Wikibooks:Reading room/Proposals/2011/October

Wikijunior Beginning Phonetics
This would be one level up from a pre-reader book. e.g. ''The fat cat ran after the rat." Heyzeuss (discuss • contribs) 10:52, 4 October 2011 (UTC)
 * Seems an interesting idea, but I'm not sure I quite visualize what you have in mind.
 * There's a potential problem in such things because people in different parts of the world pronounce English differently, especially the vowels. --Pi zero (discuss • contribs) 13:12, 4 October 2011 (UTC)
 * See Wikijunior:Alphabet, as an example. Unfortunately, there is nothing else in Wikibooks for teaching kids to read except Alphabet books. My four-year-old knows the alphabet, and can sound out certain words, but he needs some exercises at his level if he is going to progress. No hurry, anyway. I only take the opportunity to teach him when he gets interested.

Here's an example of the kind of book that I am suggesting http://media.glnsrv.com/pdf/products/sample_pages/sample_KR001.pdf and the website where I found it. http://www.aophomeschooling.com/product/ks100/

I'm not too worried about dialects. If a South African writes it, then it should be South African, if a New Zealander writes it, then it should be New Zealander. Likewise, when I contribute to Wikiwhatever, I only use American spellings. Each kid will read it with his or her own accent.

This is just a wishlist item, and I don't really expect anybody else to do it. It would be nice though. If there were already existing some public domain material or creative commons licensed material, it should be moved over to Wikijunior, posthaste. Heyzeuss (discuss • contribs) 19:32, 4 October 2011 (UTC)

I don't think Wikibooks has a policy English Dialects, but here is the one on Wikipedia. w:Wikipedia:Manual of Style Heyzeuss (discuss • contribs) 14:18, 5 October 2011 (UTC)


 * The dialect issue I'd intended to point out concerns usefulness of pronunciation-related material for an international audience. (WP:MOS is mainly concerned, iirc, with the written language, and for that matter supposes readership who can already read.)


 * As an example of the peculiar sort of difficulty that can arise from spoken dialects &mdash;this is far more sophisticated than the children's book you're talking about, of course&mdash; in Conlang/Intermediate/Sounds/Phones various vowel sounds are illustrated via words that use them (which is important in that context because it can be difficult to connect the technical terminology with actual sounds) &mdash; but I realized, after another contributor had helpfully added these illustrations, that in my dialect of English, some of those words illustrate different sounds than intended. Indeed, when I worked out exactly which sounds were supposed to be illustrated, and tried pronouncing the illustrations with those instead of the ones used in my dialect, I found myself speaking the words with a British accent. :-)  I haven't decided yet how to resolve that problem (as I've been busy elsewhere).


 * My point was simply that we want our books to be valuable to as wide an audience as possible, and therefore such issues ought to be thought through. --Pi zero (discuss • contribs) 16:35, 5 October 2011 (UTC)


 * You are right, that the differences in orthography are mostly unrelated to differences in pronunciation. The first thing that comes to mind is the way a short letter A sounds on either side of The Pond. In the U.S. the vowel is much further back than in the U.K., and then it depends on what word. The letter T can be swallowed, spit, or turned into a letter D, depending on what region, what word, and what part of the word. Letters R are rolled, dropped, or overstated, depending on the position in the word. Try saying: "The rabbit ran for cover," with a British accent, for example. Those are examples of where each reader would superimpose a regional dialect over the text. The effect would be that readers would attach their own phenoms to the words, which is good. English spelling is not 110% phonetic, so young learners need all of the help that they can get. The challenge is where spelling and pronunciation change together, but I can't think of any examples just right now.


 * Then there's the problem with vocabulary. I had never heard of a lorry until I lived outside the United States. In the U.K., people wear wellies, trousers, and swimming costumes. :D My son has children's books and TV programs from the U.K., and he learns words from them that I never use. Mostly for that reason, I think that it is appropriate that the book has a disclaimer of where it comes from. The spelling and vocabulary should be consistently from the same place, but at the same time, somewhat neutral, given the circumstances. Heyzeuss (discuss • contribs) 11:36, 6 October 2011 (UTC)


 * Your example "The rabbit ran for cover" reminds me that non-rhotic accents make it unsafe to use final r's to teach the r sound. (That one I'm not likely to forget since it figures into Tolkien's classic example of euphony, "cellar door".)  --Pi zero (discuss • contribs) 14:58, 6 October 2011 (UTC)


 * I like this idea. Don't think it really matters too much if there are contributions thrown in there from different varieties of English.  That's how things work nowadays.  Nobody is aware of only their dialect of English because of films (mostly US), TV (British internationally but also US, Canada and Australia) and the Internet which exposes people to all kinds of English.  This will be even more true for the next generation.  An ideal book would spell words phonetically for as many kinds of English as possible and would aim to include audio as well. I'd be willing to contribute with Irish or South African English.--ЗAНИA [[Image:Flag_of_Italy.svg|15px]]talk 19:45, 21 October 2011 (UTC)

Blog host blacklisting
Should all blog hosting websites be blacklisted with vetted blogs added as exceptions? Should blog hosting websites be blacklisted on a case by case bases? As an example, blogspot was blacklisted and the rational for maintaining the blacklist has been that it is not a reliable source to cite for verifying information, inclusion of blogspot constitutes original research, and book contributors willing to vet a blog can request whitelisting for a specific blog. However some people think blogspot should be removed from the blacklist entirely because blogspot can be useful in helping to develop books, or wish to link to their blog on their user page.

