Wikibooks:Dewikify

Dewikify means to remove excess links from books, often for pages originally from another project (like Wikipedia). This is normally the first step in cleaning up a transwikied page.

Why dewikify?

Many projects encourage heavy linking between pages and often links for desired pages are added. For those projects, this is generally justified, because each project is essentially one very large book with pages for every topic relevant to the scope of that project. With few exceptions, individual books at Wikibooks won't be large enough to justify linking to that extent, won't have pages for topics outside its scope, and links between books are generally discouraged because books should be self-contained. For example, there is no point in having a link to bubble gum, because there is unlikely to be a book by that name, and even if there was, it would be an entire book on the subject and not likely to cover the topic in a useful way for that book's target audience. Other examples are old interwiki links to other languages or navigation templates which are no longer useful.

Adding new chapters

Books are supposed to be self-contained resources to be as useful for reading offline as they are when reading from the website. However, writing books is a larger commitment than writing articles. If a link is needed to understand a concept, a link to an existing work can be used in the same way that desired links are used at other projects: namely, to suggest that a chapter explaining a concept is needed.

If an entire Wikipedia article is necessary to explain a concept, it's probably best to simply request that the article be imported, and then adjust it to fit into the flow of the book you are working on. Transwikiing several closely related Wikipedia articles in this manner can be a good way to build up a skeleton for a book.

If there are chapters in the same book that should be linked to, there are a couple of shortcuts for doing this, depending on the structure of the book you are working on. If the book has a flat structure (i.e., a main page and one level of chapters), links can be made between chapters using the form [[../Chapter/]] (note that the forward slash ("/") on the end makes the "../" at the beginning invisible). If the book uses subchapters, you can link to another subchapter of the same chapter using [[../../Subchapter/]], or to the subchapter of a different chapter using [[../Chapter/subchapter]] (flat structures are often preferred, in part for this reason). Please do not create redirects in the main namespace as shortcuts... these will likely be deleted when found.

Cleaning up

Once a new transwiki has been dewikified, simply remove the template {{dewikify}} from the top of the page (this is placed on all transwikis by the importing admin). If you find you enjoy dewikifying (some people do!), there's usually plenty more to attend to in Category:Pages needing to be dewikified.