Testwiki:Reading room/Archives/2008/January

Hello! I'm a new user here..

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Hello Everyone!

I'm searching informations about the Sumerian civilization. Can anyone help me? I really find it hard, to search it.

Thank you!

Hello and welcome to wikibooks! We don't have a lot on Sumerian civilization on this project, an introduction to it can be found here, but if you go to google and type in "sumerians" you'll find a lot of stuff, hopefully something that will be helpful to you. Regards. Mattb112885 (talk to me) 18:07, 1 January 2008 (UTC)

Need info on how to edit Cookbook: Smoking

I'm not sure I'm doing this right, as this is the first time I am attempting to add or edit a cookbook page. I feel the page does not fully encompass the varieties of smoking foods, and does not properly describe the variety of smokers and smoking techniques. Also, I would like to contribute some basic recipes and guidelines for cooking. I must also disagree with the statement that all smoked meats must be cured, as I use my smoker quite frequently and I rarely use cured meats. I would like some feedback as to how to properly incorporate my knowledge to this wiki cookbook, with out discrediting others. Thank you, Bbq-dtp-ri (talk) 01:03, 2 January 2008 (UTC) bbq-dtp-ri

Editing a page is deceptively simple: click the "edit this page" link at the top of the page, add what you think needs to be added, and then click "Save page". For more information about the whole process, I suggest you check out Using Wikibooks, especially the chapters for new users and for editors. The cookbook is a great resource, and gets better when chefs and cooks such as yourself add their own expertise to it. Please let us know if you need anything else. --Whiteknight (Page) (Talk) 02:17, 2 January 2008 (UTC)

LaTeX

Greetings, Wikireaders.

I'm a LaTeX novice, working my way through the LaTeX wikibook, but in need of some help. Please see the Talk:LaTeX/Title_Creation#ProTeXt_TeXnic_Center discussion page for more details.

Thank you

--Kittybriton (talk) 02:10, 2 January 2008 (UTC)

Hello Kittybriton, welcome to wikibooks! I'm not a user of LaTeX myself, but some other users around here might be willing to help you out with your problem. As you learn, consider contributing to the LaTeX book and others as well. Even small fixes to spelling, grammar, or wording go a long way to help the next generation of readers. Let us know if you have any other questions. --Whiteknight (Page) (Talk) 02:14, 2 January 2008 (UTC)

Finished Books

FREE "FINISHED" BOOKS on line

Hi Everyone at WIKI

I am not sure "who" to direct this suggestion to, but I am sure that there are many people who have written "finished" fiction and children's books/stories who would be willing to publish them free on-line.

So I would like to suggest a NEW WIKI section for "free finished" books.

Kind regards

Janet

Two points worth making here: The first is that Wikibooks does not accept fiction, complete or otherwise. So, people who have fiction works are probably better off going to Wikia or some other place like that to publish them. The second point is that we do accept donations here, but any book that is donated must be released under the GFDL and must be open to editing. That means that a book here on wikibooks is never really "complete" in the sense that more work cannot and will not be done on it. However, if the book is an appropriate form of non-fiction, and if the author agrees to the terms of the GFDL, we would be happy to accept book donations. --Whiteknight (Page) (Talk) 14:47, 16 December 2007 (UTC)

I agree that it would be cool to have a wiki section for "free finished" books. Wikisource ( http://wikisource.org/ ) sounds perfect for such books.

WIW points out that Wikisource accepts "Source texts previously published by any author" (including fiction). --DavidCary (talk) 04:32, 3 January 2008 (UTC)

I hadn't even thought about wikisource for that kind of thing. Now that you mention it, it might be an interesting area for interproject collaboration. --Whiteknight (Page) (Talk) 05:57, 3 January 2008 (UTC)

Educational standards book?

I was thinking of compiling the standards into a book from either U.S.-wide or internationally. I'd prefer the former, but of course to do either I would announce the intention. Thoughts? Laleena (talk) 01:51, 21 December 2007 (UTC)

WE WOULD LOVE THAT! Seriously, we have always wanted to write books that conform to various educational standards, and having those standards here in book-form would be a great addition to us. Our previous efforts to do this are located at Wikistudy. --Whiteknight (Page) (Talk) 17:43, 23 December 2007 (UTC)

Actually, I enjoy compiling standards. Which set to pick, though? I would like to begin with U.S. standards (I'm an American) and expand further when the time comes. At my workshop (which is crowded already, I need to send some stuff elsewhere) I'll begin. Thanks, Laleena (talk) 19:53, 24 December 2007 (UTC)

I would tend to agree with that, focus on your area of expertise first, and then try to expand to cover things which you aren't as comfortable with. If you're more willing/able to work on American standards first, then start with that. --Whiteknight (Page) (Talk) 19:15, 26 December 2007 (UTC)

I also agree. A wikibook listing educational standards would be great. So ... should it go under the "Help:" namespace at Help:Textbook Standards, since it's at a meta-level that influences lots of books? Or should it go in the main namespace at Textbook Standards, since it could potentially grow into a textbook that could be used in teacher training classes? --DavidCary (talk) 04:32, 3 January 2008 (UTC)

How to put tables on a book

I will appreciate if someone could explain me how to create a table on wikibooks, or better yet how to export a table from Word into wikibook.

Thanks in advance!

Vallsvg (talk) 21:46, 2 January 2008 (UTC)

I'm fairly certain (though would love to be proven wrong!) that it is impossible to transfer tables directly into wikibooks from Word. That said, Help:Table has a lot of information about how to make tables in many ways, shapes, and forms, although this page is admittedly quite a mess. For a lot of tables, this syntax will work (take out the stuff with which is just there for explaining purposes):

 {| border="1" <!-- singifies that you want your cells to have borders of thickness 1, if omitted your table will have no borders -->
 ! col 1 title !! col 2 title <!-- give your columns titles. These will come out bold because of the "!", which of course is optional -->
 |-
 | Column 1, row 1  || Column 2, row 1 
 |- <!-- Column separator -->
 | Cell 1, row 2 
 | Cell 2, row 2 <!--this gives the same result 
 |} <!--signals end of table -->

This code looks like this when rendered:

col 1 title	col 2 title
Column 1, row 1	Column 2, row 1
Column 1, row 2	Column 2, row 2

Note that tables are a pain in the butt and can be tricky, for example if you want one cell in a row to be bold and the other not to, they must go on separate lines, otherwise the program will get confused and think you only used one column! Mattb112885 (talk to me) 02:32, 3 January 2008 (UTC)

I just overhauled the page at Editing Wikitext/Tables, so it includes some better information now. As to the part about importing from Microsoft Word, I dont think there is a good solution to that problem. I just read that OpenOffice.org has a "MediaWiki export filter". I'm going to investigate that now and see if i can find a good workaround. --Whiteknight (Page) (Talk) 02:44, 3 January 2008 (UTC)

You could export simple tables from word usind a macro. I had a quick go at knocking something together like so:

c = ActiveDocument.Tables(1).Columns.Count
r = ActiveDocument.Tables(1).Rows.Count
S = "{| border=""1""" & vbCrLf & "|-" & vbCrLf & "| "
For y = 1 To r
    For x = 1 To c
        S = S & Replace(ActiveDocument.Tables(1).Cell(y, x).Range, Chr(13) & Chr(7), "")
        If x <> c Then S = S & "|| "
    Next
    If y <> r Then S = S & vbCrLf & "|-" & vbCrLf & "| "
Next
S = S & vbCrLf & "|}"
Selection.TypeText Text:=S

(Hmmm. Seems like I need some lessons in wiki markup myself. How do I fix the carriage returns and indents in the above?)

Usage is (for Word 2002 though should be similar for other versions):

Create a new word document.
Tools-->macro-->macros
Give your macro a name
Select macros in the document you have just created
Create
A vb screen will appear. Paste the above code between the sub and end sub.
Close the vb window.
Paste the table you want to wikify into the new document.
Place your cursor below that.
Tools-->macro-->macros
Select your macro and click run.
The wiki code appears where your cursor was.
Cut and paste into wiki!

The macro only works for the first table in the document (That's the 1 in Tables(1)) which is why I recommend creating a new document. If someone could test and let me know if the instructions make sense? --AdRiley (talk) 08:09, 4 January 2008 (UTC)

oops through java

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what is a class?how does it accoplish data hiding?

Wikicharts

If you haven't notice the results from Wikicharts are a little bizarre. Like if it takes the total number of hits since the beginning and devides by the number of days. I could not find exactly where to post the bug. -- Jacques (talk) (email) 03:20, 3 January 2008 (UTC)

You're right, they are a little bizarre. I've been trying to aggregate the results from Wikicharts HERE. These results are computed statistically, and are per-month estimates. As the month progresses, the values should asymptotically approach the "real" value. In general, the most accurate reading is at the end of the month. --Whiteknight (Page) (Talk) 03:32, 3 January 2008 (UTC)

Well the column is named views per day on their page so if it’s a monthly estimate they should change the header. Also today's numbers are half of yesterdays. Anyway, just a tool that needs some more work, I think you should tell them if they didn't notice, I haven't found how. Regards -- Jacques (talk) (email) 04:10, 3 January 2008 (UTC)

Well, when I say that the counts are monthly, those are just my observations. I think it is reasonable to say that we are getting about 100,000 page hits per month. I don't think it's reasonable to say that we are getting over 3,000,000 hits per month. Also, the counts tend to refine themselves over the course of the month, with asymptotic behavior. Counts at the beginning of the month are the least accurate, and they refine themselves from there. I could be wrong about all this, of course. You're right, however, that this tool does need a lot of work. --Whiteknight (Page) (Talk) 06:01, 3 January 2008 (UTC)

I like guessing myself so I took a look at your numbers. What they actually do is to take the total number of hits since the beginning and divide by the number of days in the current month. If you multiply their number by the the number of days in the current month you will have the total number of hits since the beginning. Substract the total for the day before and you will get the number of hits for the day. It is between 5500 and 9000 for the main page. The origin of the error is that they made tests during the first month and it worked all right. Regards -- Jacques (talk) (email) 14:15, 3 January 2008 (UTC)

That does seem to be a reasonable explanation for the origin of these numbers, but it doesnt sound to me like an algorithm that is useful for counting page hits. That is, that algorithm doesnt produce a meaningful result. I can try to update my aggregator based on this idea, to try and get some more meaningful results. Let me work on that, and see what kinds of results I get. --Whiteknight (Page) (Talk) 15:33, 3 January 2008 (UTC)

