Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Books
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Language/nationality categories
[edit]In most categorization schemes for books, the nationality categories are nested within the language categories, which has always felt very weird. I've seen people remove the language categories as it's already nested in a nationality subcategory, which I feel is actually a loss of information. A book can be French, and first published in English, or it can be Swiss and published in German, French, Italian, etc. I feel like initial language of publication is defining apart from nation. Anyone else have any thoughts on this? PARAKANYAA (talk) 02:03, 8 December 2024 (UTC)
- Hm, I share the sense that language and nationality are only correlated, not logically nested. Just consider Canada and French/English. A pure and precise ontology would probably have language and nation categories existing in parallel, at equal placement in the hierarchy. But I’m not sure how much appetite there is to essentially double-tag all works, as eg both “French books” and “books in French”. I don’t consider myself well informed about the best way to organize Wikipedia category infrastructure. ~ L 🌸 (talk) 04:16, 8 December 2024 (UTC)
- Yeah, it's an awkward situation. With countries like France specifically it may pose an issue - but with ones like Switzerland or Canada it is the reverse. PARAKANYAA (talk) 09:59, 10 December 2024 (UTC)
- This is absolutely one of my current bugbears. It's especially frustrating in the novels section, which seems to have created a system where certain non-English language books (see every entry in Category:Hong Kong novels) are in the English-langauge categories, because they were published by authors who came from a country which speaks English as an official language. Additionally, many historical European books, no matter what country they were from, would have been published in French or Latin. Our current categorization system accidentally implies that many of these books were written in modern European languages, because we expect our country-level categories to serve this dual purpose. GreenLipstickLesbian (talk) 01:32, 4 January 2025 (UTC)
- @GreenLipstickLesbian I agree, I think the mild annoyance of double categorization is better than being flat out wrong. PARAKANYAA (talk) 14:00, 4 January 2025 (UTC)
File:The Computer Book (BBC 1982).jpg nominated for discussion
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Link: Wikipedia:Files for discussion/2024 December 28#File:The Computer Book (BBC 1982).jpg. George Ho (talk) 20:14, 7 January 2025 (UTC)
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Category for discussion
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You are invited to join the discussion at Wikipedia:Categories for discussion/Log/2025 January 25 § Cults, which is within the scope of this WikiProject. ▶ I am Grorp ◀ 00:23, 27 January 2025 (UTC)
Lists of encyclopedias by language
[edit]Hi everyone,
I've been (re)writing some article lists of encyclopedias by language. These are essentially spin-offs from main article List of encyclopedias by language. I found it to be helpful to make some overview of the native titles, English titles, dates of publication, and format (printed, digital, or both), and put them into sortable Wikitables.
Also, I'm seeking to resolve the classic confusion that occurs in ambigious article titles and catnames such as List of German encyclopedias or Category:German encyclopedias: what does the adjective German mean? I've made an effort to clarify that these lists, and the categories they are based on, are defined by the language the works were written in, not the country in which they were published, nor the country the contents may be focused on.
The result so far is:
- List of encyclopedias in Dutch (rewritten)
- List of encyclopedias in French (newly written, based on Category:French-language encyclopedias)
- List of encyclopedias in German (newly written, based on Category:German-language encyclopedias)
- List of encyclopedias in Hungarian (only renamed from List of Hungarian encyclopedias)
- List of encyclopedias in Ukrainian (rewritten and renamed)
The point I'm struggling most with is how to present the different formats. I've tentatively divided them into a coloured legend at the top with "printed (paper), digital (online), both*", with a pretty long explanatory note to go with that. (Incidentally, this is based on established practice in "lists of wars involving country x", where ambiguous outcomes require some nuance in explaining, especially when it is debatable.) Because to be frank, the semantics of that tripartite classification are much more complicated that I thought. What do we mean by 'digital'?
- Fulltext photocopies of printed editions? E.g. La Grande Encyclopédie. As the text says: A scan of the full text is available at Gallica: [1]. The article title ranges are given in the volume titles; there is no direct way to go to a particular article. I don't think that is very 'digital' or 'online; this is a far cry from a fully interactive online encyclopedia like Wikipedia.
- Fulltext OCR photocopies of printed editions? This is the above, but with Ctrl+F searchable contents, however still not entry-specific.
- Completely digitised text versions of printed editions that have been made available in offline formats such as CD-ROM, DVD, USB sticks etc.? E.g. Microsoft Encarta. This is a digital entry-specific searchable database, but not online.
- Online entry-specific searchable databases? E.g. Wikipedia. The opposite of the photocopies of printed editions that are flung online without being interactive and searchable by entry, etc.
- Other.... (e.g. we may make distinctions between open-access free encyclopedias and those behind paywalls, usergenerated ones (Wikipedia) and professional ones (Britannica) etc.).
I've thrown these all together under the term "Both*", but is this even helpful for our readers? Should we split it out? If so, how? I'd love to hear your feedback! NLeeuw (talk) 13:21, 14 February 2025 (UTC)