Wikibooks:Reading room/Proposals/2015/October

Proposal of Wikibooks interwiki plolicy
Some policies and guidelines seem to need rewriting. As Wikibooks for Wikimedians guideline says "Wikibooks pages don't contain as many links as Wikipedia articles" and it also says "External linking should also be exercised sparsely.", "Wikibooks uses wikilinks conservatively". What these sentences mean? It's not clear at all.

When you refer to Wikibooks Manual of Style, you see a draft page which is stale, not clarifying Linking method clearly. It just guides you to Editing Help Page. Again you see nothing about conservatively using interwikis to other projects.

I think these kind of guidelines should be rewritten or even be converted into policies. --Doostdar (discuss • contribs) 06:02, 2 October 2015 (UTC)


 * To me, the guideline you linked to is quite clear. Interwiki and external links should be used sparingly because "a book is supposed to be a self-contained resource with a contiguous narrative". That means links pointing to pages outside of the book should be used in the way references or further reading suggestions would in a traditional book. That contrasts with how wikilinks are usied in e.g. Wikipedia, in which readers are expected to jump from one article to the next in order to get the whole picture. Implicit in this explanation is that the guideline is indeed an editorial guideline, and so it probably shouldn't be converted into a policy.--Duplode (discuss • contribs) 20:37, 3 October 2015 (UTC)
 * You are falsifying the text. It's said that "external linking" should be exercised sparsely. How did you inferred that "Interwiki and external links" should be exercised sparsely? There is no problem with linking inside the books but using interwikis, i.e linking pages/book pages to other Wikimwdia project such as Wikipedia, Wikiquote, ... --Doostdar (discuss • contribs) 14:28, 4 October 2015 (UTC)
 * The wording could be improved. Duplode's understanding of that passage is the same as mine; but in the next paragraph "external" means "outside the wikimedia sisterhood".  There's lots of room for confusion of terminology re links; when you said "interwiki" I thought of the links on the left-hand navigation bar to closest-equivalent pages on other-language Wikibooks projects.  --Pi zero (discuss • contribs) 14:38, 4 October 2015 (UTC)


 * Note that Wikibooks for Wikimedians is not "guideline" like you stated, only an informative text and so more volatile, the same is true to Wikibooks Manual of Style that if I recall correctly failed to obtain support to even be proposed as a guideline (in a time that things where done in a more protocolar way).
 * I think you should feel free to update Wikibooks for Wikimedians in light of the current discussion and attempt a merge of versions in the Wikibooks Manual of Style after you included you proposal in the latest draft without any standing objection. --Panic (discuss • contribs) 07:05, 5 October 2015 (UTC)
 * You want to say that there is not any guidelines or policies on how to use interwikis. That's exactly the same as what I told you. We need a guideline for interwikis. I'm a user with less than 100 edits in this wiki. That's why I asked you to propose the guideline. --Doostdar (discuss • contribs) 07:51, 5 October 2015 (UTC)
 * I disagree that we need a project wide guide for interwikis (I do so based on the same notions for why I also dislike the notion of a project wide style guide). I would only not object to establish a sitewide avoidance (not a ban) on wikidata use, that is, it would be seen as automatically beneficial (non objectionable) any edits that reverted or removed wikidata dependency without any further discussion. --Panic (discuss • contribs) 08:34, 5 October 2015 (UTC)
 * Wikidata is something like Wikicommons but for data. Who can say that it is bad that interwikis be transfered into a sepaerate project? --Doostdar (discuss • contribs) 09:15, 5 October 2015 (UTC)
 * No, Wikidata isn't like Commons for data. With Commons, it's mostly easy to tell here if things have been seriously screwed up there, by looking at the overtly displayed pictures visible here &mdash; and even so, the fact that they're on a separate project can cause problems.  There are, at least in theory, a couple of advantages to keeping all the images in a common area &mdash; keeping just one copy saves space for what are apt to be quite large files, and image copyright is a specialized area of expertise that can (in theory, as I say) be concentrated in one place without everyone on every project having to know all about it.  Modifying pictures is fairly difficult, too, which discourages subtle defacement.  Wikidata has none of those advantages and greatly exaggerates the disadvantages; it's simply, from a sisterhood-wide infrastructure perspective, a really bad idea.  I've met a bunch of the folks over at Wikidata, and most of them are great people; and that has no effect on it being a bad idea to automatically import stuff from Wikidata to the other projects.  I've gone into other aspects of the problems elsewhere; I see there's a thread about Wikidata currently at the general reading room, for instance.  A phrase I used there was "maximizes damage-potential from the central location while diminishing both human control and human scope of the dependent locations (I'm an advocate of semi-automation and opponent of automation [...])." --Pi zero (discuss • contribs) 11:28, 5 October 2015 (UTC)
 * All these are not good excuses for lack of a clear intrwiki policy in Wikibooks. At least different Wikibooks versions should know how to connect with each other. Now at Persian Wikibooks, for example, I've made a book on Latex named "لاتک". Is it correct to link it with the book named Latex in English Wikibooks or not? If yes, what about the sub pages of these two books?--Doostdar (discuss • contribs) 19:53, 7 October 2015 (UTC)
 * You are, as I understand, talking about the "interwiki" links that appear on the side nagivation bar of each Wikibooks page, providing the nearest equivalent to that page in various other languages. (En.wb has the navigation bar on the left, fa.wb has it on the right.)  That's different from the en.wb guideline you linked at the top of this section, which was about "wikilinks" that appear in the body of a page. For the interwikis on the navigation bar, do what you believe would be most useful.  If you believe the most useful fa.wb interwiki from our page LaTeX would be to fa:لاتک, then do that.  If you believe the most useful en.wb interwiki from fa:لاتک would be en:LaTeX, then do that too.  The same criterion &mdash; usefulness &mdash; seems applicable to subpages.  I would suggest that, as long as the interwikis are useful, it's better to provide more of them.  --Pi zero (discuss • contribs) 02:37, 8 October 2015 (UTC)


