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[edit] Homo Ludens

I have been working on Homo Ludens (Book) for some time. Recently an Editor has criticized my attempt to elaborate the text in detail, specifically by chapter. From the comments made, I deduced that perhaps the Editor in question was referring to books in general and I wished to argue that scientific books need to be treated differently.

I have two other books of a similar nature in hand:

The work on these 3 has taken about 3 months so far (spare time).

Now I really do want to conform to best practice and so I arrive here... to find that the info on science-oriented books is... missing?

I really need some help and advice on how to proceed.

In addition, there are these stubs:

WikiProject Anthropology

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WikiProject Books

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They have been there since I started. How does one negotiate between 2 interested parties: Books and Anthropology?

--Михал Орела (talk) 14:33, 17 September 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Suggestions for non-fiction science book

Since I do not find any information on the best practice in writing about science-oriented books then I will attempt to document my own. The first easy observation to make is that the work is hard. At the very least one gives the overview and table of contents. But this can not be sufficient. There must be the equivalent of the plot-summary somehow. When I started I resolved the problem by asking myself how might I characterize a particular topic or chapter?

The immediate solution was to choose a characteristic quotation from the text itself. This proved controversial and I knew it was not ideal and there seemed to be no guidelines. Nevertheless I persisted. Now after all this time I see what it was I attempted. The chosen quotation, good or bad, was this author's way of review — review by a short text.

Coming back to the quotation after a sufficiently long period of time allowed me to see why I had picked that particular quotation. It was like a note to indicate what I considered to be one of the main arguments used by the author.

So! The strategy was: comment out the quotation and fill in the text inspired by it. Any subsequent editor will see the commented text that led to the review.

A second important note on articles for non-fiction science books: one must not only have read the entire book as any reader would, but one must re-read it again in order to review it to capture the critical scientific synopsis, that thing which really characterizes the book as being scientific-worthy. --Михал Орела (talk) 19:10, 24 September 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Contents (and notability thereof)

Hi all

Wanted your views on the following. This previous version of Minor Tactics of the Chalk Stream includes without comment the full ToC, which I deleted as "unencylopedic". Another editor question this decision, pointing out (among other things) that WP:BOOKS provided for a template heading "Contents / Chapters".

In order to avoid specious arguments of this nature, perhaps the caveat that is provided in this page (if not other similar ones) could be expanded to note something along the lines that "an exhaustive list of contents, without any editorial commentary or significance, should not be included".

Thoughts?

Bongo matic 23:02, 13 November 2008 (UTC)

I tend to agree that a section consisting solely of a table of contents is of questionable encyclopedic value. I had come across [1]. It's kind of like writing an article by only creating section headings, with no content in them; it seems like it's done when editors have nothing to contribute to the article. Шизомби (talk) 06:59, 8 May 2009 (UTC)

[edit] Summarizing

My desire is to summarize all the chapters in a book, but my concern is perhaps including too much information on each chapters, rather than too little. Any examples of a lengthy non-fiction book with well summarized chapters? 76.173.203.21 (talk) 20:57, 25 December 2009 (UTC)

In general, every chapter shouldn't be summarized unless they are so distinct as to require it. It would be better to summarize the book as a whole, if possible. -- Collectonian (talk · contribs) 21:01, 25 December 2009 (UTC)