Wikibooks:Reading room/General
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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.
IPs making pages?
editSo, IPs can make pages here? What's that about? Some really egregious stuff got posted a few hours ago and is still sitting there. It's kind of ironic that a lot of pages here are protected, but yet an IP can freely create a page called "Profound Mental Retardation." Wikibooks is a very interesting corner of the Internet. MediaKyle (discuss • contribs) 12:20, 3 March 2025 (UTC)
- Looping in @Leaderboard, @MarcGarver, and @Atcovi since they've been around and admins for longer than I have. —Kittycataclysm (discuss • contribs) 13:24, 3 March 2025 (UTC)
- IPs can create content on nearly every project, including the biggest of all - the English Wikipedia, albeit restricted to doing so in the DRAFT namespace. This is very much in the ethos of "anyone can edit" and I, personally, would oppose preventing IPs from creating pages or editing. There are edit filters that stop the worst kind of vandalism, we should look at whether they can be tweaked but given that "retard" and "retardation" are in common use (e.g., "retard the throttle") I doubt an edit filter would be appropriate. For the stuff that slips through, that's what admins and Global Sysops are for. MarcGarver (discuss • contribs) 13:28, 3 March 2025 (UTC)
- Plus, if they couldn't create a page, what would they do? Just put the same vandalism on an existing page. Unless there is a proposal to block all anonymous editing, then there is no solution other than "policing" edits. MarcGarver (discuss • contribs) 13:31, 3 March 2025 (UTC)
- Thanks for your insight, MarcGarver. I agree with you to an extent, but I fail to see the practical benefit to allowing IPs to directly add pages to the mainspace, when the ability seems to be primarily used for vandalism. We just had a couple attack pages remain visible in the mainspace for about 3 hours, and I think that's concerning. To your point, someone who wants to vandalize will find a way to do so, yes. That being said, there's greater potential for harm in creating entirely new pages than there is editing existing ones, in my opinion. Anyone can undo vandalism on existing pages, but only a handful of people are around and able to delete pages. I'm certainly not proposing a blanket ban on IP contributions, but I think it's worth a discussion about whether or not there's a real use case for allowing them to create pages in the mainspace. What do you think? MediaKyle (discuss • contribs) 13:46, 3 March 2025 (UTC)
- I think the best option is to ask the community for its opinion. I'm not clear, however, on the benefit of letting someone create in a draft space v's the main space. It's still a page, and it's still visible in the same way. A page like the ones created is only visible to the creator, to someone who deliberately searches for it, or someone who looks in Recent Changes. The normal reader of Wikibooks isn't going to see it because it isn't indexed in any way. On the other hand, replacing the content of an established page with a load of vandalism is immediately visible to the casual reader. So, I'd argue that having people create new bad pages is better than having them vandalise existing pages. Or, in other words, the problem is not sufficiently serious to warrant the overhead of creating and maintaining a draft name space. We did try with Flagged Revisions to create a way of hiding bad content. Unfortunately there are thousands of unreviewed pages and unreviewed changes because Reviewers don't get round to checking pages. That's despite there being nearly 1,000 reviewers. So the chances of getting a Draft namespace properly managed seem slim. MarcGarver (discuss • contribs) 15:00, 3 March 2025 (UTC)
- I appreciate the thoughtful response. When you put it that way, it does make sense that this isn't too big of a deal at this point, and I totally see the rationale behind preferring someone create a nonsense page that no one will ever see, rather than vandalize the bits of good content we do have. This might become more of an issue if Wikibooks ever picks up speed, but at this point, I agree with you that it's not worth the trouble of trying to tackle. There's other more pressing issues at hand for Wikibooks.
- While I have everyone's attention, another thing that's caught my eye during my foray into Wikibooks is that a great deal of the guidelines never got approved. Would you folks get behind an effort to try to approve some of these guidelines? I figured we could start with WB:SOCK, should be an easy one to put together. It would be nice to have some basic guidelines to fall back on, as the project continues to take shape.
