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Welcome to the General reading room. On this page, Wikibookians are free to talk about the Wikibooks project, and all sorts of related subjects.

To facilitate ease of browsing and replying, please:

  1. Place your question at the bottom of the list;
  2. Title the question (by placing the title between equals signs thus: == title ==);
  3. Sign your name and date (by adding four tildes thus: ~~~~).

General References:

Newest Books:

[edit] Congratulations on starting a new book!

I'm revisiting WikiBooks after a long absence and looking at some of the new books. When I look at them, up the top of the page it says (for example):

"Congratulations on starting a new book! You have created the new book Open Collaboration in Aging Research. Please properly categorize your book using {Subject}. Read The Wikibooks Writer for more information about starting books. Ask questions in the Reading Room. Keep this template for at least 1 week to advertise your book. Do not remove this template until your book is properly categorized. If this is not a new book, but is not properly categorized, use {Cleanup-link} instead."

Why is the casual reader seeing this information that's clearly intended for the creator of the book?

Thanks. --Irrevenant (talk) 01:03, 12 December 2008 (UTC)

Good question. For visibility, I suspect. It could be more appropriate to place these on the talk page, but new users might not notice the talk page being created. A solution to that potential problem would be to place the template on the talk page and alert users on their talk pages too (which would also teach them about the talk page). --Swift (talk) 01:48, 12 December 2008 (UTC)
The information is not just for the creator of the book. Anyone including casual readers can help improve books by categorizing them and the like. Visibility is only part of it. This approach awhile ago replaced the manual approach where people who didn't know about a list for new books didn't get their books listed there with an automated approach that lists books that make use of the template automatically. I've gone ahead and modified the new book template some to make use of collapsing so it doesn't take up as much space and people who are already familiar with the information don't have to see most of it. In collapsed form people only see "Congratulations on starting a new book!" I hope this is a reasonable compromise. --darklama 13:20, 12 December 2008 (UTC)
I removed the {{new book}} template from several pages, in particular those that had it for some weeks and have a {{query}} template now. I don't think queried pages (which usually do not even qualify as stubs) should be advertised as new books longer than a few weeks. --Martin Kraus (talk) 13:35, 15 December 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Removing unused images

I've come across a number of images of character stroke orders that were uploaded for use in the Japanese wikibook. These are no longer used as there is a repository of superior ones at Commons. Should these be removed, or is there no benefit to that? --Swift (talk) 04:20, 12 December 2008 (UTC)

[edit] User:Whiteknight/Visual Book Designer

I've been doing a lot of development work on my book designer gadget, and today I released a new version of it. I've taken into account a lot of the feedback I got after the last release, and I think it's becoming a pretty cool and easy tool for making new books. I would love people to try it out and give me some more feedback. Some features:

  1. The tool now supports collections. You can load an outline from a collection, or save an outline as a collection (personal or private). Combine this ith the ability to load in an outline from an existing book TOC, and you have a cool semi-automated tool for creating collections. I've used it for this purpose myself on a few books already and the results are good.
  2. I streamlined the interface, there are now fewer links and things to look at (they're mostly hidden behind menus). It should be more straightforward to use now
  3. Added an AJAX editing mode, for administrators only. I might open it up to all autoconfirmed users in the future, but it's a beta test so I want it limited to users who could clean up any mistakes that are made. Once you have an outline made, you click a Create link to make the book. It will create all the necessary pages for you.

These are the biggest changes made, but not the only ones. Again, I would appreciate any feedback that people get and I would be happy to hear if anybody uses this tool to actually create a book. Thanks! --Whiteknight (Page) (Talk) 22:59, 13 December 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Box templates

I've been writing a textbook and looking for templates to implement textbook "boxes": the sort of thing that contain supplementary information to the main text, labelled "Box 1.1", etc. These are often independent (to some extent) from the main text, so I'm guessing that for these, book writers will want the content to be transcluded from another page. The nearest I've seen are the various PrettyTextBox templates, but these aren't quite flexible enough (for example, I'd like to be able to collapse the box) I've written a template myself, which allows a fair amount of flexibility, but it's not been given a very sensible name Template:Code:Transclude, and I have a few questions:

  • Am I reinventing the wheel: is there some template designed for this already?
  • If not, I'd like to rename mine to something more generic (e.g. FancyBox, SupplementaryBox, TranscludeBox, BookBox). Any suggestions as to a good name?

