Wikibooks:Reading room/General

Welcome to the General reading room. On this page, Wikibookians are free to talk about the Wikibooks project in general. For proposals for improving Wikibooks, see the Proposals reading room.

May 2026 Wikimedia Café meetups regarding the Wikimedia Foundation Annual Plan

Hello! There will be two Wikimedia Café discussion opportunities during the last weekend of May. Both sessions will focus on the the 2026-2027 Wikimedia Foundation Annual Plan. Participants may attend either or both sessions.

1. Saturday, 30 May 2026 at 15:00 UTC (timestamp converter), at a time friendly to the Americas, Africa, and Europe
2. Sunday, 31 May 2026 at 05:00 UTC (timestamp converter), at a time friendly to Asia and the Pacific

Café participants are highly encouraged to read in advance at least this summary of the plan. Optionally, Café participants are encouraged to read portions of the plan that interest them and ask questions or provide feedback on the Annual Plan talk page.

Please see the Café page for more information, including tables of timestamp conversions for both sessions, the agenda, and how to register!

↠Pine (✉) 19:44, 21 May 2026 (UTC)

Vote now in the 2026 U4C election

Eligible voters are asked to participate in the 2026 Universal Code of Conduct Coordinating Committee election. More information–including an eligibility check, voting process information, candidate information, and a link to the vote–are available on Meta at the 2026 Election information page. The vote closes on 2 June 2026 at 00:00 UTC.

Please vote if your account is eligible. Results will be available by 14 June 2026. -- In cooperation with the U4C,

Keegan (WMF) (talk) 17:14, 27 May 2026 (UTC)

Discussion at WB:TECH

I started a discussion whether we should keep the FlaggedRevs comment box hidden at Wikibooks:Reading room/Technical Assistance#Is this CSS code necessary?, but I am notifying here due to a lack of participation over there. Thank you. Codename Noreste (discuss • contribs) 22:41, 30 May 2026 (UTC)

Template:Printable testing

Is there any way to use Template:Printable so that it creates a printable version of a different page? I've been wanting to see what it looks like without having to create a subpage. User97104 (fixes) 23:59, 8 June 2026 (UTC)

June 2026 Wikimedia Café meetups regarding the English Wikipedia Editor Reflections project

Hello! There will be two Wikimedia Café discussion opportunities during the last weekend of June. Both sessions will focus on the English Wikipedia Editor Reflections project. The featured guest in the Café will be User:Clovermoss. Participants may attend either or both sessions.

1. 27 June 2026 15:00 UTC (timestamp converter), at a time friendly to the Americas, Africa, and Europe
2. 28 June 2026 03:00 UTC (timestamp converter), at a time friendly to Asia and the Pacific

Please see the Café page for more information, including how to register!

↠Pine (✉) 04:09, 15 June 2026 (UTC)

Images lost in Engineering Acoustics

Hello,

I just made an updated PDF version of the wiki book on Engineering Acoustics. During this processes I realized that 19 Images are missing. I left the respective chapters out of the PDF version. You can find the missing files by opening https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Engineering_Acoustics/Print_version in your web browser and search for the text File: . I am not sure why they were deleted. But possibly they were moved to Wikimedia Commons first and deleted after that. I could try to restore the from the 16 years old PDF version but I lack any authorship information so I think we need to redraw all of them. Furthermore I realized that some of the rest of the images in the wiki book have got a very poor resolution

Yours 18:22, 18 June 2026 (UTC) Dirk Hünniger (discuss • contribs) 18:22, 18 June 2026 (UTC)

@Dirk Hünniger: All media (ABCDEFGHIKLMNOPQRS) except Inductive law pass filter.jpg and Open-twister.gif were once deleted by Jguk and Darklame because after a grace period they still lacked copyright information. ‑‑Kai Burghardt (discuss • contribs) 14:51, 10 July 2026 (UTC)

@Kai Burghardt

Do we also need to delete the PDF then? It contains theses images.

