Wikibooks:Reading room/Assistance

Contents

Welcome to the Assistance reading room where Wikibookians help each other solve problems encountered while contributing to books or otherwise taking part in the Wikibooks community.

Copyright rules about adding a book that will later be commercialized

Hello

Thank you for your work. My names is Tomas, a math instructor, and I just want to make sure I understand the copyright rules for wikibooks. My partners and I are writing an ODEs (ordinary diffential equations) math textbook aimed for commercial use.

However, I feel bad that there is no ODEs wikibook, so I started adding content to: Ordinary Differential Equations

Do you think it is possible to keep adding content and later on publish our textbook? The plan is to add a lot of the foundational material in the wikibook and the more exotic stuff in the textbook.

According to Wikibooks:Requesting copyright permission

"The main legal issue that is important to explain to potential contributors: they would be agreeing that their material can be used freely by Wikibooks AND its downstream users, and that such use might include commercial use, for which the contributor is not entitled to royalties or compensation. "

we are allowed to use wikibook content for commercial use as long as we make a reference of the Wikibook authors.

Is that correct or did we miss something? Thank you and have a great day, Tomas — Preceding unsigned comment added by Tkojar (talk • contribs) 01:54, 26 September 2018 (UTC)

Please let me know, if I should post this elsewhere. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 02:00, 26 September 2018 (talk • contribs) Tkojar (UTC)

@Tkojar: This is a perfectly good place to ask... --Pi zero (discuss • contribs) 05:21, 26 September 2018 (UTC)

You are correct. There are many books that have been published this way. For example, this one QuiteUnusual (discuss • contribs) 10:45, 26 September 2018 (UTC)

Thank you. Can you give me examples of textbooks that started as wikibooks and got published by major companies such as Pearson or Springer? So I am guessing there are no or few wikibooks that got published by such companies, but maybe they accepted rewrites and enhanced versions. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Tkojar (talk • contribs)

I don't have any such examples, although they may exist. I think it is likely a question of degree - I see many books that incorporate material from Commons or Wikipedia (e.g., a diagram or paragraph of text) with a citation using "by Wikipedia authors" (which is not sufficient). You have to question whether a major company would publish a book where all the content was already freely available under a copyleft license. QuiteUnusual (discuss • contribs) 14:45, 26 September 2018 (UTC)

Improving the Puzzle Wikibooks Styles

Hi all ,

I am newcomer and I have a proposal to be made

I love Puzzles (and hence my username and I see that the Wikibooks for Puzzles is somehow lacking of contents.) I have read the guide for a while and create this account .

I have see the puzzle and think of why not the answer are put on same pages: Puzzles/Non-scientific puzzles/Boy and Girl

After searching quite a while, I found out that there are a template for hiding text: Template:Hidden

As you can see my sandbox, this is my suggestion for improvements. User:Miss Puzzle/sandbox

Hopefully, my improvement are accepted and I can contribute for many years to comeMiss Puzzle (discuss • contribs) 06:09, 16 February 2019 (UTC)

Aside: Wiki notation for a "wikilink", a link to a page on the wiki, is double square-brackets around the name of the page within the wiki. I've edited your above text (pardon) to demonstrate. --Pi zero (discuss • contribs) 14:05, 16 February 2019 (UTC)

@Miss Puzzle: The issue you are raising (so it seems to me) is one of interactive wiki pages. Fwiw, I can offer some general thoughts about interactive wiki pages. Wiki markup is, originally, about creating hypertext documents: a collection of pages, each containing formatted text, and some words are clickable links to other pages within the collection. That's all. It's basically static. But puzzles are one of a number of purposes for which one may wish for something a bit more dynamic. There are three ways that puzzles have been traditionally handled on wikis, and a fourth way they might be handled, based on something I've been working on.