- And to your point about the unreviewed changes, I fully intend to clear that backlog over the course of a few days (edit: I was looking at Special:PendingChanges, I guess the full backlog will take longer than a few days), just as soon as I get the reviewer user right. I have to admit, I find it funny that I could in theory go onto Wikipedia right now and move a BLP to a whacky title, but I can't do a whole lot here. Not much anyone can do about that, though. MediaKyle (discuss • contribs) 15:16, 3 March 2025 (UTC)
- I think the best option is to ask the community for its opinion. I'm not clear, however, on the benefit of letting someone create in a draft space v's the main space. It's still a page, and it's still visible in the same way. A page like the ones created is only visible to the creator, to someone who deliberately searches for it, or someone who looks in Recent Changes. The normal reader of Wikibooks isn't going to see it because it isn't indexed in any way. On the other hand, replacing the content of an established page with a load of vandalism is immediately visible to the casual reader. So, I'd argue that having people create new bad pages is better than having them vandalise existing pages. Or, in other words, the problem is not sufficiently serious to warrant the overhead of creating and maintaining a draft name space. We did try with Flagged Revisions to create a way of hiding bad content. Unfortunately there are thousands of unreviewed pages and unreviewed changes because Reviewers don't get round to checking pages. That's despite there being nearly 1,000 reviewers. So the chances of getting a Draft namespace properly managed seem slim. MarcGarver (discuss • contribs) 15:00, 3 March 2025 (UTC)
- IPs can create content on nearly every project, including the biggest of all - the English Wikipedia, albeit restricted to doing so in the DRAFT namespace. This is very much in the ethos of "anyone can edit" and I, personally, would oppose preventing IPs from creating pages or editing. There are edit filters that stop the worst kind of vandalism, we should look at whether they can be tweaked but given that "retard" and "retardation" are in common use (e.g., "retard the throttle") I doubt an edit filter would be appropriate. For the stuff that slips through, that's what admins and Global Sysops are for. MarcGarver (discuss • contribs) 13:28, 3 March 2025 (UTC)
- Don't see any need to prevent IPs from creating new pages. It might just lead to vandalism on existing pages instead. And an IP address is a good way of identifying users - so easy for anyone to find out where they are editing from while a registered account hides all that. Preventing IPs from creating new pages may discourage contributions to the project and goes against the ethos of 'anyone can edit' (or whatever it is).--Xania
talk 10:17, 30 March 2025 (UTC)
Deleting stale stubs
editThe following item from Wikibooks:Deletion policy seems to prevent deleting stale stubs:
- "In general, keep stubs that can be improved on, but delete stubs that are too narrowly defined or do not have a decent definition of what they are about."
I propose to do something about it by modifying the above. It seems reasonable to me to keep stubs for a considerable protective period, perhaps even as long as 5 years (but 1 year could be okay), but once the period elapses, the stub should go. Wikibooks is not an encyclopedia and therefore the concept of stub applies differently to it. In an encyclopedia, even a stub is of value: it is often better than nothing on the subject. In Wikibooks, the situation is different; a page in Wikibooks has to do something that Wikipedia does not do. --Dan Polansky (discuss • contribs) 13:41, 21 March 2025 (UTC)
Why is there "Akhtar Aly Kureshy" in the title of the subpage? I am asking as I have recently met this name many times in various wikiprojects, and it seems this person is a subject of some wiki-wide promotional campaign led by various sockpuppets of w:User:Akhtar Aly Kureshy, so I am just curious, whether this subpage is a part of this campaing as well. See also e. g. w:Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Akhtar Aly Kureshy or q:Akhtar Aly Kureshy. -- Jan.Kamenicek (discuss • contribs) 23:58, 29 March 2025 (UTC)
Wikidata and Sister Projects: an online event
editHello everyone, I’m writing to announce an upcoming event called Wikidata and Sister Projects that will be a mini online conference to highlight the different ways Wikidata can be connected and integrated with the other WM projects.
We are currently looking for session ideas and speakers for our program and wanted to reach out in case there were any editors here that might have a cool idea for a session proposal. Sessions can be found on the event discussion page.
As previously mentioned, we would like to showcase the relationship between Wikibooks and Wikidata, such as the storing of metadata and sitelinking between books and their respective Wikidata items. Do you have an idea for a session? We'd love to hear about it!
