Showing posts with label Wikipedia. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Wikipedia. Show all posts

11 January 2010

New Book namespace created

Here's something I co-wrote for this week's issue of The Wikipedia Signpost. Again, this version has been slightly edited to be more understandable to non-wikipedians.

By notafish and Headbomb, 11 January 2010

On 28 December 2009, the Book namespace was deployed on the English Wikipedia, intended to host "books" produced by the collection extension. The idea was first proposed in March 2009, and again in December 2009. Shortly after a poll showed clear consensus, the namespace was implemented.

Books were previously hosted in the Wikipedia namespace (Wikipedia:Books/Title) and have since been moved to Book:Title. The namespace is recognized by Wikipedia's magic words, enabling templates to take full advantage of it. The WPBannerMeta template, which is used by several WikiProjects to keep track of articles, has already been updated to recognize the book namespace, and will automatically assess these pages as Book-Class. (See previous article.)

Since the launch of the collection extension about a year ago, more than 550 books have been created. They are typically used by wikiprojects to present selections of their best articles (Book:Anime and Manga Recognised Articles), exhaustive selections of articles on a topic (Book:Hydrogen), or exhaustive biographies (Book:Frédéric Chopin). These can then be downloaded electronically or ordered as printed books. Editors interested in books can join WikiProject Wikipedia-Books, and ask their own wikiproject(s) to support the book-class.


References

• notafish, Headbomb (11 January 2010). "New Book namespace created", The Wikipedia Signpost, 6 (2). Accessed 2010-01-11.

05 December 2009

New ''book-class'' released, WikiProject Wikipedia-Books looking for volunteers

Here's something I wrote for this week's issue of The Wikipedia Signpost. I trimmed some technical sections for brevity.

By Headbomb, 30 November 2009

Wikipedia books can be downloaded electronically in PDF or ODT formats, or ordered in print.


On 23 October 2009, WikiProject Wikipedia-Books, PediaPress, and the Version 1.0 Editorial Team discussed the best way to monitor Wikipedia-Books (collections of articles that can be downloaded electronically or ordered in print, not to be confused with Wikibooks; see previous story). As a result, a new WP 1.0 assessment class was created: the book-class.

This book-class would permit individual WikiProjects to monitor the various books that fall in their scope, and thus oversee merges, renaming, deletions, and so on, by tagging the talk page of individual books with the projects banner (with |class=book). WikiProjects that are interested in adopting the book-class can do so by [...] contacting Headbomb.

WikiProject Wikipedia-Books is also looking for volunteers to join the WikiProject and help convert Good topics and Featured topics into books, as well as participate and create discussions about all things related to Wikipedia-Books.

For more about Wikipedia-Books, see Wikipedia:Books and Help:Books. For pages that need to be tagged by WikiProjects, see Category:Wikipedia Books. To create a Wikipedia-Books, click on "create a book" in the print/export box on the left side of your screen [when editing wikipedia as a logged-in user].


References

• Headbomb (30 November 2009). "News and notes: New book-class released, WikiProject Wikipedia-Books looking for volunteers", The Wikipedia Signpost, 5 (48). Accessed 2009-12-05.

11 November 2009

How to shoot yourself in the foot in three easy steps

1) Have a bad idea. Or if you aren't a Wikipedia editor, go here.
2) Ignore community input. Repeatedly.
3) Do said bad idea.

But don't worry, a bunch of us are working on slapping back some sense in the Wikimedia Foundation. Hopefully these awful (and can you say arrogant and self-absorbed!) messages will be gone soon.

Update: The banners are now down due to technical problems. Hopefully since there's a technical delay and a huge backlash, the WMF will consider the several alternatives proposed by volunteers. More as it develops.

See also

• Phoebe, Ragesoss, Pretzels (11 November 2009). "Controversial 'Wikipedia Forever' fundraiser to start 10 November", Wikipedia Signpost, 5(45). Accessed 11 November 2009.

12 October 2009

PediaPress, part 2

In my last blog entry, I mentioned that I was now working for PediaPress as a "community assistant" or whatever the title I'm supposed to use. I also wanted to give a preview of how to create books and how the printed thing comes out, but the interface was being overhauled, so it didn't make much sense in giving details about something that was going to be obsolete in just a few days. Now that the overhauled has been performed, I can tell you all about it and you won't end up confused if you come back in one week.

