This is more FYI if you havn't been frequenting Wikibooks for awhile
*** 10,000 Wikibooks modules for EN ***
The English Wikibooks has now passed over 10,000 book modules... which
also puts it in the top 50 wikis on the web (according to [[w:List of
largest wikis]]). Far from a failure, Wikibooks is starting to pick up
some popularity and has a fairly healthy user population, including
vandals and other malcontents. More publicity should happen about
passing this key milestone, but for now this is about all the publicity
that has happened so far. Which brings up the next item of news:
** Wikibooks has a new bureaucrat **
User:Aya has volunteered for and been granted bureaucrat status. What
this means for Wikibooks is that more administrators are going to be
created, with the latest being Geocachernemesis. You can debate if she
will be good at this, but then again that should have been done on the
Request for Admin Status page. The previous bureaucrats have been on
haitus or away from Wikibooks on other projects, and it appears that Aya
is more dedicated to just Wikibooks specifically. Wikibooks is growing,
and the ever present need to police what is happening on Wikibooks is
also growing. Thanks to all of the administrators who have been working
hard in the past to help clean up things like the Ass Pus attacks and in
general cleaning up everything on Wikibooks.
--
Robert Scott Horning
First of all: sorry for crossposting to all lists, but I need to reach
as many people as possible.
There are two things I would like to talk about and maybe this mail is
going to be quite long.
At this stage I took over part of the translation's organisation (or all
of it? we'll see ...)
There are some problems involved when it comes to translations for
wikimania - on one hand we will have people that know how to edit and
that go simply there and edit an article on the other hand we will work
with translators who don't know how to do this and therefore they
receive the article and send it back to me - then their work needs to be
copied and pasted into the wiki.
Therefore I created a page where to collect the names of people who work
for wikimania and a yahoogroup to assure that every article is only
translated once.
The translator's list can be find here:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Translators_that_are_willing_to_co-operate
It is organised by language combinations. I also added myself, but
really I suppose I won't have much time to translate since I will need
the time for organisational tasks.
The translator's list is on yahoo: wikimaniatrans(a)yahoogroups.com
I am inserting all translators there since all articles that need
translation are posted there. The first translator who answers to the
list with "I am doing this translation EN-IT" (just to make an example)
will translate that language combination of that particular article - so
all other translators know that this work is being done.
So if you are interested in co-operating for translations, please add
yourself to the list and subscribe to the yahoo-group. If you won't do
this yourself: just send me a mail indicating
Language combinations
Name
e-mail
Website (if any)
As to the reporters: to be faster in our work it would be great if you
sent me a note with the link as soon as your article is online and ready
for translation. I know that this is not the normal "wiki-way" but we
have to deal with people that are not used to wikis and we don't have
the time to teach them how to work there.
Please drop me a note so that I know you before (it would be great).
As to admins: please post the message that we are on search for
translators in your Beer Parlours and ask people who are interested to
contact me by e-mail (either sabine_cretella(a)yahoo.it or
s.cretella(a)wordsandmore.it) - I understand German, Italian, English,
French, Spanish and write German, Italian, English - I approximatively
understand some more languages, but it is not the case to guess what is
written in this situation, so please bear with me and accept these
limits :-)
For now that's all - the more we are the better we will be and the less
work anyone will do - if there's someone who would like to help with the
copy/paste upload: please let me know.
Ciao!!!!
Sabine
*****
Sabine Cretella
Translations
s.cretella(a)wordsandmore.it
skype: sabinecretella
___________________________________
Yahoo! Mail: gratis 1GB per i messaggi e allegati da 10MB
http://mail.yahoo.it
Potentially interesting. *Not* run by archive.org; the organizer was
just spamming the archivists list. Perhaps someone free can attend
and report back?