I think there may be some good points for both blacklisting and not blacklisting blog hosting websites. I think the reasons are likely true for all blog hosting websites. --dark lama  17:14, 4 October 2011 (UTC)


 * I also think that blocking blog hosting sites increases quality to the links and is a method to reduce link spam. Another issue is that blogs tend to be very dynamic/volatile and even dangerous to be good long term external resources. But I don't think preemptively blocking is a good path to fallow.
 * How has it been working so far? I understand that some mass blog hosting sites have already a block or is only blogspot ? Can wikibookians see a list of blocked sites ? --Panic (discuss • contribs) 20:57, 4 October 2011 (UTC)


 * I think Blogspot is likely the only blog hosting site blacklisted right now. I think some people may feel Blogspot was unfairly targeted as a result. I think though the reason Blogspot is likely the only blog hosting site blacklisted is because people are just not aware of what other blog hosting sites are out there. Any Wikibookian can see the list of blacklisted sites, but I think the average Wikibookian (and Administrator too) probably wouldn't be able to understand what they were looking at because of how its implemented. I'm not sure exactly by what criteria or how to measure whether blacklisting is working or not working. I think that might be something the community still needs to sort out. What method would you use to determine how blacklisting has been working so far? --dark lama  23:04, 6 October 2011 (UTC)


 * I had the idea that the site blocking was general to all Wikimedia sites, not project dependent and it should (or could be) if not using a per-emptive setup. As lets say depending in a predilection for a particular site for a above average amount of link spam or as a detected virus vector. More or less why we block the most URL shorteners/redirectors.
 * Well the more I think about it the more I think that there is no good reason to really treat those types of site differently, at least for glovbal link blocking, since some people may wish to add them to their userpages. In the instance a virus is detected on one of those sites it would be more beneficial to just report the issue to the firm doing the hosting since it would certenly fall outside of the terms of service (this may require a temporary block at best). Is there any reference or information on the particular reason Blogspot was selected for special treatment ?
 * The negative effects we discussed are possible but I can't say to have noticed any particular trend, if it exists it can be covered by establish a guideline not to use those links in books if avoidable, in fact this should not be necessarily directed only to blog hosting sites, and we already cover some of it as we classify it as spam. I have pruned some of these types of links from some works on that basis.
 * I imagine the list of blocked sites to be using regular expressions not very easy for human reading but should have a place in the Special pages listing. --Panic (discuss • contribs) 00:26, 7 October 2011 (UTC)


 * For any site, go to MediaWiki:Spam-blacklist. This is a regex list of regex. You can see all blogspot blacklistings by searching for blogspot in your browser. I have commented on MediaWiki talk:Spam-whitelist, recommending that blogspot be delisted. It's probably causing more trouble than it is preventing. The spam blacklist was not intended as a method of making generic content decisions, but only for preventing linkspam, as the name implies. Using the spam blacklist for content control ("not reliable source") gives administrators special powers to determine content, generally not a good idea, and I've seen this abused. (I'm not claiming abuse here, to be clear.) Suffice it to say that I've been over and over this subject, at Wikipedia and at meta.
 * I'll note that Wikipedia is generally strict about blacklisting and often blacklists sites with possible legitimate uses, and whitelisting there can be frustrating, with requests sometimes sitting for months. Nevertheless, blogspot is not blacklisted there; instead there is a blacklisted list of specific blogspot subdomains. That means that Wikipedia, tough on linkspam, has nevertheless decided to allow non-specifically-blacklisted blogspot domains to be linked. To make what can become a long story short, blogspot should be delisted here. Some blogs may even be reliable source, it's simply not true that all blogs are not RS. For example, a blog by a notable expert may be considered RS on the views of that expert. Further, RS requirements, on Wikipedia, do not apply to external links; external links are allowed where the site is considered useful for further reading and is properly and neutrally presented as such.
 * While Wikibooks could go the "blacklist all and exempt specific" route, most users will not go to the trouble of requesting whitelisting, even if it's a good link. They just go away. So blacklisting when it's not necessary can do significant damage.
 * One more detail, since there seems to be some confusion. There is a global blacklist at meta. Individual WMF wikis have their own blacklists and whitelists. The local whitelist overrides the global blacklist. The local lists only affect local editing. --Abd (discuss • contribs) 14:01, 11 October 2011 (UTC)


 * I have delisted blogspot from the blacklist... let's see what happens in terms of spam linking (or not) QU TalkQu 15:49, 11 October 2011 (UTC)

Question and possible proposal
What is the record kept in the source as transwikis are made? Would it be possible to include in the process a requirement to duplicate with the necessary changes the requests in the pages targeted for transwiki. This would possible increase visibility of local projects and bring more knowledgeable and interested editors to the relevant books. --Panic (discuss • contribs) 00:30, 21 October 2011 (UTC)
 * As far as I know, there's no way to monitor exports of pages other than through the pageview log, which is enormous, so you're looking for a needle in a haystack. Anyway, very few people have access to it.  Imports are recorded in the import log.-- Arthur  Vogel  19:11, 21 October 2011 (UTC)


 * I was not looking for the log, but to understand how the action is expressed at the source project. We can indeed request that the acting admin to include in the steps of the import a post on that source page talk of a notice pointing to the trasnwiki request for instance so that source editors are made aware of the use being given to the content. A similar function that I have came to appreciate and value is that we can see all Wikimedia's projects use of Commons Images, this permits to link various sources of useful content. --Panic (discuss • contribs) 19:18, 21 October 2011 (UTC)
 * I understand what you're getting at. A simple template would be useful that could be placed on the talk pages of future imported articles.  They already use banners on talk pages to note when an article was referenced in the media.--ЗAНИA [[Image:Flag_of_Italy.svg|15px]]talk 19:38, 21 October 2011 (UTC)