Wikibooks:Reading room/Assistance

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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)