You can try to make sense out of buggy information but the ideal would be to get the thing fixed (I think it's clearly a bug). I have send an e-mail to the developper, opened a bug on their server and opened another support bug in case the first one remains unnoticed (not sure Leon is very active right now). I keep you posted if I have any news. -- Jacques (talk) (email) 20:25, 3 January 2008 (UTC)

Using the algorithm that you suggested, It appears that wikibooks is getting anywhere from 20K - 30K hits per day, for a total of 750,000 page hits per month. This seems like a large number, but not when you consider some key things. An edit consists of 3 page hits. The first to view the page, the second to edit the page, and the third to show the page when it is saved. That's if the page is not previewed while editing (a preview adds an additional page hit). Based on some stats I've seen, we have an average of about 16,000 hits per month, which translates roughly to 48,000 page hits (we have negligibly few bot edits, and bot edits wouldn't be counted by this). That leaves about 700,000 non-edit page views per month, or about 23,000 page views per day. This is a very large number, but is not necessarily far-fetched. I think that's a good estimate for us to use. --Whiteknight (Page) (Talk) 02:42, 4 January 2008 (UTC)

Assuming that the algorithm used by WikiCharts is to simply add hits together and divide by the number of days, there are still a few problems with the theories on how many actual hits are happening. The actual number in all probability is higher rather then lower, because the sampling is random making it dependent on the algorithm implode by each browser as to how often a hit is registered, all actions that do not involve just viewing a page (such as editing it, moving it, etc.) are never counted, and people using a text-only browser or has javascript disable aren't being counted either. So an edit consists of only 2 hits max, since the editing and the previewing aren't counted, and its unlikely that both viewing before and after an edit are going to be counted. Its also unlikely that any one person's page views are getting counted all that often. So you should either accept that 20K to 30K hits per day is actually rather low compared to how many hits are actually happening, or aim for a number much higher then 30K. --dark lama 15:14, 4 January 2008 (UTC)

You're right about the editing point, I didn't realize that wgIsArticle was false on an edit page. I would venture to guess (and this is purely guess work) that the number of people using all-text browsers or browsers with javascript disabled are very low. I say this because many modern websites become almost unusable without javascript. People who have it disabled would have a very hard time doing some things on the internet. I make the limiting assumption that the number of people who fall into this category is negligible. --Whiteknight (Page) (Talk) 15:23, 4 January 2008 (UTC)

Hi, extract from a conversation on #wikipedia-en-help few minutes ago:
14:14:36 | <Farosdaughter> Heya Jacques611. Need help?
14:15:05 | <Jacques611> hi, easy question actually
14:15:23 | <Jacques611> there is problem with a tool we use on wikibooks
14:15:36 | <Jacques611> the tool is name Wikicharts
14:16:06 | <Jacques611> there is a bug with it and there does not seem to be any active support
14:16:15 | <Jacques611> I am wondering where to go
14:16:42 | <KFP> Jacques611: Wikicharts?
14:17:20 | <Jacques611> http://tools.wikimedia.de/~leon/stats/wikicharts/?wiki=enwikibooks
14:17:44 | <KFP> Jacques611: As far as I know, that is a very problematic tool.
14:17:53 | <Jacques611> did you get the link?
14:18:00 | <KFP> Yes.
14:18:13 | <KFP> Jacques611: It is not reliable at all, as far as I know.
14:18:22 | <Jacques611> sorry what do you mean by very problematic?
14:18:35 | <Jacques611> ok
14:18:47 | <Jacques611> so are there any alternative?
14:19:30 | <KFP> Jacques611: I am not aware of an alternative tool.
14:19:43 | <Jacques611> ok thanks
Well who is the "authority" with those kind of tools? -- Jacques (talk) (email) 19:33, 4 January 2008 (UTC)

My newbie understanding at this point is that the Wikichart tool is buggy, generally considered unreliable and not actively supported. In that context we may want to be very cautious about publishing any info based on that tool. -- Jacques (talk) (email) 22:43, 4 January 2008 (UTC)

hello

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hi m jahang, persuing master of Arts in psychology, m vary proud to become a wikian n realy its an amagine webside m thankful towards founder.m interested in counselling.

Hai Semua(Hi All)

Selamat datang,Salam,Shalom,Ni hao, and another . I'm newbie here. Actually I'm temporary admin from Malay wikibooks. Malay wikibooks is unpopular and the comunity is so small! . If me have problem, can I ask here.Sorry broken English.Putera Luqman Tunku Andre (talk) 16:27, 7 January 2008 (UTC)

Welcome to the en.wb project! If you have questions, you can always ask us here. We will help anyway we can. Tell the Malay Wikibookians that we said "hello". --Whiteknight (Page) (Talk) 19:42, 8 January 2008 (UTC)

Greeting from Suresh

Hello, I am a newbie here. Template:User suggested that I introduce myself. I have started writing a Wiki book on Healthy Living. I would like to start organizing it better. I have written simple Wiki pages but none as complex as a book. Tell me where I can start. I would like to be able to have a PDF of the entire book when I am finished. Ssuresh (talk) 07:23, 8 January 2008 (UTC)

Welcome to wikibooks! Using Wikibooks is a little guidebook that we've been writing to help answer common questions. It's not complete yet, but it does contain lots of valuable information. Lots of our books have PDF versions, and when your book is ready we can help you make a PDF for it too. Also, the software developers for this site are working on an automatic PDF generator function that will help to make this process easier in the future. I hope this helps, and don't hesitate to ask any more questions. --Whiteknight (Page) (Talk) 19:41, 8 January 2008 (UTC)

Maintenance Projects

I have recently created a page to organise maintenance-related projects on Wikibooks at Wikibooks:Maintenance Projects. Does anyone think it is workable? Helpfulstuffnz (talk) 06:25, 1 January 2008 (UTC)

I noticed it when you created it. I'm wondering is its intended use any different from that of Wikibooks:Wikibooks maintenance? That being a more lengthly list of maintenance-related stuff that most people can help with. --dark lama 13:50, 1 January 2008 (UTC)

Raises the issue that maybe Wikibooks:Wikibooks maintenance needs to be better advertised. --Whiteknight (Page) (Talk) 17:38, 1 January 2008 (UTC)

When I click "help cleanup" on the community menu on the left of every page I get to Wikibooks:Wikibooks maintenance, how do you see it more advertised then that? Regards -- Jacques (talk) (email) 19:11, 1 January 2008 (UTC)

On the discussion on Wikiprojects above User:Helpfulstuffnz was suggesting to put a more prominent link to the Wikibooks:Wikiprojects page. Since book projects go with books and subject projects will probably eventually go with subjects it seems perfectly logical to put maintenance projects with maintenance and just give an explanation of the 3 kinds of projects in the Wikiprojects page. So good idea for me, I would just consider the possibility of putting the links to the projects directly on the maintenance page, that would save a click and a page. The discussions on potential projects could go on the talk page. Regards -- Jacques (talk) (email) 19:11, 1 January 2008 (UTC)

I made Template:Backlog a while back, which lists tasks that non-admins can do which are regularly backlogged (or need to be constantly done, like vandal patrol). It includes instructions and links to resources needed to do those tasks, which are based off of Wikibooks:Wikibooks maintenance. The template itself may be useful, or feel free to steal language for use elsewhere. – Mike.lifeguard | ^talk 21:14, 9 January 2008 (UTC)

Opinions?

Apple Inc. - A Brief History - not textbook material? I almost deleted it then thought other opinions would be wise! Thanks --Herby ^{talk thyme} 17:27, 1 January 2008 (UTC)

I think it's too substantive to qualify as a speedy, and doesn't seem like a copyvio to me (though I did not check thoroughly), I'd recommend listing it on VfD. It seems like an advertisement to me, and though there might be a book we can merge this into, I somewhat doubt it. Mattb112885 (talk to me) 17:30, 1 January 2008 (UTC)

I feel like this very issue has come up before. I may be mistaken, of course. I'll do a little research on it and see what I can find. --Whiteknight (Page) (Talk) 17:36, 1 January 2008 (UTC)

Apple is a significant event in late 20th century history but in its current form the text is a Wikipedia article rather than a book. It should really go in a book called "The computer industry - a history" or similar, along with histories of other pioneers such as IBM, DEC, Honeywell, ICL, NCR, Cray, Bull etc. As a standalone article it should be deleted because it is advertising. Is it worth creating a new book title such as "The computer industry - a history" just to preserve the text? RobinH (talk) 11:30, 4 January 2008 (UTC)

Picture of the Year competition

Dear Wikimedians,

Wikimedia Commons is happy to announce that the 2007 Picture of the Year competition will be held soon. Any user who is registered at any Wikimedia wiki and has more than 200 edits is invited to vote.

The competition is among the 514 images that became Featured Pictures at Wikimedia Commons between 2007-01-01 and 2007-12-31. There are literally hundreds of beautiful high quality pictures... please help us choose the best one!

Voting will be conducted through a tool on the toolserver (to make it easier to count compared to editing on a wiki). Users can request a voting token on http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Picture_of_the_Year/2007/Voting . You will need to have email enabled for the user account you intend to vote from. You can only vote once, even if you have multiple accounts that meet the edit requirement. The voter log will be public although the actual votes themselves will be private.

There are two rounds of voting. In the first round, you can vote for as many images as you like, regardless of category. In the final (28), you can only vote for one image.

Thanks, Wikimedia Commons Picture of the Year committee http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Picture_of_the_Year/2007 --Herby ^{talk thyme} 13:07, 8 January 2008 (UTC)

Voting now open

Dear Wikimedians,

The 2007 Wikimedia Commons Picture of the Year competition is now open!

Please visit here to see if you are eligible and get a voting token: here

The images are presented in categories, but you can vote for as many as you like, in as many categories as you like. (The categories are just so you don't have to look at hundreds of images at once.) The top 28 images will make it to the final.

Before you cast your vote, you can preview them all at the galleries. Voting is open from January 10-17, so please take the time to have your say!

