User:Headbomb/Sandbox4

Book Reports

 * This is an automated message on behalf of WikiProject Wikipedia-Books

Wikipedia books are topical collections of articles, such as Book:Hadronic Matter or Book:September 11 attacks, which can be downloaded in PDFs, or printed as bounded books. They have been around for about two years now, and several WikiProject have incorporated the Book-Class in their banners. As of writing, there are roughly 1,600 books on a wide range of topics. For those unfamiliar with them, The Signpost had several articles on them (see the banner on the right). Your WikiProject's books can be found in on of the subcategories of either Category:Book-Class articles or Category:NA-Class articles, depending on whether your WikiProject's banner supports book or not.

Some recent development which may be of interest to this project are worth mentioning. Specifically, a new bot has been coded to keep track of the quality of the articles within a book: NoomBot, proposed by Headbomb (BOTREQ) and coded by Noommos (BRFA).

NoomBot looks at the articles found within a book, and then produces a talk page report detailing the assessment ratings of each articles found in the book. It also estimates a rough "average rating" for the book, and reports cleanup tags (such as citation needed, dubious, inappropriate tone, ...) found in each articles. For users familiar with the defunct WolterBot and its cleanup listings, it is very similar to that, except it works on books rather than on all the articles of a WikiProject.

Since examples speak for themselves, here's a report for a small book containing eight articles. On the left is Book:13th Floor Elevators, a book about an American rock band from Austin, Texas; on the right is the book report from NoomBot. The first column lists the articles of the book, the second their assessment ratings, the third lists cleanup issues and non-free media, and the final column gives a link to various cleanup and feedback tools.

Book were already useful tools to monitor changes across a particular topic—the saved book banner, present on each book, contains a recent changes link in the bottom-right corner. However, now they can act as "mini-WikiProjects", with their own "watchlists", assessment tracker, cleanup reports, etc.

WikiProjects interested in monitoring Wikipedia books only need to modify their project banner to handle the book-class via book (otherwise they get rated as NA-Class, instead of Book-Class) and even form their own "book taskforce". Editors can also join WikiProject Wikipedia-Books, which specifically focuses on all things related to Wikipedia books. For more on books, see Books and Help:Books, as well as the above Signpost coverage. Questions, feedback, and suggestions about book reports, or the bot itself should be asked to User talk:NoomBot. General questions about books should be asked to Help:Books/Feedback or Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Wikipedia-Books.