Talk:Book management 2012/Scope

Page addition wizard?

Hi!

From the description of items "2. Page addition wizard (also containing search filters for finding particular pages)" and "5. Add to a book option for every page" it seems to be supposed that a book is created in the following order:

1. Create one or more pages (to behave like chapters)
2. Group then in a (new) book

This seems appropriated when using the Collection extension to create "books" whose chapters are actually (existent) Wikipedia articles, but I think it doesn't reflect the Wikibooks/Wikisources reallity very well. From what I've seen on Portuguese Wikibooks, I believe the process happens in the opposite direction. Specifically, the authors:

1. Create the book's index (main, root) page, whose name will be the book's name, having links to each one of the future chapters
2. Follow a (red) link from that page to start developing a chapter

So, I think an ideal extension for dealing with books would let the author to provide the book "metadata" first (e.g. categorization, target audience/reading level, development progress, title/subtitle, authors, references, ...), and then allow the creation of its chapters. This is kind of what happens when someone uses wikipedia:Special:Book to create a book by typing the names of existing chapters (articles), instead of going from one article to the other and adding them to a "collection" of pages which will be called a book. Helder 19:50, 13 February 2012 (UTC)

Hello,

I would like to explain my idea.

From what I thought, the "2. Page addition wizard (also containing search filters for finding particular pages)" would be similar to the Special:Book where the user creates a book and adds all the metadata. I'm not sure of the feasibility, but I was thinking to add a page addition mechanism that would enable the user to add links to pages/chapter there itself. Example, if the user creates a book named 'Periodic Table', the user can be provided with a page-addition-wizard which would list pages pertaining to all elements of periodic table (perhaps using a filtered search) and he can select there initially all the pages he wants to add to his book and order the pages/chapters as he wants. I am not sure about this and it is a feature I feel would be good if added. Kindly guide if there is a flaw in this approach.

"5. Add to a book option for every page" comes into picture once the book has been created where the user has an option to add pages he visits to a particular book similar to one in Collection.

--Aashish.mittal 18:30, 14 February 2012 (UTC)

My point is that I view the creation of a book as consisting of:

1. (A lot of) planning
2. Structuring the book index/main page (with red links which will point to the future chapters); and only then
3. Actually creating pages for the chapters

In your example: after the user decides he wants to create a book named "Periodic Table", and go to a page similar to wikibooks:Special:Book, he will not have created any pages of the book yet, so there is no pages to be suggested to that book (the pages already existing on the project are part of some other book, and only of that other book, since two books in principle do not share a common chapter). Helder 12:00, 15 February 2012 (UTC)

Thanks for the info. This was one thing confusing me that can a page can be added to multiple books. Makes sense now. Will revise the design. --Aashish.mittal 18:09, 15 February 2012 (UTC)

MetaBooks

What is "MetaBooks"? Helder 20:08, 13 February 2012 (UTC)

I came across it in the documentation of Collection here. I'm not sure where is it used, but the idea seems good. --Aashish.mittal 18:31, 14 February 2012 (UTC)

Thanks. I've added the link on the page itself. Helder 12:00, 15 February 2012 (UTC)