Wikibooks:Reading room/Archives/2020/November

Bot Wikipedias and human Wikibooks
At start they were mostly for inserting interwikis (links between Wikipedia articles in different languages), but gradually they started to create new articles. Lastly, some Wikipedia versions like Cebuano, Waray-Waray and Egyptian Arabic were remained full of bot articles but with small reader communities. Bot usage was always at low level in Wikibooks, maybe because of complexities of its scientific content and contextual relationship between its pages. As well as, this project has the least number of interwikis (between various languages of Wikibooks), now present in the Wikimedia project Wikidata. Wikidata provides data for other Wikimedia projects including Wikibooks (now mostly in Lua language). These data can be used to autofill infobox templates in some Wikivoyage versions and may have more usages. Is wikidata changing Wikibooks to become a bot-based project, too? --Doostdar (discuss • contribs) 10:59, 2 November 2020 (UTC)
 * We do not remove manual interwikis even if they are also linked at Wikidata. Neither does en.wn. --Pi zero (discuss • contribs) 19:31, 2 November 2020 (UTC)
 * I will "battle" all day long to resist the encroachment of Wikidata here. I've seen what similar tools can do. A data set is used to generate "human readable" (debate!) content that is then consumed by more technology. For example, financial services companies create "commentary" on stocks by dragging data into "AI" generated templates to create something that has some resemblance to human written analysis. It is then typically read by another piece of software to extract the data for consumption into an analytics platform. The sum of all this computer horsepower is to move one set of data points to another place while dressing up as if there is some intelligence or meaning in it. It's idiotic. QuiteUnusual (discuss • contribs) 15:26, 5 November 2020 (UTC)

Wiki of functions naming contest - Round 2
. Reminder: Please help to choose the name for the new Wikimedia wiki project - the library of functions. The finalist vote starts today. The finalists for the name are: Wikicode, Wikicodex, Wikifunctions, Wikifusion, Wikilambda, Wikimedia Functions. If you would like to participate, then please learn more and vote now at Meta-wiki. --Quiddity (WMF) 22:10, 5 November 2020 (UTC)

Starting a book???
What can I start one on? FcoonerBCA (discuss • contribs) 06:22, 7 November 2020 (UTC)
 * You can start one on what you like, if within scope and policy. You might want to read What is Wikibooks? first, to give you an idea of what is allowed. Using Wikibooks is helpful as a manual. If you want to start "History of Wales" I'd imagine that would be fine. -- Jules (Mrjulesd) 11:02, 7 November 2020 (UTC)

Reference Previews – deployment to wikibooks?
A new feature called Reference Previews was introduced as a beta feature last year. After more than a year of testing, bug fixing and other improvements it will soon leave the beta state in the first wikis, enabling it by default for all users including readers. New features like this are deployed in multiple batches, to ensure everything runs smoothly. Therefore, we are currently looking for wikis that are interested in being among the first to gain the new feature.

The feature shows you references in a small popup when you hover over the reference number in square brackets. This way you can look up a reference without jumping down to the bottom of the page. The feature is part of the MediaWiki Popups extension, which is also used for the Page Previews feature. Both features can be turned on and off together by the user.

Several wikis have a gadget called “RefTooltips” to provide the same functionality. The new improvement was built as a possible replacement that should be more robust in the long term. It will however be up to the communities of each wiki to decide whether the new version should replace the old or not. If the gadget is enabled the user will not see the popup of our extension but only the old popup. If the user however disables the gadget and has page previews enabled, they will also see the reference previews by the popup-extension.

We would be very excited, if the wikibooks community is interested to be in the first batch to receive. If you have questions, let me know. -- 88.66.249.199 (discuss) 14:14, 19 November 2020 (UTC)
 * Hello 88.66.249.199,
 * That feature has existed in "Mobile view" for a year or so? Or Mobile has RefTooltips?


 * A few features in Desktop are not evident in Mobile. Aside from the "missing features" Mobile accomplishes the same result as Desktop with less complication. For me, duplication of interfaces is unnecessary.


 * The reference popup runs on JavaScript? Do MediaWiki developers test on a non-JavaScript browser? So much JavaScript flies around the 'net these days. Most of it achieving no great result. In fact Dillo usually opens a page in less than a second whereas Firefox is noticeably slower. If a wiki page can switch to a reference faster than it can open a popup, is the popup really a benefit? In most Web sites, I'd rather the JavaScript were omitted. No offense to developers but a matter of efficiency.
 * Regards, ... PeterEasthope (discuss • contribs) 16:07, 23 November 2020 (UTC)
 * Hello – first an apology for posting as not logged in user – that was not intended, I didn't notice I wasn't logged in.
 * Yes, the feature is similar, but not identical to the feature on the mobil view. And yes, the reference popups are implemented with Javascript, unfortunately this can still not be implemented properly without Javascript. If Javascript is disabled, the old behavior of jumping down to the reference is preserved. We implement all our features to work without Javascript – if technical possible. We also make sure that the behavior of users without Javascript is not deteriorated. In this case people explicitly wished to see the references without jumping down and up again, so that they wouldn't loose their focus while reading. As always with this kind of features, it can be disabled. -- Michael Schönitzer (WMDE) (discuss • contribs) 15:45, 25 November 2020 (UTC)

