User:Mbrickn/Development

Books I started

Please help contribute!

Content complete at time of editing. I doubt these will ever be finished.

These are my personal ideas, and don't always represent the views of the community or official Wikibooks policy.

Automatic credit tool for pictures in printable versions to comply with licensing. Ideally it would just be something like {{ImageCredits}}
Optional automatic tool to take inline citations, and do traditional style references. This gives the advantages of inline citations for review, while preserving the readability of book style references.
Add Template:Inflation from Wikipedia. Would be useful for history books, and aid maintainability of texts.

As a reader, it's annoying to have underdeveloped books rated at a higher completion status then they actually are. However I find it more annoying when books that are complete, or are nearly so are rated as barely started. This does the reader a disservice because finding quality material is harder, and it does the editor a disservice, became it makes finding easily developed topics harder. Overall it harms Wikibooks to be overly cautious here. Of course, the inverse would be just as bad if it were as widespread.

Recentism is an interesting issue.
- Indeed A Wikibook should be more than a collection of links to news articles. Yet the process of quality writing on a platform where anyone can edit, and really any serious academic writing, involves citing sources so claims can verified. Building a scaffolding of factual claims to later grow into a cohesive narrative is a good strategy, and withholding text from others until it is fully developed seems to defeat the purpose of a collaborative platform.
- Ongoing news and events should certainly be added with care, but if it is obviously in the readers interest and factual it ought to be added. The ability to keep content up to date is one of the major advantages of electronic books over physical books. It comes down to if an incomplete or underdeveloped section is more desirable than nothing at all. I would dare say most readers have the intelligence to value what information is available, and understand that ongoing stories may be unfinished.