Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2011-06-06/WikiProject report



This week, we turn our attention to WikiProject Wikipedia-Books. Started in March 2009 by Cerejota, the project is a collaboration to improve Wikipedia's coverage and documentation of Wikipedia-Books (from now on, simply 'books'), as well as to improve and maintain the organization of books, books-related categories, and books-related templates. [A Wikipedia Book is a collection of Wikipedia articles that can be easily saved, rendered electronically in PDF, ZIM or OpenDocument format, or ordered as a printed book.] The project has 20 participants, who currently look after over 1,700 books.

The Signpost interviews project members Headbomb, Discographer, and Sven Manguard. Headbomb is a Canadian Wikipedian who has had a Wikipedia account since 2006, but only became active from March 2008. Discographer, a European living in Canada with his wife, has been a Wikipedian since August 2009, and is a huge fan of The Supremes. Sven Manguard is an American Wikipedian who works primarily in files and back end areas of the project.

What are Wikipedia-Books and what are the most important functions of the project?
 * Headbomb: Basically, it's the rallying ground for anyone with an interest in Wikipedia books. So it serves as a notice board for issues that affect large numbers of books, or a place to ask questions when things are unclear, or guidance is wanted. We've also got watchlists that monitor everything that goes on with books, so it's very easy to track what goes on with books every day.
 * Discographer: Wikipedia-Books are a collective of books we have here on Wikipedia ranging from many different types of subjects. My personal favourite subject of course is on music. An important part of this is to include all the articles on the subject for each book, as their is a "recent changes" function key that allows one to review a grand comprehensive list of changes that may have occured affecting the subject editing matter. This is, of course why, I try and do my very best to include all the articles which are somehow connected to that subject matter.
 * Sven Manguard: I see Wikipedia-Books as a great little fundraiser for Wikipedia. A portion of the sale goes to the WMF. Mind you there are nowhere near enough sales right now to put a dent in obnoxious Jimbo banner season, but one can dream for the future. As for what the books are, they're corporeal manifestations of the millions of hours that the community has put into creating Wikipedia. They are Wikipedia content in paper form. As such they are as flawless or as flawed as the articles that go into the books. Our collection of South Park material, in book form, would beat anything that the local library has on the subject. Our collection of material, on say, "Great Women Scientists of the 20th Century", would not.

How did you get involved in the Wikipedia-Books project?
 * Headbomb: "A while ago, Heiko Hees, head of PediaPress, the developers of the collection extension and the book tool, made a post on one of the various Signpost pages saying he was looking for someone who was involved with the English Wikipedia and was able to create a link between the developers and the community. As I was heavily involved with WikiProjects, proficient with templates, and generally knowledgeable about the behind the scenes stuff, I felt this was right up my alley, so I talked to them, and now I'm part of the team. [The project] existed before I got involved, but it was rather disorganized, and lots of the technical stuff needed for WikiProjects to run smoothly were either nonexistent (like the WikiProject banner) or disorganized (categories). Books were also very new and not many people knew about them, so many were neglected, or of very poor quality. There was no standard way to link to them from mainspace articles (now, this is mostly handled through Wikipedia-Books or at the bottom of banners like Megadeth). I spent lots of time just cleaning up things, writing documentation, and setting up the backbone to make things both user-friendly and bot-friendly."
 * Discographer: "... though not "officially" a member, I like to say I really am (I'm non-commital, that's why I've not "officially" joined). Headbomb and I are the biggest contributers to this project, which I just adore, as I love things like this". "... books are what lets one generate knowledge, for it's what's in them that can be educational and useful".
 * Sven Manguard:: "To be honest, I really don't remember how I wound up working in books. If I had to guess, I'd say that Headbomb brought it to my attention over the IRC, so I looked around a bit and decided to take up PediaPress on their make a book, get a book free offer. I'll admit that I'm not as active as I could be, but I stayed around and made a half dozen books after the initial one. There are still about 90 of those free books left, by the way".

