Wikibooks:Reading room/Proposals/2011/June

Show All Books in the "Subject:" Pages
Most of the "Subject:" pages show they have no Competed Books - because the books are all stashed away in subsections. For example, the "Subject:Science" page shows no completed books, but there are 46 completed books in its subsections (almost one subsection per book).

Showing no completed books in the subject pages is confusing and disheartening. It makes it look it Wikibooks hasn't finished anything and is not worth checking out. We should keep the subsections, but also show a complete list of books in the subject pages. Later, when the lists get too long, we should move all the books to the subsections (creating "miscellaneous" subsections, if necessary).69.157.21.118 (discuss) 22:10, 26 April 2011 (UTC)


 * The wikimedia software doesn't make it easy to list all pages belonging to a category or any of its descendants. Even if you know what all the descendant categories are, a DPL (Dynamic Page List) can't do a union of categories, only an intersection, so you have to have a single actual category to which all the pages of interest belong.  Sister project Wikinews actually does that, and it's a big hassle &mdash; every article related to, say, New York City has to go in categories New York State, United States, and North America.  Some articles end up belonging to a couple of dozen categories.


 * If we wanted badly enough to make this happen, we could play games with bots and hidden categories. --Pi zero (discuss • contribs) 05:13, 27 April 2011 (UTC)


 * Subject:Science still needs to have the books at the root pushed down into subcategories so it can use root subject instead of subject page. The former allows us to manually specify the featured books present in any of the subcategories.  About half of the root subjects we have are fully diffused.  Featured books are normally nearly complete or complete, so that would accomplish largely the same thing.  See, for instance, Subject:Humanities.  – Adrignola discuss 23:44, 27 April 2011 (UTC)


 * I know what. If a book is complete then just add it to the top category as well. -Arlen22 (talk) 13:11, 1 June 2011 (UTC)

Feature to track blankings by newbies?
Recent discoveries I have made in edit histories have led me to wonder whether a feature would be possible which could give you an all-time list of edits which removed 100+ characters and which were made by accounts, especially IPs, with fewer than five previous edits. Unexplained blankings often go unnoticed if there is other activity on the page, and in the cases I found these blankings were done in Featured Books, by IPs which had never edited before or since. It would be nice to be able to salvage all valid content which has fallen victim to such experimentation or whatever it is. Belteshazzar (discuss • contribs) 18:38, 7 June 2011 (UTC)

Tests?
Hello everyone,I love this site, and I always use it, but I was wondering if there is tests with the subjects? Say u read a text book about science and u wanted to test yourself to see if u learned anything and to have a test and be graded on it.


 * Depends on the book. Some books include tests; many don't. (I know that many of the books about language learning include simple tests.) Also, wikibooks supports the Quiz extension but this was added relatively recently, thus, it isn't used in many books (yet). --Martin Kraus (discuss • contribs) 20:50, 8 June 2011 (UTC)