Wikijunior talk:Stories

Scope
I think the scope of this book needs to be reined in. "Stories" is just too broad. --Pi zero (discuss • contribs) 15:56, 18 May 2017 (UTC)
 * I chose "Stories" just because I wanted to keep the title short and simple. Everyone is welcomed to go ahead and edit what I wrote in WJ:Stories. --ZxxZxxZ (discuss • contribs) 15:38, 19 May 2017 (UTC)
 * This is the "charter" of the book, its definition, and will shape its later success or failure. We need to get it right at the outset.  What do you have in mind for inclusion criteria?  --Pi zero (discuss • contribs) 19:33, 19 May 2017 (UTC)
 * I think we should include stories that have been published in a source (except blogs, wikis, social media, etc.). Each story should mention its source. There may be more than one version in sources, I think there is no problem to have them as separate stories, if the difference is meaningful (e.g. difference in fate of a charachter). We should rewrite stories to avoid copyright violation, but we should not retell a story; that is, the main course of the story, the fate of the characters, etc. need to match those of the source. In a story I added a "What can we learn from this story?" section listing the points of the story which can be very informative for kids, I don't know if it is "original research", but I think it wouldn't be problematic in most cases; there are stories which can be viewed in different ways, users could list as many points as they want. What stories are children's stories? There are books that claim they could be useful by kids, there is no problem in that case. There are also stories which are supposedly for older people but also can be read and understood by kids, it is difficult to drow a line. I can figure certain zen stories that could be useful for kids. We can add the stories from the first kind of sources in a certain category, but also include stories from the second kind of sources in the project. --ZxxZxxZ (discuss • contribs) 06:33, 20 May 2017 (UTC)
 * I'm very worried that we need to pin this down before it goes completely rogue on us. This could become a great asset to our collection if it has from the outset a clear definition of what sorts of stories can be included and how they are to be treated.  Here are some questions and suggestions:
 * What length of story is suitable? I suggest that these should be short (and we need to establish what we mean by that); it would not be appropriate to include, say, the whole of Alice in Wonderland as an item in this collection.
 * What kind of story is suitable? From where and with what sort of content?  Are these to be traditional stories?  Stories with a moral?
 * I strongly suggest that there should be clear guidelines for annotations to be included on every story, otherwise the annotations will never happen. One model that makes sense to me would be to have a short note before starting each story, telling about its history, and then a note that may be short or longer, after the story, saying something about what it means.
 * --Pi zero (discuss • contribs) 23:25, 22 May 2017 (UTC)
 * (If we're going for stories with a moral, I agree that published stories now out of copyright, that were meant for children, are likely okay (subject to length, whatever that is). And stories traditionally told to children (by whatever culture).  Is that sufficient for the "kind" of story, or is there more to it?) --Pi zero (discuss • contribs) 23:47, 22 May 2017 (UTC)


 * I should have mentioned this in the beginning: in short words, I'm not working on this project yet; actually, it is relatively difficult for me to post stories in English, I prefer to contribute in other ways. Let me share this experience then. I have actually this personality type that I'm a big fan of planning, analyzing and talking about the idea itself and so forth rather than taking any steps on the ground. The brains of most other people don't work like that, and if we are going to need their assistance on the way, we have to communicate differently, this is what I learned after years of contributing in these wikis by trying to propose new ideas, facing so much opposition from the communities--mostly because I couldn't show them the future I was seeing, rather than flaws in the ideas, I rarely propose cheap ideas; I tend to think a lot on them and imagine their future with details first. Most people won't be attracted to new projects simply by explaining ideas to them. This problem is probably more serious in Wikibooks which is already an unattractive project for most contributors. I learned the solution mainly in an experience in en.wikt, which took several months. I proposed an idea (module:links) to the community on several occasions trying to explain it in different words as I thought they are misunderstanding me, but later I realized they just couldn't imagine what I was imagining. After creating a prototype and just showing it to them without explaining any ideas whatsoever, the difference in the reaction of the community was laughable--users loved it, it was instantly implemented, programmers assisted in its development massively. No matter how much you explain that the idea is good, we should choose this new direction, etc., most people won't trust you and your idea unless you show them something workable. They may even don't care reading your proposals. So people come here and think like this, wow, this page looks attractive for kids, editors have posted stories, I can post that story that I liked as well, we are free to use pics in the Commons to illustrate the stories like that, the titles are listed in the first page like that, it will become a nice collection, ... that's when they take the project seriously.
