdisciplinarity 2018-19). Leaderboard (discuss • contribs) 22:41, 16 February 2019 (UTC)
 * What a wonderful coincidence - I am at the University of Virginia and that Lentis project is from about a month ago. I will go meet the instructor and see what more I can do with that person. Thanks so much for replying with good examples. I am fortunate that you were watching and made the referral.  Blue Rasberry    (talk)   13:00, 17 February 2019 (UTC)

Talk to us about talking
The Wikimedia Foundation is planning a global consultation about communication. The goal is to bring Wikimedians and wiki-minded people together to improve tools for communication.

We want all contributors to be able to talk to each other on the wikis, whatever their experience, their skills or their devices.

We are looking for input from as many different parts of the Wikimedia community as possible. It will come from multiple projects, in multiple languages, and with multiple perspectives.

We are currently planning the consultation. We need your help.

We need volunteers to help talk to their communities or user groups.

You can help by hosting a discussion at your wiki. Here's what to do:
 * 1) First, sign up your group here.
 * 2) Next, create a page (or a section on a Village pump, or an e-mail thread – whatever is natural for your group) to collect information from other people in your group.  This is not a vote or decision-making discussion: we are just collecting feedback.
 * 3) Then ask people what they think about communication processes.  We want to hear stories and other information about how people communicate with each other on and off wiki.  Please consider asking these five questions:
 * 4) When you want to discuss a topic with your community, what tools work for you, and what problems block you?
 * 5) What about talk pages works for newcomers, and what blocks them?
 * 6) What do others struggle with in your community about talk pages?
 * 7) What do you wish you could do on talk pages, but can't due to the technical limitations?
 * 8) What are the important aspects of a "wiki discussion"?
 * 9) Finally, please go to Talk pages consultation 2019 on Mediawiki.org and report what you learned from your group.  Please include links if the discussion is available to the public.

You can also help build the list of the many different ways people talk to each other.

Not all groups active on wikis or around wikis use the same way to discuss things: it can happen on wiki, on social networks, through external tools... Tell us how your group communicates.

You can read more about the overall process on mediawiki.org. If you have questions or ideas, you can leave feedback about the consultation process in the language you prefer.

Thank you! We're looking forward to talking with you. Trizek (WMF) 15:01, 21 February 2019 (UTC)

Improving the Puzzle Wikibooks Styles
Hi all ,

I am newcomer and I have a proposal to be made

I love Puzzles (and hence my username and I see that the Wikibooks for Puzzles is somehow lacking of contents.) I have read the guide for a while and create this account.

I have see the puzzle and think of why not the answer are put on same pages: Puzzles/Non-scientific puzzles/Boy and Girl

After searching quite a while, I found out that there are a template for hiding text: Template:Hidden

As you can see my sandbox, this is my suggestion for improvements. User:Miss Puzzle/sandbox

Hopefully, my improvement are accepted and I can contribute for many years to comeMiss Puzzle (discuss • contribs) 06:09, 16 February 2019 (UTC)


 * Aside: Wiki notation for a "wikilink", a link to a page on the wiki, is double square-brackets around the name of the page within the wiki.  I've edited your above text (pardon) to demonstrate. --Pi zero (discuss • contribs) 14:05, 16 February 2019 (UTC)


 * The issue you are raising (so it seems to me) is one of interactive wiki pages. Fwiw, I can offer some general thoughts about interactive wiki pages.  Wiki markup is, originally, about creating hypertext documents:  a collection of pages, each containing formatted text, and some words are clickable links to other pages within the collection.  That's all.  It's basically static.  But puzzles are one of a number of purposes for which one may wish for something a bit more dynamic.  There are three ways that puzzles have been traditionally handled on wikis, and a fourth way they might be handled, based on something I've been working on.
 * It's more-or-less possible to handle puzzles using just ordinary wiki hypertext. You have a question, and either a link to the solution, or links to possible answers.  Here's a favorite page of mine (worth a smile, anyway) that uses this technique, though it's not on a wiki:.
 * One might set up a page with the answer to a problem in hidden text. This has the drawback that when a page loads slowly, hidden text may be temporarily visible while the page is loading, which annoyingly shows the answer before the user has had a chance to try to solve the problem on their own.
 * There is a "quiz" wiki extension, which we have installed on wikibooks. I'm not personally enamoured of the quiz extension, as it seems complicated and brittle to me, but it does exist.  See Help:Quizzes.
 * It has seemed to me that what wikis need, in general but it does apply to the particular case of quizzes/puzzles, is a truly general sort of page interactivity that can be specified as part of wiki markup. I've created such a thing; it takes the form of a small set of templates for adding input fields of various kinds to a page, and buttons that can be clicked to send the input somewhere.  The next step is to learn how to wield this tool effectively.  See Help:Dialog. It should be possible, using dialog, to create quizzes/puzzles that aren't just multiple-choice, but can take more general kinds of input.  I've come to believe that interacting with another human being is what people would really like to be able to do on a wiki, and I've wondered if dialog could be used to facilitate that; a core challenge needing addressed for that is, how to ensure there's someone else to interact with.  But even without another person, a much wider range of possibilities opens up with dialog-driven quizzes. --Pi zero (discuss • contribs) 14:46, 16 February 2019 (UTC)

