User talk:Dextrose/Books/Language families, pt. I
 | Problems have been found in this book. (rev 360260652, at 10:27 05 May 2010 (UTC)). For a detailed explanation of the problems found, and on how to fix them, click on [show] at the right of the blue lines. Redirects
A redirect in a book is not necessarily a problem. For example Richard P. Feynman redirects to Richard Feynman is not a problem redirect because it points to the intended target. However a redirect, such as Nicole (Dead or Alive) to List of characters in the Dead or Alive series#Spartan-458 (Nicole), is most likely problematic, as it will include the List of characters in the Dead or Alive series article, and not Nicole (Dead or Alive) as it once stood. As such, it is good practice to ensure that books include no redirects, if only so this notice doesn't show up.
Duplicate articles Duplicate articles are articles that are included more than once. These are usually the result of redirects to the same article, and unintentional. Although this should not happen very often, it is possible that some articles are intentionally duplicated. Mark these with a comment below the link, such as: :[[Hydrogen]] <!--This article is intentionally included twice in the book because ... -->Comments on the same line as the link will cause the article to be ignored by the PDF.
:[[Hydrogen]] <!--This article is intentionally included twice in the book because ... -->
Parenthesis in article titles
Parenthesis in article titles are usually due to a need to distinguish between two similarly named topics. However in books, context is often clear enough that the parenthesis are superfluous. For example in a book on basketball Robert Smith (basketball) can be renamed Robert Smith without confusing the reader. To do this, simply write [[Robert Smith (basketball)|Robert Smith]]. Although this should not happen very often, it is possible that some articles should keep their parenthesis. For these, simply write :[[Robert Smith (basketball)|Robert Smith (basketball)]] <!--This Robert Smith can be confused with Robert Smith (baseball), also present in this book -->This will let editors (and WildBot) know that this is intentional. The comment must be below the link, if it is on the same line, the PDF will ignore the article.
:[[Robert Smith (basketball)|Robert Smith (basketball)]] <!--Can be confused with Robert Smith (baseball), also present in this book -->
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G'day[edit]
These two volumes are an unorganised collection of categorised language family pages on Wikipedia. I hope someone can do a better job of putting things like this together; there are the following, arguably atrocious, flaws:
- There are no criteria for entries. Basically, I was trying to find all of them.
- There is no logical order to them whatsoever. They went in as I found them. Arguably sections could be meticulously arranged, perhaps by some hierarchy of speaking populations within the family tree.
- There is no guarantee that this list is by any means exhaustive. Of course, this holds true for the Encyclopedia. The books ought to be maintained following the progress of the Wiki, and further questions arise regarding what level of detail warrants inclusion.
I'm not very familiar with this process, nor am I in possession of softwaric magery that might aid me in my ventures. Weak is my mortal form.
In addition, I believe there ought to be similar resources (that I'll probably OCD out at some point for no real reason) on actual languages, as well as more specific data on language dialects, perhaps divided into volumes divided by genetic or geographic population. There would have to be even stricter lines drawn as to which page would fall where.
Given more reasonable organisation, I wouldn't say no to dividing this into three or more smaller books. At the same time, I'd really rather have these things be in self-navigable local documents; do the PDFs we download cross-reference? can they be made to? Dextrose (talk) 05:30, 1 May 2009 (UTC)