 * I'm also thinking about a way to find Wikimedia projects users who are probable to become interested in this project, I intend to advertise it there. More people will be attracted, and we can use their ideas on how this project should look like.
 * There rarely would be any editor willing to post very long stories (edit: of course except when the text is out of copyright, I did not consider that while writing this). But if one is going to do that, I don't see any reason why we should put a limit. We can discourage, we can suggest what's better, though, and that's probably enough. There are long stories which are also published in shorter versions; we can include both, and note that's a strength that we possess! There would be a single story that is published in different versions (different lengths, different courses, etc.), let the editors post them all, and let the readers choose what to read, this is a feature that could not be found in any other story collection. One story may have been published in 100 versions in 100 websites, what to do? If the length is significantly different (for example, I think one page is significantly different from three pages), then I think they may have separate pages. If the lengths are the same and there's not substantial differences, we should merge them, with a shorter version being preferred, since we're writing for kids. In other words, if the course of the story, the moral or the point of it, is different, we can have a separate version, in a separate page here on Wikibooks.
 * Stories with a moral looks to be the kind of the stories that fits best with the stated aim of Wikibooks and Wikijunior, as they are "instructional". But then again, I can think of stories that I find it difficult to write down what was their point and so forth, yet of course I didn't waste my time by reading them.
 * I'd like to point out something here: Having a collection of "all stories written by humans [rewritten to avoid copyright violation]" may not fit perfectly with this particular project [at the moment], but I think it is an exciting and useful thing in complete accordance with the spirit of the Wikimedia projects. The purpose of the current wikis may alter in the future, new wikis may emerge, but I think for now we can keep such collection here even parts of it don't fit well with this rule or that (provided that the Wikibooks community agrees), until either this project and its inclusion policy change or a new place is created. This is one of those difficult but possibly rewarding decisions which if it was up to me I would have made. If the Wikibooks community disagrees, that's ok, then we should find a way at upper levels.
 * I guess kids won't find history of a story very interesting, but other kind of introduction to a story in form of an annotation at the beginning may be useful but I find it difficult to propose a hard and fast rule, the content of such introduction, which is aimed to help the reader understand the story and especially the moral, depends on the story. The only guideline that I can think of is to keep it short, i.e. to limit that to a single paragraph or several sentences, to avoid having massive "original research". The annotation at the end, which are supposed to be commentaries on the story, can be added by the community as a short paragraph or two; more if anyone can mention more points for a single story. Plus I think it's a good idea to let people write their own commentaries, maybe in the talk page, just like people add comments in Wikinews.
 * Where to start from? For now, let's have a more limiting guideline, a guideline that limit users for a specific kind of stories that are highly likely to be kept in the future; later, when more people started to contribute, we would discuss more and extend the scope. So let the guideline be as follows: only stories with a certain moral should be added. There are stories that actually discuss the moral at the end of the story in short words, those are great sources for this project and are recommended. If there are several versions for a single story, the shortest version is recommended. If the story is more than a handful of pages, it is recommended to be summarized; [currently] the objective of the project is not to simply tell a story, but to teach a moral. We can also have a list of morals in the first page and present the stories via their point, that would be an exciting way to collect stories.
