Wikibooks:Reading room/Proposals/2016/November

Abandoned books
Hi, what do WB policies say on abandoned stubs while they have a good structure like Catholicism? --Doostdar (discuss • contribs) 16:20, 17 November 2016 (UTC)


 * If someone wants to adopt such a book, they get to decide whether to work with the existing structure or modify (or even replace) it. --Pi zero (discuss • contribs) 16:29, 17 November 2016 (UTC)
 * Why wouldn't we tag a Query template to it? Sure, it has a good structure to it, but there is absolutely no work beyond the main page. --Atcovi (Talk - Contribs) 14:52, 18 November 2016 (UTC)
 * [EDIT] And a "Basics page". --Atcovi (Talk - Contribs) 14:53, 18 November 2016 (UTC)
 * There has been some discussion at RFD lately about how much material there has to be in a stub book for it to be worth keeping. I think an outline may or may not be useful enough to be worth keeping, depending on the outline and the nature of the topic.  The question is, if someone came along and wanted to write such a book, would they find the existing outline a help or a hindrance.  --Pi zero (discuss • contribs) 15:01, 18 November 2016 (UTC)

Well, this discussion would be worth debating about honestly. Worth debating about for future references when it comes to books like this. --Atcovi (Talk - Contribs) 15:07, 18 November 2016 (UTC)
 * Ah, the future. I have a vision for the future.  I believe how easy it is to do things makes a huge different in the viability of a book, or any other wiki content unit (such as a news article or encyclopedia articles); and I believe semi-automated assistants, such as I mean to build using wikidialog, can completely transform Wikibooks in the long term, by making contribution to existing books, and altering the structure of existing books (and presumably other things I'm not thinking of atm), vastly easier.  I'm reluctant to see stubs removed partly because I don't know how greatly their futures can be improved by semi-automated assistants and I would hate to see them removed merely because their value has been judged based on what can be done with them without semi-automated assistants.  --Pi zero (discuss • contribs) 15:28, 18 November 2016 (UTC)
 * Yeah, it's pretty confusing. We'll probably need more opinions/comments? In my opinion it matters on an outline. --Atcovi (Talk - Contribs) 15:48, 18 November 2016 (UTC)
 * (My tool development btw, so far over on Wikinews, is taking me recently to some fascinating places I'd no idea were on the itinerary. Like, if you want a wiki community to grow assistants the way they grow content, you need to develop idioms for assistants that allow an assistant to be modified continuously from start through long-term maintenance, so that each incremental change produces an assistant that is useful as-is.  And, to preserve the human touch (which imho is crucial), you not only need to allow people to not follow general advice, you need them to be able to preserve the decision so other contributors won't simply be pushed to follow the general advice but will know why their predecessors didn't do that.)  --Pi zero (discuss • contribs) 16:18, 18 November 2016 (UTC)

Big books
Hi, this book has 3,568 pages. Is there any limitations for the number of pages? --Doostdar (discuss • contribs) 07:58, 16 November 2016 (UTC)


 * I don't understand that "book"; so far in my review of our entire library, it stands out as the most perplexing case. It appears that the book itself, with Pinyin as its main page, is simply a language tutorial; but then there are large subtrees that try to present themselves as books to the categorization system (but they can't actually convince the system of that; the entire infrastructure from top to bottom assumes that the part of a content-page-name before the first slash is the name of the book).  If I fully understood what those subbranches are, I'd try to figure out what to do about them in the infrastructure; but I don't really understand, and haven't had a chance to look into it yet (there's the whole rest of the library to curate, after all).  I'm under the impression there are pages being created regularly (I seem to recall some of them looked rather like news items), which suggests there's somebody we can ask, though it wouldn't be surprising if we'd have to cope with some degree of language barrier in doing so.  --Pi zero (discuss • contribs)
 * Pinyin is the romanisation of the Chinese language and used to aid the learning of Chinese. Many of the pages added regularly seem to be articles transliterated from Chinese sources.--ЗAНИA [[Image:Flag_of_the_Isle_of_Mann.svg|15px]]talk 13:25, 16 November 2016 (UTC)
 * If so, that is likely to require large-scale admin action. If a copyrighted work is translated, the translation does not escape the copyright restrictions of the original; on the contrary, the translation is more restricted than the original since it has all the restrictions of the original plus whatever further restrictions the translator may impose.  So if those materials are transliterations of copyrighted material, we are legally required to take them all down.  --Pi zero (discuss • contribs) 13:52, 16 November 2016 (UTC)
 * After a quick look at a few random pages it seems that there probably isn't much to worry about, e.g. Pinyin/Philippines_Seizes_North_Korea_Ship_(2016-03-05). I can't imagine anything from this very short page was taken from a copyrighted source.--ЗAНИA [[Image:Flag_of_the_Isle_of_Mann.svg|15px]]talk 13:58, 16 November 2016 (UTC)
 * That does look pretty trivial, yes. Though it leaves the original problem of an enormous number of pages &mdash; we're talking about something like 7% of the pages in our mainspace, I think &mdash; that may not even be organized in book form.  --Pi zero (discuss • contribs) 14:52, 16 November 2016 (UTC)

Size While discussion of this particular book is maybe worthwhile, the general question stands: do we have guidelines on size for pages, subpages, entire books, etc.? And should we? I imagine that if this were printed, these thousands of pages would not actually amount to half that many sheets of paper due to short entries, so that doesn't seem like a problem to me. —Justin ( koavf ) ❤T☮C☺M☯ 16:43, 16 November 2016 (UTC)