 * If the book is under generic labeling (that the title simply states the subject, like Nanotechnology) it should be ok to interwiki with other books on the subject depending on how the other wikiprojects are organized. For instance, if we take it backwards, on our newest named projects, we try to not to block or overshadow other works covering the same subject, and so we use more creative/descriptive labeling for projects and a subject page that lists all the related local books and other wikiprojects' content. So adding an interwiki directly to those books is not necessary as also adding that subject link on other wikiprojects should be preferred. Doing otherwise is not prohibited (adding any metadata is always better), but it should be preferred as it would be counter productive for the organization effort being done and in making space for diversification, even as to make us more clearly distinct from wikipedia articles. --Panic (discuss • contribs) 02:53, 8 October 2015 (UTC)
 * Even though these rules seem to be good guidelines but they don't involve of all books. Not bad for beginning phase of interwiki development. --Doostdar (discuss • contribs) 17:07, 8 October 2015 (UTC)

Javascript loading
It seems to me that in the past few weeks (probably the devs have been mucking with the software platform in order to optimize one or another of the ill-advised projects they're working on), en.wb javascript loading has gotten drammatically slower than it used to be. Our common.js makes very heavy use of importScript, which is supposedly inherently slower than using the gadgets extension; in theory there should be only about two places in common.js where that should be resorted to &mdash; one for book-specific css, and one for page-specific js. As some point in the reasonably near future, unless somebody objects, I hope to try to convert most of those import-scripts to gadgets. Fortunately this should be mostly straightforward to do, as we have a very well-organized common.js; once this operation is completed, we should have an almost empty common.js. --Pi zero (discuss • contribs) 12:37, 2 September 2015 (UTC)


 * Digressive question: Lately I have noticed that in some days parts of the interface behave oddly - for instance, accept a pending revision sometimes led me to a separate confirmation page instead of just displaying the "Done, accepted!" message withing the review box. Do you think both phenomena are related? --Duplode (discuss • contribs) 03:26, 3 September 2015 (UTC)


 * @Duplode: In the case of that particular effect, where sighting a page leads to a separate confirmation page, I believe the answer is "yes", it's definitely related. The pattern I've observed is that if the software hasn't finished loading all the javascript stuff when you sight, it takes you to a separate page.  When (if, but I'm really hoping when) I import my dialog tools here, this effect will be more obvious, because the interactive elements on a page &mdash; mostly text input boxes and buttons &mdash; won't be formatted correctly until javascript is finished loading.  My dialog tools include a template  that can hide those interactive elements if they're not supported; when I first roughed out my design I thought that template would only be for obscure situations like if the user is using a twenty-year-old browser or has javascript switched off, but lately, with the javascript performance of the wiki platform tanking, I've found it necessary to use the template on any interactive element that appears on a page designed to be viewed outside of a dialog (it's not a problem once you've started a dialog, because then the software is already in place and doesn't have to be reloaded, making everything faster &mdash; something else I didn't anticipate, I thought the dialog tools were going to be subjectively slower than the wiki platform).  --Pi zero (discuss • contribs) 11:02, 3 September 2015 (UTC)


 * Whoa! The slowdown is quite dramatic indeed, given that I am able to compare the diffs, decide that the revision is OK and accept it before the javascript finishes loading... --Duplode (discuss • contribs) 01:32, 5 September 2015 (UTC)


 * I've been observing in recent days that sometimes the javascript doesn't load properly at all; it doesn't just take a long time, it stops without completing. Which I can tell because one of the more visible gadgets I have turned on does not appear.  Which is quite upsetting to me since my wikidialog tools can't function without their javascript element, and I'm hoping they could be of immense value here once I port them over.  --Pi zero (discuss • contribs) 16:10, 10 October 2015 (UTC)