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.
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in modifying the editing footnote to add some phrases that I regularly utilise in editing, but those comments have now been archived.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)Reply
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)Reply
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)Reply
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)Reply
Latest comment: 1 month ago2 comments2 people in discussion
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? JJPMaster (she/they) 22:33, 16 December 2024 (UTC)Reply
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)Reply
Yes you are right you have to use the print version of the wikibook. This is documented on the main page of the converter. It says explicitly: If you intent to compile a wikibook make sure you use the link to the printable version of the book.. Page 20 is empty. This is also intentional since new chapters can only start on pages on with an odd page number. Please feel free to report any further issues you may notice. Yours --Dirk Hünniger (discuss • contribs) 13:38, 31 December 2024 (UTC)Reply
I don't see what is wrong on page 17. I see an image of a clock showing two o'clock and no problem. Possibly you can explain a bit more what you consider to be wrong.
@Dirk Hünniger: In the original, the clock was quite small and next to the text. Here, it takes up almost a third of the page, and appears before the text.
Also, for the title of the PDF, please make it the book name ({{BOOKNAME}}) instead of the page name without the namespace ({{PAGENAME}}), since the title of the book is not "Philosophy/Print version", but "Wikijunior:Philosophy". JJPMaster (she/they) 13:48, 31 December 2024 (UTC)Reply
1) the appearance of the clock as large image taking the whole page is also intentional. The idea is to create book which does not require an internet connection to read. So the image has to be large because you can not click on it to enlarge it as you can in the web-browser. You can override this behavior by including the image in the wiki text with the 100px directive where 100px means a quarter of the page 200px means half the page and so on.
2) The title of the wikibook as it appears on the first page of the PDF is by default generated for the URL the was supplied to mediawiki2latex. So in your case it defaults to Wikijunior:Philosophy. This behavior can be changed by the user. In this case an other way of defining the printable version is needed. In your case the the printable version is created by using the template {{Printable}}, but in order to define a custom title you have to do it the same way as it is done for example in User:Dirk_Hünniger/latex. I hope the wikitext on this page is rather self explaining, otherwise just ask. Furthermore you have to tell mediawiki2latex to process it in the right way. Just change the combo box Template expansion on the generator page from Standard to Expand Templates internally
Latest comment: 18 days ago3 comments2 people in discussion
Hi everyone,
in my project Thesis Writing Guide, I've gone through some iterations and think I've settled on a structure now. I'd like to ask how the different heading levels are "commonly" used, or say "should" be used.
To my understanding right now:
Level 1 is not used at all. It resembles the Page-/Book-title and is out of question.
Level 2 is the first one used, one might call them chapter or section - let's stick to "section" for now. They give the book big, brought structure.
Level 3 is a subsection then, but immediately loses differentiation: line beneath, just bold and barely different from any level further down below.
Coming from LaTeX, I feel like there are only two real levels. Level 2 is for sections, everything else is a paragraph.
Would it be wrong to e.g. use Level 1 for Chapters?
Hi @TimBorgNetzWerk! In books, we tend to reserve Level 1 headers for the page (chapter) title. Level 2 headers and below are typically then used for sections and subsections on that page/chapter. I rarely use anything below level 4, since they become visually indistinguishable from each other below that. Hope this helps! —Kittycataclysm (discuss • contribs) 19:13, 3 January 2025 (UTC)Reply
Hello there, thanks for the feedback - it alongside your edit history has really helped me out, thanks!
I've now moved the book out of my sandbox into Thesis Writing Guide and set it up as seems right. Feel free to have a look and see if I'm missing something, otherwise I feel comfortable with everything basically shifting one level up now:
Level 1 is never used in the Source, but is the page heading (either book page or chapter page, now shifted to subpages)
Level 2 is now free since it no longer has to be used for chapter headings - that means everything can move up a level, and this Level is free for sections within chapters - great!
Level 3 is now a subsection, works
Level 4 is now a paragraph, perfect.
Thanks! With Nav and printable I feel even more motivated now, ease of navigation is always appreciated!
I've settled on listing the 10 most common chapters in a student thesis:
Chapter 1: Introduction
Chapter 2: Background
Chapter 3: Related Work
Chapter 4: Method / Approach
Chapter 5: Implementation
Chapter 6: Evaluation
Chapter 7: Results
Chapter 8: Discussion
Chapter 9: Future Work
Chapter 10: Conclusion
Very likely, no student thesis will ever have all 10, likely some will be merged (e.g. Discussion & Future Work).
It is also very likely that I am missing some, maybe even some used more often than those 10.
So how does one handle a dynamic rank with a fixed title?
Update all consecutive titles when a new insertion/deletion happens?
Name them "Chapter:Introduction" or similar, to remove the number?
Make them Submodules "Chapter/Introduction"?
Just call them "Introduction"?
This for example I cannot do, since my Book itself has an Introduction. On that note, another issue there, which I will raise as a new topic.
I would like to keep the guide universal in nature, but allow for specific modules. These I just listed by from where they would arise, so a given university in germany may have the module Thesis Writing Guide/DE/LUH/DSDL.
Is this the proper way to handle module stacking?
Should they be included in the printable version?
How can should I create an overview for them? Categories?
