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%2F…
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.
--
Robert Scott Horning