Creating a book

Essential you enable the book tool, then browse Wikipedia and select relevant pages. Once you're done with that, you pick a title (and subtitle if you feel like it), arrange the pages by chapters and presentation order. Once you're done, you can order the books in print or download them electronically.

See the documentation of the book creator tool for further details, or alternatively this blog post at PediaPress.

Book covers

Here's some pictures as promised earlier:




Pretty damned sexy book covers if you ask me. Even without considering the Body Modification one...

External links

Book creator tool

02 October 2009

Got a job at PediaPress

You can read all about it here.

Basically, I'll coordinate the behind-the-scenes stuff to make sure that book creation is well-documented, and that both editors and WikiProjects are aware that books exist, and that they have the tools to monitor, improve, and create them.

Which is pretty great since I love doing this sort of thing, and I wanted to work in the publishing world. w00t! For the full job description, see here.

External links

PediaPress
Wikipedia > Help:Books

28 August 2009

And the most cited journal of Wikipedia is...

...the Journal of Biological Chemistry (cited 22227 times), followed by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (14628), Nature (11127), Genome Research (10208) and Science (5803).[a][1]

Some context and history

A while ago, I got the idea of building a compilation of all the journals cited by Wikipedia based on the "|journal=" parameters found in citation templates,[b] and organized them alphabetically and by popularity.[2] This would help to identify the most popular journals that didn't have an article on Wikipedia, potential redirects (for example Phys. Rev. Lett. and Physical Review Letters are the same journals, so someone searching for the former should be automatically be taken to the later).

This allowed us (WikiProject Academic Journals) to create redirects and new articles for a bunch of journals. Before the compilation was built, the most-cited "journal" (see note [a]) without an article (or redirect) was cited 10190 times (Genome Res. which was redirected to Genome Research).[3] After a bit more than two months, the most-cited journal without an article was cited 328 times (Malacologia).[4,5] A pretty good improvement I would argue, although this was the "easy" part. It mostly involved creating redirects rather than entirely new articles, and there is also the fact that highly-cited journals are rarer than the not-so-highly-cited journals. A reasonable goal for the next months would be to push the threshold down to 150.

Wish us luck.

Notes

[a] Some caution about these numbers. These are the number of times for a particular spelling used in the "|journal=" parameter. For example the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences can be written Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. (14628), Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (393), Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (378), Proc Natl Acad Sci USA (350), PNAS (302), Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U. S. A. (151), Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A (121), and so on. These also exclude references that are "manually formatted", which form a significant portion of citations on Wikipedia, and I would not be surprised if they formed a vast majority. For more details, see Journals cited by Wikipedia: Reading the data.
[b] Wikipedia articles can be referenced in many ways. Usually it simply involves writing placing something like
[ref]Author (Date). "Title", ''Journal'', '''Volume''' (issue): pages.[/ref]"
after the sentence in need of a reference. However, it can be annoying to remember the exact way to format a reference. To facilitate this, reference templates can be used instead; these will automatically make your references pretty. What you instead add after the sentence is something like this:
{{cite journal
|author=Jimmy Longpants
|year=2009
|title=I like pirates
|journal=Journal of Pirates
|volume=3 |issue=2 |pages=34-36
}}
which will display as
Jimmy Longpants (2009). "I like pirates", Journal of Pirates, 3(2): 34-36.
The bot retrieves all the "|journal=" parameters of all the citations templates used on all the articles of Wikipedia.

References

[1] ThaddeusB (28 August 2009) "Journals cited by Wikipedia (22 August 2009 dump)", Wikipedia:WikiProject Academic Journals. Consulted 28 August 2009.
[2] Headbomb (30 May 2009). "Journal Compilation", Wikipedia:Bot Requests. Consulted 28 August 2009.
[3] Wikipedia:WikiProject Academic Journals/Journals cited by Wikipedia/Missing1 (30 May 2009 dump). Consulted 28 August 2009.
[4] Wikipedia:WikiProject Academic Journals/Journals cited by Wikipedia/Missing1 (22 August 2009 dump). Consulted 28 August 2009.
[5] ThaddeusB (28 August 2009). "New Upload in Progress", Wikipedia:Wikiproject Academic Journal. Consulted 28 August 2009.

External links

WikiProject Academic Journals