 * --ZxxZxxZ (discuss • contribs) 12:11, 23 May 2017 (UTC)
 * Regarding planning: I've observed there are difference cases. I'm in the midst of a massive software development project for the wikis (this stuff) that would be sunk by trying to get agreement from the Foundation, or community consensus, before proceeding (the only way to explain what it is and what it can do is to actually implement it and do things with it).  But with a wikibook, in my experience, there are certain aspects of the structure of it that have to be gotten right to start with if it's going to work in the long run.  I mentioned in the earlier discussion the World Religions book, which failed painfully for many years due, amongst other things, to a poorly chosen page outline.  Getting wikibooks set up well is a challenging thing that, in my judgement, we're going to need to start accumulating wisdom on how to do once we've got better infrastructure for accumulating wisdom on things like that (which is part of what I hope to accomplish with, again, dialog).  It has been remarked, not entirely in jest, that Wikipedia is properly just a single book, whereas we have thousands of books here and thus we are a vastly bigger project than Wikipedia; certainly they have had to put a huge amount of thought into how to set up just one book, so it's not surprising if we have to work at how to set up a very wide variety of others.
 * We wouldn't want a hard bound on story length (like, X hundred words), but if we give would-be contributors the impression up-front that they should be thinking in terms of, say, short traditional stories, with perhaps some suggestion of how small such stories would typically be (though this might require careful phrasing since, e.g., it's no longer as safe as it was a few years ago to assume any sort of "standard" screen size), that should naturally guide things in a good direction.
 * Hm, I thought easily of the word "moral" because we'd been talking about fables; but, perhaps, for a somewhat less rigid concept, "teaching/learning stories for children"? Or some such.
 * Everything ever written sounds very much like the province of sister project Wikisource. And if a particular story is really big, perhaps its annotated version ought to be a standalone wikibook (whether in Wikijunior space or mainspace; but, as I'll remark, annotations for children is something we made need to work at learning how to do, and how to usefully annotate a large story for children seems even harder).
 * I was thinking we could have a very brief note at the top of each story about its origins. Probably just one sentence.  Short enough to set the stage for kids without taking long enough, or going into so much detail, as to be uninteresting.  "This story has been told in China since ancient times", or nearly that simple.
 * Annotations for children seems an interesting challenge. I see it as a key part of keeping this clearly, solidly within the scope of Wikibooks, but if we can just come up with something good enough to guide contributors into doing a bit of something for each story now, that can encourage things to go in a good direction and improvements/refinements can be made later.  A common technique with stories where there's something to be learned from it (including stories for adults) is to ask questions for the reader to think about; can we do something useful with that?
 * I see significant problems with the idea of a discussion forum for kids. We've no way to keep it kid-friendly; sooner or later it'd become a target for trolls, and the very concept of a censored discussion forum sounds worrisome even if there were a practical way to implement it.  We have had some difficulty calibrating our treatment of comments-space on Wikinews; we commonly call it "troll space" and, in theory, we allow anyone to express their opinions there no matter how odious their opinions may be to us (an oft-cited example is that, on occasion, we have published interviews with Neo-Nazis, some actually quite interesting, but then it would be grossly unfair to publish an interview with such a person and then only allow comments by people who disagree with the interviewee).  But then... I may be mis-recalling a bit, but it happened something like this &mdash; a few years ago we had an article about someone leaving a "boy band", and someone wrote a comment bidding them a fond farewell from the band, and it drew lots of really nasty responses that, in retrospect, we should have deleted... yet it wasn't obvious at the time.  Six months later the poster of the original, fond comment asked to have their comment deleted, saying they'd only wanted to express their good feelings toward the artist and the responses were so ugly.
 * --Pi zero (discuss • contribs) 16:01, 23 May 2017 (UTC)
 * --Pi zero (discuss • contribs) 16:01, 23 May 2017 (UTC)


 * I left a note in your tp regarding this.
 * In order to naturally guide things in the right direction I would write something like this in the guideline, "The aim of the project is to create a collection of teaching stories for kids, similar to the other collections that already exist. These stories are usually short traditional stories with a moral. A shorter version of the stories are preferred. The bulk of the stories here are supposed not to exceed X words."