Cheers, HYanWong (talk) 18:28, 15 December 2008 (UTC)

Now modified and saved under Template:DropBox and Template:TranscludeBox. The latter is a bit hacky, but seems to do the job. HYanWong (talk) 00:47, 19 December 2008 (UTC)

[edit] User contributions

So I recently noticed, that sometimes there started to appear [rollback] and [vandalism] in the list of contributions after some of those. I started to wonder, what it means. If anybody could tell me here, I would be really thankful. Does this has something to do with flaggedrevs or twinkle gadget? Probably not with twinkle, as disabling it didn't changed anything. If this should go to WB:SLN then sorry. Thank you for reading. Soeb talk|contribs 17:07, 18 December 2008 (UTC)

Bit late, but yes that's Twinkle that does that. If it didn't disappear when you changed your preferences, then you probably needed to reload the cache too. Unusual? Quite TalkQu 14:38, 3 January 2009 (UTC)

I have a question relating to the contributions sections. Sometimes the edits are highlighted in a light pink, but I do not see a certain pattern. What does the pinkish highlight mean? ~ TheSun (talk) 03:01, 6 January 2009 (UTC) ~

Those are edits which haven't been flagged yet.  — Mike.lifeguard | talk 03:02, 6 January 2009 (UTC)

[edit] Transclusion of content between books

Should transclusions be allowed between books ? Ada Programming/Statements Ada Programming/Variables are examples of the problem. Transclusions between Wikibooks aren't helpful, they break several subsystem, including book renames, even deletion, categories and ultimately make edits problematic (edits can break one of the books sharing the same content by using transclusion), content should be copied and attributions give to the original book, if the size of the used content is relevant, Wikibooks should be self containing. --Panic (talk) 00:12, 19 December 2008 (UTC)

The people on the original wiki usually frown on "copy and paste" -- Wiki:CopyAndPasteProgramming.
I personally think transclusion is pretty helpful. Does Wikibooks really need 20 copies of the ASCII chart?
These problems you mention -- do they still occur if I "refactor" the common content in the "template:" namespace, and then transclude that content into each book?
Didn't we already talk about this at Wikibooks talk:Naming policy/Archive 1#things that go into 2 or more books ?
--DavidCary (talk) 06:14, 19 December 2008 (UTC)
We haven't, but you did :). (I've read them now,txs) In any case using the template namespace for content doesn't seem to be a solution. It would solve some of the above mentioned problems, like Wikibooks renames, deletions and probably alterations, since people would get "informed" that the content was outside of the book, and presumably understand that changes would have a higher impact, it would also reduce the problem with the use of categories. On the other hand it would be gaming the system and doesn't address the problem of ownership (rights) or attribution. Is there any guideline or policy were we could start and reach a decission on this issue ? Should it be included in some way on the style proposal ? --Panic (talk) 07:04, 19 December 2008 (UTC)
So, how do you solve the problem with attribution if you transclude content (whether from other books or from templates)? You have to transclude the authors list in order to include future authors, right? Is that possible? If there is no answer to this question, it is simply not allowed to transclude content due to the GFDL. Isn't it that simple? --Martin Kraus (talk) 09:42, 19 December 2008 (UTC)

I agree with Martin Kraus. At first sight I would propose that constant references such as the ASCII table should be copied into each book with acknowledgements. Disk space is cheap nowadays. Similarly, content that will only be changed by the authors of the primary book should be held within the book with acknowledgements. Again, at first sight, content that might be changed by authors of other books, and where the reader should always see this changed and timely content, should be dealt with using references and links in the same way as a non-wikimedia book might be referenced. RobinH (talk) 10:27, 19 December 2008 (UTC)

References and links are not helpful when the books are printed. I know that a lot of the people who read my book print out chapters for use in places where they have no Internet access. That book does transclude material from other books. What I really wish for is the ability to import modules from one book to another inside Wikibooks including edit history. We could kinda sorta do this in a very ugly way right now if we imported the book into another wikimedia project and then imported it back to here. But that can only be done by a person having import rights on two projects. --Jomegat (talk) 15:23, 19 December 2008 (UTC)