Thanks, Wikimedia Commons Picture of the Year committee http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Picture_of_the_Year/2007 --Herby ^{talk thyme} 11:08, 10 January 2008 (UTC)

Please

Can you please put somethign about Majestic Cathdrals of Reims, France

See w:Notre-Dame de Reims. – Mike.lifeguard | ^talk 01:16, 10 January 2008 (UTC)

next IRC meeting, Saturday, 19th January: History - Thucydides: The Peloponnesian War

Hello everybody, perhaps someone would like to join the next IRC meeting about Thucydides: The Peloponnesian War ? There are announcements made also at other Wikibooks and Wikiversities. The exact time is not decided yet (let's wait 1 or 2 days), since we wait for the other responses, so problems with different timezones are minimized. --Erkan Yilmaz (talk) 16:32, 13 January 2008 (UTC)

Moving a book

Hello, I've just recently started a new book about Yiddish. Its target audience is very different from the already existing Yiddish book, as explained in the introduction. I was wondering if it is okay to get the page Yiddish to point to both books, and to rename the other one (which currently has almost no content at all) to Conversational Yiddish, or something like that. I notice that other languages (such as English and Chinese) have their own bookshelves, and want to know if would be possible to do something like that for Yiddish. (Or possibly just to delete the other book which currently is just a useless list of animal names and colours.) Thank you. Clum (talk) 08:35, 10 January 2008 (UTC)

You're right, the Yiddish book has almost no content. Let me ask you, since you know more about this subject then I do: Is the Yiddish book worth keeping as it currently is? If it's not worth keeping, we can "merge" it into your book. Since this book has so little content, a "merge" would basically consist of deleting that page and posting a redirect to your book instead. Some other options to consider:

We could easily rename that page "Conversational Yiddish", and then use the page Yiddish to point to both books (see C++ for an example of that).
We could create a page at Subject:Yiddish to point to both books (possibly still using Yiddish to disambiguate).

Let me know what you think. --Whiteknight (Page) (Talk) 15:57, 10 January 2008 (UTC)

On the one hand, the current Yiddish book isn't really worth keeping. The only part of it which is slightly useful is the Verbs section, which has conjugations for three of the most common verbs (particularly to be and to have which are used as helping verbs). This information is in any case found in my book as well.

On the other hand, I'm not sure that its such a good idea to have Yiddish pointing directly to my book, because someone expecting to learn conversational Yiddish might be a bit disappointed by my book. The problem is that modern Yiddish is really split into two distinct uses. There are still hundreds of thousands, or perhaps millions of speakers of Yiddish which mainly use Yiddish as their every-day language. However, most of them speak Yiddish natively, and are unlikely to look to Wikibooks for help in learning the language. The other group of people that uses Yiddish is the Yeshivah (Jewish Torah study centers) system. Since Yiddish is the language that has been used to speak by Ashkenazic Jewry for centuries, many lectures in Yeshivos are still taught in Yiddish. The jargon used in Yeshivos, though, is very different from everyday conversation. It consists mostly of words referring to Torah concepts and religious law, and is usually heavily mixed with the local language (usually English or Hebrew). I believe that a large percentage of people trying to learn Yiddish are doing so in order to understand lectures in Yeshivos (that's why I learned Yiddish), and would benefit from my book. However, my book concentrates mostly on obscure religious terms that someone who wants to learn conversational Yiddish would have no interest in, so it could be misleading to call my book plain "Yiddish".

In short,

No, the current Yiddish book is not worth keeping.
But, I like the idea you gave of having the Yiddish page pointing to both books, like in C++.
So I'm unsure what should be done. --Clum (talk) 16:57, 10 January 2008 (UTC)

Well, how about we delete the Yiddish book, create a redirect from Yiddish to your book, and then when we have a book about conversational yiddish (because we dont have one now) we can add that to the Yiddish page. Because, until we have two books, it doesnt make sense to go out of our way to make space for them. Plus, once we get the book in the future we will know exactly where to put it. Sound Good? --Whiteknight (Page) (Talk) 20:46, 10 January 2008 (UTC)

Oh no! I just spent lots of time renaming the old book and setting up all sorts of bookshelves, categories, and disambiguation pages. I still do believe that the Conversational Yiddish book as is is totally useless, so if you can undo everything I just did and follow through with your plan, then that might be a good idea. On the other hand, the existence of a Conversational Yiddish book might encourage people to contribute to it (not that it has encouraged anyone in the last couple of years - look at its disappointing talk page).

One more thing, I tried putting all pages from both books into the automatically created Category:Yiddish and for some reason, even though I added it to my Template:Yiddish for Yeshivah Bachurim/Bottombar, and a link is added to each page, they're not appearing in the actual Category. --Clum (talk) 21:29, 10 January 2008 (UTC)

Is there a way to browse/filter books by Wikibook Development Stage?

There are a ton of books on the site - many (most?) of which are far from complete. Is there a way to browse/filter books by Wikibook Development Stage? Thanks. 75.45.115.36 (talk) 03:25, 15 January 2008 (UTC)

There isn't currently, but that's a good idea. We could include a category, and use DPL to list the books. This would rely on the books having that on the appropriate page, and that it be maintained. It's still worth thinking about.

What you can do right now though, is take a look through our featured books, which are recognized by the community as being high-quality. Hope that helps. – Mike.lifeguard | ^talk 03:48, 15 January 2008 (UTC)

Gadgets Extension

Commons has an interesting extension loaded that allows people to select certain "gadgets" on the preferences page. Once selected, these javascript tools are loaded for you automatically, without having to modify your javascript pages, and without having to know any javascript. Information about the extension is here:

http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Gadgets

And you can see the results on commons here: commons:Special:Gadgets and commons:Special:Preferences (when you are logged in, on the "Gadgets" tab). All javascript gadgets are located in the MediaWiki namespace, so only admins can modify them. This would allow people to:

Test or preview a javascript code without having to modify your personal javascript file, or refresh your cache.
Share useful javascripts with other members quickly and easily
Quickly customize your interface by picking and choosing from existing scripts, without needing to know anything about javascript.
Test changes or extensions to the site javascript on small groups, without having to make changes directly to MediaWiki:common.js.

I think it's a good-looking extension, doesnt appear to affect performance (it's in use on commons, and they have higher traffic then we have), and is completely opt-in because you need to change your preferences before any of these javascript gadgets will take effect. --Whiteknight (Page) (Talk) 17:52, 5 December 2007 (UTC)

Like I already said elsewhere, I think this is a good extension, but I think we should wait for them to fix the bugs first, before using it. --dark lama 18:11, 5 December 2007 (UTC)

Yes, I probably should have posted that here; WB:AA is like a "default" for me. I did mention the bugs there. In short, it won't work (for now) with cologne blue, and can mess up custom skins. OTOH, most people use a monobook-derived skin, and if you've made your own, then you can probably figure out the workaround.

Even with those drawbacks, I think it's a useful thing to have. Assuming that there is some (small) population of Wikibookians who can't use it due to those 2 bugs, it will be highly useful for those who can use it. And eventually, the bugs will get fixed. Do we wait until the bugs in MedaiWiki are fixed before using it? Clearly not. (Duesentrieb is thinking of adding a feature to restrict certain scripts to admins/bcrats etc, so you can actually restrict who can click the checkbox. Now, you have to just say "don't use this unless you're an admin; it won't work.") The extension is stable, and is used on other WMF wikis. I had some ideas of which scripts would be useful to enable through this extension on the other page, and we can certainly ~~steal~~ borrow ideas from other projects. – Mike.lifeguard | ^talk 18:59, 5 December 2007 (UTC)

I use a custom skin myself, if you've ever taken a look at my [[User:Whiteknight/myskin.css|css file, you'll know it was a big undertaking, and it would be trivial for me to adjust it for a new extension. I also have about half a dozen scripts of my own that I would love to get more people using because they automate common book-related tasks (categorizing books, creating new books, creating print versions, etc). Like I said though, commons already uses it, so it can't be too buggy. Commons has more traffic then we do, so if it's good enough for them, it should be good enough for us. --Whiteknight (Page) (Talk) 20:11, 5 December 2007 (UTC)

The issue with custom skins was patched by darklama. – Mike.lifeguard | ^talk 04:26, 14 December 2007 (UTC)

For anyone looking back, this was enabled on all WMF wikis without us asking. – Mike.lifeguard | ^talk 21:08, 9 January 2008 (UTC)

Vote

Template:Support – Mike.lifeguard | ^talk 00:06, 12 December 2007 (UTC)
Template:Support --Whiteknight (Page) (Talk) 00:10, 12 December 2007 (UTC)
Template:Support – Urbane (Talk) (Contributions) 16:24, 12 December 2007 (UTC)
Template:Support Now that the Gadgets extension can play nicely with custom-skins rather than overriding them, its just a matter of time until the effect goes live. --dark lama 16:57, 14 December 2007 (UTC)

What's the difference between a subject and a category?

I have no clue, which is sort of embarrassing, since I've been quite active, and only just realized that they were two different things. When should a subject be used, and when should a category be used? Thanks. Hoogli (talk) 02:13, 17 January 2008 (UTC)

The template Template:Tlx allows you to include up to 10(?) categories. I've actually stopped using it because it makes it difficult to change categories with a bot. That's neither here nor there. The Subject: namespace consists of pages with dynamically-created lists of categories. This uses DPL, which allows more flexibility than the category pages and need not be manually maintained like the bookshelves. For example, we can list the intersection of two categories, or all pages in a certain category that are not in some other category. So there really is no "using subjects" - pages which are appropriately categorized will show up on the corresponding Subject: page automatically. If you want more details, User:Whiteknight was the one who proposed that namespace. – Mike.lifeguard | ^talk 02:23, 17 January 2008 (UTC)

The Template:Tlx template is simply a short-hand way to write categories. The following code snippets are identical:

[[Category:A]] [[Category:B]] [[Category:C]]

and

{{Subject|A|B|C}}

We figured that this nice shortcut would help to improve readability, and would help to encourage authors to actually use proper categorization (as mike pointed out, it's not ideal for bot use, so categories can be used instead for the same effect).

The Category: namespace is automatically generated based on page lists that contain the [[Category:...]] tags. In the category, all pages are simply listed, and we don't have any control over presentation. In the Subject namespace, we can use DPL to transclude lists from multiple categories, or to combine categories. For instance, we can show a list of pages that are in both category A and category B (but not one or the other). We can also show pages that are in category A, but not in category B. This ability to combine and intersect two categories Can be used to great effect. Look at Subject:Engineering as an example: We can create lists of books that are engineering books AND have printable versions. Or, we can create lists of books that are engineering books AND are featured books.

In addition to these automatically-generated lists using DPL, we can also create manual lists because Subject: is just an ordinary namespace with pages that can be edited normally. User:SB Johnny has been using Subject: pages to try and cross-reference some common words, especially between the gardening book and the cookbook. See for instance: Subject:Maple. I hope this answers your questions. --Whiteknight (Page) (Talk) 14:07, 17 January 2008 (UTC)

What is there to do?

