Wikibooks:Reading room/Archives/2020/August

Changing a "directory"
Hi, In the Oberon book, I've been advised to change "Oberon/S3/" to "Oberon/ETH Oberon/". This is more than one change. There is at least one directory and several pages under Oberon/S3/. Most of these pages are original as created by me or have been revised once or twice by me. Few or none have been changed by another editor. I understand how to move a page to a new location. Alternatively I can create a new page and mark the old one for deletion. Pertinent question: is a deleted page archived or deleted absolutely? Deletion would avoid the clutter of links from moving. Which is preferable in this case: move or recreate and delete? Thanks, ... PeterEasthope (discuss • contribs) 14:16, 25 June 2020 (UTC)


 * A few miscellaneous technical points, fwiw.
 * An admin can move a page and all its subpages, and can do it without leaving redirects behind.
 * We ordinarily prefer to move pages, to keep the edit history; partly for copyright purposes, but also as, really, historical record of the evolution of the page.
 * Deleted pages remain in the wiki database; they're visible to admins, and can be undeleted.
 * --Pi zero (discuss • contribs) 15:27, 25 June 2020 (UTC)


 * Thanks Pi zero.
 * "An admin can move a page and all its subpages, and can do it without leaving redirects behind."
 * A third possibility I had failed to notice.


 * "We ordinarily prefer to move pages, to keep the edit history; partly for copyright purposes, but also as, really, historical record of the evolution of the page."
 * OK; to respect advised name usage, please move Oberon/S3 and everything below that to Oberon/ETH_Oberon. (Or "Oberon/ETH Oberon" if the underscore is implicit.) After the move I can search out links to S3/* and fix them. Earlier today I should have requested such a move for the sitemap page rather than recreate the page and request deletion. Similarly in earlier cases.


 * "Deleted pages remain in the wiki database; they're visible to admins, and can be undeleted."
 * Absolutely appropriate. Thanks, ... PeterEasthope (discuss • contribs) 16:31, 25 June 2020 (UTC)


 * Done. --Pi zero (discuss • contribs) 17:12, 25 June 2020 (UTC)


 * , thanks for the help; and, incidentally, isn't "@J.Doe" social media syntax? Why not just "J.Doe,"? ... PeterEasthope (discuss • contribs) 14:55, 5 August 2020 (UTC)


 * I believe it did start from social media, yes. See Template:Ping. --Pi zero (discuss • contribs) 15:01, 5 August 2020 (UTC)

Redirection?
Hi, I have a request which I'd describe as "creation of a redirect". I created the page Oberon/Contributors. Subsequently salvaged the old ETH Hall of fame to Oberon/hall. Later incorporated Contributors into the hall page. Now I wonder: can Oberon/Contributors redirect to Oberon/hall? A page move won't accomplish the objective. Duplicating the information from one page to the other will lead to update errors. So probably administrative assistance is needed. Thanks, ... PeterEasthope (discuss • contribs) 14:47, 5 August 2020 (UTC)
 * You can do this yourself by adding #REDIRECT Oberon/hall to the Contributors page. QuiteUnusual (discuss • contribs) 17:00, 5 August 2020 (UTC)

Technical Wishes: FileExporter and FileImporter become default features on all Wikis
The FileExporter and FileImporter will become a default features on all wikis until August 7, 2020. They are planned to help you to move files from your local wiki to Wikimedia Commons easier while keeping all original file information (Description, Source, Date, Author, View History) intact. Additionally, the move is documented in the files view history. How does it work?

Step 1: If you are an auto-confirmed user, you will see a link "Move file to Wikimedia Commons" on the local file page.

Step 2: When you click on this link, the FileImporter checks if the file can in fact be moved to Wikimedia Commons. These checks are performed based on the wiki's configuration file which is created and maintained by each local wiki community.

Step 3: If the file is compatible with Wikimedia Commons, you will be taken to an import page, at which you can update or add information regarding the file, such as the description. You can also add the 'Now Commons' template to the file on the local wiki by clicking the corresponding check box in the import form. Admins can delete the file from the local wiki by enabling the corresponding checkbox. By clicking on the 'Import' button at the end of the page, the file is imported to Wikimedia Commons.