 * Most wikimedia projects, I think, in their list of things the project is not, include NOTPAPER. Although iirc the wiki software does put a limit on how many transclusions can be done on a page, so that with 3500 pages in Pinyin it probably wouldn't be possible to assemble a "print version" page by template transclusion.  (I suspect you also wouldn't want to because the entire pile of 3500 pages can't be considered a book; more about that below.) Common sense may dictate what should and shouldn't be done with a book.  If there's a reasonable justification for having such a huge number of pages be treated as a single book, then, fine; I recall someone (possible Mike.lifeguard, back in the day) remarking that logically Wikipedia should be a book on Wikibooks (not that we want it here). I'm more concerned that in fact this huge pile of pages, as a whole, isn't a book.  The "main page", Pinyin, presents an outline that doesn't contain most of those 3500 pages.  There may be various parts of the pile that could be considered books, including the part whose main page is Pinyin.  There may also be large parts of the pile that aren't part of anything book-like at all, but rather are instances of treating Wikibooks as a web host (another item on the list of things Wikibooks is not).  --Pi zero (discuss • contribs) 17:10, 16 November 2016 (UTC)
 * This project, Wikisource, and Wikivoyage are all intended to be printworthy. Wikitravel even had a press. I reckon the Book extension may help with this? We don't need to use templates to transclude pages. Don't get me wrong: this particular book merits discussion; I just don't want to lose the forest for the trees--Doostdar had a particular question that I don't want to get forgotten. —Justin ( koavf ) ❤T☮C☺M☯ 17:26, 16 November 2016 (UTC)
 * I agree it's desirable to be able to produce a print version of a book, but that desire should not impose limits on what a wiki book can do. Wikibooks is not paper.  With wikidialog, I imagine we'll eventually implement some really cool interactive content that might then require extra effort to figure out how to render in hardcopy.  I'm all for supporting hardcopy, but that shouldn't hold us back from exploring the interactive possibilities.  --Pi zero (discuss • contribs) 17:37, 16 November 2016 (UTC)
 * 100% agreed--especially since we can include multi-media (audio and video, even 3-D models) which cannot translate to print. —Justin ( koavf ) ❤T☮C☺M☯ 17:44, 16 November 2016 (UTC)
 * On the French Wikibooks, we've got a photography book with more than 3,000 pages. Probably one of the greatest in the world, and it wouldn't be the first world record thanks to these wikis. Moreover, I'm sure that the headache of splitting it in spite of its authors first plans, would be tyrannically useless. JackPotte (discuss • contribs) 00:18, 17 November 2016 (UTC)
 * Did its authors have a plan? Or did it just happen?  Or is it multiple efforts that happen to have used this naming scheme?  And are all of those efforts books, or are some of them clusters of pages that aren't within our scope?  And if the latter, should they be within our scope?  I'm not suggesting answers to any of these questions; I'm saying we don't know the answers to them, and that we should.  I do agree that the number of pages isn't necessarily unacceptable; we simply don't know enough yet.  As for the merits of renaming, we don't even know whether that would be an appropriate measure to redress the situation... since we don't even know what the situation is.  --Pi zero (discuss • contribs) 02:03, 17 November 2016 (UTC)
 * Apart from the number of pages, in my opinion there's another problem with this book: Notability. Book content does not seems to be pedagogic. It's more like a reference book or a dictionary. Just have a look at this page, it's like a dictionary entry. Does this book qualifies WB notability policy? I am active in Persian WB and don't know a lot about English WB situation but I'm sure it should comply with policies like WB:DICT--Doostdar (discuss • contribs) 15:25, 17 November 2016 (UTC)
 * My opinion is similar. It seems that there is at least one book that's a subset of those 3500 pages, and I'm not sure if there may be more than one such book there, but those may well be only a small fraction of the 3500. One characteristic of a book, I suggest, is that it has a main page that explains the purpose and organization of the book.  I'm having trouble finding that for most of the pile of 3500.  --Pi zero (discuss • contribs) 16:12, 17 November 2016 (UTC)
 * In fact, I've traced who is contributing to the book, and from past discussion on their talk page it looks as if there have already been discussions there about materials that may be dictionary rather than book, things that may be news rather than book, and non-neutrality. So in fact this probably is a major problem.  It may even be the political machinery of a country using Wikibooks as a platform for propaganda.  --Pi zero (discuss • contribs) 16:26, 17 November 2016 (UTC)
 * As Justin said there's a problem of size. While discussion of this particular book is maybe worthwhile, the general question stands: do we have guidelines on size for pages, subpages, entire books, etc.? WB handbook says "Books on Wikibooks are not constrained by the length of a printed page. There is no predefined minimum nor maximum length to a book." We know that this project, Wikisource, and Wikivoyage are all intended to be printworthy. For getting a print version we have to impose limitations on number of book pages. BTW we should put specific regulations for multi-media (audio and video, even 3-D models). I think WB:NOTPAPER is contrary to make a book printworthy. --Doostdar (discuss • contribs) 09:57, 18 November 2016 (UTC)
 * The book can be significantly trimmed (and made closer to the scope of WB) by moving the mass of dictionary pages to Wiktionary. I'd support doing this. As for POV concerns, that's going to take a deeper look. QuiteUnusual (discuss • contribs) 13:54, 21 November 2016 (UTC)
 * I agree, the first step to bringing this book closer to Wikibooks scope is to export the dictionary pages. I suspect the second step may have to do with news items, and may be more painful (because en.wn doesn't take new material about "old news"), but that's to deal with later.  --Pi zero (discuss • contribs) 14:29, 22 November 2016 (UTC)