SJ
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Samuel Klein <sjklein(a)hcs.harvard.edu>
Date: Jul 26, 2005 12:51 PM
Subject: [archivists] Announcement: Online Conference about eBooks
and Digital Audiobooks (fwd)
To: 2.718281828(a)gmail.com
---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Tue, 26 Jul 2005 09:43:05 -0700 (PDT)
From: Tom Peters <tapinformation(a)yahoo.com>
To: archivists(a)yahoogroups.com, archivists-talk(a)yahoogroups.com
Subject: [archivists] Announcement: Online Conference about eBooks and
Digital Audiobooks
This announcement is being sent to several lists, with apologies
extended to those who receive multiple copies.
You are invited to attend an online conference about books, ebooks,
and digital audiobooks to be held on Thursday, July 28, 2005 (early
Friday morning in Australasia). There is no cost to register, and
there is no registration deadline. Already over 185 librarians,
information technologists, ebook and digital audiobook users,
publishers, and others from across the U.S. and around the world have
registered to attend this innovative online conference.
To participate all you need is an Internet-connected computer running
a Microsoft Windows operating system (Windows 98 or later), Mac OS X,
or Linux. If in addition to text-chatting you wish to communicate via
voice-over-IP, you need to have a microphone connected to--or embedded
in--your computer.
The homepage for the conference website is:
http://www.planetlibrary.info/lgleindex.htm
The direct link to the conference registration page is:
http://www.planetlibrary.info/tinc?key=opjmI0gx&formname=LGLEregister200507
If you want to test your connection prior to the day of the online
conference, here is the link to one of the online conference rooms:
http://67.19.231.218/v4/login.asp?r=7c4d784b&p=0
Access to this room is available 24/7 from now until the conclusion of
the conference. Please note: The first time you enter one of these
online meeting rooms, the operating system you are using may ask for
your permission to download and automatically install a small, safe
software plug-in.
In addition to vendor exhibits and opportunities for informal
networking, this conference will feature the following outstanding
speakers:
Mark Beatty from WILS: Wilsconsin Library Services
Lori Bell (Director of the Mid-Illinois Talking Book Center):
An Introduction to Digital Audiobooks
Charlotte Johnson (Director of User Services at Lovejoy Library,
Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville), and William Harroff
(Reference and Information Technologies Librarian, Holman Library,
McKendree College):
(r)Evolutionary (e)Books
Asra Nomani (Author of the new book Standing Alone in Mecca, one
woman's pilgrimage to reclaim the rightful role of women in Islam):
Interview and Online Book Signing
Jon Noring from the OpenReader Consortium, a cooperative project to
create a universal, open standards digital publication distribution
format.
David Rothman from TeleRead, an organization dedicated to bringing
ebooks home and advocating for well-stocked national digital
libraries.
Blake Squires from Findaway, Inc., which will begin selling the
Playaway self-contained digital audiobook device in October.
Juliet Sutherland from Distributed Proofreaders, supporting the
digitization of public domain books.
Lori Watrous-deVersterre from LibraryCity, dedicated to bringing
ebooks to online communities in the Carnegie tradition.
Claudia Weissman from OverDrive, a leading digital book and digital
audiobook vendor for libraries and retailers.
This online conference is part of Let's Go Library Expo, a planned
series of online conferences on timely topics related to librarianship
and information technology. Please watch for announcements of future
conferences in this series.
It is being organized by:
Mid-Illinois Talking Book Center
North Suburban Library System near Chicago
Alliance Library System in Central Illinois
TAP Information Services near Kansas City
The conference is sponsored by:
OverDrive (www.overdrive.com), a leading digital book and digital
audiobook vendor for libraries and retailers.
For more information please visit the conference website
(http://www.planetlibrary.info/lgleindex.htm) or contact Tom Peters
from TAP Information Services (tpeters(a)tapinformation.com). Thank
you!
Tom Peters
TAP Information Services
1000 SW 23rd Street
Blue Springs, MO 64015
phone: 816-228-6406
email: tapinformation(a)yahoo.com
web: www.tapinformation.com
TAP Information Services provides a wide variety of high quality
planning, consulting, research, and assessment services
supporting libraries, library consortia, government agencies,
professional associations, and other information-intensive
organizations.