HI, I'm new to wikibooks i'm generally on wikipedia but go by the name User:Yun-Yuuzhan. Do alot of reverting vandalism over at wikipedia but hope i could be of some help on wikibooks i would appreciate if there's WikiGnome tasks which i could do. Terra (talk) 19:20, 16 January 2008 (UTC)

Welcome to wikibooks! We don't have a large amount of vandalism here, we tend to be very strict with vandals (no warnings, etc), so they have less fun here and move to easier targets. However, we have plenty of other maintenance tasks to be done, and we always need copyeditors! Take a quick glance at Wikibooks:Wikibooks maintenance for some idea of the open tasks that we have. Good luck, and let us know if you need any help! --Whiteknight (Page) (Talk) 23:46, 16 January 2008 (UTC)

Ok thanks, i have a look at the maintenance tasks. Terra (talk) 14:45, 17 January 2008 (UTC)

Introducing Myself

Hello I am new to Wiki books and still playing around with it. I am trying to put a picture to my profile and have some troubles. I uploaded a file but I am not seeing it on my page. If anyone can help I would sure appreciate it.

Please sign with four tildes like this:~~~~. Cheers, Laleena (talk) 00:38, 18 January 2008 (UTC)

hello

i'm new to WikiBooks so I thought I'd say hi ... my interests are working on the politics section and the German language wikibook. Julie22193 (talk) 11:31, 19 January 2008 (UTC)

New user: Zeus111

Just introducing myself as a new user to Wikibooks. I love wikis and my goal is to improve the on-line reference materials for Ruby on Rails. Zeus111 (talk) 16:45, 20 January 2008 (UTC)

Rollback and Patroller Rights

There are two tools that have been available traditionally only to admins, but which are possible to be extended to other users as well. These are:

Rollback: It's like the "undo" function, but faster. 1 click undoes all the edits made by the most recent editor. It's useful for fighting vandalism quickly, but there is a certain potential to be abusive because rolling back a legitimate edit is not considered "good".
Patroller: This allows a person to patrol pages at Special:Newpages. Again, this is useful for finding vandalism, but it also helps in making sure that newly created pages are "correct".

At the moment, these two capabilities are reserved for admins, but rollback can be useful to other people, and there is a perpetual backlog of unpatrolled new pages that our current admin staff can't keep up with. I would like to propose the following:

Enable Rollback and Patroller rights to be separate from admin rights (that is, non-admins can get them)
Allow admins to give rollback and patroller rights (not require bcrats or stewards to do it)
Also allow admins to remove these rights if they are abused (or maybe only allow bcrats to remove the rights, to prevent warring or something).

Giving these kinds of rights out would help reduce strain on our current admin staff, and would also provide a "testing" phase for new admin candidates to get good experience with some extra tools. --Whiteknight (Page) (Talk) 16:42, 11 January 2008 (UTC)

Template:Support 1 & 2 strongly. 3 - removal is important as well.... (actually thinking! if "quicker" removal was an issue it might be better if admins could remove as well as grant but I don't think I feel strongly. With some very limited exceptions (unblocking an IP because I found it was an Open Proxy being the only one that springs to mind) I would never revert the actions of another admin without real discussion, probably not even then. --Herby ^{talk thyme} 16:51, 11 January 2008 (UTC)
Template:Support and echo Herby: admin actions must be undoable (by admins). I hadn't thought about this being a trial phase for potential admins, but that's a great point. This would be a really good way to see if someone's ready - show they know what's vandalism and how to use rollback; show they understand WB:WIW by new page patrolling. – Mike.lifeguard | ^talk 17:05, 11 January 2008 (UTC)
Template:Support the proposal point 1) to separate the flags from the admin rights but on proposal points 2,3 even if I also agree to the text, would require that responsibilities and requirements to and from granting those rights be written (and discussed) even if not approved on the RFA or any other place that would allow a Wikibookian to request the flags. On another note since I already expressed support, I must ask if this is really necessary, because we can is not a very great argument. I would as soon give all the administrative rights and tasks to a user, and I strongly object to Mike.lifeguard to use this as a "trial base" for the full admin rights. --Panic (talk) 18:04, 11 January 2008 (UTC)
Template:Comment - see Wikibooks:Reading room/Archives/2007/November#Mentorship?. I'll try my hand at drafting a simple guideline for granting (and revoking) these tools. Remember: if adminship isn't a big deal, then this isn't a big deal. Finally, this !vote is to request the configuration. How we dole out the rights is separate issue. – Mike.lifeguard | ^talk 18:57, 11 January 2008 (UTC)

Template:Comment Well, current user-rights decisions are left to bureaucrat discretion, and I don't see why that would have to change for these rights. It's generally better to keep all the processes standardized, so there is no confusion or special cases. I propose that all requests/nominations for +rollbacker or +patroller are handled on WB:RFA (possibly rename that page to "Requests for permissions", or something more general). We leave the final determination up to administrator discretion. Since these are less then admin, we should expect a person to get about half as much support as would normally be needed to become an admin, and about a quarter of what it would take to promote a new bcrat. Here are some general guidelines: rollbacker/patroller: 4 votes, admin: 8 votes, bcrat: 16 votes. Admins who don't use proper discretion, or abuse this privilege, like any other abuses, could be nominated for de-adminship. People with rollback/patroller who abuse those rights can have them removed quickly. Beyond this, I don't forsee any problems. --Whiteknight (Page) (Talk) 19:36, 11 January 2008 (UTC)
Template:Comment - Before I place a vote, could someone give me an actual example of a user who fits into this category? Most vandal-fighters become admins here and I think this set of actions hurts the sense of community, especially amongst admins. While this might be a good idea for a busy project or one that needs many layers of filtering, I don't think we have users that need this (I guess this sort of became my vote). -withinfocus 21:56, 11 January 2008 (UTC)
After some discussion, I Template:Support point 1 and Template:Oppose points 2 and 3. Bureaucrats oversee admins here and I think the trend should continue (keeps with the pattern and actually gives a little more reason for crats to be crats). -withinfocus 02:15, 12 January 2008 (UTC)
Template:Comment - is this needed? Wikibooks is still a small project and adding another layer of beaurocracy seems unneccesary at present and besides tools like 'rollback' can be added by anybody already by adding the script to their monobook thingy. Xania ^talk 22:12, 11 January 2008 (UTC)
Good questions from both Withinfocus and Xania here, let me see if I can answer them adequately. First thing, the "new page patrol" job can be performed by any trusted user, not just admins. Basically, you just check out newly created pages, and tag them with appropriate cleanup templates if needed. Too many new pages are created regularly, and our current admins just can't keep up with the backlog. There are many new pages that are never patrolled. Being an admin comes with a certain amount of responsibility, and people have turned down nominations before becaues of this. Having the ability to patrol new pages without having to become a full-fledged admin might be an attractive option for many people. I don't have a specific example of a particular person who could use this, but that doesnt mean that such examples don't exist.

To Xania, I would say that we are not a "small" project in any sense, and we have the workload of a larger project. The problem is that many book authors don't get involved in community-wide cleanup tasks. We have an uncharacteristically small amount of vandalism, but that's because we have some very aggressive anti-vandalism policies and practices (especially compared to wikipedia, for instance). Some of the numbers and statistics that we are starting to see show that wikibooks is actually a surprisingly large project. Plus, many people anticipate more growth. Even if we don't have a pressing need now for these tools (and I would argue that we do) it still makes sense to implement them now. I hope this helps. --Whiteknight (Page) (Talk) 22:24, 11 January 2008 (UTC)
I'm probably an example - I help out whenever I have time, but that time is limited and sporadic, so getting support for full-admin probably wouldn't happen. But having these tools available would allow me to make somewhat better use of my time. Xerol Oplan (talk) 02:37, 16 January 2008 (UTC)

Template:Comment - Actually, with the Gadgets extension, it's even easier than editing monobook.js. MW rollback is easier on the servers, and faster for the user than a scripted rollback. As well, we're looking at giving +patroller, which is where I think we really need this. There's no backlog visible today, but there usually is (a big one) - more hands there are definitely needed. As for adding bureaucracy, I think my initial ideas for a guideline avoids that. I have some users in mind, but I'm not sure it's appropriate to start nominating people before the software is configured and we have some idea of what process we'll be using. – Mike.lifeguard | ^talk 22:31, 11 January 2008 (UTC)

Supporting what Mike & Whiteknight have said. This merely makes RC patrolling easier/quicker for those who do it anyway and who are not admins. In practice I think WB could get great benefit from this - it is SO frustrating to deal with vandals with one hand tied behind your back - I can still remember it! This doesn't solve the problem but it does make it easier to deal with. There are few RC patrollers and even fewer of those are admins. For those of you who are unsure try actually watching RC for a few days - you will then understand the problem and see people who might be granted the rights.

On reflection I have no problem with admins granting the rights (I notice I am able to on en wp!). If there are few admins active it is even more true that there are few 'crats active. It is not even as though we have particularly "new" admins on here - maybe if we did it would be wise for them not to grant such rights for a month or so? It really is no big issue - the fact that en wp manages to make it one merely shows what a madhouse that place can be. --Herby ^{talk thyme} 09:10, 12 January 2008 (UTC)

Template:Support rollback and patrol for non-admins, I didnt realize they were admin-only to begin with, and it doesn't really make sense to me. Mattb112885 (talk to me) 00:46, 12 January 2008 (UTC)
Template:Support with conditions. I want the thing to have a nomination page, at least one admin must agree, and five-ten (should be ten, probably) others agreeing to it. Perhaps we should put done other stuff in the policy too. Laleena (talk) 13:56, 12 January 2008 (UTC)

Template:Oppose - Ten votes of confidence might as well be an RFA around here. If adminship is no big deal, than one or both these rights is really really no big deal. – Mike.lifeguard | ^talk 17:22, 12 January 2008 (UTC)

Template:Oppose - I think it quite likely than a number of admins here got their rights with less than 10 votes! If en wp can allow me to grant these rights as an admin without any control I don't think there would be any dangers here. The rights are just as removable as they are grantable --Herby ^{talk thyme} 18:28, 12 January 2008 (UTC)

