Wikibooks:Reading room/Proposals/2014/May

Welcome template for Class Project users
Since there are so many new users involved in academic projects I thought it was a good idea to create a welcome template for such users. I have created Template:Classwelcome. I hope somebody can edit it further as more should be said. As with all welcome messages it should be substituted. Maybe it would be better to refer to the users as being involved with academic projects as many of these seem to be university students so class isn't the appropriate word (at least not in Europe).--ЗAНИA talk 18:46, 5 May 2014 (UTC)


 * Should welcome messages be substituted? I'm not actively disagreeing, just wondering about the reasoning involved.  On Wikinews, we never (intentionally) substitute the {{Howdy}} template, which is transcluded on a humongous number of user talk pages (I see it's over a million now); every few years, when we decide to upgrade it, the upgrade gets deployed to everyone's user talk page.  --Pi zero (discuss • contribs) 18:59, 5 May 2014 (UTC)
 * I have always substituted them because I recall reading somewhere that I should and there's no need for old welcome messages to be updated I'm guessing (as the message has already been read). I don't know much about the technical side of all this except that people claim that substituting is less demanding on the servers but to what extent I don't know.  As for academic project people, I know it's not always clear if a new user is here for an academic project but often the type of page they edit or their username will give it away (for some projects everybody has a similar username).--ЗAНИA [[Image:Flag_of_Estonia.svg|15px]]talk 19:16, 5 May 2014 (UTC)
 * True, there is a server demand issue: a single edit to the Wikinews Howdy template would require the server to update over a million pages.  So it's not something to do unless distributing the change like that is really what one wants.  Fair enough.  --Pi zero (discuss • contribs) 02:36, 6 May 2014 (UTC)

Do we need 7 different Reading rooms?
In the Discussion category we have: General | Proposals | Projects | Featured books

In the Assistance category we have: General | Technical | Administrative

Do we really need this many reading rooms? Could the General discussion and Proposals be merged? And the General and Technical Assistance be merged too? Having two rooms named General also seems a bit confusing? I can see why Wikipedia needs so many rooms but other projects seem to manage with fewer - I only see one regularly used at Voyage.--ЗAНИA talk 21:43, 19 May 2014 (UTC)
 * And after my little rant I now realise that I've probably filed this message in the wrong reading room. Another problem possibly?  People often are not sure where to put their messages.--ЗAНИA [[Image:Flag_of_Estonia.svg|15px]]talk 21:45, 19 May 2014 (UTC)


 * At en.wn we have five water coolers. Nowadays some of them might not see anything posted in a given month.  Nobody's even suggested consolidating; it's a given that better times are ahead, and the infrastructure for keeping things straight is already in place for when it's more needed than it is now.


 * However, the point about people not knowing where to post is important. I'd want to address it by some means other than collapsing the infrastructure, but it should be addressed.


 * And, well, yes, the preferred reading room for the topic would probably be "Proposals". ;-) --Pi zero (discuss • contribs) 22:03, 19 May 2014 (UTC)

(edit conflict) English Wikinews has 5 places in their water cooler, plus the Newsroom (which I think is like the Projects Reading Room). English Wikinews may not have featured news because they list many current news stories on their main page. I think the General Discussion and General Assistance reading rooms could be merged. I think proposals should be kept separate to keep from overwhelming any other discussions or assistance people may need. I think technical assistance should be kept separate to ease tracking by people who can help. Administrative assistance might make sense to discontinue as administrators already watch the other reading rooms, and because there might not be much there that doesn't overlap with other requests for assistance or discussions. --dark lama  22:26, 19 May 2014 (UTC)
 * (Just an aside &mdash; The Newsroom isn't a place for discussion, it's a place where unpublished articles are automatically listed sorted by status; mainly, not yet submitted for review, and failed review so potentially in need of repairs. Articles can't be nominated for Featured Article status until they're archived, a week or more after publication; there's a page for discussing FA nominations.)


 * Merging General Discussion and General Assistance seems fairly reasonable to me. It should be raised at the proposals rr, though, because there's a reasonable expectation by people who may care about the decision, and who might not be watching here, that such a thing would be raised there.


