Wikibooks talk:Featured books

I think having a featured book concept would be useful (and I was going to propose one myself before you jumped in ).

I would, however, make the following suggestions/questions:

1. Set a start date - say 1 August - to allow for discussions on the criteria and what books should initally be listed.
2. Drop the minimum page criterion. What's wrong with a great, complete book being 90 pages long? Or 80 pages long? Or 48 pages long (which is meant to be the target length or a Wikijunior book)? Does it matter as long as it does not look unfinished?
3. Drop the pdf requirement. Instead adopt the approach of encouraging pdfs for books that become featured.
4. Where did your proposed starting list come from? Having all books of the monthas potential founding members seems sensible. As does having current hotpicks. Perhaps if we do set a start date, allow being to raise objections to these books by then, otherwise deem them to be adopted. Then have a positive voting/discussion system to allow other nominations.
5. If it works well, we could end up replacing book of the month (why not book of the week, or day, even?).

Jguk 06:01, 22 June 2006 (UTC)Reply

I wouldn't object to any of your changes, so feel free to make any revisions you like. But here's my reasonong for my version:

I chose a 100 page limit in order to not include short guides. It seems unreasonable to me that a textbook would be less than 100 pages. Wikijunior may be an exception, or maybe we should leave it out altogether, since it's a separate project. I chose the proposed list from {{highlighted}} and its talk page. Feel free to remove any books you do not deem worthy of featured status (or vice versa).

I chose PDFs as a requirement because they are very easy to create, but add a lot to Wikibooks' functionality and appeal. The ability to download a textbook is very important, in my opinion, and it'll be easier on browsers if they know that all featured book could be downloaded.

I also didn't want long discussions or voting on whether a book should be listed or not, so I decided to go with simple, general criteria. Anyone can add any book that meets the requirements. I think the "official voted-upon featured status" should only be to bolded books, and the rest of the list should remain unofficial (as long as books reasonably meet the criteria). We can switch to voted-upon books only when Wikibooks grows to a certain point.

But again, this is all trivial, so feel free to change anything or create policies. --hagindaz 06:44, 22 June 2006 (UTC)Reply

Regarding your last suggestion, one possibility is to display a different non-BotM featured book each day of the month on the main page. Since there are 27 of these books at the moment, that works out rather nicely. --hagindaz 06:49, 22 June 2006 (UTC)Reply

I've been toying around with a small template, similar to {{Botm Winner Short}} that will post a small image after a book, for use on a bookshelf to denote books that are featured. This is just more advertising, of course, but it's an easy analog to those BOTM templates. The template is {{Featured}}, and is used like this:

• {{featured|Ada Programming}}
• Template:Featured

It just creates a link to the book, and that little star graphic at the end. --Whiteknight (talk) 22:08, 30 April 2007 (UTC)Reply

This would also be handy for interwiki links, like what wikipedia use -- Kowey 05:15, 1 May 2007 (UTC)Reply

I noticed that the Featured Books logo () looks a little awkward, text-positioning wise, so I was wondering if something like the one below would be better suited.

• 
  Current logo
• 
  My proposal

Suggestions? I'd be glad to change the font, add shading, and so on. Doodledoo 21:03, 25 October 2007 (UTC)Reply

The current logo uses a retro font, layout and colour scheme - whether that was intended, I'm not sure. I like it a lot more than most logos used around here. While there may be a better option, I don't think this is it. I welcome your efforts to find us a new logo. Perhaps something more along the lines of the Nuvola theme would fit in better (especially now that we're using those icons for many major templates. – Mike.lifeguard | ^talk 21:08, 25 October 2007 (UTC)Reply

How about if the font was the same as the original? I could easily change it. Doodledoo 21:26, 25 October 2007 (UTC)Reply

Ta da. Doodledoo 21:47, 25 October 2007 (UTC)Reply

Sorry, it just looks kinda amateur. That's why I suggested something more like Nuvola, which looks really slick and professional. I just don't see the point of trying to imitate what we already have. – Mike.lifeguard | ^talk 16:54, 26 October 2007 (UTC)Reply

Can someone add the following link ? [[fr:Wikilivres:Vitrine]] --90.38.52.70 17:50, 1 November 2007 (UTC)Reply

This one, too? [[de:Wikibooks:Empfehlenswerte Bücher]] --80.136.87.231 (talk) 13:56, 19 March 2008 (UTC)Reply

Done. --DavidCary (talk) 15:22, 2 February 2009 (UTC)Reply

After looking around the site for about 10 minutes, I could not find a feed with just the new featured books, like the one for featured articles on Wikipedia. This would be a nice addition.

You're right, this would be a nice addition, and is something that maybe we could work on. There are relatively few featured books on Wikibooks (compared to featured articles at wikipedia), and we promote new books relatively infrequently. One thing that you could do is to check out the history feed for the featured books page HERE. This feed will show you all the changes to the page, and the page is changed every time a new featured book is added. Of course, it will also show you other edits, such as formatting, spelling, grammar, and organization edits, but it's the price you need to pay for this. Thanks for the suggestion! --Whiteknight (Page) (Talk) 13:33, 11 December 2007 (UTC)Reply

When people look at the list here, some wikibooks have "(PDF) (print)" links after them:

• ... — Algorithms (PDF) (print) — ...

while others don't:

• ... — Consciousness Studies — ...

