Wikibooks:Reading room/Proposals/2014/June

Sharing
It dawned on me earlier that Wikibooks is one of the few websites which I regularly use which doesn't include buttons for sharing pages (books) with various social networks. Digging around showed that this had been discussed many times before on W'pedia (here but has such a proposal taken place in Wikibooks? I've read the arguments against the idea and understand how it might promote certain other websites and so on but when more and more traffic is coming from mobile devices it seems like the obvious way forward.  Copying and pasting a URL and then switching to a VK or Facebook app to post the link is quite a chore on a mobile device.--ЗAНИA talk 01:16, 16 March 2014 (UTC)


 * n:Template:Social bookmarks. --Pi zero (discuss • contribs) 02:49, 16 March 2014 (UTC)
 * With that precedent in mind, I think it's an interesting idea; but, where would you envision putting the share buttons? For example, if we wanted them per-book, and at the bottom of the book's main page, we could add them to template subjects (with some care, since there might be some books that don't put subjects in the standard place).  Sharing per-book makes a certain amount of sense to me, because the point of our project is the books as coherent units, rather than just collections of pages (which is Wikipedia's turf).  On the other hand, there are times when a particular page is of interest, and very much so in the Cookbook subproject.  --Pi zero (discuss • contribs) 16:21, 16 March 2014 (UTC)
 * I'd say that share buttons at the foot of the page would be the best idea. The buttons would be for sharing the whole book with the exception of Cookbook pages.  But what are the negatives of doing this?  I don't fully understand why Wikipedia rejected it - it seems like an obvious idea to me but it seems to have been repeatedly shot down.--ЗAНИA [[Image:Flag_of_Estonia.svg|15px]]talk 19:12, 16 March 2014 (UTC)
 * Well, bluntly, the Wikipedian community plays headgames with itself. They have this virulently anti-elitist tradition, yet in openly acknowledging they aren't themselves a reliable source they nurse an inferiority complex that compels them to put on the trappings of elitism.  Share-links would be plebian.
 * (I choose to believe Wikipedia isn't beyond redemption. I do.  But I think they've gotten themselves into a hole they can't dig themselves out of; it's going to be up to their sister projects to succeed and show them how it can be done.  Not a short-term goal, but one I think worth striving for.)  --Pi zero (discuss • contribs) 19:51, 16 March 2014 (UTC)
 * I'd welcome it being made easier to socially share Wikibooks content, especially on mobile devices: it might go some way to addressing the disparity between Wikibooks' quality and how well known it is. On the "per-book" versus "per-page" issue, I request that avoid paternalism and put as much as possible in the hands of the user. This fits with the Wikimedia ethos of content freely reusable by anyone for any purpose. Say I find the page Communication_Theory/Uncertainty_Reduction and want to share it with colleagues or students: I'd hope the page itself would be shared, not the entire book on the assumption that the book is intended as a coherent unit. Leave it to the user to share what they think is worth sharing, rather than deciding on their behalf. Cheers, MartinPoulter (discuss • contribs) 17:16, 24 March 2014 (UTC)
 * Well I tried to have a go myself. I copied the template text from Wikinews (User:Xania/Template:Social_bookmark) but then got stumped by the mention of Javascript (which I found on common.js but it scared me).  There really must be an easy way.  We mentioned above about the problems with Wikipedia and other Wikimedia sites but as countless media articles have pointed out over the years it's the software that puts most people off.  Anything more than simple editing of pages is beyond the limits of most users.  It's no wonder people need lots of time to become a bigger part of the community, it's why out of all the stewards there is only one female, and it's why Wikipedia is lacking in so many subjects which the majority of contributors have no interest in.--ЗAНИA [[Image:Flag_of_the_Isle_of_Mann.svg|15px]]talk 18:08, 4 June 2014 (UTC)


 * The objective of my interactive tools is to allow ordinary wiki markup to be used to construct interactive web pages, such as wizards. On the theory that the community of a sister project should be used not only to crowdsource ongoing development of content for the project, but also to crowdsource ongoing development of semi-automated assistance for on-wiki tasks requiring expertise.  There are lots of tasks on any wiki requiring expertise; content development requires expertise, and various administrative tasks do too, and the community could capture these things and make almost everything anyone does on the wiki easier.


 * That said, there will always be occasions when one has to resort to some other language (for example, I'm creating my interactive tools using javascript and lua). Wiki markup is, and must remain, deliberately weak enough that it doesn't offer exploits.


 * Some of the javascript over on Wikinews is truly harrowing; iirc bawolff has remarked that he wrote a bunch of it when he was much less experienced, and it scares him now. When I get a chance, I'll see what the javascript for the social bookmarks is like, and thus whether it can be adapted or would need rewritten.  --Pi zero (discuss • contribs) 19:04, 4 June 2014 (UTC)