This has been talked about in the reading room before as well with no real conclusion from what I recall. I don't think books should be sharing content. Books are suppose to be more focused, explain more and be written to reflect their target audience which can be hard enough to do already without adding more complications like having to consider other books which might not even have the same goals, writing style, or target audience. Take the pages your referring to for instance. Things use to be a lot worst than they probably are now, more books use to share the content, and as a result included examples that weren't even in the programming language being discussed! Which could be confusing for people new to programming when used in a book that was suppose to focus on only one programming language. I think having examples in multiple programming languages makes more sense in a more general book, such as Computer Programming. In fact I think that shared content is also used in that book as well. --darklama 15:40, 19 December 2008 (UTC)

I think that we don't need a policy on this. We should let the authors free to share content if they want to. I don't know why transclusion is a problem with book renames, deletion, etc. more than it is for linking. When one of these operations is made on a page, one must check the "What links here" page for the old name so all the links and transclusion are fixed. Regarding author acknowledgment, it is copying the action that can break acknowledgment, transclusion always preserves the original authors in the transcluded page history. Having said that, I don't mind if it is decided that content sharing should not be done, but please, don't just delete the transclusion, copy the contents instead. --ManuelGR (talk) 11:30, 20 December 2008 (UTC)

Sorry for my ignorance, how do you transclude the page history of one page in another? --194.196.95.89 (talk) 13:42, 20 December 2008 (UTC)
As far as I know you cannot do that. What I meant is that for getting the full list of authors you can check all the pages in the book, including the transcluded pages. This could be done automatically. Copying and giving credit in the comment is not subject to author list automatization. Adding to that, the user may forget to comment the copy. -- ManuelGR (talk) 12:36, 21 December 2008 (UTC)
Sorry for the "me too" comment, but I could hardly agree more with ManuelGR. I don't think we need an official policy or guideline for this. Sharing content by transclusion can be both useful as well as harmful. We should trust Wikibookians to be able to judge which is the case with the books they contribute to. Those interested in helping users learn about this could describe the pros and contras on Help:Templates or some other fitting help page. --Swift (talk) 11:08, 22 December 2008 (UTC)
  • reset

I don't think a policy is required but a guideline should be welcomed so to establish the best practice. Trasclusion between works aren't helpful, they create to much problems.
Martin Kraus is mixing the problems transcclusions of Wikibooks aren't the same as using templates, templates by default shouldn't have content, and if they have some close relation to a work they should be kept on that work namespace, in general they aren't problematic in any way, well, I've been having some trouble with the use of categories in templates...
The Wiki copy-paste mentality, to address DavidCary comment, isn't cleanly transposed to every wiki project, here on wikibooks we have special requirements, the most important is the license we use, while copy paste works on Wikipedia, here we must give attributions to other works even if they are present on the site, doing other wise would be plagiarism and a violation of other people's rights. That is similar to the requirement of giving attribution to Wikipedia material (or use it's edit history).
To reply to ManuelGR, I will explain some of the problem, the problem with deletion is that if you remove a book that has been trascluding other books pages you can be creating orphan pages, since no one guarantees that the other book is still linking them, and those pages aren't deleted because they don't share the same scope. As for renames, they can break trasnclusion without any warning, you rename a book and each trasclusion ceases to function without any warning, both require previous knowledge of what was in place to be corrected, so in the name of easy reuse (not considering the GFDL issue), we create a maintainability problem. This also has an impact on the use of categories and other navigational aids it can break or make it's use problematic. About the edit history, the information it holds is highly volatile, as it can be lost or corrupted on edits, and it is to complex (due to all the different types of edits) to hold any significant data, if authors wish to be recognized they should do it within a high visibility page, but that is another discussion in it itself.
I would like for Swift to point out other benefits of trasclusions that aren't restricted to saving work for the editor that uses it, claiming it prevents waste of project resources is not a valid argument here... --Panic (talk) 20:02, 22 December 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Thank you all

I've just found IB Biology and can safely say that, after looking through it's contents and, these articles will help me pass my exams! These are by far the most in-depth, useful study notes I've ever seen and I'd like to thank everyone who has ever contributed to them for helping me get through my exams. --Gwib (talk) 22:23, 24 December 2008 (UTC)

[edit] New book doesn't have the hierchical links pointing back to parent pages?

I created a new book, Magicjack. It refers to sub-pages using links like

[[MagicJack/Introduction | Introduction]]

I created those sub-pages by following the link. However, when I visit them, I don't see the small links in the top-left to follow the hierarchy back. (See MagicJack, Introduction.).