 * I'm uncomfortable about discontinuing administrative assistance; there should always be a place to ask for help from the admins. --Pi zero (discuss • contribs) 23:11, 19 May 2014 (UTC)
 * I agree this proposal should be moved to the proposals rr for the reasons you mentioned. --dark lama  23:30, 19 May 2014 (UTC)


 * This topic has been moved from Reading_room/Assistance--ЗAНИA [[Image:Flag_of_Estonia.svg|15px]]talk 23:49, 19 May 2014 (UTC)

About administrative assistance, there are already specific pages to request specific assistance from administrators. The only remaining requests seems to be ones that may require discussion or anyone can do, much like anyone can discuss whether to keep or delete books at RFD/RFU and anyone can evaluate what the consensus is. Administrative action is only required when/if consensus is to delete.

I think the distinction between discussion and assistance might be the main problem with the organization of the reading rooms. --dark lama  00:18, 20 May 2014 (UTC)


 * On the second point, if the distinction between discussion and assistance is a problem, then I expect the solution to be difficult to work out. Actually, looking at the nav bar at the top of this page, it looks more intuitive the more we discuss changing things.  We'll want to think this through very carefully.


 * I'd like to explore the first point. You say "there are already specific pages to request specific assistance from administrators".  Hmm.  What pages are you referring to?  --Pi zero (discuss • contribs) 01:17, 20 May 2014 (UTC)


 * I think the solution is easy with General and Assistance merged there is no overlap with the rest:
 * Technical − Ask questions, request assistance, and discuss technical issues
 * Proposals − Suggest and discuss ideas for improving Wikibooks
 * Projects − Ask questions, request assistance, and discuss book-related problems
 * Imports − Request material and files be imported to Wikibooks
 * Permissions − Request access to addition tools
 * Renames − Request name changes
 * RFD/RFU − Request and discuss (un)deletions
 * Featured books − Request and discuss featured status for books
 * General − All other questions, requests, and community discussions


 * Imports and Renames are requests for specific assistance from administrators. Requests in the other reading rooms may require assistance from administrators to implement depending on what is being requested. People don't always understand what requests may require assistance from administrators and what requests do not. Requests may also not be clear from the beginning whether there is a need for administrator assistance or not. I think ambiguities in who assistance is needed from should be addressed with either specific request pages with focus on the request type and not the who, or when unknown should be addressed with something more general that isn't administrator specific with the assumption that anyone can generally help and if a request really does request assistance from someone with access to specific tools then a person with those tools can join the discussion and address the problem. --dark lama  02:20, 20 May 2014 (UTC)
 * Intuitive? Hardly.  Just look at the amount of discussions in the various rooms which begin with Not sure if this is the right place, but....  And any kind of message or proposal can turn into a discussion.  Though I quite like the description above Darklama - I had no idea that that was what the Proposals and Projects rooms were for.  I'd presumed Projects was related to class projects and I had gathered that Proposals was for this kind of discussion but also guessed it was for book-related proposals.  Anyway, most of these pages are not reading rooms - maybe there could be one reading room and several other things with a somewhat different name (just as RfD is not the Deletions reading room).--ЗAНИA [[Image:Flag_of_Estonia.svg|15px]]talk 09:35, 20 May 2014 (UTC)


 * @ЗAНИA. What pages are not reading rooms? What do you propose to change now? Maybe we agree. Maybe we disagree. I do not know. I do not understand where you are going with this comment. --dark lama  14:40, 20 May 2014 (UTC)


 * Regarding the exitence of many specific pages for different kinds of adminstrative requests &mdash; that's no substitute for having a simple, easy-to-find place to ask for administrative help. There's a good chance that sort of request may come from folks who are either already having trouble figuring out what's what, or already feeling harassed/frustrated/generally put-upon and don't need another hassle figuring out where to go to ask for assistance.  I would expect any sister project to have a single general-purpose clearinghouse for administrative concerns, regardless of how many more specialized pages there are.