Template:Support. Any user can undo rollback very easily, so I can't see the small chance of abuse being a problem. I oppose any lengthy or bureaucratic procedures, though. We don't need more of these. Regards, —Celestianpower ^háblame 13:59, 12 January 2008 (UTC)
Template:Support. I don't think this needs to a big deal, any abuse could be quickly and easily undone. As others have said, we just need to keep it simple. Which really it is: these tools aren't rocket science. I will offer myself as an example of someone who would request and make use of these tools. I would be happy to patrol new pages and would make good use of the rollback in reverting vanadlism. I'm not a stage at the moment where I am looking to request adminship, as I can't guarentee my constant presence round here, (sometimes the real world pulls me away for periods), so these tools would be an excellent inbetween. --AdRiley (talk) 23:21, 12 January 2008 (UTC)
Template:Support. Rollback would make reverting multiple-edit vandalism much easier, rather than having to sort through diffs until finding a good version of a page. And patrolling abilities would be a huge help for checking Recent Changes, as I often do. This would let me know which edits have already been OKed by other trusted users. I agree with what Mike said far above, that these rights would allow bureaucrats to test potential administrators without giving them too much free range to mess things up. I am in AdRiley's situation as well - looking for a nice in-between of having extra buttons to make editing easier, but not at the moment having the open schedule for full-fledged administrator duties. These additions would be especially helpful to Wikibooks. Νεοπτόλεμος 01:43, 13 January 2008 (UTC)
Template:Comment - We don't have diff patrolling; it's only for new pages off of Special:Newpages. Nevertheless, even patrolling only new pages is a burden that should be spread out. – Mike.lifeguard | ^talk 01:54, 13 January 2008 (UTC)

Template:Support - Strongly - This has been a feature that I've advocated for an incredibly long period of time, and fought against individuals who felt it was a waste of developer effort to make this change to MediaWiki. Many on en.wikipedia didn't want to even see this option available at all. All of this said, I am grateful to the dev team that it is now a reasonable option to grant these administrator tools to others who may not want or need the full set of admin tools. For myself, I hope that here on Wikibooks these are handed out fairly liberally, and that the process will be much more informal than trying to obtain adminship. Especially the rollback feature, although I would like to see somebody formally commit to helping scan recent changes if they receive the patroller tools. I am indifferent in regards to giving admins access to removing access to these tools, as I hope that the number of individuals who need to have these rights taken away would be such a small handful that one or two bureaucrats ought to be able to handle that workload. This does give a nice set of options for "pre-administrators" or people who want to show they are honorable enough to become admins but the rest of the community would like to gain some extra trust from first. --Rob Horning (talk) 12:14, 16 January 2008 (UTC)

Progress check - Since so much has been said so far, I figured I'd try to weigh everything up to this point. This certainly doesn't mean that we have to stop discussing - on the contrary, we should continue. Please also see the discussion elsewhere.

It looks like people are strongly in favour of spreading the work out for both rollback and patrolling somehow, and the questions remaining are regarding implementation.

One issue raised is whether admins or bcrats should be granting the rights. Whiteknight has asked that bcrats not be responsible for this (Herby and I agreed); withinfocus has requested the opposite.

Several people have noted that these rights are not a big deal. In a similar vein, some of the strongest comments are requesting that whatever process there is for granting/revoking the rights be drama- and bureaucracy-free. Opposing that view is a request for a vote for each user requesting the rights.

Finally, I'd like to plug my not-a-policy-proposal; it's just ideas for how admins might rationally choose who to give the rights to (though I don't think we really need anything written down). Anyone who does new page patrol is invited to help with writing Wikibooks:New page patrol.

– Mike.lifeguard | ^talk 23:44, 13 January 2008 (UTC)

Template:Support - I also support all three points; this proposal has passed and is going nicely on en.wiki, so why not here? --- Anonymous Dissident^Talk 23:55, 13 January 2008 (UTC)

Template:Comment - For those who aren't aware of the scope of new page patrol, today I patrolled 209 page creations. We need to spread the work out. – Mike.lifeguard | ^talk 22:48, 12 January 2008 (UTC)

Honestly I'm not really sure what is the purpose of patrolling, it seems like the same purpose had been accomplished fine before patrolling, but without having to tag a lot of good pages. Has anyone noticed any changes since this ability has been implemented? Mattb112885 (talk to me) 01:27, 16 January 2008 (UTC)

I don't understand what you mean. Yes, we still had to patrol new pages before this software feature was enabled. The only thing this changes is that new page patrollers can see each other's work so there's no duplication. Since we're spread ~~to the breaking point~~ very thin in this area, let's allow other users to help out. Yes, they could help without the right, but that doesn't reduce the number of pages I have to look at since I don't know what work has already been done. – Mike.lifeguard | ^talk 02:13, 16 January 2008 (UTC)

Good point, makes sense now. Mattb112885 (talk to me) 02:29, 16 January 2008 (UTC)

Template:Comment - Twinkle will soon use MediaWiki rollback. Currently the only remedy for abuse of TW is to block the user, which is rather harsh; before TW was a Gadget, an admin could remove TW from the user's monobook. This update to TW means that removing +rollbacker will disable TW. It is possible to keep an old version of TW, but I think we should keep a reasonably up-to-date version. – Mike.lifeguard | ^talk 02:06, 15 January 2008 (UTC)

Template:Support (See also above) It's certainly something that would allow people with limited time to contribute to assist without having to apply for full adminship. Xerol Oplan (talk) 02:37, 16 January 2008 (UTC)
Template:Support This sounds like a great idea (I also like Whiteknight's idea of using this for an pre-admin testing phase) and as Mike said we do need a bit of help with new page patrol around here. --Az1568^(Talk) 06:03, 17 January 2008 (UTC)

Comment since this idea that it should be used as a pre-admin test is taking a life of its own, I must restate that I strongly object to test phases or mentoring as a "requirement" that could be used to prevent a user from obtaining the administrative flag. Administrative tasks go beyond monitoring edits. On the other hand I agree that any productive work should be a contributing factor in any form one wishes to contribute it for obtaining the access. In other words I'm against the formalization of some sort of steps that would require a user to prove more that the normal level of interest and knowledge as is now expressed on the RFA at least as drastic as this one. We are all volunteers, assuming good faith, a demonstration of interest and knowledge is all we should request. --Panic (talk) 06:21, 17 January 2008 (UTC)

Consensus check

Well this looks like consensus to me. Barring any new concerns or objections, I'll be submitting this request to bugzilla on Friday. As for implementation, here's what it looks like we're doing:

Admins may hand out +patroller and +rollbacker to any user they feel are qualified to have them using their best judgment;
- It may be useful to point potential patrollers towards Wikibooks:New page patrol and potential rollbackers towards Wikibooks:Dealing with vandalism for information. For both, you might remind them about the Gadgets options.
- You may want to use Wikibooks:User rights as a very loose ~~guideline~~ idea for granting and revoking the rights. I do not expect this to become an official policy or guideline. In fact, I dont't want that. Instead, that page should be changed to reflect what we're doing. So if it turns out that the page doesn't describe how we go about granting and revoking these rights, then the page changes - not us. The admins here can be trusted to be sane.
Admins are not to wheelwar with the rights - discussion is to take place before reversing another admin's rights change except in the case of obvious abuse;
Users will request rights at WB:RFA (which will be renamed to Wikibooks:Requests for permissions and have it's sections changed - I'll do this at the same time as the request);
Admins will process requests, and archive them as normal. No discussion is required; admins will use their discretion in granting these rights. Comments are welcome, as always, but this is not an RFA(!)
For removal in the case of clear, ongoing abuse: remove first, discuss second;
For removal in all other cases: discuss first, remove second (this includes inactivity).

Sound good? Please feel free to tweak this if my measure of consensus is off; with such a long discussion I may be off in places. – Mike.lifeguard | ^talk 05:45, 17 January 2008 (UTC)

Template:Support Sounds perfect with the exception of the inactivity bit. I'll probably be one of the first in line once the request page goes up, as these are tasks that I frequently do but with long (and I mean long, see my history) periods of inactivity, which is the only thing preventing me from requesting a full RfA. I don't think inactivity should be a reason to remove these rights as they're not as extensive as adminship and it just seems like it adds a layer of bureaucracy that was trying to be avoided. Xerol Oplan (talk) 06:44, 17 January 2008 (UTC)
Template:Support - nice work Mike. Any views on how long a request should be on the page? Is it hours, a day or two any longer would be odd to me? Going for a low bureaucratic process is great with me. Thanks --Herby ^{talk thyme} 07:52, 17 January 2008 (UTC)
Let's not aim for minutes like enwiki had for a while =D. I'm guessing that time before yea/nay will be hours for people we already know (ie I have some people in mind to get the bits already); for people we don't, maybe a day or two (esp for +patroller, we may want to let them patrol without the bit so the other patrollers will be looking at their work, thought this is not necessary). After {{done}} or {{not done}}, things should be archived as normal(?), which means a week. Maybe check that last point - if there's no big discussion then Special:Log/rights may suffice. – Mike.lifeguard | ^talk 12:53, 17 January 2008 (UTC)
Fine with me - just clarifying, thanks --Herby ^{talk thyme} 12:57, 17 January 2008 (UTC)
Template:Support --Jomegat (talk) 05:33, 18 January 2008 (UTC)
Template:Oppose - I am totally unsold about admins managing these rights themselves. I guess you can just override me since more people are supportive, but I don't agree with the above decisions about these rights being given out. -withinfocus 18:15, 18 January 2008 (UTC)
- Template:Comment I think the most prudent option would be to enable this for bureaucrats-only, at least for a limited trial phase. If demand is high, and if few problems are encountered, we can discuss opening it up to a wider user-base. --Whiteknight (Page) (Talk) 18:47, 18 January 2008 (UTC)
  - Template:Comment Seriously, what use are we as bureaucrats if we don't take this task? I don't think giving these to admins fits the normal style at all. However, the bug has been resolved and so it's too late unless we ask to change it again. -withinfocus 23:09, 18 January 2008 (UTC)
    - I guess my question would be "why is it not an admin task?". Lack of trust or what? The rights (unlike most 'crat assigned rights) are removable again very easily. They really are "no big deal" & should be seen as such. Within reason "ask & you can have them" - this is a very small community - anyone watching RC will get to know people very quickly I think (possibly far quicker than a 'crat who is not very active for example). --Herby ^{talk thyme} 09:37, 19 January 2008 (UTC)
      - I don't think it's a lack of trust, it's more like people are opposed to making exceptions to the rules already in place (i.e. that 'crats give special permissions to people). I think that makes sense in some degree, unless there are too many people asking for the tags for the 'crats to handle. What mechanism would people use to request the tags anyways? Mattb112885 (talk to me) 09:50, 19 January 2008 (UTC)
      - The reason we have bureaucrats grant +sysop and +bot is that it's necessary to weigh a consensus since there's a discussion that takes place, and it's a weighty one. We're not having RFAs here; these are not powerful tools (useful, but not powerful), so there will be no consensus to weigh before granting the rights. In cases where there is some discussion (if someone expresses some concern over giving it to some user), the discussion will probably be smaller than a VFD, which admins close regularly. Nevertheless, I wouldn't oppose having a bureaucrat handle those requests where there was some non-trivial discussion about whether to grant the bit or not. That seems like a good compromise between "admins are in the best position to see who should get these rights which aren't a big deal and we hate bureaucracy" and "but bureaucrats are supposed to grant user rights" – Mike.lifeguard | ^talk 16:13, 19 January 2008 (UTC)

Progress

I've renamed WB:RFA to WB:RFP and changed the section hierarchy. I hope this will work well since that page will now be getting a bit more traffic. I've moved the archives, so they should all appear properly. I've also updated a few pages that this is going ahead, but the configuration (bugzilla:12676) isn't done yet. I don't think there's anything further to do but wait for someone to fill that request. If I've missed something, feel free to let me know. – Mike.lifeguard | ^talk 16:28, 18 January 2008 (UTC)

Whiteknight fixed the header, which I forgot. I'm going to change the places where it says to wait for the bug to be fulfilled, since it has been. Let's remember that these buttons are not a big deal. English Wikipedia has patrol upon autoconfirmed & rollbacker is getting handed out like nobody's business, and they haven't disappeared into the abyss yet. Surely we can manage even better than they can with a more restrictive system.