What are the biggest challenges for the project?
 * Headbomb: Cleanup. That's a very tough cookie to crack, much more than on articles. First you inherit all the cleanup of the articles in your book, then have additional cleanup to do like removing certain navigational templates from articles. Then you have additional considerations. In articles, redirects are not very important; but they can greatly affect a book. A redirect from Endgame (album) to Endgame (Megadeth album) is no big deal since you end up where you intended, but if you have a redirect like Barney Calhoun to Characters of Half-Life in Book:Half-Life series, then the book will suffer from it. Likewise, links to disambiguation pages (such as Chell instead of Chell (Portal)) are another thing to watch for. This is very hard to catch manually, but luckily we have book reports from NoomBot to help us with that. Incidentally, books and book reports are wonderful tools for people who are interested in a particular topic, even for people who couldn't care less about books themselves. Every book comes with a watchlist of all their articles (see Recent Changes, on the bottom-right of the banner in Book:Canada), and with a book report of what goes one with the articles of the book themselves. I picked a book about my country, but this obviously applies to all kinds of books, such as one on someone's city, their favourite band or videogame series, or on serious and not-so-serious topics.
 * Discographer: For me, it's the length of what a book is going to turn out to be. If I find an article on an individual with relatively few and light articles, and am interested in turning this into a book, then I'll go ahead and automatically do this. Easy peasy. Now, say for example, I wanted to create a book on Elvis Presley (which I really want to by the way), then that's really going to take a lot of studying, a lot of work, and a lot of time. This is the very matter that dis-interests me in creating such articles like that, as knowing they're going to be of enormous size. Doing these without getting any money for and on our own is a complete different matter.
 * Sven Manguard: Book quality. Making books is easy. Sure it takes time, and as Discographer mentions, it takes research, but making books is a heck of a lot easier than making articles. Trust me, I've done both. However, as I alluded to in the question on what Wikipedia-Books are, books are only as good as the articles that go into them, and there are a whole lot of articles that are in need of improvement. Wikipedia-Books is a worthwhile endeavor, but I think it has yet to really take off because the amount of books that contain material of a high enough quality that people would spend money for them is relatively small. What I recommend is that people find something that they are interested in. If it dosen't have a book on it, they should make that book themselves. Then they should spend some time improving the articles that go into that book. There's something special about being able to hold the fruits of your own work in your hands, to be able to look at it and be proud of it, and the ability to show it to others and say, "This is what I did". Wikipedia books affords people the opportunity turn their passions into real, printed books. It's an opportunity that should not be passed up.

'''What are the most pressing needs for WikiProject Wikipedia-Books? How can a new contributor help today?'''


 * Headbomb: Well, like all WikiProjects we can always use more people. More people equals better books, more books. But in terms of specifics, nearly all topics are under-represented in books. Start up the book creator (or create them manually), if you have ideas for 100 books, there's probably 98 of them that don't already exist, and the other 2 can always use extra attention. For those who don't feel like creating new stuff, pick random books, and check the talk page for the book reports.
 * Discographer: Getting people involved is the most pressing need for Wikipedia-Books. We definitely could use all the help we can get, because with more people, that alone will give us more ideas, and with more ideas that will help turn this into something quite possibly amazing. The more the better!
 * Sven Manguard: Think about your city, your country, your favorite band, your favorite show, your favorite genre of art, literature, or music, your favorite academic discipline, your favorite (insert your passion here), chances are that that topic is missing a book. Not many people remember Wikipedia in its infancy, when even the most basic of topics lacked coverage. Heck, most of the users here today weren't even around when most articles lacked coverage. Wikipedia-Books is one of the few spaces, possibly the only space, where coverage of even the most basic content is missing.

You can download book versions of The Signpost at Book:Wikipedia Signpost. Next week, we'll take to the skies. Until then, glide over to the archive.