Wikibooks:Reading room/General

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 have reverted your blankings of Xeverything11's pages

No one owns books on Wikibooks. You are not allowed to blank other people's work just because you it was added to a book that you worked on. The proper venue for that is WB:RFD. JJP_Master (she/they) 03:12, 8 February 2025 (UTC)

Hello JJPmaster

This matter was taken to https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Wikibooks:Reading_room/General with Topic "Page Size"

I have taken up some of the suggestions offered by reasoned contributors and am still working on implementing others.

I ask that you should read the full discussion there before proceeding further.

In the meantime your edits are adversely affecting my content creation and I ask that you revert your edits so that I can proceed unimpeded with this important work.

Any further discussion should continue in Reading_room/General with Topic "Page Size"

Regards

Samuel Dellit Samuel.dellit (discuss • contribs) 08:45, 8 February 2025 (UTC)

Global ban proposal for Shāntián Tàiláng

Hello. This is to notify the community that there is an ongoing global ban proposal for User:Shāntián Tàiláng who has been active on this wiki. You are invited to participate at m:Requests for comment/Global ban for Shāntián Tàiláng. Wüstenspringmaus (discuss • contribs) 12:42, 2 February 2025 (UTC)

Reminder: first part of the annual UCoC review closes soon

Please help translate to your language.

This is a reminder that the first phase of the annual review period for the Universal Code of Conduct and Enforcement Guidelines will be closing soon. You can make suggestions for changes through the end of day, 3 February 2025. This is the first step of several to be taken for the annual review. Read more information and find a conversation to join on the UCoC page on Meta. After review of the feedback, proposals for updated text will be published on Meta in March for another round of community review.

Please share this information with other members in your community wherever else might be appropriate.

-- In cooperation with the U4C, Keegan (WMF) (talk) 00:48, 3 February 2025 (UTC)

Luna

How do you use Luna. Cactusisme (discuss • contribs) 01:41, 19 February 2025 (UTC)

There should be a "Luna" dropdown menu next to "More". There, you will be able to use all of the features listed in the "Autoconfirmed" column here, which work roughly the same as they do with Twinkle (see w:Wikipedia:Twinkle/doc for information about that). JJP_Master (she/they) 01:59, 19 February 2025 (UTC)

@JJPMaster I don’t see it. I’m on mobile Cactusisme (discuss • contribs) 02:03, 19 February 2025 (UTC)

Unfortunately, Luna is not yet supported using the default mobile skin or mobile app. It does work on the mobile website if you use a skin other than the default ("MinervaNeue"). JJP_Master (she/they) 02:06, 19 February 2025 (UTC)

@JJPMaster I’m sorry, but I don’t understand. Cactusisme (discuss • contribs) 02:07, 19 February 2025 (UTC)

You can use it on mobile if you go here and set the skin to anything other than MinervaNeue. JJP_Master (she/they) 02:09, 19 February 2025 (UTC)

Mines alr in vector Cactusisme (discuss • contribs) 02:15, 19 February 2025 (UTC)

If that's the case, then you should add this to your common.js:

mw.loader.load('//en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User:Þjarkur/NeverUseMobileVersion.js&action=raw&ctype=text/javascript');

This will display the desktop version of the skin whenever you load on mobile, allowing you to use the tool. JJP_Master (she/they) 02:28, 19 February 2025 (UTC)

Ok Cactusisme (discuss • contribs) 04:24, 19 February 2025 (UTC)

Upcoming Language Community Meeting (Feb 28th, 14:00 UTC) and Newsletter

Hello everyone!

We’re excited to announce that the next Language Community Meeting is happening soon, February 28th at 14:00 UTC! If you’d like to join, simply sign up on the wiki page.

This is a participant-driven meeting where we share updates on language-related projects, discuss technical challenges in language wikis, and collaborate on solutions. In our last meeting, we covered topics like developing language keyboards, creating the Moore Wikipedia, and updates from the language support track at Wiki Indaba.

Got a topic to share? Whether it’s a technical update from your project, a challenge you need help with, or a request for interpretation support, we’d love to hear from you! Feel free to reply to this message or add agenda items to the document here.

Also, we wanted to highlight that the sixth edition of the Language & Internationalization newsletter (January 2025) is available here: Wikimedia Language and Product Localization/Newsletter/2025/January. This newsletter provides updates from the October–December 2024 quarter on new feature development, improvements in various language-related technical projects and support efforts, details about community meetings, and ideas for contributing to projects. To stay updated, you can subscribe to the newsletter on its wiki page: Wikimedia Language and Product Localization/Newsletter.

We look forward to your ideas and participation at the language community meeting, see you there!

MediaWiki message delivery 08:28, 22 February 2025 (UTC)

Modernize the shelves

Good day folks. I meandered over here from Wikipedia the other day, and I'm looking forward to contributing more to the project. As I've been looking around, my primary observation is that the navigation system for English Wikibooks is pretty outdated, and could be deterring readers and new contributors. Compare, for example, the RU Wikibooks main shelves pages to our main shelves page, and the RU computing shelf to our computing shelf. Obviously for one reason or another RU Wikibooks has seen a lot more activity, so in our case I think it would make sense to simply modernize the look of all the top-level shelf articles, and then condense all the subtopics into those shelves. Looking through Department:Recreational activities for example, most subtopics only have a few books in them, and it makes for a rather clunky browsing experience. Subtopics in other shelves with a substantial amount of books in them would obviously stay as subtopics. The German cookbook is also a great example of how we might be able to modernize the cookbook. Not sure how many people read this board, but I'd love to hear some thoughts. MediaKyle (discuss • contribs) 13:27, 2 March 2025 (UTC)

IPs making pages?

So, 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)

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)

Wikibooks:Sockpuppets

Just started adding to the sockpuppet guideline draft, based on Wikipedia:Sockpuppetry. I figured this would be an easy way for us to get started on developing the remaining guideline drafts, as we should be able to come to consensus about what exactly constitutes as a bad sock relatively easily. We don't have to make this a policy like Wikipedia does either, given the current size of the project, leaving it as a guideline is fine. If anyone wants to add more to it, or provide some feedback, I'll probably tinker with it a bit more and submit it as a proposal in a couple weeks. If all goes well we can start chipping away at the remaining guidelines, with the eventual goal being to approve a Manual of Style. MediaKyle (discuss • contribs) 13:13, 5 March 2025 (UTC)

Universal Code of Conduct annual review: proposed changes are available for comment

Please help translate to your language.

I am writing to you to let you know that proposed changes to the Universal Code of Conduct (UCoC) Enforcement Guidelines and Universal Code of Conduct Coordinating Committee (U4C) Charter are open for review. You can provide feedback on suggested changes through the end of day on Tuesday, 18 March 2025. This is the second step in the annual review process, the final step will be community voting on the proposed changes. Read more information and find relevant links about the process on the UCoC annual review page on Meta.

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 information with other members in your community wherever else might be appropriate.

-- In cooperation with the U4C, Keegan (WMF) 18:50, 7 March 2025 (UTC)

Deleting stale stubs

The 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)

Islam In The World/Akhtar Aly Kureshy

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)

I've deleted it. JJP_Master (she/they) 00:21, 30 March 2025 (UTC)

Wikidata and Sister Projects: an online event

Hello 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)