How can we, as a community, improve the LaTeX WikiBook?

Question

The topmost answer in the very popular question What are good learning resources for a LaTeX beginner? recommends the LaTeX Wikibook. I found it helpful as well when writing my thesis, because it provides hands-on practical advice (and because it is always among the first hits on a web search about LaTeX).

However, in the comments it is implied that there are errors and/or bad advice in the Wikibook. It is pointed out that the commenters could easily edit the book, but the discussion ends there. A beginner reading this could be detracted from the Wikibook by these comments (I guess that's their purpose after all) even after these potential flaws were fixed (if there are any).

To underline this, the Wikibooks guidelines tell you to be bold when editing books. My understanding is that replacing Bad Advice™ with better advice in a book would be desirable, especially because the book are meant to be instructional resources.

Thus I'd like to pick up the thread started in the comments of the above-mentioned answer. Since we (as a community) recommend the Wikibook (it is the topmost answer in the "Resources for beginners" question, after all), and the possibility to improve it exists, we should strive to improve the book wherever we see potential for improvement, for the benefit of LaTeX beginners.

Personally, I don't feel knowledgeable enough to discern bad LaTeX advice, but there are people here who can easily tell what's A Bad Idea™ from years of experience. And if those people among us pointed out flaws in the book, we could discuss and eventually fix them.

However, I'm not sure how one would organize such a quest:

• A community wiki question on the meta site or on the main site, where people can point out flaws which they found, which can then be discussed in the comments and subsequently fixed?
• Some sort of chat event, like the "Answer the Unanswered" events? (disclaimer: I've never taken part in one).
• Determine that this is not our job and "the Wikibook community" should fix it? (wait for the problems to "fix themselves", so to say)?
• Determine that, actually, there are no flaws in the book, and this post is superfluous?

Answer 1

The Wikibook only will improve through people with a good LaTeX knowledge actively helping and working on the wikibook. Everybody can join and make changes to the pages there. However, instead of just registering and working on the pages or even just working on the pages without registering it is better to first to try communicate with the people there.

Each wikibook page has an associated discussion page where one can join the current discussion, make suggestions what to improve (and maybe also why).

I registered a few days ago and started working on the German wikibook (and the associated dictionary) after I saw what they presented for chemical typesetting. I started on improving that section but I also corrected errors elsewhere, joined discussions on other topics, made suggestions, waited for feedback and finally applied my changes. My impression was that the people are very happy about new people willing to improve things and are glad to help with any question you might have. So far the experience has been quite fun! :)

If enough of us do the same then in the end the wikibook will improve even if it may be a slow process. (I'll stick with the German version for the time being, though…)

Answer 2

While it would obviously be wonderful if the wikibook was improved, it seems to me that the real problem here is that it is the top-voted resource. Even if the wikibook is improved this second, we have (collectively) been directing people to a poor resource for however long. That's a problem here.

Note that I'm aware that it is not necessarily a TeX SE problem specifically. It may be that the SE voting mechanism is not, in general, very good at selecting better answers. Or that it is not very good at selecting better answers to certain kinds of questions. I'm not saying this is so - perhaps people just vote badly here or perhaps there's some weird interaction between the SE voting system and TeX users. But when I say it is a problem here, I just mean that it is a TeX SE or SE or... problem, as opposed to a wikibook problem. It is 'our' problem in a way that the state of the wikibook itself is not.

Again, I'm not saying it wouldn't be great if it were improved. It would also be great if all those templates were updated, corrected and made sane. Not just good in general. But good for this site. Even so, those are not 'our' problem in the sense that a highly-voted recommendation to use those templates would be.

Answer 3

A wiki is essentially a reference source. As being such it is a very bad place to be a reference material for the beginners and intermediate users of LaTeX. Surely you can place some information about how to use \date or \author but the complexity increases substantially if you just want to push that title down a bit and make a line break in the institution name.

To do this simply, people do a lot of ugly-as-hell hacks which rub people here the wrong way. Simply because we know better. But it just works why should anyone bother about what we think?

The biggest obstacle in TeX to convey is that there are gazillion-many ways to do the same thing since only the expanded tokens matter. How it got to that point is not relevant and that is the major obstacle in making people learn TeX. Coincidentally this is the same reason why old and wrong habits don't die. Because they kind of work for some years and break down out of the blue sky.

Unlike other programming languages the inplace replacement nature of TeX makes it almost impossible to treat the subject in a Wiki fashion. Also it serves as a horrible source of confusion since internet supplies an authoritative tolerance to anything that bears the prefix wiki.

Instead of wasting the time and effort of the community, if there will be a collaborative effort, I would put my money on an intermediate level TeX treatment of an online book (Distilled TeXbook if you like). That would for example, eliminate lots and lots of discussions, edit wars and so on that you see even on math pages.

It can be much better with a Read The Docs type of format such that the wikibookness can be kept (if that is absolutely necessary) but the flow would be much better with a GitHub-powered pull-merge intake and we can have indices, table of contents and much more. Even better, a LaTeX3 solution can be incorporated to all this at any point. A LaTeX3 based introduction can finally make a clear distinction between the document level and programming level formats. So much so that new generation can give up on the old style and start from scratch without the need of learning every LaTeX version before they can perform the simplest hack.

I have the lesser-likened opinion that this much of backwards compatibility is not useful for any purpose other than bragging about it. Things have changed and so have people. The engines are still around and if you are dying to replicate the 30-years old document you still can. That doesn't mean we have to get stuck with a system because somebody wants to compile a 30-years old document.

Irrelevant opinion: In fact, if TeX can't get out of this PDF-output lock, it will be one of those archaic things because interactivity is killing everything on its way.

Answer 4

I work on a textbook in Wikibooks since many years and I am one of the admins in the German Wikibook community. Thus I can only underline the answer by Clemens: We are really happy that he (and other authors of this site) started to improve the German Wikibook about LaTeX in the last weeks and I want to encourage you all to do the same!

I want to supplement his answer by additional notes:

• Wikibooks and tex.stackexchange.com share the same license (namely CC-BY-SA 3.0). Thus you can copy and paste any answer from tex.stackexchange.com into Wikibooks. Take care that you add an URL + the answer's author name into the summary of the edit.
• A good place to report errors are the talk pages which are associated to each article. See Help:Using talk pages for a tutorial how to use them.
• Wikibooks uses wikitext which is similar to Markdown (Markdown is used on this site). Thus it shall be easy for you to learn the syntax of Wikibooks. See Help:Wiki markup for a good summary.
• For LaTeX code you should use <syntaxhighlight lang="latex">..</syntaxhighlight> See Extension:SyntaxHighlight for more details.
• When you need help in editing you can make a question on Wikibooks:Wikibooks:Reading room/Assistance (Wikibooks:Ich brauche Hilfe for the German project about LaTeX)

An additional note for the German LaTeX project:

• Before Clemens, Johannes and others started to make improvements to this project, the project was not actively maintained. Thus you can make changes there directly and I would also encourage you to do so.