Wikibooks:Reading room/Proposals/2021/January

Now under construction: Wikibooks Stacks
As part of the infrastructure overhaul I've been doing for, at this writing, just over 23 months, and following from the previous discussion here in the ongoing series of threads (link), I'm now developing a replacement for the current subject hierarchy, in the form of a book called Wikibooks Stacks.

I'm not currently asking for help with this, tbh. Somewhat embarrassingly, given the collaborative nature of wikis, just atm I really need to do this carefully, step by step, myself, because there's still new design work involved at each step. But I do want to let everyone know what I'm doing, and perhaps folks here will offer advice (or point out that I'm making a huge mistake somewhere!).

When I'm all done, all our 3000-or-so books will be filed in both the "old" subject hierarchy and the "new" stacks, and I'll be able to do the equivalent of flipping one of those big high-voltage switches and suddenly the categories visible on each book main page will be shelves instead of subjects, and then I can start the process of carefully mothballing the old subject pages, one by one. Then it'll be time to start in earnest on the final(?) stage of this multi-year overhaul of our infrastructure, the introduction of topical categories that list pages as well as books, which will enable us to provide much better targets for incoming links from sister projects, including from Wikipedia.

Grouping all of this machinery in a book is more convenient, organizationally, than the  namespace, as it happens. The new pages, equivalent to subjects, have name prefix  or, at the top level, , which are not recognized by the wiki platform as namespace prefixes, so these pages are all technically in mainspace, as is the book. Our infrastructure templates such as BookCat and BOOKNAME know to associate these name prefixes with book Wikibooks Stacks, which is convenient because most of the pages involved don't have to have the name of the book built into them at all, they can just use markup  (which expands to  ). Shelves correspond to subjects that use subject page, departments to subjects that use root subject.

There are shelf categories, each with an associated allbooks category, just as there are subject categories with associated allbooks categories. When I set up the machinery of the subject hierarchy, I arranged that when any of the pages involved detected a problem, it would flag it out, and provide buttons to help a human operator implement likely actions to fix it. This time around, I've made some improvements to this semi-automation while I was about it.

I also very much want to arrange for dialog-based assistants to replace the older-style editing buttons (with the older-style buttons reappearing if the dialog tools are not detected &mdash; thus, graceful degradation when things aren't working right). This would be very cutting-edge use of the dialog tools, and I very much want to learn as much as I can from the experience, about how to make effective use of the dialog tools. Which is actually part of what's holding me up just atm: I could be marching forward with setting up shelves, but then I'd be missing out on this major opportunity to gain experience with dialog. --Pi zero (discuss • contribs) 19:51, 3 June 2018 (UTC)


 * Progress report: All our books have been shelved; they're also all listed in subjects. The shelf categories are hidden, the subject categories are visible; but I'm now in a position to switch that, so the shelf categories are visible and the subject categories hidden.  Then I can start shutting down the subjects, which also has to be done manually.  Strangely, I've got a discrepancy between the number of shelves and the number of subjects, whose cause should eventually come out during the manual shutdown.  I'm not sure what to do about possible incoming links to subject pages that are now going to be either nonexistant or redirects. --Pi zero (discuss • contribs) 02:26, 29 September 2018 (UTC)


 * Cheers for all the work you have made already. I noticed two things which I'm not sure whether they are glitches or not: 1) Departments do not list any featured books. 2) Under Wikibooks Stacks/Departments the Wikijunior department correctly lists the Wikijunior shelf, but the Help department does not list the Help shelf. -- Vito F. (discuss) 23:46, 10 October 2018 (UTC)
 * On the second point, actually the link provided is to the help shelf, rather than to the help department. I'm unsure whether that should be treated differently, or if instead the wikijunior department should be treated differently. --Pi zero (discuss • contribs) 04:03, 11 October 2018 (UTC)
 * I think I've got the department featured books problem . --Pi zero (discuss • contribs) 06:43, 12 October 2018 (UTC)
 * I've improved both of those displays on the departments page. --Pi zero (discuss • contribs) 12:44, 13 October 2018 (UTC)
 * Update: My progress on this is currently mired in the various pages associated with quality as assigned by various "WikiProjects". That part of our infrastructure was imported by Adrignola and adapted for Wikibooks &mdash;mainly by adding support for Subject pages&mdash; back in 2010; it isn't heavily used, but wants updating to support the rearrangement; except that frankly I find its internal design largely indecipherable.  How Adrignola figured it out to make changes then, I find hard to imagine, and it's worse now with existing use of the Subject-based version to accommodate. --Pi zero (discuss • contribs) 13:28, 22 January 2019 (UTC)
 * Still mired. --Pi zero (discuss • contribs) 21:14, 8 April 2019 (UTC) – 14:33, 5 January 2021 (UTC)

Help:Contents update
Hi, I've made a major update to Help:Contents. I've been bold and updated the page already, but if I get any strong objections I'll revert pending discussions.

Anyway its like creating a "one stop shop" on help and project pages, as it contains a good many. It also should contain all the basics on using Wikibooks, whether you want to read books or contributed.

Technical details: although the content is my own, the design is based upon wikipedia:Help:Contents. It uses CSS for two columns; it also uses CSS flexbox, which means it should render as a single column on low resolution screens such as smartphones. On obsolete browsers not supporting flexbox it will still render, although it could be a single column.

Anyway, any feedback would be nice. -- Jules (Mrjulesd) 22:29, 29 January 2021 (UTC)
 * Great work! I don't see any issues with it and it does look more appealing than previous versions. —Atcovi (Talk - Contribs) 23:15, 29 January 2021 (UTC)
 * I concur, this is a nice update from before. Didn't even know that this page existed. Leaderboard (discuss • contribs) 07:59, 30 January 2021 (UTC)