User:SB Johnny/sandbox9

Request for policy and structural modifications for transwiki to wikibooks

Wikibooks now has Special:Import enabled for transwikiing from wikipedia. We're not quite ready for the big show (we want our "Transwiki:" pseudonamespace turned into a true namespace first for smooth interwikilinking...material in that namespace will now be permanent redirects so wikipedians can find things they're looking for), but I have begun to transwiki recipes into the Cookbook:" namespace (keep in mind there are very few wikibooks administrators, so clearing the wikipedia backlogs will take some time).

The most recent discussion about this is here, which was where we voted for it, but transwikis from wikibooks have long been a contentious issue for a lot of the wikibookians, because in the past things tended to just get dropped there willy-nilly (often without pagehistories, etc.), sand more often than not just ended up being deleted.

So we're hoping a few policies can be changed here on wikipedia to take full advantage of our shiny new tool. First, we'd like to call an end to copy-paste transwikis (the current mood is to ban copy-paste in lieu of import on the wikibooks side, so the policy here should probably reflect that). Any wikipedian wishing to have something transwikied to wikibooks can simply make the request at Wikibooks:Requests for Import. I personally will bee keeping an eye on Category:Copy to Wikibooks and Category:Articles containing how-to sections, but most of the other admins aren't particularly interested (with the exception of Uncle_G, who I believe is also an administrator on wikipedia).

Second, I'd like to have a few templates/categories we can use to inform both the authors of the articles and the "WP:NOT" patrollers that the transwiki has taken place, and the article can either be switched to a soft redirect, cleaned up to remove how-to/textbookish material, or just deleted. I had made some templates for this a month or so ago, but a bot came through and cleared them out (I never could figure out why), so I'd prefer to leave this part of the work to some more experienced wikipedians (also, the onus of the actual importing and cleaning up on the wikibooks side will most likely be squarely on my shoulders, so I'd rather just watch the policy than try to take part in it).

Templates of the following ilks would be useful:

• 1. A template for articles tagged with {{Copy to Wikibooks}}, along the lines of {{Copied to Wikibooks}} (which is the one cleared out by the bot... it affixes a new category to the page which I hope will be helpful for wikipedians on the cleanup detail).
• 2. A template for articles tagged with {{Howto}}, which would inform any interested party that the article has been safely copied, and the how-to material can be removed. Maybe a category for this too, as a subcategory of Category:Articles containing how-to sections.
• 3. A template for articles imported for forking purposes (i.e., to be used as source material for a book or a chapter of a book). This would be affixed to the talk page of the article in question. This should also be affixed to the talk pages of articles that are copied and then rewritten in an encyclopedic style, so that the contributors whose contributions were removed will (hopefully) find comfort in the fact that they are still being put to good use (and thus hopefully avoid some heated disputes).
• 4. A "no thanks" template for materials that would not have a place on wikibooks. Quite a few of the articles that are tagged for moving to wikibooks are either too stubby to be worth importing (wikibooks is rather unlike wikipedia in the sense that stubs are rarely adopted and developed), aren't appropriate (some stuff seems to actually be transliterations of PD texts, which should go to wikisource), or would clearly not survive our deletion process. Please note also that Jimbo has banned video game guides from wikibooks, so those should go to one of the wikimedia sites (the majority of the ones formerly on wikibooks have gone here).

I should point out that I'm a wikipedian also, and part of why I'm doing the importing is to help the cleanup process here, as well as preventing mess-making there. I'm also a follower of the ism that wikipedia is not doomed, but in some topic areas, wikipedia is more or less done: the only way to improve a lot of the articles is to actually make textbooks out of them, which definitely goes into realms well beyond the limits set by WP:NOT. Wikibooks can be nearly anything, as long as they're NPOV, instructional, and factual: hopefully wikipedians who've already written all they could on their areas of expertise might want to bring it a step further. (Yes, I am plugging a bit here, but after spending a bunch of time wikifying, there is a certain perverse pleasure in de-wikifying :-).)