• It's more-or-less possible to handle puzzles using just ordinary wiki hypertext. You have a question, and either a link to the solution, or links to possible answers. Here's a favorite page of mine (worth a smile, anyway) that uses this technique, though it's not on a wiki: [1].
• One might set up a page with the answer to a problem in hidden text. This has the drawback that when a page loads slowly, hidden text may be temporarily visible while the page is loading, which annoyingly shows the answer before the user has had a chance to try to solve the problem on their own.
• There is a "quiz" wiki extension, which we have installed on wikibooks. I'm not personally enamoured of the quiz extension, as it seems complicated and brittle to me, but it does exist. See Help:Quizzes.

It has seemed to me that what wikis need, in general but it does apply to the particular case of quizzes/puzzles, is a truly general sort of page interactivity that can be specified as part of wiki markup. I've created such a thing; it takes the form of a small set of templates for adding input fields of various kinds to a page, and buttons that can be clicked to send the input somewhere. The next step is to learn how to wield this tool effectively. See Help:Dialog.

It should be possible, using dialog, to create quizzes/puzzles that aren't just multiple-choice, but can take more general kinds of input. I've come to believe that interacting with another human being is what people would really like to be able to do on a wiki, and I've wondered if dialog could be used to facilitate that; a core challenge needing addressed for that is, how to ensure there's someone else to interact with. But even without another person, a much wider range of possibilities opens up with dialog-driven quizzes. --Pi zero (discuss • contribs) 14:46, 16 February 2019 (UTC)

Thank you Pi Zero, I think I may cleanup the Puzzles pages a bit but I think I may implement the hidden text for now (shown in my sandbox) as I think that, we don't need to have too many pages of question and answers, which I think may lead to difficulties of cleaning up the pages later on. Also, I may add some rebuses (hieroglyphic puzzles) of my own in the near future. Thanks for your kind input. Miss Puzzle (discuss • contribs) 16:43, 16 February 2019 (UTC)

Cateogry, project or?

I have started a book VCE Physics. VCE stands for Victorian Certificate of Education which encompasses curricula for a variety of subjects, including physics. There seem to be some other VCE books already started (e.g. VCE Chemistry and VCE Specialist Mathematics). So I thought it would be suitable to create a "Category" called VCE to encompass them. But then I read the advice about Categories and thought the VCE Category would be better as a "project". But going to projects, this seems to be all about Class Projects in seeming contradication to the advice on the categories page which indicates a project would be good to encompass books on related curricula. I'm confused! Please provide advice!

In a related question about categories etc. I've also added a subject category tag of "physics" to the bottom of the VCE Physics main page. But it is not showing up. It is just showing the Subject : Book : VCE Book (I created a "book"). I am not even sure what the purpose of the "Book" is. Surely the main page I created was the "book"... why was I directed by the Categories advice to create a book category?... what is it used for?... how does it relate to the book and/or subjects and/or projects!

I want to do the right thing. I'm academically astute (teach at a university), IT savvy (program in multiple languages etc.) so I am inclined to think the system, at least in relation to the current existing explanations, is objectively unclear... but maybe it will all become clear when someone provides just a little explanation?

Please provide further explainattion of the logic of category, book, project etc. (and, preferably, include advice relating to my situation) it is unclear, to me, from the existing documentation.

--Theo Hughes (discuss • contribs) 05:08, 27 February 2019 (UTC)

OK, so I found the help info I should really have been reading (Wikibooks/Shelves, Categories, and Classifications), and looked at what other books did, and now things are starting to make sense . However, I'm now not sure about the relevance of the Categories help page which initially led me astray... does it need updating?... or how is it now relevant?... is it an old thing that was replaced by books and shelves etc?