If you want to know more about the FileImporter extension or the Technical Wishes Project, follow the links. --For the Technical Wishes Team: Max Klemm (WMDE) 09:13, 6 August 2020 (UTC)

Aspies Book interest/participation
If you feel it concerns you or your interests please consider contributing to Aspies Book. If you know somebody with Asperger's/ASD or who identifies as an Aspie please let them know about the book.

I'm interested in feedback for this book. Is it really Abnormal Psychology it belongs to as a category? Could it need more categories or maybe it doesn't belong to any category? Regardless, any feedback and/or participation is appreciated! Datariumrex (discuss • contribs) 11:49, 21 August 2020 (UTC)


 * Well, every book should be on at least one shelf. It's related to psychology, and only a small fraction of the population are of that type so the plain meaning of the word "abnormal" would seem to apply; therefore, Shelf:Abnormal psychology seems to me a plausible choice. --Pi zero (discuss • contribs) 12:32, 21 August 2020 (UTC)

New Book out of (parts of) existing CC-BY-NC-SA - PDF Ebook: More Than Words Training Manual
Hello everybody!

Recently the trans-european MORE THAN WORDS project's final results have been published. I myself have been involved in the creation of a Ebook (published unter CC-BY-NC-SA) and got clearance for a transfer into Wikibooks. It's a training manual for intercultural work using nonverbal methods, available online if you look for training manual integrating creativity More than Words Especially the included exercises and training-Descriptions are open to be further developed and Wikibooks seems to be the ideal place to do so. Important: While the text contents are Creative Commons, the images are not (it says so explicitly on the first page). Anyway several fotos could be published under CC Licence by the time.

Anyway there are some questions, as I would like to advance quickly (now that it receives a lot of attention and possible support in the social environment of the Project), as I am new to Wikibooks (but not to Wiki-projects in general), and as it is certainly an exceptional


 * Should I first start to copy chapters in my user Namespace?
 * Any Ideas how to refer to the original PDF on every Page?
 * Should the exercises each get a page/Chapter of their own?
 * How to treat chapters that not yet have been transferred into Wikibooks?
 * Would people recommend to start it with the exercises only and use a different Title in the meantime?
 * Do you think that the Shelf:Communication is best fitting?

Btw: Some parts already have been translated into other languages, so there's a chance to also start versions of the book in Polish, Hungarian, Italian, German.

Thank you! --Dan-yell (discuss • contribs) 09:41, 20 August 2020 (UTC)
 * Hello, unfortunately the license CC-BY-NC-SA is NOT compatible with Wikibooks. You will need to go through the process to get clearance to republish it here rather than just copy it. That is, you need to treat it as a copyright work and get specific approval from the copyright holders. Why? Because of the NC part of the license - Wikibooks allows commercial use, the license you are proposing to copy from does not allow commercial use, hence they are incompatible. Please don't copy anything until you have resolved this as it will be deleted. QuiteUnusual (discuss • contribs) 11:37, 20 August 2020 (UTC)
 * Thanks a lot, QuiteUnusual, for the quick reply! That is, of course, a clear situation. I will continue communication with the creators and publishers to see if the republication (maybe of only some text parts) will be possible. --Dan-yell (discuss • contribs) 08:43, 21 August 2020 (UTC)
 * Update: I am getting agreements for publications. Yet more Questions:
 * How does the republication have to look like? Any even easier way, using maybe an email from the publisher or something?
 * Does it matter if there is CC-ba-sa 3.0 or 4.0? And GFDL is a must?
 * --Dan-yell (discuss • contribs) 18:19, 22 August 2020 (UTC)

Jupyter Notebooks in WikiBooks
Is it possible to use Jupyter Notebooks with either WikiBooks or Wikiversity? Mediawiki mentions this experimental extension.

Jupyter notebooks will be great for creating programming exercises, especially for Computing Shelf. Maybe this use case is better suited for Wikiversity. Are there any alternatives to Jupyter that maybe be more suitable for wikis (and is already being used to satisfy this use case)?

