Wikibooks:Reading room/General

Welcome to the General reading room. On this page, Wikibookians are free to talk about the Wikibooks project in general. For proposals for improving Wikibooks, see the Proposals reading room.

'Wikidata item' link is moving, finally.

Hello everyone, I previously wrote on the 27th September to advise that the Wikidata item sitelink will change places in the sidebar menu, moving from the General section into the In Other Projects section. The scheduled rollout date of 04.10.2024 was delayed due to a necessary request for Mobile/MinervaNeue skin. I am happy to inform that the global rollout can now proceed and will occur later today, 22.10.2024 at 15:00 UTC-2. Please let us know if you notice any problems or bugs after this change. There should be no need for null-edits or purging cache for the changes to occur. Kind regards, -Danny Benjafield (WMDE) 11:30, 22 October 2024 (UTC)

Sign up for the language community meeting on November 29th, 16:00 UTC

Hello everyone,

The next language community meeting is coming up next week, on November 29th, at 16:00 UTC (Zonestamp! For your timezone <https://zonestamp.toolforge.org/1732896000>). If you're interested in joining, you can sign up on this wiki page: <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Language_and_Product_Localization/Community_meetings#29_November_2024>.

This participant-driven meeting will be organized by the Wikimedia Foundation’s Language Product Localization team and the Language Diversity Hub. There will be presentations on topics like developing language keyboards, the creation of the Moore Wikipedia, and the language support track at Wiki Indaba. We will also have members from the Wayuunaiki community joining us to share their experiences with the Incubator and as a new community within our movement. This meeting will have a Spanish interpretation.

Looking forward to seeing you at the language community meeting! Cheers, Srishti 19:53, 21 November 2024 (UTC)

GFDL is outdated

Hi! Since 2009 the wiki-family have been dual licensed and existing text was updated from GFDL to GFDL and cc-by-sa-3.0. There are some books that is licensed with Template:GFDL and I think it is not correct. See more on w:Wikipedia:Licensing update. So I think that there should be a template like w:Template:CC BY-SA 3.0 migrated that is added to the template or it should be indicated in some other way that the content is dual licensed. MGA73 (discuss • contribs) 06:12, 6 December 2024 (UTC)

I think a simple update to that template would be enough? Leaderboard (discuss • contribs) 12:49, 6 December 2024 (UTC)

Works for me! --MGA73 (discuss • contribs) 17:02, 6 December 2024 (UTC)

Something like this?

Because of the Licensing update in 2009 to the content licensed GFDL was also available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 license starting from June 15, 2009. Since the ToU-update in June 7, 2023, the content is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license.

Or should it be more like c:Template:Kettős-GFDL-cc-by-sa-3.0 or de:Vorlage:Doppellizenz Buch CC-BY-SA? --MGA73 (discuss • contribs) 12:57, 8 December 2024 (UTC)

Page size

How big should a page be without being slow in loading times? I think around 100-150 kB. Above this, I think pages should be split.

History of wireless telegraphy and broadcasting in Australia/Topical/Biographies has a size of 2 MB. It takes 8 seconds to download on 3G connections, over a minute on 2G, and 5 minutes on a dial-up connection.

I tried to spilt into multiple pages (A, B, etc.) for performance reasons, but it was reverted.

We already have a guideline on Wikipedia, see w:WP:SIZE.

What are your thoughts? I'm pinging @Samuel.dellit. Xeverything11 (discuss • contribs) 07:44, 13 December 2024 (UTC)

History of wireless telegraphy and broadcasting in Australia/Topical/Biographies is indeed very big—it took quite a bit to load for me. I would be in support of splitting it by letter. —Kittycataclysm (discuss • contribs) 01:38, 14 December 2024 (UTC)

