Wikibooks:Reading room/Proposals/2017/August

Add the autopatrol right to the user group "reviewers"
Hello, when a user becomes a reviewer, he's supposed to be trusted by the community. However the MW:Help:Patrolled edits doesn't take this right from MW:Extension:FlaggedRevs into account, by default.

That's why I propose to add the right "autopatrol" to the "reviewers" group, as it had been made for the administrators and bots. Then, we won't have to mark [//en.wikibooks.org/w/index.php?title=Special:NewPages&hidepatrolled=1&namespace=all their new pages as patrolled anymore]. JackPotte (discuss • contribs) 17:28, 3 August 2017 (UTC)


 * I don't even know what the autopatrol thing does.  I've this vague impression that it does something that's kind of like an earlier/lesser attempt at something similar to what we use the review bit for, and that (consequently?) it isn't used much on en.wb, but, as I say, that's just a vague impression. What does the autopatrol thing do?  --Pi zero (discuss • contribs) 19:15, 3 August 2017 (UTC)
 * typically if you want to make the page User talk:Tyler.ks disappear from [//en.wikibooks.org/w/index.php?title=Special:NewPages&hidepatrolled=1&namespace=all Special:NewPages&hidepatrolled=1], you have to click at the bottom right of this new page, on [Mark this page as patrolled]. And the problem is that the reviewers new pages are treated like the IPs ones.
 * So, their autopatrol right would just remove the [Mark this page as patrolled] link for them (and I will be able to check the newbies new pages more quickly). JackPotte (discuss • contribs) 19:30, 3 August 2017 (UTC)
 * Ah, I see. So the platform is set up to make it easy to use autopatrol for vetting page creations?  Sounds like a fair thing to add to reviewer; sure.  --Pi zero (discuss • contribs) 21:39, 3 August 2017 (UTC)

✅ . JackPotte (discuss • contribs) 20:22, 4 August 2017 (UTC)

Automatic Navigation of Individual Books
Most books on enwikibooks do not have an navigational template. I made a template (AutomaticNavigation) to automatically show the pages of a root book. I propose adding this template to every book in enwikibooks that does not have a navigational template. |Wikibooks=PokestarFan*Talk*Contributions|#default= PokestarFan*Talk*Contributions  }}|Wikibooks=PokestarFan*Talk*Contributions|#default=  PokestarFan*Talk*Contributions  }}|Wikibooks=PokestarFan*Talk*Contributions|#default=  PokestarFan*Talk*Contributions  }} 04:30, 9 August 2017 (UTC)


 * My first thought is that there is no one navigation strategy that would work for all books. Books are not alike, and ultimately it requires human minds to think about each one and custom-choose what to do with each.  Perhaps your template, in its current form or some clever variant of it we can come up with &mdash; or both &mdash; or, for that matter, some other device (or, again, some combination of these things) can cover many books that have no navigation device atm.  But I do not think anything can be appropriate for all books that don't current have any navigation template.  I'm not so sure there's even anything that can work for most of them. I did try, once, to build a powerful device that would work for many books, the Template:Navlist suite, and have in mind lately to upgrade it, possibly when I finish some of the category-infrastructure upgrades I'm doing or possibly before then; but even a navlist upgrade raises interesting design challenges, as I've mentioned a bit here from time to time.  Alas, I got rather limited feedback from others here about how to upgrade navlist; which is not surprising, because upgrading navlist is a genuinely difficult design problem.  It's too much to expect someone would immediately hit on some brilliant idea (it would be nice, though :-). Some questions/thoughts:
 * What does your template do? It isn't easy to tell, for sure, by looking at the template code, and we would need to write good documentation for it in any case.  And we need some practical experience with it in order to get a sense of when it is, and when it isn't, particularly useful, or whether some variant of it would work better, etc.
 * For navlist upgrading, I have at least three thoughts, and would welcome feedback on them.
 * The existing template uses a syntax for the navlist that I think is too clumsy to use generally. But I'm not sure what notation one ought to consider using instead.
 * The whole navlist device (suite of templates) is built around the idea of a single central page that describes the whole structure of the book, but this approach has a basic weakness: it maximizes the potential for damage from one central location, malicious or otherwise. This is of course also a design failing of all manner of directly Wikidata-driven content.  More ambiguously, it also means that, because the central page for a book is then actually transcluded on every page of the book, the wiki software will register any edit to any part of the central page (which is a sort of glorified table-of-contents) as forcing updates to every page of the book, which is a modestly-high-server-load operation.  I imagine the devs would say this was clearly a bad thing; I can't help feeling ambivalent about it, atm, because I'm about three months in to a roughtly-twelve-month project of changing the book category naming scheme, and it would greatly speed up parts of the operation if there were a trivially easy way to force the serve to purge all the pages of any given book; no doubt the devs would be upset, though.  Server-kitty.jpg
 * I see to recall JackPotte had recently mentioned some sort of device that did something along these general lines.
 * --Pi zero (discuss • contribs) 12:29, 9 August 2017 (UTC)
 * Apparently there's a problem with the current AutomaticNavigation at least into SuperCard Programming.
 * Moreover, its alphabetical order isn't the best to navigate, I would prefer to include the TOC in a template for it, like on fr:Modèle:ModèleLivre.
 * Apart from that, I had effectively proposed an automatic Lua navigation template for the book subpages: footer (in the accurate order from the TOC), but no need to deploy it in all books because their authors should all agree first.
 * JackPotte (discuss • contribs) 12:54, 9 August 2017 (UTC)