Wikibooks:Reading room/Proposals/2014/February

Usability, and reliability
I have noticed more often that there are many book that are not completed that are useful to many people. I wait and think for a few weeks that there will be a user that would complete the book ,but no one completes it and even if there is a change it would be a addition of just a single sentence which is useless. For this reason I suggest that wikibooks administrators and Wikibook moderators should be involved in the completion of the books since they are the ones who mostly keep this site running. Doorknob747 (discuss • contribs) 00:45, 2 February 2014 (UTC)
 * Contributing to a book requires understanding of its subject. Contributing to an existing book also requires understanding of the book.  Writing a book is actually quite a difficult task; I'm involved, for instance, with the Conlang book, which was started almost ten years ago and I have been contributing to for about six, and we're still working, slowly and carefully, on how it should be organized.  In the longish term I hope to build interactive tools to help people with the specialized tasks of writing particular books, but that's still a ways off.  --Pi zero (discuss • contribs) 01:14, 2 February 2014 (UTC)
 * And most people who come here are either a school class project working for a fixed period - and then the book is abandoned, or they want to write their own book and lose steam. There's no chance of the handful of administrators completing all the books here. In any case, there's no need to be an admin to contribute to a book. QuiteUnusual (discuss • contribs) 17:17, 3 February 2014 (UTC)

Category:Books with print version dynamicity
Currently it's quite fastidious to create a book printable version page, and even more to maintain it when its pages change. That's why I propose to reduce this time to one minute by using the Template:printable which uses Module:Printable version, to get the full book in real time without any effort.

Actually something similar is already used [//pt.wikibooks.org/w/index.php?title=Internet/Imprimir&action=edit in the Portuguese version], and I've also proposed my short module [//fr.wikibooks.org/w/index.php?title=Programmation_XML/Version_imprimable&action=edit to the French one] today.

The difference between these two sites and here is that over there each table of contents is on its book subpage (eg: fr:MySQL/Sommaire), in absolute paths ([//en.wikibooks.org/w/index.php?title=Git&action=edit&oldid=2565249 not relative like here]), and called from the main page, and the printable version, and eventually a navigation bar on the right. JackPotte (discuss • contribs) 15:17, 3 February 2014 (UTC)

Travel Guides
Greetings from Wikivoyage!

I was just having a quick look through Wikibooks' catalogue when I noticed that you have a number of travel guides and tourism topics on your shelves; most of which haven't been altered for a little while.

I wondered how you'd feel about merging at least some of these into Wikivoyage - many have direct analogues, whilst others could form starting points for new guides.

Of course, I fully understand if you'd rather these topics remained on Wikibooks - I'm certainly not advocating some sort of Wiki-imperialism, it would just be nice to see them as part of a larger guide where they're more likely to be updated.

Either way, it would be nice to hear from you. Please feel free to call in over on WV and say 'hello'! :)

Nicholasjf21 (discuss • contribs) 00:08, 3 February 2014 (UTC)


 * Well hi there.


 * The page you want is Subject:Tourism; we use subject pages instead of bookshelves, nowadays.


 * I'm not too familiar with your format over at Wikivoyage. I might have guessed (but wouldn't have bet anything on) that the Wikivoyage format would be different from a full book; but even if that were true, not everything we have here is a full book, as lots of it is in a fairly early stage of development.


 * The procedure to propose moving the content of a book altogether to another sister would, I would think, be a transwiki proposal at WB:RFD. Naturally, material can be imported from one project to another using Special:Import even if it's to be left intact on the original project; we often import stuff from Wikipedia to here.  --Pi zero (discuss • contribs) 04:55, 5 February 2014 (UTC)


 * Thanks for letting me know - I've nominated the pages here. --Nicholasjf21 (discuss • contribs) 22:55, 5 February 2014 (UTC)