Users who are watching this unfold may now request these patroller and rollbacker permissions at the appropriate section of WB:RFP (instructions are there). Happy editing! – Mike.lifeguard | ^talk 01:22, 20 January 2008 (UTC)

Steward policy review

Can I draw the community's attention to the vote on the updated steward policies on Meta. This is your opportunity to have your say in this. The page is here. Thanks --Herby ^{talk thyme} 10:31, 15 January 2008 (UTC)

This notification to the discussion should be made more visible to Wikibookians as it will have some impact on the Wikibooks project. --Panic (talk) 01:48, 16 January 2008 (UTC)

To be fair, i think that the reading room is really one of the most visible forums available to us. We could cram all sorts of information into the various site notices and watchlist notice messages, but I don't think that those should be general-purpose news display methods. Because en.wikibooks has a relatively large and stable core of bureaucrats and admins, the stewards policy won't affect us too too much. However, other wikibooks projects (notably simple.wikibooks) do rely heavily on steward actions because they have smaller groups of administrators. --Whiteknight (Page) (Talk) 16:32, 16 January 2008 (UTC)

hello

This message will be archived normally

Hello, i`m user:1bookfan. I joined wikibooks because I wanted to give back to something that has helped me a lot.

i want to completly stduy about operating system in slabus manner

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plz tell me about some links

Books

Hello ,I am Tejaswy from India,I wrote some articals about maximization of BTX,Now my problem is that I am not able to format it properly as i am new to wiki..and using the sand box is really a problem as we have slow internet speeds..this also deters many of my friends from using wikipedia to contribute.Could you please tell me some kind of software where i can format my articals and paste them ..like some html editors...i am looking up the net for it...nothing seems to do what i want it to do.

Yourdeadin (talk) 19:12, 20 January 2008 (UTC)yourdeadin

Hi Yourdeadin; welcome to Wikibooks. You can use any text editor if you're going to compose your edit beforehand and paste it into the edit box. If you use Windows, Notepad will do fine; Notepad++ is even better. Hope that helps! – Mike.lifeguard | ^talk 19:22, 20 January 2008 (UTC)

But a problem remains with tables ...If we make tables with MS word and then we need to put them here ..what do we do then ?

Yourdeadin (talk) 20:02, 20 January 2008 (UTC)Yourdeadin

See the thread Wikibooks:Reading_room/Assistance#How_to_put_tables_on_a_book above. --AdRiley (talk) 16:56, 22 January 2008 (UTC)

Hello

I'm Jeremy McCracken; my interests are on my userpage. I'm an educator in training and like spreading knowledge, so that's why I'm here. JeremyMcCracken (talk) 23:10, 20 January 2008 (UTC)

Are you double majoring to teach in middle/high school? If so, are you double majoring in a science major? Even if not, it should be a good exercise to help with Volcanoes. A teacher needs to learn research (in my opinion). YOu could practice with the book, which I am pulling out of VFD status. Thoughts? Laleena (talk) 23:48, 20 January 2008 (UTC)

That is my grade level but not my subject area. I'm in social studies; right now I'm working on a new wikibook, Parapsychology. I'm afraid my science knowledge is probably too limited to be of much help. JeremyMcCracken (talk) 14:45, 22 January 2008 (UTC)

Welcome aboard Jeremy, it's always good to meet new people who care about education. Parapsychology seems like a good project, and we have plenty more things to work on also, if you get bored with that. Have you seen Subject:Social sciences, and the related sub-topics? Lots of books around in there to have a look at if you are interested. Welcome to Wikibooks. --Whiteknight (Page) (Talk) 16:50, 22 January 2008 (UTC)

BOOK

I am looking for a place that might help in finding a proper place to submitt my published book for a producer to look at, in considering it for a movie.

The book is a true story of four small children deserted by their mother and left to be raised by an alcoholic father.

For details of this great book please vist my website at. www.afatherwithcustody.com

Thank you,
Author kenneth Stalnaker
1-940-631-3431
1-281-250-7807

Wikibooks is not a suitable place for fiction. --Jomegat (talk) 14:58, 4 January 2008 (UTC)

In all fairness, you could look at The Fiction Wikia if you are interested in "publishing" a fiction book under the GFDL. However I would agree that this advertisement isn't necessary here on Wikibooks. --Rob Horning (talk) 12:22, 16 January 2008 (UTC)

General John Hunt Morgan of the Civil War from Lexington Kentucky

I am very much interested in getting information on John Hunt Morgan from Lexington Kentucky. He is my great great great grandfather or uncle on my father's side. And I'm trying to trace my family history. Thank You. I can be contacted at eaglegirl226@yahoo.com

This is most definitely not what Wikibooks is for. Please try Google. – Mike.lifeguard | ^talk 22:40, 22 January 2008 (UTC)

Um, why not? A book on researching genealogy would certainly be a good textbook. Genealogical indices would be quite appropriate for that book. --SB_Johnny | ^PA! 12:51, 23 January 2008 (UTC)

Well yes, a book on researching genaeology would be entirely appropriate for Wikibooks. But this person is looking for specific information on a specific person, and we're not currently amassing details of random people's genaeology. I'm not sure such information would be appropriate as an appendix to a text on genaeology either, because that would be more like a reference book like a Bescherelle, thesaurus, or one of those old-school books of logarithms. We don't consider any of those to be textbooks. I suppose a sampling would be fine, as readers might need some sample data to practice on, but I could never envision Wikibooks to be a suitable place to actually do research on your family history. The point is moot as we currently have no textbook like this. – Mike.lifeguard | ^talk 14:58, 23 January 2008 (UTC)

Wheew. What A Discussion... ;) And a nice reply Mike... :) —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Thewinster (talk • contribs) 08:49, February 13, 2008.

hello

hello i'm borisbaran. i've signed up 'cause i wanted to edit the Sufism/Nasrudin‎-page and don't wanted to be an IP (for example if someboda has questions 'bout my edits...).--Borisbaran (talk) 13:03, 23 January 2008 (UTC)

Hi there. There are plenty of religion books you could contribute to if you want. If you ever need help with something, come on back here; we'll be glad to help. – Mike.lifeguard | ^talk 06:17, 25 January 2008 (UTC)

.NET Framework 3.0

I've created a book on .NET Framework 3.0. I've been working alone and could'nt find any collaborators. It would be great if any of you with considerable knowledge and experience in the field of .NET programming could get involved with me to increase the standards and quality of the book.Thanks. -Ravichandar84 (talk) 06:07, 24 January 2008 (UTC)

Help on creating a new book

I would like to create a new book on simple web design / website development from a design perspective but I'm having trouble setting up the first pages. I've done the best i can, but i don't know if it's right. I show up under the page "simple web design". Please let me know how to fix up my template so that this is done right. Thanks, Omniuni (talk) 21:05, 24 January 2008 (UTC)

Suggestion

I've noticed a couple of bookshelves that bear the exact same name as their departments- e.g. Wikibooks:Natural Sciences bookshelf and Wikibooks:Social science bookshelf. Since these are in departments of the same name, would it be helpful to add "general" to the names? (e.g. General Social Sciences) It works with the Arts bookshelf and Humanities bookshelf, as these are two pieces of the "Arts and Humanities Department", but singularly, the idea seems redundant. JeremyMcCracken (talk) 23:49, 20 January 2008 (UTC)

In short, it's a good suggestion. However, we're presently (slowly) transitioning away from the departments/bookshelves and starting to use the subject pages instead. Taking the effort to rename or refactor these pages at this point seems like a waste of time to me. --Whiteknight (Page) (Talk) 00:28, 21 January 2008 (UTC)

Wikijunior?

I'm really interested in putting some significant time into some of the Wikijunior books. My only hesitation is that it seems as though there is very little activity over there. What I'm wondering and trying to gain a sense of, is how many people are involved with the junior projects. Some of the books need some significant work and refinement that I know I'm not capable of doing alone. I don't really want to put a lot of time into books that will never be finished. What's going on over there and what books are being actively worked on? Rmawhorter (talk) 00:59, 28 January 2008 (UTC)

I really enjoy working on Wikijunior, unfortunately I put a lot of time into some of my other projects. I think that problem is that people prefer writing adult books more than Wikijunior books. Thoughts? Laleena (talk) 01:11, 28 January 2008 (UTC)

Keyless Entry Remote Reprogramming - 2004 Kia Optima EX V6

I am looking for instructions on how to reprogram the remote keyless entry on my vehicle. For some reason, the remotes stopped working as the weather became colder. I need directions on how to reprogram the remotes so I can try to remedy the situation before going into a dealership and being charged ridiculous money for a 3 minute fix. Please help! Thanks, Qdawg09 (talk) 13:33, 25 January 2008 (UTC)

This is not a question that should be asked at Wikibooks. Go ask a car mechanic, look at your vehicle's manual, or ask the people at Wikipedia. Thanks, Laleena (talk) 22:38, 25 January 2008 (UTC)

Welcoming myself.