 * Other issues here seem to be about knowing where to go, and I think that's very bound up with the way the menu bar is constructed. I'm gonna need to think about that a bunch more.  --Pi zero (discuss • contribs) 11:25, 20 May 2014 (UTC)


 * @Pi zero. I think people don't need the added hassle of figuring out where to go to ask for assistance, where to go to discuss things, or to whom it may concern. I think the priorities are getting answers to questions and getting problems fixed, rather than who answers or fixes the problem. I would expect any community-driven project to have a single general-purpose place where people can get answers and have their problems fixed, regardless of how many more specialized pages there are. I think what should or shouldn't be brought up on the administrative page is added hassle people don't need and is the result of the page being either too specialized or not specialized enough.
 * I think the main issue is about knowing where to go. I too think the layout of the navigation bar/menu is part of the problem. --dark lama  14:40, 20 May 2014 (UTC)


 * I suspect we agree on a lot more than we disagree on here. If someone brings a question to one place, and some other place would have been better, they ought not to be (a) berated for being in the wrong place, or (b) told that such-and-such would be a better place and told to go reask their question there.  And they souldn't worry that either of those things might happen.  Various helpful responses are possible, neither (a) or (b) amongst them.  This is, perhaps, an important ingredient to keep in mind for any upgrade:  the nav bar should help them to usually pick a pretty okay place to ask without creating anxiety over where the user should be taking their concern.  The clarity, and the reliably pretty-good choice, and the lack of anxiety are all parts of what we want.


 * Keeping in mind the non-anxiety factor, I'm saying there should be a place one can raise issues that are meant to be particularly brought to the attention of admins. One certainly ought not to respond to other placement of such a post with any of the unhelpful responses such as aforementioned, but there should be a place for admin-relevant concerns particularly.  Some people will be expecting that there is such a place, and if they can't find it, that may cause distress to them.


 * Note that this is not only about the user knowing where to post. That's obviously hugely important.  But it is also a matter of where each discussion ultimately gets archived.  Admin concerns ought, I suggest, to be archived in a place where one can find such things collected.  --Pi zero (discuss • contribs) 15:12, 20 May 2014 (UTC)


 * I want to reduce distress and anxiety about where posts ought to be placed, who ought to address particular concerns, and where past discussions ultimately ought to be archived. People also shouldn't be hassled because only administrators or whoever can address their problems and told they need to repost somewhere else to get attention from the "right" people. Getting attention from the "right" people should not be a problem. I think there should be no "wrong" place to post, or one "right" approach to get attention from the "right" people. Wikibooks has made searching the archives easier, but there is probably more that could be done so that one search will return all relevant community discussions. --dark lama  16:54, 20 May 2014 (UTC)


 * It occurs to me en.wn has one other page, not considered part of the water cooler, related to this discussion: WN:AAA &mdash; Admin Action Alerts.  That's the page that corresponds, roughly, to our Administrative Assistance reading room &mdash; and, as I say, it's not considered a water cooler (equiv reading room) at all.


 * The five water coolers (while we're accumulating comparisons that might provide some snippet of relevant insight) are Policy, Proposals, Technical, Assistance, and Miscellaneous. Those seem to me to be considerably better defined than our set of reading rooms, even though there are situations where more than one choice is reasonable.  Food for thought.  --Pi zero (discuss • contribs) 17:52, 20 May 2014 (UTC)


 * For the sake of disclosure and any potential bias, I draw a comparison with the water cooler because I made the original proposal that resulted in the split of the reading room, I was influenced by Wikinews' approach, and the name "reading room" was proposed along with it. Prior to that, the reading room consisted of a single page named "staff lounge", and the administrative assistance was known as the "administrator's noticeboard". I think I may have suggested merging the administrator's noticeboard into the general reading room then as well. I know I felt a far clearer overlap between the two pages existed back then. The general reading room is like the miscellaneous water cooler. I didn't suggest a policy page back then because the common practice at the time was to discuss on a proposed policy's discussion page and announce the discussion in the site notice. I think there is still no need for a policy page because those can be discussed here in the proposals reading room should the need ever arise, plus consensus from proposals can lead to policy changes, which has happened in the past. What do you think needs to be better defined? I guess maybe my involvement in the reading room's conception leads me not to see how the reading rooms aren't clearly defined already. --dark lama  13:40, 30 May 2014 (UTC)