How do I fix this list to show links for the print and pdf versions of the Consciousness Studies wikibook? And other wikibooks that have print and pdf versions? I'm guessing we need to move the print and pdf versions somewhere else where the {{PDF}} template can find them? Is this something that needs to be mentioned in the Wikibooks:Naming policy? --DavidCary (talk) 15:41, 2 February 2009 (UTC)Reply

I have organized about 2000 PDF files on Commons in the main Category:Pdf files There are a couple of book related pdf subcategories there as well. I would suggest just creating a subcategory for the pdf files. WayneRay (talk) 19:41, 12 July 2009 (UTC)Reply

There appear to be several books listed at WB:FB for which the featured status is not indicated on the book's page and which are not found in the category listing. Being new here I don't know what takes preeminence, so perhaps someone could sort this out.

• Arimaa
• Cognitive Psychology and Cognitive Neuroscience
• Cookbook
• Formal Logic
• Haskell
• How To Assemble A Desktop PC
• Social and Cultural Foundations of American Education
• This Quantum World
• Wikijunior:Animal Alphabet

75.101.206.103 (talk) 08:18, 10 November 2009 (UTC)Reply

Thanks for pointing that out. For a book to be featured, it must first be nominated, discussed, and receive consensus by the WB community. The authoritative source is therefore Wikibooks:Featured books/Nominations or in its archives. I will begin an investigation of the books you've listed to see if they were ever discussed, but it's a lot of work, so I invite others to pitch in. I also propose that we protect WB:FB so that it can be edited by admins only (right now it can be edited by any registered user, which I think is inadequate). --Jomegat (talk) 13:04, 10 November 2009 (UTC)Reply

• Arimaa - promoted on 3 May 2007 by RobinH. Discussion archived here.
• Cognitive Psychology and Cognitive Neuroscience discussed here.
• Cookbook discussed here.
• Formal Logic discussed here.
• Haskell - no evidence found (yet).
• How To Assemble A Desktop PC - no evidence found yet.
• Social and Cultural Foundations of American Education discussed here.
• This Quantum World - discussed here.
• Wikijunior:Animal Alphabet - discussed here.

--Jomegat (talk) 13:27, 10 November 2009 (UTC)Reply

Actually, I'm going to make the proposal to protect this page in the Reading room. --Jomegat (talk) 13:31, 10 November 2009 (UTC)Reply

The "November's new featured books" category, originating at Wikibooks:Featured_books/Templates, appears to be seriously out-of-date. It appears as though that template doesn't get updated much. 93.217.231.219 (talk) 08:08, 28 November 2009 (UTC)Reply

It just adjusts the month name variable. We'd have to actually have some new featured books to update the template. It may be better to just sort out the ones in the top section and comment out the "new featured books" section entirely. -- Adrignola ^{talk contribs} 14:22, 28 November 2009 (UTC)Reply

I know this is not a problem in browsers where collapsing is OK, but on IE, it looks irritating. Will it be possible to decrease the size of the cover pictures and arrange the books one book on each row, rather than three cells per row? Thanks Kayau (talk | email | contribs) 04:05, 1 October 2010 (UTC)Reply

Collapsing works for me in IE 8. One per row will make the page extremely tall; even worse if collapsing isn't working for someone. I made an attempt to drop the thumbnail size on this page, however. It works for the non-SVG images. – Adrignola talk 12:08, 1 October 2010 (UTC)Reply

I reread my comment and realised that the collapsing part makes no sense at all. I still find the current state very irritating because of the odd arrangement, especially social sciences and computing. I don't think arranging in rows will make it taller since the size of the pictures can be further reduced. Kayau (talk | email | contribs) 12:13, 1 October 2010 (UTC)Reply

The wording below as shown on the front page is absolutely incorrect.

Seen a wikibook you like?

It is worse considering the area is for books. Did you see.. or Have you seen would be better.

http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Wikibooks:Featured_books

William Maury Morris II (discuss • contribs) 07:10, 1 September 2012 (UTC)Reply

It's not absolutely incorrect. It's mildly informal. --Pi zero (discuss • contribs) 17:14, 1 September 2012 (UTC)Reply

I was looking at the list of featured Wikibooks and discovered that A-level Computing/AQA is featured among the books. So to clear up a bit of my confusion, is /AQA a separate featured Wikibook or is it a Wikibook chapter? Usually any book with a / and some label usually means it is a chapter of a book.

So the chapter /AQA is that a featured chapter of the book while the book itself isn't a featured Wikibook? It would help in clearing up my confusion regarding this topic and how I add/edit Wikidata items for the works here on English Wikibooks. Looking forward to your help! Thank you! Datariumrex (discuss • contribs) 06:25, 21 August 2020 (UTC)Reply

I see a lot of featured books which don't have their own separate Wikidata items. Instead I see many of the featured Wikibooks which link the book itself to the main subject it discusses. As a fictional example, let's say a Wikibook about Cats links to the concept of Cat. In such an example the Wikidata item for Cat can't be added as instance of = book since a cat is instance of = taxon. It would confuse somebody to see that the Wikidata item is not a book when it links to a Wikibook. Also adding main subject = Cat wouldn't be possible/logical since it would then link to itself. A book about a cat is a book whose main subject is cat, not the book itself.

I've posted in the Wikidata project chat where I list examples of Wikibooks that link to general concepts and Wikibooks with their own items. I'm awaiting community input over at Wikidata so perhaps from these findings it will be easier for Wikibookians to more correctly create/edit Wikidata items directly related to English Wikibooks and relevant data about them. Datariumrex (discuss • contribs) 08:04, 21 August 2020 (UTC)Reply