Regards, BishtSarthak (discuss • contribs) 15:03, 24 August 2020 (UTC)


 * I know virtually nothing about Jupyter notebooks. But I would note, that according to Special:Version, the Extension:NotebookViewer is not installed. Also Wikiversity doesn't seem to have it either.
 * As for alternatives, I really don't know. But apart from using the standard wikitext editor, you can also go to Special:Preferences and enable Visual editing, which is certainly worth a try, and the "New wikitext mode" to enable easy switching between the two. -- Jules (Mrjulesd) 20:29, 25 August 2020 (UTC)

Problem with Fullscreen mode in wikiEd
I enabled wikiEd in my Preferences. So far everything except Fullscreen button seems to be working. When I click the fullscreen button the editing window takes up the whole window but it is placed underneath the regular window text. i.e., the global wikibooks sidebar is still there. At first so was all the regular header info for the page and I could not click any editor button including the button to toggle to and from fullscreen. I mostly like the button layout in the wikiEd and would like to work in fullscreen sometimes as I frequently work on an ipad. I haven't done any windows programming in a long time but it looks like the global page layout stuff got updated and now interfers with the assumptions the wikiEd code made. --Eddiem0710 (discuss • contribs) 19:05, 26 August 2020 (UTC)
 * In general, you'll find it easier to get help on technical features by asking on Wikipedia as it has a more active community of technical specialists. They can hunt out the answer with the MediaWiki team. However, as the software configuration is different here on Wikibooks, they may not see the problem on Wikipedia and often the answer is that MediaWiki has been developed in a way that creates problems and incompatibilities for all non-Wikipedia projects. That is the sad truth of the focus - the big project gets the goodies, we get the problems. QuiteUnusual (discuss • contribs) 07:40, 27 August 2020 (UTC)

Important: maintenance operation on September 1st
Read this message in another language •  m:Special:MyLanguage/Tech/Server switch 2020

The Wikimedia Foundation will be testing its secondary data centre. This will make sure that Wikipedia and the other Wikimedia wikis can stay online even after a disaster. To make sure everything is working, the Wikimedia Technology department needs to do a planned test. This test will show if they can reliably switch from one data centre to the other. It requires many teams to prepare for the test and to be available to fix any unexpected problems.

They will switch all traffic to the secondary data centre on Tuesday, September 1st 2020.

Unfortunately, because of some limitations in MediaWiki, all editing must stop while the switch is made. We apologize for this disruption, and we are working to minimize it in the future.

You will be able to read, but not edit, all wikis for a short period of time.


 * You will not be able to edit for up to an hour on Tuesday, September 1st. The test will start at 14:00 UTC (15:00 BST, 16:00 CEST, 10:00 EDT, 19:30 IST, 07:00 PDT, 23:00 JST, and in New Zealand at 02:00 NZST on Wednesday September 2).
 * If you try to edit or save during these times, you will see an error message. We hope that no edits will be lost during these minutes, but we can't guarantee it.  If you see the error message, then please wait until everything is back to normal.  Then you should be able to save your edit.  But, we recommend that you make a copy of your changes first, just in case.

Other effects:


 * Background jobs will be slower and some may be dropped. Red links might not be updated as quickly as normal. If you create an article that is already linked somewhere else, the link will stay red longer than usual. Some long-running scripts will have to be stopped.
 * There will be code freezes for the week of September 1st, 2020. Non-essential code deployments will not happen.

This project may be postponed if necessary. You can read the schedule at wikitech.wikimedia.org. Any changes will be announced in the schedule. There will be more notifications about this. Please share this information with your community. Trizek (WMF) (talk) 13:48, 26 August 2020 (UTC)

Dangerous page
When I was reviewing some pages, PSP/Official Extras is somehow flagged as dangerous. Any idea what's causing that? --Sigma 7 (discuss • contribs) 02:59, 12 August 2020 (UTC)
 * Google has decided the page is dangerous, but afaics they provide no information that would be useful to us, as a good-faith information provider, in determining exactly why they've decided that. I'm thinking of providing the urls without links, if I can remember how to do that, but then I also don't know how long it would then take for Google to decide to reassess.   --Pi zero (discuss • contribs) 03:54, 12 August 2020 (UTC)
 * My guess is that pspdemocenter.com (which has since gone) was reported by Sony for malware, maybe because it hosted unauthorized PSP software. I have replaced it with another link which is up, hopefully when Google crawl it it wont flag it further. -- Jules (Mrjulesd) 05:37, 12 August 2020 (UTC)

Newbie questions about creating a book.
I have some questions about creating a new wiki book. I would like to create a “Culinary Arts” textbook which would be comparable to and with the detail of the textbooks used by professional Cooking schools but meant for non-professionals. I installed mediawiki on my computer and began developing the book. I now have a well defined structure and have begun fleshing the pages out but now I’m running into issues like not having the needed wikibooks templates. So now I’m interested in using my account here that I resurrected from mediawiki from years ago.