Broadly I'm neutral on this, with the following exceptions. There are two groups of people who come here from other Wikimedia project and are looking immediately for assistance (so their first edit is usually to a Reading Room): The Small Wiki Monitoring Team ("SWMT") including Global Rollbackers and Global Sysops who want to make vandalism reports / block requests; editors wanting to usurp an account in order to complete their Single Unified Login and are directed here from Meta. The renames / usurps are handled by Bureaucrats so are better left on their own page IMO. It can be named something else if people want but I think it is best just left as is because I've only seen a couple of misplaced rename requests so it obviously works. For the SWMT, a page that is familiarly named is most useful as not all are English first-language speakers. So "Administrative Assistance", "Administrators Noticeboard" or something similar is best I think. QuiteUnusual (discuss • contribs) 13:52, 30 May 2014 (UTC)


 * I think everything in the requests part of the top navigation is clearly defined and should be kept as is. I think the administrative assistance is not clearly defined. Based on your comment, I think a reading room to discuss and report problematic behavior would be clearer than "administrative assistance". How about the "user mediation" reading room? Administrative assistance could be renamed leaving the redirect behind, or simply redirected, either would leave a redirect behind for SWMT to find. --<span style="font: bold 10pt 'courier new', comic, sans, ms;"><font color="midnightblue">dark lama  14:10, 30 May 2014 (UTC)


 * A passing thought: mediation pretty much doesn't work.  It's basically begging to escalate a situation and maximize how disruptive it is for as long as possible.  I'm not saying I know an ideal alternative, but mediation is horrible and definitely ought not to be encouraged as a default way of thinking.  Mediation is part of the interlocking infrastructure by which Wikipedia makes itself a troll-haven.  --Pi zero (discuss • contribs) 15:43, 30 May 2014 (UTC)


 * Mediation/Arbitration hasn't worked for English Wikibooks either. Maybe people are anxious about any page being used to discuss and report problematic behavior out of the fear that it is begging to escalate a situation to maximize disruption for as long as possible. Maybe that is why these type of pages always use a less specific name compared to other request pages. Meta has RFC, which people use to propose things and to propose blocks. I remember when I was new to Wikibooks, before I knew anything about how the wikimedia projects work, I sought out help on the irc channel for my questions because I didn't know where else to go, and figured anyone who ran the website would be there. Seems like other people new to Wikibooks now often resort to an admin's user discussion page when they have questions or need help with something. --<span style="font: bold 10pt 'courier new', comic, sans, ms;"><font color="midnightblue">dark lama  16:54, 30 May 2014 (UTC)


 * My original concern was simply that so many rooms were unnecessary because it means looking in several rooms to find what you want and because it may bewilder new users (or me). I also felt that the descriptions weren't clear enough.  But it's clear people don't want anything to change so no bother.  As for mediation - Wiki attitudes to this are often ridiculous as can be seen on Wikipedia where old-timers simply baffle less-experienced editors with their knowledge of Wiki jargon thus getting their own way or the fiasco of Panic's ridiculous mediation / arbitration / whatever many years ago (although that is all very amusing looking back at the long discussions and blocks / unblocks in the archives).--ЗAНИA [[Image:Flag_of_Estonia.svg|15px]]talk 18:53, 30 May 2014 (UTC)


 * Meh. The status quo isn't so wonderful.  I think we're just going to take a while to settle on how to change things; no need to move hastily.  We may well get there in the end.  --Pi zero (discuss • contribs) 19:13, 30 May 2014 (UTC)


 * I didn't see any objections to merging the two general reading rooms. That might possibly be the only thing that can change, unless Pi zero still wants/needs more time to think about reorganizing. --<span style="font: bold 10pt 'courier new', comic, sans, ms;"><font color="midnightblue">dark lama  19:42, 30 May 2014 (UTC)