Yours Dirk Hünniger (discuss • contribs) 07:49, 11 July 2026 (UTC)

@Dirk Hünniger: It depends on the images’ contents, whether they’re copyrightable. ‑‑Kai Burghardt (discuss • contribs) 08:40, 11 July 2026 (UTC)

@Kai Burghardt Well to me the look copyrightable. And further more its just the same images that were deleted from the wiki due to copyright issues Dirk Hünniger (discuss • contribs) 13:33, 11 July 2026 (UTC)

@Dirk Hünniger: As far as I understand the issue was a formality. All files must bear license info, regardless whether they’re copyrightable or not. It is quite possible all deleted images don’t meet the threshold of originality, but still were deleted because of this formality. Images like File: Equ1.jpg presumably contain just some rasterized text formula and as such are not copyrightable. I have not had a look at them, so I can’t tell. ‑‑Kai Burghardt (discuss • contribs) 14:30, 11 July 2026 (UTC)

@Kai Burghardt If its just a formality and the images don't meet the threshold to be copyrightable we could just restore the deleted images from the PDF. But keeping the PDF and not restoring the images surely is a contradiction. Furthermore there are quite a lot of books with the same problem. Dirk Hünniger (discuss • contribs) 17:25, 11 July 2026 (UTC)

Citing WikiBooks?

Wikipedia has a page for Citing Wikipedia, but I haven't found one here, so I have a few questions:

1. How would I cite Wikibooks in an essay?
2. Do I need to cite sources on Wikibooks? If so, how?

BlazeFlames (discuss • contribs) 22:48, 18 June 2026 (UTC)

1. This should give you a good method: https://www.scribbr.com/citing-sources/how-to-cite-wikipedia/
2. Generally, no. We have no policy that requires or prohibits citing sources and we have a help page on how to do it, with a number of templates to standardize the process. There is definitely value in citing sources, so I don't want to discourage it.

―Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 09:10, 19 June 2026 (UTC)

@BlazeFlames: As you can see in Special: Version § Installed Extensions this MediaWiki has the CiteThisPage extension installed. On the English‑language edition of Wikibooks you can navigate to Special: CiteThisPage/… even though it is not listed in the MediaWiki: Sidebar (but it’s listed in Special: SpecialPages). However, on WB I would link via the page ID rather than the page title; replace title=Booktitle with curid=123456. ‑‑Kai Burghardt (discuss • contribs) 15:09, 10 July 2026 (UTC)

Unhide the FlaggedRevs comment box?

Reposted from Wikibooks:Reading room/Archives/2026/April#Is this CSS code necessary? as the former link had no participation.

I propose unhiding the FlaggedRevs comment box (via MediaWiki:Common.css) because it might be useful to add in a comment when reverting with the FlaggedRevs reversion, unlike rollback. It might also be useful in cases to add a comment on what the user edited when accepting a revision. Thoughts? Codename Noreste (discuss • contribs) 21:17, 20 June 2026 (UTC)

RFC about AI-generated content in Wikimedia Commons

You are invited to participate in a request for comment on Wikimedia Commons about a policy update for AI content. This may affect files that are uploaded to Wikimedia Commons for use on this project. Thank you. Codename Noreste (discuss) 17:11, 23 June 2026 (UTC)

Deployment of Legal and Safety Contacts Link in the Footer of Your Wiki

Legal & Safety Contacts

Hello community, the Wikimedia Foundation has provided a single legal and safety contact page, to be linked in the footer of your wiki, to ensure access to accurate legal information. This is a regulatory requirement. We have already rolled out links to English, German, Italian, Spanish and other wikis and we will deploy to your wiki soon. Please read more on the project page and leave any comments in this thread or on the talk page.

-- User:Sannita (WMF) (talk) 13:30, 25 June 2026 (UTC)

A question about the user right move-subpages

Even though reviewers have the ability to move 100 pages per minute (per InitialiseSettings.php), they do not have move-subpages, which allows moving a book (with all its subpages) in one single action. Is this user right considered sensitive (hence it is restricted to administrators by default)? Codename Noreste (discuss • contribs) 04:23, 9 July 2026 (UTC)

I'm not 100% sure what the problem is as long as mass moving is limited to admins in the first place, as this can really cause problems (I recently encountered this mass-moving 100 out of c. 260 pages on a wiki). I support filing a ticket at phab: to extend $wgMaximumMovedPages to 1,000. ―Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 05:33, 9 July 2026 (UTC)

Regarding local checkusers

Not to be negative here, but I am not sure what is the point of having local checkusers here, while by policy we explicitly allow stewards to perform CUs here. An example would be because MarcGarver, while a local CU and is sometimes pinged here, has an intermittent pattern of activity here. Codename Noreste (discuss • contribs) 22:15, 9 July 2026 (UTC)

Could you explain your position a bit more? I don't immediately see the issue with having both local CUs and steward CUs. —Kittycataclysm (discuss • contribs) 15:24, 12 July 2026 (UTC)