Jon wrote:
I don't think we want a Cookbook-specific guideline, especially as this relates to all maturing textbooks.
However, I don't mind the participants of the cookbook adding additional restrictions or standards to the cookbook as a whole for cookbook-specific guidelines. And other books can do the same thing among their participants. Why exactly should this be something bad?
Personally, I have already assented to deleting these on the request of main contributors to the textbook under the part of our deletion policy that says we can speedily delete:
"A page that has been nominated for deletion due to a general reorganization of the Wikibook by the contributors."
although I confess I was unaware of the next sentence which says: "In this situation, please note the location of the relevant discussion that occured regarding the page cleanup." (which is particularly difficult to achieve if a book has only one main contributor!)
This is not difficult to do, and if there is truly only one contributor, it isn't a problem. But make sure there is only one contributor. The deletion policy also allows you to nominate for deletion content to which you are the only editor/contributor, which should be a no-brainer about being reasonable about contributions. A user that tried to do a massive overhaul of a Wikibook should still be watched carefully if they are working with an older Wikibook that might have inactive contributors. In that case they should at least try to start a dialog on the main discussion page of the Wikibook, which should be fairly obvious to participants. Generally this is the talk page of the table of contents, but it can be elsewhere.
Although for maturing textbooks, we can in the vast majority of cases prettymuch go with what the main contributors say on this issue, I do think we also need to keep provisions allowing for community review. This must be by allowing individual modules to be nominated on VFD (with due weight being given to experts in the subject area) and by being able to review speedy deletions on VFU (whilst acknowledging that if material is reinstated, it probably ought to be moved out of that textbook into another).
I would still appreciate more comments on:
http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Wikibooks:Inclusion_criteria/Proposal
Some bits have changed since originally proposed, and these amendments can be seen here:
http://en.wikibooks.org/w/index.php?title=Wikibooks%3AInclusion_criteria%2FP...
I am looking to see it replace the current wording at WB:WIW in around a month, provided the text can be agreed. (It isn't really meant to be a fundamental change to what we do in practice, even though it is a fundamentally different way of expressing it.)
That, especially for Wikibooks, is an incredibly short period of time, particularly since you havn't mentioned this on the Staff Lounge either. You are talking about a major overhaul of a fundimental policy for the entire project, and expecting that there will be little opposition to even the idea of doing the overhaul? The "What is Wikibooks?" and its predecessor "What Wikibooks is not." came from painful discussions (in terms of arguments and verbal language) that have developed over the courses of years, not months or even days. This is not something that should be done quickly, and is something that should be very widely advertised in terms of seeking input. Something like a global announcement that is site-wide and displayed on every Wikibook page in terms of user input, lasting at least six weeks for the comment period alone. I am saying this due to my own experience with Wikibooks users, and I would strongly object to a major overhaul of a policy page like this (even if it is warrented) if it was changed and I never knew about it.
It is a good first step, but substantially more user comments should be sought before it replaces a policy page like [[WB:WIW]].
I would add that I would expect the inclusion criteria to be read permissively rather than restrictively. Like every policy, this is intended to be an aid to us developing Wikibooks productively going forward, not a tight straitjacket - so the phrase "worthy of study" is meant to mean that some people consider a subject to be "worthy of study", not that the whole world considers it to be so.
Kind regards
Jon
I want to add here that I think this is a good approach to go. Just that we may have to be going a little slower than you are used to with Wikipedia.