--Theo Hughes (discuss • contribs) 21:50, 27 February 2019 (UTC)

@Theo Hughes: Well, we're really still in the midst of converting from the older subject pages to the new shelves. Which is itself the most recent step in a multi-stage infrastructure upgrade I've been working on for some time now. There's some history at Wikibooks Stacks/History. --Pi zero (discuss • contribs) 05:29, 28 February 2019 (UTC)

Many thanks, its starting to make sense now. And the fact that I have come to wikibooks in the middle of a transition explains the slightly confusing documentation. I will attempt to organise things as per the new shelves etc. At the moment I'm now just playing around with the best format for TOC for the book I started. I started playing with templates... then realised what I was trying wasn't quite correct. I'm playing around with having a complete book TOC in a collapsible column etc Navbox that will automagically (template parameters based on page names sort of thing) have the current "topic" uncollapsed. Not sure if this is still what I want, but I'd like to get the navigation somewhat sorted before going to far with content, and then making it difficult for myself to rearrange - though I intend not to spend too much time fiddling with this as I do want to get onto content... ooops forgot the sig, here it is --Theo Hughes (discuss • contribs) 05:42, 28 February 2019 (UTC)

Renaming "Medical Suction Machines"

I'm thinking to generalize the coverage of Medical Suction Machines to Medical Machines. How can the renaming be accomplished? Suppose I create a new book named Medical Machines. Then can Medical Suction Machines be moved into it as Medical Machines/Suction Machines? Thanks, ... PeterEasthope (discuss • contribs) 18:20, 8 March 2019 (UTC)

@PeterEasthope: Yes, an admin can do that for you. --Pi zero (discuss • contribs) 22:24, 8 March 2019 (UTC)

What if I create the new book, add the content from Med. Suction Machines and then request deletion of that? The expanded book wouldn't have the creation date and history of the older book but that would be a minor loss. Does any policy apply here? Is one method preferable? Otherwise I'll just begin the new book. Thanks, ... PeterEasthope (discuss • contribs) 05:13, 9 March 2019 (UTC)

I'd rather save the history. --Pi zero (discuss • contribs) 13:11, 9 March 2019 (UTC)

> Yes, an admin can do that for you.

What is the procedure? Just state the request here. Please move Medical Suction Machines to Medical Machines. Thanks, ... PeterEasthope (discuss • contribs) 22:38, 9 March 2019 (UTC)

@PeterEasthope: Um. I'm hesitating, here. It seems as if that much material about just one kind of machine wouldn't belong in the book-main-page of a book about all kinds of medical machines; cf. {{split}}. --Pi zero (discuss • contribs) 22:57, 9 March 2019 (UTC)

OK, now there is a book, Medical Machines containing a heading/link "Suction Machines and Aspirators" which I visualize being connected to the existing book. Under that heading are subheadings for the existing sections in the existing book. There are also headings for a few other classes of machine I want to include. It's similar to the structure of This Quantum World. How is that? Thanks, ... PeterEasthope (discuss • contribs) 02:04, 10 March 2019 (UTC)

I moved the pre-existing page. There's plenty of neatifying to do, of course, but it's a start. --Pi zero (discuss • contribs) 05:11, 10 March 2019 (UTC)

Thanks. A little elementary tidying done. Plenty of work ahead, ... PeterEasthope (discuss • contribs) 20:06, 10 March 2019 (UTC)

Experienced Wikipedia editor wanting to get started on Wikibooks

I am an experienced editor on the English Wikipedia (12 years, 45,000 edits) who is thinking about getting involved in Wikibooks. Obviously I need to learn any differences in how things are done here.

I am working on a book on the topic of running diagnostics on various scientific and graphing calculators. Everything I write I release to the world under a CC0 license.

Would Wikibooks be an appropriate place to put my work? Are there any tutorials, help pages or examples I should know about? Do I need to put it in a specific place? --Guy Macon (discuss • contribs) 05:41, 7 April 2019 (UTC)

@Guy Macon: Welcome! :-)  You might read Wikibooks:What is Wikibooks? for a start, then the book Using Wikibooks. (It occurs to me that Using Wikibooks may not be up-to-date with our recent replacement of Subject pages by the Wikibooks Stacks, but that's just one detail.) --Pi zero (discuss • contribs) 11:16, 7 April 2019 (UTC)