Hi, I just stumbled upon this site a few days ago and am excited to get some good work done on some of the wikijunior books. I'm a homeschooling mom and I consequently have a passion for children's education. I intend to move into the developing world and continue to teach my children from there and possibly other school children. I can only imagine how valuable some of these books could be to us then. --Rmawhorter (talk) 05:06, 29 January 2008 (UTC)

Earthquakes

I am starting this new book as a sequel to Volcanoes, my pet project. I now it's not developed, but I'm working on that. Laleena (talk) 23:07, 27 January 2008 (UTC)

Wikijunior - calling for more support

I'm interested in doing some work over on some of the wikijunior books. Laleena offered her support and now I'm wondering if anyone else is interested in putting in some work. If you're interested what books seem worthy of your time? It's a wasteland over there at the moment and I think that we can get some good work done if we focus our energy and work together. If there's no more interest then I guess Laleena and I will be lonely but powerful. :) Rmawhorter (talk) 03:11, 29 January 2008 (UTC)

I don't know that I would call it a "wasteland", but Wikijunior really does need our love and our help. We've tried doing things to promote Wikijunior, including adding prominent links to the sidebar and the main page, creating a whole Wikijunior: namespace and creating categorization systems such as Subject:Wikijunior. I'm able to lend some help, although I tend to work in very short energetic bursts, and I like to have a plan ready before I do anything. You come up with a good plan, a listing of specific items that need help, and I'll see what I can do about it. --Whiteknight (Page) (Talk) 03:15, 29 January 2008 (UTC)

I think that we should start with some of the books that are almost done. My suggestion is that we start with Languages and then move on to Dinosaurs. Languages has significant content already as opposed to some of the other unfinished books. Here's what I think needs to be done on Languages:

grammar/spelling work
continuity between the different articles with regard to scope and layout
age appropriate vocabulary and grammar
more words defined in the glossary
see that there's appropriate coverage for the 25 most spoken languages
if we can finish then a pdf and an html version should be created Rmawhorter (talk) 05:01, 29 January 2008 (UTC)

closed wikibook group?

Hello,

I'm wondering if it is possible to create one's wikibooks that is closed to a group and with a content manager to oversee content and revisions, like other wiki applications?

Thanks!—The preceding unsigned comment was added by 142.36.184.153 (talk • contribs) 23:22, January 29, 2008.

No, this is contrary to Wikibooks' mission, and is forbidden by policy. You do not own a book you're working on since it is licensed under the GFDL. Each user is as welcome as the next to contribute; this is what makes Wikibooks work. Note that Nupedia, the predecessor to Wikipedia failed because they did not have this radical openness. – Mike.lifeguard | ^talk 23:33, 29 January 2008 (UTC)

Your best bet might be to install the m:MediaWiki software somewhere else. --Jomegat (talk) 00:13, 30 January 2008 (UTC)

Our wiki does have the ability to track contributions using the history pages, but you cannot close your project, prevent people from editing freely, or try to maintain any kind of editorial control. However, if you give it a chance, I think you will find that using an open system can be very productive. More people will be likely to edit an open book (as opposed to a closed one), and in practice you will find that few people (at least initially) will participate in it anyway. --Whiteknight (Page) (Talk) 00:44, 30 January 2008 (UTC)

copying from wikipedia

The module C Programming/Standard libraries appears to be a copy-and-paste fork of Wikipedia:C standard library. So I slapped the "dewikify" template on it, as recommended by Wikibooks:Dewikify. Anything else I need to do that isn't already mentioned on Wikibooks:Dewikify?

Is there some "policy" or "guideline" on how to handle copy-and-paste from Wikipedia articles to Wikibooks, in general? In particular, handling cases "forks" where we end up with 2 slightly-different versions, one on Wikipedia and the other on Wikibooks? See Talk:C Programming/Standard libraries for one specific case, which I'm sure will not be the last. --DavidCary (talk) 04:06, 30 January 2008 (UTC)

Technically to satisfy the GFDL, you should make sure that somewhere in the page, or somewhere in the edit history, you mention that the page was originally adapted from Wikipedia. Beyond that, just dewikify it and you're done. --Whiteknight (Page) (Talk) 04:21, 30 January 2008 (UTC)

Wiki as a Database

Since I feel more comfortable working with the Wikibooks community, and I'm afraid I would get overwhelming feedback in other forii, I'm raising this issue here and will try to expand upon this elsewhere if there seems to be some interested in the concept.

What I'm trying to do is to help organize a group/documentation project that would explain how you can use MediaWiki software as a database, and to help point out flaws in the MediaWiki software that make it harder to implement some of these ideas, where perhaps some developer effort could be used to help improve the situation. I'm talking some very minor changes to MediaWiki here, not some major all-inclusive foundational changes like the earlier meta:WikiData project that sought to give direct access to the MySQL database running the Wikimedia projects. Eventually this discussion, if it continues, will be moved to Meta, but I'd like to talk about this with those who I consider to be friends first.

To show an example of a project I've been working on that uses this concept of a Wiki as a Database, I can give you wikia:Runescape:Grand_Exchange_Market_Watch. What I've done here is to create a sort of a database with an extensive array of hierarchical templates that feed into one another. It is important to note that nearly all of the features of this concept already exist within MediaWiki... even if they haven't been extensively used in this fashion before. One of the key features of this is how each database "record" is kept as a separate page and not mixed with other page content. I'll go into administrative nightmares (aka what a wiki admin or sysop does) with this whole thing, but it is manageable. Don't get caught up with the specific implementation here, but I do think there are many applications of this concept that can be used extensively here on Wikibooks.

One of my goals with setting up this template hierarchy was to introduce the concept of "edit once, update everywhere". In other words, this is a genuine database that is intended to have either parts or major sections of each database record to be used on multiple pages throughout the entire wiki, and mixed liberally with other wiki content with a very minimal amount of fuss. I've used this data for displaying the information into tables, integrated it into "infoboxes" common on Wikipedia and elsewhere, performed calculations upon the data, and in general pushed the concept about as hard as can be done. Like I said, this is a real database, using MediaWiki, and nearly anything you can normally do with a database can also be done with this information.

Some significantly lacking areas of MediaWiki including the following problems:

A way of showing when a record/page was last updated from within the template hierarchy. The current "hack" that is being used is to accomplish this task is to use the five tilda (~~~~~) substitution mechanism for showing when an entry was last modified. To fix this, some method should be created to allow the date of modification of a template to be passed up to a page that has transcluded text. Currently, Media Wiki only allows you to view the date/time of last modification for the current page only, not any of the subordinate templates. This is particularly useful in a wiki context as you can flag data which is out of date or stale and encourage wiki participants to help update the information to something more current.... especially if the information is time sensitive like stock information or population statistics (to give examples).

Preloading assistance for updating data records. MediaWiki has a wonderful mechanism for allowing preloaded text to be used as a sort of standard "template", but it can be used only if the content of the page is already blank or doesn't already exist in the MediaWiki database (meaning the SQL database running the wiki). I've been trying to use this as a mechanism to overcome the problems of dating time sensitive material (the above problem by simply generating the five tildas when you edit a page), but there are other uses for allowing some sort of calculated modification of a template, where you can generate wiki markup text based upon content from this database. BTW, I do understand why for the sake of vandals this isn't done, but I'm pointing out that there are some useful reasons why you may want to preload new content to replace older content.

Administrative issues for where to put the database items. At least here on Wikibooks, this could all be shunted off to be something of a bunch of sub-pages from a Wikibook, but it is a huge problem for other wiki projects. I've gone into huge arguments about the fact that these pages ought to be thrown into various namespaces for project administration, as people doing a recent changes patrol are simply overwhelmed with literally thousands of database modifications that are drowning out modifications to other content that isn't in the context of a database item. Basically, these admins want to have some sort of flag that they can "ignore" the database items when performing a recent changes patrol. A database record-specific namespace would IMHO be the ideal way to accomplish this task, but that isn't a standard feature for MediaWiki installations (yet). Throwing these into the "Template:" namespace of a typical MediaWiki project is only going to destroy patrolling templates.... which IMHO is something that normally should be viewed with a jaundiced eye as changes to most templates can have a tremendous impact on a project... but updating these records ought to be routine and most of these changes are of little consequence.

This is all a huge mouthful, and I'll wait for some replies on the topic. One area I would love to hit here is the book information database, where information about all of the Wikibooks can be organized in various fashions for browsing to find something you want, and include information that goes well beyond categorization. Perhaps I'll start a Wikibook about this topic as well. It is at least another concept that you can add into your tool box for editing content on a wiki. --Rob Horning (talk) 13:45, 16 January 2008 (UTC)

If I understand your ideas correctly (and I need to take a much closer look at your implementation), I think you are really adding undue complexity in order to make MediaWiki perform a task which it isn't strictly designed to do. With respect to the dating problem you describe above, User:Darklama did a lot of work with having templates that changed their appearance over time. Using a timestamp and some creative parserfunctions, you can easily highlight pages that are old and stale. Having these timestamps be automatically updated when the page is edited is going to require some kind of change to either javascript (regular expressions can find old timestamps and replace them with new timestamps before an edit is submitted) or some kind of custom mediawiki extension. I think the javascript option is the better of the two, but then you have the problem of needing to install the necessary javascript for all editors, possibly by default (without installing it on non-database pages, or for users who don't use the database). I don't know much about Wikia, but I am doubtful that they would have an equivalent of the "per-book" gadget that we recently installed here.

In short, I think this is an interesting idea, but I worry that the added complexity of all the necessary scaffolding is akin to cramming a round peg in a square hole. It may be worthwhile to create the necessary mediawiki extensions, or even fork mediawiki and create a specialized wiki that can do things like this automatically. --Whiteknight (Page) (Talk) 16:27, 16 January 2008 (UTC)

In defense of this concept... yeah, I would have to agree that this is a cramming a round peg into a square hole, and successfully shaving off the edges of the peg in order to get it to fit. What is so killer on all of this is that MediaWiki runs on top of a real database anyway, but in order to get this to work, you have to "undo" the restrictions that prohibit you from accessing the database in the first place.

BTW, I've looked into parser functions of almost any and every stripe that I can find, particularly to solve the date function issue. Parser functions simply don't have this capability in any way, shape, or form (at the moment). If the "template" or "page" has a hard date-stamp on it somewhere, that information can be used for dating (including the color modification you are talking about). But the date stamp must be provided when you edit the page and can't be derived after the fact (using a subst: command can work, but even that can be clumsy). I'll bet Darklama's pages were using a subst: invocation to add the timestamp. Adding a fancy timestamp template is far more difficult than simply using five tildas... in terms of user simplicity. I have also looked into modifications of MediaWiki:Common.js as a solution, and for smaller wikis this generally isn't a huge problem. This does, however, require constant tweaks if you want to come up with another database that uses the same sort of interface, and poses additional problems.