 * "teaching/learning stories for children" looks to be a broader category, and we can choose that as the aim. So moral stories would be part of it, I guess it would constitute most of it.
 * Wikisource only includes out of copyright texts though.
 * A short note describing the story seems to be useful, especially if it encourages the reader to read the story, such as "This is a story from ... told since the Bronze Age", something that tell the reader that the story is going to be interesting.
 * Here also we can suggest a short explanation of the moral. Regarding questions, I just noticed that the current software does not fit the purpose of Wikibooks. This problem can be felt almost in all projects except Wikipedia, for which Mediawiki was originally developed. I can imagine an appropriate software for Wikibooks would be a wiki with a lot of extensions for various features. I haven't chcked all wikibooks here, but the ones that I had seen, for example, the wikibooks that teach languages, or the ones that programming languages, are crude in my opinion. It should be more interactive. I just opened Wikijunior:Alphabet, I had to open a new page for every letter, and come back to the previouse page. Annotated photos are needed in many books, such as Wikijunior:Solar System and Human Body. You just mentioned one of the features, we need an extension for asking close-ended questions, maybe like a poll (I just searched in the MediaWiki wiki and found plenty of extensions that do the job). I think such tool would be useful for many teaching books here (much more for a project like Wikiversity, i haven't been there much). For stories, a question can be asked, upon answering, the results of the poll and the correct answer would be revealed instantly by the software, and also the explanation of the storyin siple words and what can the reader learn from it [and possibly more information] would be displayed.
 * --ZxxZxxZ (discuss • contribs) 13:08, 24 May 2017 (UTC)
 * --ZxxZxxZ (discuss • contribs) 13:08, 24 May 2017 (UTC)


 * --ZxxZxxZ (discuss • contribs) 13:08, 24 May 2017 (UTC)
 * I like "teaching stories" better than "teaching/learning stories" (even quite aside from the clumsy syntax of the "/"). I like most of your guideline, except the last sentence.  I'd rather give a typical range, highlighting that there can be a lot of variation.  I see the three in place so far are something like 300+, around 700, and 200- words.  Trying another draft,
 * The aim of the project is to create a collection of teaching stories for kids; usually short traditional stories with a moral. Shorter versions of the stories are preferred.  Typically stories should be a few hundred words; occasionally less than two hundred, rarely more than a thousand.
 * We should avoid copyrighted stories, yes.
 * Yes, the wikimedia software is not well suited to anything except an encyclopedia, and in fact I believe the dialog tools I'm creating, once I've learned how to use them &mdash; which is at least as hard as building them in the first place, quite possible harder &mdash; should be hugely useful on Wikipedia as well as on the other sisters. What must be avoided, though, is the trap of thinking "we need lots of extensions".  No, that would be very bad, and the Foundation has been snared in that trap, too.  What we need is one (or, very nearly just one) simple and immensely potent enhancement to wiki markup.  Something that is easy to maintain, and that does not involve the Foundation launching "initiatives" to provide new stuff; if the community wants something new, they are the ones that should make it happen, using existing general tools that make it easy for them to do so.  Any time one ends up wanting lots of extensions that's a sign that something is wrong with the core.  If the core is as simple and flexible as it should be, there should be no need for extensions.
 * --Pi zero (discuss • contribs) 14:57, 24 May 2017 (UTC)
 * --Pi zero (discuss • contribs) 14:57, 24 May 2017 (UTC)


 * It looks better now (although I would count the explanation of the first story as well which make it 400+ words, and the second is not a complete text, but the it won't make a difference)
 * But we can re-write copyrighted stories and post them here, can't we?
 * Let me continue this in your talk page.
 * --ZxxZxxZ (discuss • contribs) 16:56, 24 May 2017 (UTC)
 * We should generally avoid copyrighted stories, I would say. That's natural for wikimedia.  --Pi zero (discuss • contribs) 23:55, 24 May 2017 (UTC)