Wikibooks:Reading room/Proposals/2010/October

Top icons for reading level
Does anyone else think it would be useful to have an icon on the top left corner of the main page of a book showing its difficulty, like the status icon? It could be something like Template:WJ Level, with '1' as pre-reader and '5' as professional. Kayau (talk &#124; email &#124; contribs) 14:17, 1 October 2010 (UTC)

The 'from' tagline
The 'from' tagline reads: From Wikibooks, the open-content textbooks collection. However, we do not contain only textbooks, and people reading WJ and cookbooks will be quite surprised to see such a line. I think it should be changed to something else, like non-fiction books collection or something. The line is also used in the Main Page. Kayau (talk &#124; email &#124; contribs) 14:53, 1 October 2010 (UTC)


 * Considering that Wikijunior was supposed to be split out at some point to http://wikijunior.org and the Cookbook if started today would violate guidelines on using existing projects as incubators, I'd say that it's not surprising that it would be surprising. Also keep in mind that the tagline does not appear on the Vector skin (and probably shouldn't given the extensive use of subpages and the automatic navigation links that push the page down vertically in addition to what the tagline would). The main page phrase is still visible as well as the page title.  Interface text at MediaWiki:Tagline and MediaWiki:Pagetitle was changed by Derbeth in late 2005.  I see no consensus for that change, as I see nothing in Derbeth's contributions history suggesting it was a result of discussion.  The only firm thing was have is the slogan, "Open books for an open world".  It was suggested in July 2008 to remove that from the page title to increase search engine ranking. Wikibooks states that we are a collection of free-content textbooks and not open-content textbooks.  Changing to simply "books" rather than "textbooks" would run contrary to a statement Jimmy Wales made in the past here that books here should cover subjects that would be feasibly taught at a university.  However both he and Karl Wick no longer participate here, so we're coasting along on whatever momentum we have.  Doesn't rule out some navel gazing to decide how we're doing on that mission or whether we need to change course. – Adrignola talk 19:53, 1 October 2010 (UTC)
 * WB:WIW makes clear the scope includes manuals, guides, and annotated texts too &mdash; not just textbooks. Wikibooks' slogan uses "books" instead of "textbooks" too. I see no problem with replacing "textbooks" with "books" in the tagline. The tagline could possibly be made namespace dependent, which might allow for example: "open cooking" for the cookbook namespace, "open children's books" for the wikijunior namespace, and "open books" for the main namespace. --dark lama  22:14, 1 October 2010 (UTC)