I have been incredibly tempted to get into hacking a mediawiki extension that would make this all happen. Again, this would require some sort of direct access into the database tables of an SQL database... and it would all have to be logged somehow as well, provide histories of table entries, and all sorts of other overhead (if you are going to keep a wiki philosophy of providing an audit trail to revert changes by vandals). What I'm suggesting is something that does work now, even if it is a very imperfect solution... and provide the basis to motivate those who might want to provide a much better solution. Attempting to make an extension of this nature, this is a huge undertaking of a degree that I am only beginning to comprehend. Please look at meta:Wikidata to see many such attempts in the past, none of which are currently in a state ready for general use on MediaWiki projects. Not even Ultimate Wiktionary has been this useful, and the other direct database implementations have been very specific in their objectives and have not been for a general database application for use within a wiki.

Another huge design constraint I'm putting on this is that whatever interface is selected, it should be usable by even brand-new editors without requiring a separate "client" download in order to use the interface. In other words, it should be organic to the wiki itself and should use similar kinds of user restrictions on its use. 'bots are nice to use for some people, but getting access to a bot necessarily complicates getting the tools in the hands of additional users.

The point here is that there are many very real applications that would make use of a genuine database within a MediaWiki project that can show real-time data changes on multiple pages simultaneously. There is also no legitimate reason to have to update the very same piece of data on multiple pages... which is definitely where some sort of template is helpful. Yes, setting up the template heirarchy is incredibly complex, although editing a single "record" has proven to be pretty simple to accomplish... and I've seen some very new wiki users (new to any sort of wiki interface) successfully make modifications, or even add some interesting extensions. I've made some mistakes along the way to setting this up, and I'm also willing to be shown a better way to accomplish this task. Yes, this takes a bit of mind bending to see how this works, but it does work, in many ways thanks to some newer extension that have been added as "standard features" to MediaWiki software that wasn't available even so much as a year ago. --Rob Horning (talk) 23:49, 16 January 2008 (UTC)

Hi Robert, this afternoon I was noting to somebody at university that I did not think MediaWiki was supporting any form editing or list management (à la Notes or SharePoint services to name a few). I understand from your post that you are confirming this absence of support. You are a real hacker to built it "over" the template structure :-) I started using that approach to generate the navigation for .NET Development Foundation and it's fun but a little complicated. A good programmer can put a database anywhere. But from a management point of view I think those approaches should remain isolated and "hacker reserved" for special projects (like yours) until real support for forms and list management is added to MediaWiki (maybe that will never come because poeple at wikipedia are generally not in favor of transcluding stuff). I am worried, for the same reasons, at all the extensions that User:Whiteknight, User:Darklama and others are constantly adding. If they happen to leave the project there might be a major support problem. But you probably have though about that like they surely did. Regards, -- Jacques (talk) (email) 00:48, 17 January 2008 (UTC)

You probably already know this. An example of how "database like" functionality could eventually find its way into MediaWiki without giving access to the backend database. -- Jacques (talk) (email) 04:12, 17 January 2008 (UTC)

Thanks for the pointer to the semantic wiki. I've been following semantic web philosophies for more than a decade, and have worked on some similar concepts from time to time with an eye toward applications in education.

One aspect of all of this that does concern me, however, is the CPU bandwidth requirements for processing all of this data. I know that a number of significant features have been "turned off" from Wikimedia projects due to some considerable problems with CPU bandwidth, not to mention "external storage" I/O bandwidth. I'm not suggesting "my approach" is necessarily lighter on that topic either... in fact I think it is worse than a direct database access by likely a whole order of magnitude and may even be a smaller O(n) algorithm if you can avoid templates in the manner I've been using them. As you have been discussing in terms of all of the extensions that have been added to Wikibooks, this is continuing to be a concern. Local I/O bandwidth (not network bandwidth surprisingly) is IMHO the "critical path" problem that will open this sort of activity up for more general usage.

A concern that I have with projects like Semantic Web and Ultimate Wiktionary is that they are addressing specific issues without looking at the global issues involved.... and providing two semi-compatable but incomplete solutions to nearly the same problem. On both of these projects there have been some very intelligent individuals who have thought through a great many issues, and I'm not trying to slight either effort. Some incredible work has been done to try and "crack" this problem, and there clearly is some demand for access to something of a database by wiki users within a wiki. --Rob Horning (talk) 13:20, 17 January 2008 (UTC)

I was pretty sure you were already following these things. Whatever the syntax used I think the information will be kept in the "pages" (template parameters like you do, page attributes, link tags like del.icio.us, semantic categories like Semantic MediaWiki, straight natural language processing "à la Prolog" or anything else). In all cases the information will have to be processed either on page save (like the timestamp problem you are pointing), on page rendering (the template structure with caching) or by a "bot" of some kind (asynchronous processing). In all cases very interesting servicing and performance questions will arise. My point is that those questions have to be adressed before trying to "generalize" an approach, same thing for the "maintenance" problems I was talking about earlier (and as you know we could add lots of those types of concerns).

The "individual" approach used to update pages on Wikipedia (not sure it works that well on Wikibooks) clearly does not work well for software projects, even open source ones. This is why I am pointing at things like Semantic Mediawiki. Not the solution itself but the fact that there must be a community adressing the problem. I see a technically average solution supported by a community as much better than a technically good solution without support (isn't that what MediaWiki is all about? - not aven a WYSIWYG editor!). All this verbose to say that you can count on my support, and some of my time, if you can integrate this effort in one of the communities surrounding MediaWiki (or MediaWiki itself). If that cannot be done my newbie feeling is that we should keep this for special projects so we do not jeopardize the main application and database. That said I fully respect your IT competences and looking forward to work with you sometime. Best regards, -- Jacques (talk) (email) 16:28, 18 January 2008 (UTC)

At least some of this is already in use on Wikiversity's Bloom Clock, in the sense that is uses templates inside other templates. So for example, if you look at the edit window of v:BCP/Taraxacum officinale, you note that it contains a number of templates and other included pages, while on the other hand that page is used like a template on numerous pages in the Bloom Clock's Keys (I think it definitely bears repeating here as a way of incorporating a true "modularity" to Wikibooks).

FYI, Wikispecies is supposed to be a database project as well, but I'm not entirely sure how the data is supposed to be used and sorted. --SB_Johnny | ^PA! 16:41, 19 January 2008 (UTC)

Clearing an article's cache?

Hi all. I'm working on a tag-extension for uploaded images in which I make it possible to edit tags succesfully in image description pages without having to make changes to the article itself. I did this by sending the tags to updateArticle() when posting and then bypassing the "if ( 0 != strcmp( $text, $oldtext )" (check if anything changed in the article) by putting my function addTags() after it. This way the tags are added anyway, even when the article wasn't updated.

My problem is: when an article isn't updated the cache isn't cleared, requiring a hard refresh to see the new tags. How can I make sure the article cache is cleared even when it hasn't changed? Many thanks! Litso (talk) 15:16, 30 January 2008 (UTC)

I could try to take a stab at the answer here, but this really isnt the right place for your question. I suggest you check out http://www.mediawiki.org, or you can subscribe to Wikitech-L, the mailing list for mediawiki developers. --Whiteknight (Page) (Talk) 15:37, 30 January 2008 (UTC)

Haha thanks, googled my way to this page but I guess I didn't read too well :P Thanks anyway Litso (talk) 20:32, 30 January 2008 (UTC)

Changeing a sections name

I'm working on Wikijunior Languages and I'd like to change the name of the Bengla chapter to Bengali which is the more common name for the language. How do I do this? when I go into the edit mode the title of the article is not at the top. Rose (talk) 23:30, 30 January 2008 (UTC)

Hi, you can rename a page by clicking the move button at the top. If there isn't one, it means the page is move protected, and you'll have to ask an admin to move it. Regards, Majorly (talk) 23:49, 30 January 2008 (UTC)

Test templates

Hi, I just gave a test template to an IP, who made a test to one of the pages, by removing a </math> tag. The template itself is incredibly harsh, I think. A bold "Do not make inappropriate edits" followed by "your edits are considered disruptive and harmful" for what was simply someone testing the wiki, seems way over the top. I haven't even looked at the other test templates, and not sure I want to, for fear of frightening myself away from here ;) Anyway, compared to some other wikis I work on, the test messages here are very harsh and unfriendly, and I propose they be changed. Thanks, Majorly (talk) 00:21, 31 January 2008 (UTC)

We actually use Template:Tlx as the vandalism warning - only rarely are others ever used. So I think it's appropriate that the wording is geared towards true vandalism, not test edits. Of course, perhaps this should be changed - Template:Tlx could be for actual test edits, and Template:Tlx could be for actual vandalism, instead of using the former for both cases. Let's get some feedback before changing such a widely-used template. – Mike.lifeguard | ^talk 00:34, 31 January 2008 (UTC)

I see. On other wikis, there are usually four test templates, growing in severity as the number increases. I only used test as it is what I'm familiar with. So, do vandals here only get one warning before a block? Majorly (talk) 00:38, 31 January 2008 (UTC)

Generally speaking, yes. People doing test edits get more leeway, but we tend to block vandals much more quickly than other wikis (while it's not necessarily one warning, we definitely don't give 4 warnings like enwikipedia). There are several admins (possibly most) who will block without a warning if vandalism is particularly distasteful. – Mike.lifeguard | ^talk 00:41, 31 January 2008 (UTC)

Ah well, I'll often do that despite the "rules" of the other projects. No point in letting a blatant vandal continue just for the sake of rules. Majorly (talk) 00:44, 31 January 2008 (UTC)

This does show that perhaps our template names could do with yet another update to be more specific. Template:Tlx should likely be a message to new users on harmless test edits (as the name implies). As mike said, vandals around here only get one warning at most (and in many cases, they don't even get that). Newbie tests on the other hand are viewed with so much tolerance that we rarely comment on them at all. It's often easier to fix the mistake and then give the user a proper welcome then it is to give them any kind of "warning" at all. I think it's probably nicer that way too. --Whiteknight (Page) (Talk) 15:02, 31 January 2008 (UTC)

We used to have a Template:Tlx, and so on template here. They got deleted in order to simplify the procedure of warning vandals, but yes, the simple "thank you for experimenting with Wikibooks" has been lost in the process. I would support a change of Template:Tlx to the default vandal warning. Mattb112885 (talk to me) 18:46, 31 January 2008 (UTC)

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