So here are the questions...

Should I just start building the book on my user page until I’m sure it is viable?

Or should I just formally start a new book?

It appears that I can clip a great deal of the material from Wikipedia then format the clipped material into a textbook format. Is that legal and/or appropriate?

Also, there will be much of the technical material that I can get from the wiki book cookbook which would also need to be reformatted and edited. The Cookbook has much good info but seems very encyclopedic though informal. Is that ok to have so similar of a book?

I’m assuming that any pages I create in my user space will be globally visible. Do I need to make the pages look like what they would in the final book or do I need to prefix every page with my username?

Thanks in advance for your help.

EddieM0710 —Preceding undated comment added 01:44, 19 August 2020.


 * Hi,  Pages to be used from Wikipedia should be requested for import.  You may want to take a look at Using Wikibooks, which includes info about how to create a book. --Pi zero (discuss • contribs) 05:08, 19 August 2020 (UTC)


 * Hi, the stuff I need would be 1 or 2 paragraphs from a large page. I’m not understanding why the page should be imported by an administrator when I can simply copy and paste the paragraph and underlying refs. I would be looking at hundreds of imports with most of it being deleted.


 * Also, did I reply to this correctly. I sort of expected a reply button. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Eddiem0710 (talk • contribs) 13:38, 19 August 2020 (UTC)


 * The conditions of copyright of Wikipedia do not allow material to be copied without attribution. That's the basic hang-up.  The usual solution is to import pages from Wikipedia at need; granted, that is most practical when one is importing most of a certain Wikipedia page to a particular Wikibooks page.  You're saying you'd be drawing small(ish) passages from hundreds of Wikipedia pages? --Pi zero (discuss • contribs) 15:55, 19 August 2020 (UTC)


 * yes. For instance, under ingredient definitions I would have an entry for salt. I expect I would only need a couple of paragraphs from the Wikipedia related article to composition and it’s importance to cooking. The material incorporated would probably highly edited and additional connecting material added. I would want to keep the external references as references for the book. I expect I would do something similar for most entries in the book. Thus probably hundreds of imports. I certainly don’t mind giving Wikipedia due acknowledgement. I’m doing little more than organizing and editing and really expect no acknowledgement.


 * Is that an appropriate way to develop a book?


 * I’m still struggling with what is ok and what isn’t. Here is a page/chapter I’ve been working on to see what I can do. Much of the text was copied from several Wikipedia articles and edited for more of a book feel rather than a research paper. Knives please take a look at it and tell me what you think. Eddiem0710 (discuss • contribs) 22:09, 22 August 2020 (UTC)


 * The outline of Culinary Arts looks plausible to me. There's some interesting food for thought (er... actually didn't intend a pun there) in how to arrange the relationship of this book to our existing Cookbook.  That is presumably a topic to discuss at Talk:Culinary Arts.  The Cookbook page itself could be improved; I see it doesn't even use our shelving system, nor is it immediately obvious how to make it do so, something I really should try to redress (in my copious free time), and Cookbook:Table of Contents seems to me to rather fail to advertise the actual outline of the thing, such as it is.  I agree that it's rather encyclopedic.  There are also some aspects of Wikibooks that are set up on the rather arrogant assumption that Cookbook is the only thing here on its subject, e.g. Cooking is a redirect to the Cookbook ToC.


 * Thoughts on the matter of importing and merging large numbers of Wikipedia articles for the sake of borrowing a sentence here and a sentence there, or alternatives thereto? (Also, ?) --Pi zero (discuss • contribs) 10:48, 26 August 2020 (UTC)
 * We might avoid a few imports with WikipediaCredit. JackPotte (discuss • contribs) 11:13, 26 August 2020 (UTC)


 * part of the reason I am struggling is that it seems way overkill to import the whole Wikipedia article. What seems appropriate to me is that I should copy what I need, freely edit it removing all the wiki links, maintain any references it uses and add another reference back to the Wikipedia article. I wanted my final book to look like any other printed textbook when done and referencing this way would look appropriate. Btw... I didn’t want to beat up the cookbook too much because I thought it may be an important someone’s sacred project. But there is a lot of good info there.


 * I suggest you do what I did. Copy the text into your page and in the edit summary insert a permalink to the Wikipedia source. QuiteUnusual (discuss • contribs) 13:41, 26 August 2020 (UTC)