Exactly what I was looking for. Thanks! My only remaining question is whether a book on running diagnostics on various scientific and graphing calculators belongs in Shelf:Computer hardware, somewhere in Department:Mathematics, or some other place. Is there a place where there are discussions on where a book belongs? --Guy Macon (discuss • contribs) 17:20, 7 April 2019 (UTC)

@Guy Macon: Computer hardware sounds like a good place. The goal is for people to be able to find the book, after all. Looking through the hierarchy under Department:Mathematics, I didn't off-hand see a place where it would likely be looked for. (If you do think of a second place that would be useful to list it, listing on two shelves is generally considered reasonable.) --Pi zero (discuss • contribs) 21:46, 7 April 2019 (UTC)

Page information in mobile view

Hi, is there any direct way to reach page information when viewing a page in mobile view? Of course desktop view can activated; then the "Page information" link in the left margin is available. There should be a more direct path. Thanks, PeterEasthope (discuss • contribs) 16:27, 11 May 2019 (UTC)

@PeterEasthope: You could activate "Page information" in desktop view and then switch back to mobile. I don't think there is a more direct way, however. Leaderboard (discuss • contribs) 08:40, 12 May 2019 (UTC)

Thanks Leaderboard, ... PeterEasthope (discuss • contribs) 18:05, 12 May 2019 (UTC)

Creating a book as a compilation of truncated Wikipedia pages

Hi, I am hoping to create some re-compile (and cut down) the content from existing Wikipedia pages to create an open educational resource (OER) for a course I teach. I've created two example pages: User:Cameronpiercy/Social_Loafing and User:Cameronpiercy/Nonverbal. I am a novice Wikipedia editor and have never used Wikibooks. The first question I have is (1) is it okay to create a Wikibook in this manner? The second question is (2) all of the links broke when I copied the page, is there an easy way to restore existing links to Wikipedia pages? As I read here Using_Wikibooks/Wikipedian_Primer I'm thinking Wikibooks may not be the best venue for this type of "mashup." Any advice? Cameronpiercy (discuss • contribs) 19:52, 14 May 2019 (UTC)

This is not Wikipedia, and one of the differences is that we do not have lots of wikilinks that link to other books or to Wikipedia. You are strongly advised not to "repair" the links to Wikipedia but instead remove them. If you are copying material from Wikipedia you must observe the license requirements. That means you must link (in the edit summary) back to the permanent URL from where you copied it or, preferably, request the material is imported to Wikibooks at WB:RFI which enables the edit history to be maintained. QuiteUnusual (discuss • contribs) 15:28, 15 May 2019 (UTC)

What is a digital menu board?

It is a way to present our services in an effective way. Digital menu boards for restaurants is helpful to increase sales and customers. A digital menu board can replace your traditional menu board. Digital menu boards provide rich and vibrant visuals that are more appealing than traditional printed menus.

Some reasons for using a menu board:-

Increase Sales up to 21-23% Digital menu Board Increases sales up to 21-23%, It is a long term and one-time investment and it can reduce many costs like price changes and adding new items, etc. In the digital menu board, you can change any item or price as you like.

Easy to manage:- You can easily add on and update new items and change prices with a digital menu board software with your computers and it is easy to create new menu boards using the customizable template with drag and drop. Ease of menu changes and day-parting, new items, auto-disable sold-out items. It can decrease customer wait time, can do up-sell & promote new items.

Save money:- It can save our money because traditional printing is a costly and time-consuming activity. Once traditional menu boards created then it doesn't change but we can change digital menu boards when we want & the cost to print, shipping & installing are eliminated.

Improve branding:- It is a better way to enhance our brand with HD images and videos of our items. It offers tremendous business opportunities for retailers in creating a recognizable brand in the market, increasing sales and boosting their customer engagement. Digital signage is a powerful medium to communicate brand messages effectively in a seamless and convenient manner. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Explorestream (talk • contribs)

So what? If you want to write a book about it, please have a look at Using Wikibooks. JackPotte (discuss • contribs) 11:53, 22 May 2019 (UTC)