Thank you Pi Zero, I think I may cleanup the Puzzles pages a bit but I think I may implement the hidden text for now (shown in my sandbox) as I think that, we don't need to have too many pages of question and answers, which I think may lead to difficulties of cleaning up the pages later on. Also, I may add some rebuses (hieroglyphic puzzles) of my own in the near future. Thanks for your kind input. Miss Puzzle (discuss • contribs) 16:43, 16 February 2019 (UTC)

Cateogry, project or?
I have started a book VCE Physics. VCE stands for Victorian Certificate of Education which encompasses curricula for a variety of subjects, including physics. There seem to be some other VCE books already started (e.g. VCE Chemistry and VCE Specialist Mathematics). So I thought it would be suitable to create a "Category" called VCE to encompass them. But then I read the advice about Categories and thought the VCE Category would be better as a "project". But going to projects, this seems to be all about Class Projects in seeming contradication to the advice on the categories page which indicates a project would be good to encompass books on related curricula. I'm confused! Please provide advice!

In a related question about categories etc. I've also added a subject category tag of "physics" to the bottom of the VCE Physics main page. But it is not showing up. It is just showing the Subject : Book : VCE Book (I created a "book"). I am not even sure what the purpose of the "Book" is. Surely the main page I created was the "book"... why was I directed by the Categories advice to create a book category?... what is it used for?... how does it relate to the book and/or subjects and/or projects!

I want to do the right thing. I'm academically astute (teach at a university), IT savvy (program in multiple languages etc.) so I am inclined to think the system, at least in relation to the current existing explanations, is objectively unclear... but maybe it will all become clear when someone provides just a little explanation?

Please provide further explainattion of the logic of category, book, project etc. (and, preferably, include advice relating to my situation) it is unclear, to me, from the existing documentation.

--Theo Hughes (discuss • contribs) 05:08, 27 February 2019 (UTC)


 * OK, so I found the help info I should really have been reading (|Using Wikibooks/Shelves, Categories, and Classifications), and looked at what other books did, and now things are starting to make sense . However, I'm now not sure about the relevance of the Categories help page which initially led me astray... does it need updating?... or how is it now relevant?... is it an old thing that was replaced by books and shelves etc?


 * --Theo Hughes (discuss • contribs) 21:50, 27 February 2019 (UTC)


 * Well, we're really still in the midst of converting from the older subject pages to the new shelves. Which is itself the most recent step in a multi-stage infrastructure upgrade I've been working on for some time now.  There's some history at Wikibooks Stacks/History. --Pi zero (discuss • contribs) 05:29, 28 February 2019 (UTC)


 * Many thanks, its starting to make sense now. And the fact that I have come to wikibooks in the middle of a transition explains the slightly confusing documentation. I will attempt to organise things as per the new shelves etc. At the moment I'm now just playing around with the best format for TOC for the book I started. I started playing with templates... then realised what I was trying wasn't quite correct. I'm playing around with having a complete book TOC in a collapsible column etc Navbox that will automagically (template parameters based on page names sort of thing) have the current "topic" uncollapsed. Not sure if this is still what I want, but I'd like to get the navigation somewhat sorted before going to far with content, and then making it difficult for myself to rearrange - though I intend not to spend too much time fiddling with this as I do want to get onto content... ooops forgot the sig, here it is --Theo Hughes (discuss • contribs) 05:42, 28 February 2019 (UTC)