Jump to content

Community Wishlist Survey 2019/Wikisource/Improve export of electronic books

From Meta, a Wikimedia project coordination wiki

Improve export of electronic books

Original title (Français): Améliorer l'exportation des versions électroniques des livres
  • Problem: Imagine if Wikipedia pages could not display for many days, or would only be available once in a while for many weeks. Imagine if Wikipedia displayed pages with missing information or scrambled information. This is what visitors get when they download books from the French Wikisource. Visitors do not read books online in a browser. They want to download them on their reader in epub, mobi or pdf. The current tool (Wsexport) to export books in these formats has all those problems : on spring 2017, it was on and off for over a month ; after october 2017, mobi format did not work, then pdf stopped working. These problems still continue on and off.
    Français: Imaginez si les pages Wikipédia ne s’affichaient pas pour plusieurs jours, ou n’étaient disponibles que de façon aléatoire durant plusieurs jours. Imaginez si sur les pages Wikipédia certaines informations ne s’affichaient pas ou était affichées tout croche. C’est la situation qui se produit pour les visiteurs qui désirent télécharger nos livres. Les visiteurs ne lisent pas les livres en ligne dans un navigateur, ils désirent les télécharger sur leurs lecteurs en epub, mobi ou pdf. L’outil actuel (Wsexport) permettant l’export dans ces formats possède tous ces problèmes: au printemps 2017, il fonctionnait de façon aléatoire durant un mois; depuis octobre 2017, le format mobi puis pdf ont cessé de fonctionner. Ces problèmes continuent de façon aléatoire.
  • Who would benefit: The end users, the visitors to Wikisource, by having access to high quality books. This would improve the credibility of Wikisource.

    This export tool is the showcase of Wikisource. Contributors can be patient with system bugs, but visitors won’t be, and won’t come back.

    The export tool is as important as the web site is.

    Français: L’utilisateur final, le visiteur de Wikisource, en ayant accès à des livres de haute qualité. Ceci contribuerait à améliorer la crédibilité de Wikisource. L’outil d´exportation est une vitrine pour Wikisource. Les contributeurs peuvent être patients avec les anomalies de système, mais les visiteurs ne le seront peut-être pas et ne reviendront pas. L’outil d’exportation est tout aussi important que le site web.
  • Proposed solution: We need a professional tool, that runs and is supported 24/7, as the different Wikimedia web sites are, by Wikimedia foundation professional developers.

    The tool should support different possibilities of electronic book, and the evolution of ebooks technology.

    The different bugs should be corrected.

    Français: Nous avons besoin d’un outil professionnel, fonctionnant et étant supporté 24/7, comme tous les différents sites Wikimedia, par les développeurs professionnels de la fondation Wikimedia. Les différentes anomalies doivent être corrigées.
  • More comments: There are not enough people in a small wiki (even French, Polish or English Wikisource) to support and maintain such a tool.
    Français: Nous ne sommes pas assez nombreux dans les petits wiki (même Wikisource Français, Polonais ou Anglais) pour supporter une telle application.

Discussion

When it comes to PDF format, mw:Reading/Web/PDF Functionality is probably also related here? --AKlapper (WMF) (talk) 12:46, 7 November 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Yes it is a "related tool" mw:Reading/Web/PDF Functionality is not covering Wsexport features: Wikisource books are split in multiple subpages and Wsexport is able to know automatically which pages should be included and in which order. It also properly attributes the proofreaders of the Page: pages and extract the relevant metadata (e.g. the author is the original author of the work and not the Wikisource contributors).
On the technical side about Wsexport: its codebase is mostly derived from a quick PHP hack and is not able to scale with the current load on the restricted tools labs capacities. A full rewrite is I believe required in order to get this tool in a working state. Tpt (talk) 09:14, 10 November 2018 (UTC)[reply]
+1 we need to increase reading capability. downloading in e-reader format would expand off-line reader base, increasing use-ability. will require some community management. Slowking4 (talk) 22:00, 15 November 2018 (UTC)[reply]

As a writer of science (Mathematics and Physics) books, it is important for me, to be able to extract these books also in odt form. I have already written three books in both forms (wiki and odt) and the additional effort to do this was not exactly sparse. Of course I need the odt Format, in order to be able to change contents according to the needs of my pupils any time, without needing to change the wiki project. If extraction in odt format exists, then it is very easy to make a pdf out of it (the opposite is not exactly so easy). I already tried to create a Star-Basic macro, that should do part of the job, the wiki-programmers can maybe find there ideas for a wiki2odt converter. If this in not possible, a working pdf converter would also suffice... Yomomo (talk) 05:25, 20 November 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Voting