I am the principal author of this Wikibook to which I have devoted almost ten years of my spare time, much of the last six years on this biographies page. Keeping all the potted biographies on one page has a major benefit in searching by various parameters such as callsign, location, surnames etc. The slow load time is a minor trade off for the utility of searching. The potted biographies page has been near the 2MB limit for some years & I have never received a complaint till now. I am progressively deleting a large number of comment lines on the page, now that the page is largely complete, which will take it well below the 2MB limit. I had assistance from several Wikibooks administrators years ago, especially in modifying the editing footnote to add some phrases that I regularly utilise in editing, but those comments have now been archived. Unless some kind soul can develop a search tool to search easily across 26 subpages, I do not wish to split the page. If needs be, I would simply cease development here and transfer my efforts to another platform. I do not spend time learning Wikibooks principles by heart, but I do recall in general terms that in Wikibooks, the principal author's view should generally dominate. Overly rigorous and overbearing adherence to Wikipedia guidelines is considered a driver in the reduction in numbers of active Wikipedia editors, it would be sad if that issue transfers to Wikibooks also. Samuel.dellit (discuss • contribs) 09:03, 14 December 2024 (UTC)

Thank you for weighing in, @Samuel.dellit! I took a look at the whole book, and it's certainly a mammoth effort that you've contributed an enormous amount to. Since you feel it's critical to the function of the biographies page to have it be easily searchable by various parameters, I can understand keeping it as-is.

I do personally find it somewhat difficult to parse and navigate the book because of its highly nested structure, and I would want to modify the structure slightly so that the navigation for all the chapters is located on the main front page (perhaps with collapsible elements to control visual size). But, I don't want to insult your years of work by barging in with proposed changes; I just offer my feedback and would love to engage in a dialog about this. Cheers! —Kittycataclysm (discuss • contribs) 13:53, 14 December 2024 (UTC)

I'm happy to consider any suggestions, the subject is vast and the nested structure works for me, but may not for the non-specialist Samuel.dellit (discuss • contribs) 22:07, 18 December 2024 (UTC)

Hi Samuel, have you not considered that putting a box on the main page allows for easy searching? I do have to concur with the OP that pages this large (or even half this large) should only be done with a really good reason. That being said, please understand that we're having this discussion to help you and the community - we certainly don't want you to leave like that but statements like "I would simply cease development here and transfer my efforts to another platform" isn't in line with our collaborative nature and isn't something I expected from you (especially given that all Xeverything11 did was ask others for comments on this page). We do tend to leave editors alone and are quite trusting of editors as far as WMF projects go, but we also work together to make Wikibooks better and there's a reason guidelines and rules exist (though not on size). Leaderboard (discuss • contribs) 15:48, 14 December 2024 (UTC)

Thanks for your reasoned comments. I certainly reacted to another editor jumping in without notice and changing the structure without prior discussion. I have entered two search boxes and have tinkered a little with options. The main page search box works great in finding everything. The biographies search box doesn't yet do everything that I want. Samuel.dellit (discuss • contribs) 22:11, 18 December 2024 (UTC)

RfD subpages

I've noticed a log of deletion log summaries with red-linked RfD pages, and the reason for this is because the requests are made directly on WB:RFD, and then copy/pasted to separate RfD subpages. This is problematic. Firstly, since we don't have XFDcloser, all of that has to be done manually, and is often not done for several weeks, meaning that the log summaries are red-linked for several weeks. Additionally, this can lead to attribution problems, since it is often not indicated where they're copy/pasted from in the edits where they're being copied. Is there any particular reason why this is the preferred method of handling deletion requests that might outweigh these concerns? JJP_Master (she/they) 22:33, 16 December 2024 (UTC)

As far as I'm aware, this is just how things are done, but it does have issues like you say. I would not necessarily be opposed to improvement here, but I don't really have the technical capacity to do so. —Kittycataclysm (discuss • contribs) 13:29, 17 December 2024 (UTC)

Wikibooks:Files for upload

I have now created Wikibooks:Files for upload as a centralized place for requesting the upload of non-free files. Please tell me what you think! JJP_Master (she/they) 20:52, 18 December 2024 (UTC)

I don't mind it, but I don't think we have ever had the demand for this to have its own page. Leaderboard (discuss • contribs) 02:25, 19 December 2024 (UTC)