Talk: Wikibooks

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What Should I do with the book I wrote?

A couple of ten years ago, I wrote a book, Codeword Dictionary. No need to ask, it was a real book, they paid me, I did not pay them.

Anyway, I have the copyright and was wondering what I should do with it, now that the Dead Tree edition is out of print and will probably not inspire a second edition.

The book was a dictionary of military operations names. I have used the files to work on the 'pedia's List of operations and projects (military and non-military) page, but we are talking thousands of entries here.

So what should I do? My options include:

• • Nothing
  • Make about a thousand entries to the page mentioned above.
  • Enter the whole thing as a WikiBook.
  • Something else.

Your thoughts, please.[[PaulinSaudi 11:58, 16 Sep 2004 (UTC)]]

If you want to include it there, Wikibooks sounds like the most reasonable place to me. In the format you describe, it sounds more like a complete reference work than an encyclopedia article, so it would be appropriate for Wikibooks. As a complete text, it's probably beyond the scope of Wikipedia itself, though of course pieces of individual information can be added to individual articles as you've been doing. --Michael Snow 15:48, 16 Sep 2004 (UTC)

If you put it in Wikibooks, perhaps others can pull out the parts that are useful into individual Wikipedia entries, saving you the work. I might do a few. – Quadell ^{(talk) (quiz)} 16:08, Sep 16, 2004 (UTC)

Another option might be to put it all into user subpages. Wikibooks seems an uncomfortable match to me, and Wikisource is out according to their current policy. I think you're doing the right thing raising it here for discussion. It's an excellent offer, and might also be a significant precedent.

How do you feel about breaking it into sensible 32k chunks and putting them all up as user subpages? Wikilinks to these from articles would be inappropriate, but wikilinks from talk pages would make the material available to other Wikipedia editors. It seems to me that's exactly the sort of thing the user namespace is here for.

That's my best initial thought. But interested in other views. Andrewa 16:19, 16 Sep 2004 (UTC)

I am unclear on what breaking it into userspace article entails. Can you point me to an example? Would a person looking at The War in Italy still find a link to Operation Soandso? We could chop it into a million little bits, each entry is a stand-alone. Still, giving it to WikiBook seems to be the low-work option. I am leaving in a few days for vacation. I will do nothing until Ramadan, when I return. [[PaulinSaudi 16:58, 16 Sep 2004 (UTC)]]

I assume it's alphabetical, so the first thing would probably be to break it into 27 or 28 pages, one for each initial letter, plus one for an index and one for non-alphabetic initial characters if needed. This is just to get the page size down. You might want then to break some of the larger pages down further, say BAA-BON and BOO-BZZ instead of B, for example, if this split cuts it roughly in half. That's where the index becomes important. This shouldn't be too much work.

So far as the War in Italy goes, at least the more prominent operations and perhaps even all of them would be mentioned, bolded, in the text of a larger article, and these could have redirects or disambiguations pointing to them. This is a lot of work obviously, but putting the material in the user namespace means that other editors can do some of it. Andrewa 12:12, 17 Sep 2004 (UTC)

It would be good to see it, then we could see whether having thousands of articles on it would be good. My gut feeling is that yes, it could be. Intrigue 18:44, 16 Sep 2004 (UTC)

Independently of whatever you may decide to do vis-a-vis Wikibooks, have you considered giving it to Project Gutenberg? Dpbsmith (talk) 18:52, 16 Sep 2004 (UTC)

I agree it's a generous offer, and thank you. One concern I have is whether it might be a little too generous. Even though you have the copyright, and could presumably prevent the publisher from re-issuing the book without cutting a deal with you, the contract might give the publisher some rights. At a minimum, it might restrain you from taking any action that kills the market for a possible reprint, by giving the same text away for free. Before you elect any of the options discussed here, you should probably speak with your publisher and/or your lawyer. JamesMLane 01:39, 19 Sep 2004 (UTC)