Call for insights on ways to better communicate the work of the movement
. Apologies if you are not reading this message in your native language. . A translatable version of this message is available on Meta. Call for insights on ways to better communicate the work of the movement The Movement Strategy recommendations published this year made clear the importance of establishing stronger communications within our movement. To this end, the Foundation wants to gather insights from communities on ways we all might more consistently communicate about our collective work, and better highlight community contributions from across the movement. Over the coming months, we will be running focus groups and online discussions to collect these insights. Visit the page on Meta-Wiki to sign up for a focus group or participate in the discussion. ELappen (WMF) (talk) 18:56, 18 November 2020 (UTC)

Problems adding / recognising modules
Hi there, I am adding modules on Latin Wikibooks such as la:Module:TableTools but these are not always being recognised by Template scripts, eg la:Formula:Ordered list. Does anyone have any tips as to why this might be? JimKillock (discuss • contribs) 13:59, 28 November 2020 (UTC)

Community Wishlist Survey 2021
The 2021 Community Wishlist Survey is now open! This survey is the process where communities decide what the Community Tech team should work on over the next year. We encourage everyone to submit proposals until the deadline on , or comment on other proposals to help make them better. The communities will vote on the proposals between and.

The Community Tech team is focused on tools for experienced Wikimedia editors. You can write proposals in any language, and we will translate them for you. Thank you, and we look forward to seeing your proposals!

SGrabarczuk (WMF) 05:52, 20 November 2020 (UTC)

Wikidata descriptions changes to be included more often in Recent Changes and Watchlist
''Sorry for sending this message in English. Translations are available on this page. Feel free to translate it in more languages!''

As you may know, you can include changes coming from Wikidata in your Watchlist and Recent Changes (in your preferences). Until now, this feature didn’t always include changes made on Wikidata descriptions due to the way Wikidata tracks the data used in a given article.

Starting on December 3rd, the Watchlist and Recent Changes will include changes on the descriptions of Wikidata Items that are used in the pages that you watch. This will only include descriptions in the language of your wiki to make sure that you’re only seeing changes that are relevant to your wiki.

This improvement was requested by many users from different projects. We hope that it can help you monitor the changes on Wikidata descriptions that affect your wiki and participate in the effort of improving the data quality on Wikidata for all Wikimedia wikis and beyond.

Note: if you didn’t use the Wikidata watchlist integration feature for a long time, feel free to give it another chance! The feature has been improved since the beginning and the content it displays is more precise and useful than at the beginning of the feature in 2015.

If you encounter any issue or want to provide feedback, feel free to use this Phabricator ticket. Thanks!

Lea Lacroix (WMDE) 14:39, 30 November 2020 (UTC)

Books
History of Wales I want to start. Is this okay???

FcoonerBCA (discuss • contribs) 06:30, 7 November 2020 (UTC)


 * Sounds like a good topic for a book. We have a book about how to write books for Wikibooks: Using Wikibooks.  You'll likely want to shelve a book about the history of Wales on Shelf:European history.  Welcome to Wikibooks. :-)  --Pi zero (discuss • contribs) 12:28, 7 November 2020 (UTC)

What can I do here
Hello! I come from the Simple English Wikipedia. I'm wondering what I can do to help out here! --つがる (discuss • contribs) 03:27, 27 November 2020 (UTC)
 * Thanks for asking. On Wikibooks, most books are basically individual efforts, really. There's no reason it has to be that way but there is just a very small community here. So if you have a passion project, you can work on that, for sure. If you have a low level of English, take a look at Wikijunior. Or, if you have recipes to share, see the Cookbook. There's of course also maintenance, fixing typos, etc. —Justin ( koavf ) ❤T☮C☺M☯ 05:12, 27 November 2020 (UTC)
 * If you are experienced with working with simple English, there are several books (as well as the whole of Wikijunior) that would benefit from expansion and editing. The Wikijunior books are targeted at 8 year old children, so as well as simple English it's important to keep the concepts simple and the language engaging. Please do read Using Wikibooks first. This project works quite differently to the Wikipedias - for example, we don't tend to have lots of wikilinks or link between different books as they are intended to be read as a book - front to back - potentially in print form. QuiteUnusual (discuss • contribs) 09:07, 27 November 2020 (UTC)