[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
Yahoo! Groups Links
<*> To visit your group on the web, go to:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/archivists/
<*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to:
archivists-unsubscribe(a)yahoogroups.com
<*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to:
http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
--
++SJ
I need to solicit major feedback from veteran Wikibookians and the
public in general about this, as I am about to propose a major policy
overhaul. As you know, Wikibooks policy is rarely strictly enforced,
with [[User:Aya]] pointing out that many of our existing policies are
vaguely defined and self-contradictory, and that [[User:Rob Horning]]
showing that sometimes good material may be left without a home (see
debate on [[Biography of Nikola Tesla]]).
As such, I propose to the world at large a change in how we define
what Wikibooks actually is besides from [[WB:WIN]]:
The two basic parts of Wikibooks as we know it is the form of a book
and the concept of what constitutes instructional material. These
should be canonized into [[Wikibooks:Books]] and
[[Wikibooks:Instructional material]] (hereby referred to as
[[WB:IM]]). However, new Wikibookians (or Wikipedia ex-patriates)
may want to create (or may have created) books that are not that
instructional (but remain nonfiction). If we were to make such a
radical overhaul, we might as well broaden the scope of Wikibooks and
add [[Wikibooks:Reference material]] (hereby referred to as
[[WB:RM]]). Hopefully the three will be more of a solid guideline as
to what constitutes a book.
As for organizing books, we need [[Wikibooks:Bookshelf]] for the
basic concept of a bookshelf, as well as "the first Wikibooks
WikiProject", [[Wikibooks:WikiProject Librarian]], for users that
wish to organize, categorize, and otherwise "stock bookshelves" as
new books are made.
We shall also need to overhaul [[WB:MOS]] and [[WB:NC]] to anchor a
uniform appearance across all books. [[WB:HNS]] is to be adopted and
only colon or slash (slash recommended) separators are permitted.
[[WB:MOS]] is to be expanded to cover the following:
* MOS for cover pages ([[Cookbook]], [[Programming]], [[Pokémon]], etc)
* stating that each book has its own MOS that must conform to the
main MOS and [[WB:NC]]
* MOS for general wiki formatting
Feedback among the community is generally appreciated.
I've already put up some discussion on this topic at the staff lounge:
http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Staff_Lounge#Forking_of_Wikipedia_content
This e-mail is mainly to advertise the larger issue to those who might
read this list but don't frequent the Staff Lounge (I'm not sure exactly
how many that is.)
The general gist of what I'm trying to propose is under what
circumstances can content from a Wikipedia article be used as a seed to
start an expanded Wikibook. A Wikibook about Nikola Tesla was started,
in part, due to an edit war on Wikipedia where some Wikipedia editors
wanted to add content, but it keeps getting cut due to the fact that the
article already is quite large.
The Wikibook, titled "The Biography of Nikola Tesla", was IMHO a rather
well put together Wikibook with title page, about 7 "chapters", and a
couple of appendices. Indeed, other than the fact that it was the
subject of an edit war at Wikipedia I thought it was a very well
organized Wikibook, particular in comparison to most of the rest of the
content on Wikibooks. It was a little sparse on content for Wikibooks,
but that should be something that happens over time to expand and is
precisely the purpose of Wikibooks. This Wikibook was ungraciously
deleted over my objections because of a simple majority vote of those on
the delete page.
I guess that I'm trying to modify the deletion policy somewhat to allow
*some* forking of Wikipedia content, provided that the content on
Wikibooks really is an expansion of the Wikipedia article and not just
some POV fight or fork of Wikipedia content. The nature of Wikibooks
certainly allows almost any article on Wikipedia to be turned into a
book, provided there are interested parties willing to write the
content. Forbidding any fork would, in effect, kill almost any Wikibook
stub right now.
--
Robert Scott Horning