The event is scheduled between May 29 - June 1st, 2025. If you have any questions about the event, would like more information or have a session idea to propose, please feel free to get in touch by replying to this post or writing on the event page or on my talk page. Thanks for reading, - Danny Benjafield (WMDE) (discuss • contribs) 07:45, 1 April 2025 (UTC)
Final proposed modifications to the Universal Code of Conduct Enforcement Guidelines and U4C Charter now posted
editThe proposed modifications to the Universal Code of Conduct Enforcement Guidelines and the U4C Charter are now on Meta-wiki for community notice in advance of the voting period. This final draft was developed from the previous two rounds of community review. Community members will be able to vote on these modifications starting on 17 April 2025. The vote will close on 1 May 2025, and results will be announced no later than 12 May 2025. The U4C election period, starting with a call for candidates, will open immediately following the announcement of the review results. More information will be posted on the wiki page for the election soon.
Please be advised that this process will require more messages to be sent here over the next two months.
The Universal Code of Conduct Coordinating Committee (U4C) is a global group dedicated to providing an equitable and consistent implementation of the UCoC. This annual review was planned and implemented by the U4C. For more information and the responsibilities of the U4C, you may review the U4C Charter.
Please share this message with members of your community so they can participate as well.
-- In cooperation with the U4C, Keegan (WMF) (talk) 02:04, 4 April 2025 (UTC)
Wikidata and Sister Projects: An online community event
edit(Apologies for posting in English)
Hello everyone, I am excited to share news of an upcoming online event called Wikidata and Sister Projects celebrating the different ways Wikidata can be used to support or enhance with another Wikimedia project. The event takes place over 4 days between May 29 - June 1st, 2025.
We would like to invite speakers to present at this community event, to hear success stories, challenges, showcase tools or projects you may be working on, where Wikidata has been involved in Wikipedia, Commons, WikiSource and all other WM projects.
If you are interested in attending, please register here. If you would like to speak at the event, please fill out this Session Proposal template on the event talk page, where you can also ask any questions you may have.
I hope to see you at the event, in the audience or as a speaker, - MediaWiki message delivery (discuss • contribs) 09:18, 11 April 2025 (UTC)
Vote now on the revised UCoC Enforcement Guidelines and U4C Charter
editThe voting period for the revisions to the Universal Code of Conduct Enforcement Guidelines ("UCoC EG") and the UCoC's Coordinating Committee Charter is open now through the end of 1 May (UTC) (find in your time zone). Read the information on how to participate and read over the proposal before voting on the UCoC page on Meta-wiki.
The Universal Code of Conduct Coordinating Committee (U4C) is a global group dedicated to providing an equitable and consistent implementation of the UCoC. This annual review of the EG and Charter was planned and implemented by the U4C. Further information will be provided in the coming months about the review of the UCoC itself. For more information and the responsibilities of the U4C, you may review the U4C Charter.
Please share this message with members of your community so they can participate as well.
In cooperation with the U4C -- Keegan (WMF) (talk) 00:34, 17 April 2025 (UTC)
Vote on proposed modifications to the UCoC Enforcement Guidelines and U4C Charter
editThe voting period for the revisions to the Universal Code of Conduct Enforcement Guidelines and U4C Charter closes on 1 May 2025 at 23:59 UTC (find in your time zone). Read the information on how to participate and read over the proposal before voting on the UCoC page on Meta-wiki.
The Universal Code of Conduct Coordinating Committee (U4C) is a global group dedicated to providing an equitable and consistent implementation of the UCoC. This annual review was planned and implemented by the U4C. For more information and the responsibilities of the U4C, you may review the U4C Charter.
Please share this message with members of your community in your language, as appropriate, so they can participate as well.
In cooperation with the U4C --
Call for Candidates for the Universal Code of Conduct Coordinating Committee (U4C)
editThe results of voting on the Universal Code of Conduct Enforcement Guidelines and Universal Code of Conduct Coordinating Committee (U4C) Charter is available on Meta-wiki.
You may now submit your candidacy to serve on the U4C through 29 May 2025 at 12:00 UTC. Information about eligibility, process, and the timeline are on Meta-wiki. Voting on candidates will open on 1 June 2025 and run for two weeks, closing on 15 June 2025 at 12:00 UTC.
If you have any questions, you can ask on the discussion page for the election. -- in cooperation with the U4C,