And, if I visit a page two levels deep, like:

[[MagicJack/Support_Resources/New_users]]

it shows the navigational/hierarchical link, but the base of the link doesn't contain the two components "MagicJack" and "Support Resources". (See MagicJack, Support Resources, New users.).

When I developed these pages in my userspace (User:Az2008) the link looked different. (See: the same page in my userspace.).

Can someone please tell me why it's different? Did I do something wrong?

Thanks. --Az2008 (talk) 01:02, 30 December 2008 (UTC)

Update
I found my problem. I created the book name with the wrong capitalization. All the sub-pages were created with the correct capitalization. So, the links worked. But, the little link-back links in the top-left weren't right. Sorry. --Az2008 (talk) 01:19, 30 December 2008 (UTC)
Hint for the future: You could have left off the "MagicJack" part, and made your links like this: [[/Introduction|Introduction]]. The leading slash implies the parent. DOing it this way makes it a lot easier to rename the book too, should the need ever arise. --Jomegat (talk) 02:20, 30 December 2008 (UTC)
Hint for the future: [[/Introduction/]] is equivalent to [[/Introduction|Introduction]] - saves you typing. :)  — Mike.lifeguard | talk 05:10, 30 December 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Possible new wikibook - seeking advice on whether Wikibooks is the right place

In 2000, I completed a PhD in Economics on the Origins of Stakeholder Theory. I get requests from time to time about the content although I have now left academia. I would like to make the content available to people who have the time and inclination to find out more. Should I use Wikibooks? The thesis shows step by step how the idea of Stakeholders developed, so it seems to conform to the requirement of being fact based, rather than a particular position. I'm considering making it available via Wikibooks so that it can also be printed on demand if people want. My questions: (1) Is Wikibooks an appropriate place to publish this work (2) How easy would it be to convert a 60,000 word Word document into a Wiki publication? thanks GilesS (talk) 05:09, 3 January 2009 (UTC)GilesS

Welcome, GilesS,
Since w:Stakeholder theory isn't your original research, I'd say that as long as your thesis is a discussion of existing ideas, it should be fine here.
The difficulty of converting your thesis depends on the level of markup, how many pages you want to place it on and the sort of interlinking that it would employ. See mw:Help:Contents for some syntax help. --Swift (talk) 05:29, 3 January 2009 (UTC)
Also, please note there are some tools which are intended to help you convert microsoft word documents to wiki code (link to list of these tools). It won't help in spitting the book into pages or anything but it should help you with the formatting (although I haven't tried the tool myself so I don't know). Anonymous101 (talk) 16:19, 5 January 2009 (UTC)

First time user needs to know amount of energy used by an Airbus jet to leave the ground. Can you tell me how to go about reaching that goal? Don't know protocol. Can anyone out there help me? Geohenson@comcast.net

[edit] Edit count

My edit count seems to be quite different then what my contributions page would suggest. I only care because this seems to have some impact on whether or not I get "editor" status under this Flagged Revisons setup. I probably haven't made enough contributions yet anyways, but I thought I would let someone know that the edit count seems off, as maybe it means there is a problem elsewhere. Thanks. Thenub314 (talk) 14:44, 7 January 2009 (UTC)

Hi, do you mean the edit count from the "my preferences" page, or the one you get when you click "edit count" at the bottom of the "my contributions" page? The "edit count" link has been giving me strange numbers for a while. It looks like it hasn't captured any numbers from January. A similar edit counter here is also giving odd results. It says you only have 2 edits for example. Might be some larger underying problem. Unusual? Quite TalkQu 14:51, 7 January 2009 (UTC)
The replication lag between en.wikibooks and the toolserver is currently 9.1 days - so your edit count there will be 9.1 days out of date. This shouldn't affect anything like editor promotion I believe as this is driven from the Wikimedia servers themselves and does not rely on data being replicated out to the toolservers. Someone else correct me if I'm wrong please! Unusual? Quite TalkQu 17:24, 7 January 2009 (UTC)
Thanks for the quick responses. I have made all but two of my edits in the past few days, so that makes sense. (Those two edits were several years ago, I got a bit distracted in the mean time.) Thenub314 (talk) 08:59, 8 January 2009 (UTC)
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