User:B7T/subpage

Books interface counterintuitive

I've been testing Wikipedia's new book creator feature, adding information to a user book over several sessions. The default behavior seems to be to create a new book from scratch, when you enable the book creator. No book is listed in the Special:Book form; you have to type it each time, and it asks if you want to overwrite the existing content if you type in the name of a previously created book. I figured out that if you load the book first (from the "open in book creator" link on the book's page), it will append new pages, but will still write over some customizations, like the title page design. If you load the book to which you intend to append content after enabling the book creator, the overwrite prompt adds an "append" option; but it may append content twice (including chapter titles) if you've already loaded the book. Saving the book then overwrites my book cover to the default, and apparently any other customization except chapter titles.

I thought what I would be able to do was more along the lines of saving browser bookmarks:

1. Open bookmarks dialogue.
2. Pick a folder and/or tags for the bookmark
   • Create new folders or tags if necessary...
   • ...or let it be saved in the default folder or highest level list.
3. Optionally write a short blurb to accompany the bookmark.
4. Save the bookmark.
5. Optionally go to your list of bookmarks and rearrange, edit, and/or delete them.

For the book creator, this would be something like:

1. Enable book creator.
2. Upon enabling, you are prompted either to create a new book or choose a title from a list of books you've been working on (if any; an additional feature would be to remove any books from this list, that you're no longer interested in editing.) This book becomes the active book, and you're taken to the Special:Book page, where you can configure chapters and titles if you want.
   • The book title and namespace is pre-filled in the fields at the bottom, and there are links at the top to return to the page from which you activated the book creator, or to add that page to the book from the special page (like the link on the watchlist special page if you try to watch a page that's still loading).
   • When you add a page, it could ask if you want to add it to a chapter, or in a section at the end to be sorted later; if the former, it will let you choose or create the chapter. Such a feature could be especially useful when you add categories to a book. And there should be more divisions than just chapters; textbooks often have units, chapters, and smaller sections in chapters, for example.
3. Introductions that tie the various articles together would be useful for customizing a book. It is, of course, already possible to write your own intros in your userspace, and add those pages to the book, but perhaps a feature could be developed that could include them automatically as part of chapter titles or as includes with articles.
4. When you save the book, the current book should be prefilled in the save section, and a dropdown list (as in step 2) could allow you to change it on the fly. A feature like this would be helpful if you forgot/mistyped the name of the book you wanted to save.
5. A book that was already saved and then customized through the regular editing interface shouldn't lose any of its customizations when updated.