[Foundation-l] Enabling import from en.wp to en.wb

[John McC]

Hi,

I'm curious why the import function is not currently
enabled from between these two projects. 

en.wikipedia has a strictly enforced policy of
deleting articles with "how-to" materials, and/or
removing sections of articles containing this sort of
information. See, for example, this category:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Articles_containing_how-to_sections

I also remember seeing quite a few articles on the AfD
pages which were decided as "Delete/transwiki to
wikibooks", but don't seem to have shown up on the
transwiki log at wikibooks (though some are simply
copied directly to a main namespace location). 

The current system just seems broken, for several
reasons:

1) Many articles that *are* transwikied end up being
moved without edit histories, and in one case I had to
get a WP admin to undelete a series of articles and
provide the histories. 

2) We (as in the wikibooks admin staff) have no idea
if new modules (i.e., books or chapters) are
transwikied or not. We can often make a good guess if
a new module has a million red links in it, but even
so this doesn't necessarily tell us where it came
from.

3) The current copy/paste method is just unwieldy and
time consuming. Is there any real reason the import
function shouldn't be enabled (I've used it on
wikiversity, and it's quite graceful and easy to use).


4) Many of the articles that are marked as having
how-to sections contain only a slice of information
about a topic that might be part of a larger text, and
stubs just aren't very appropriate to the structure of
wikibooks. For example, I recently transwikied
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithium_ion_battery from
wikipedia, then placed it in an otherwise empty book
called Battery Power (
http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Battery_Power ). To
provide structure for filling out the book, it would
be nice to be able to transwiki related articles (see
table of contents of the book), which may or may not
currently contain how-to information, in order to have
something to build from. (The book could be useful for
emergency preparedness, energy independence,
electronics, etc.). This would be much easier to do
using the import tool.

I'm curious whether there's any strong arguments
against doing this, or if not, perhaps it could be
enabled?

-Johnny

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