Re: [Wikitech-l] GSoC 2013: Improve support for book structures

Hi! Your proposal looks very good. I'll be very happy to help you as co-mentor on this project if is no GSoc project for Proofread Page. Some comments: 1. You should keep in mind that the extension will be used by Wikibook and Wikisource communities so these communities must be involve in the project. 2. For Wikisource, the extension should be nicely integrated with the current proofreading workflow managed by Proofread Page (this can be done in a second time but we should keep it in mind). 3. The extension should, I think, be able to manage metadata about books like the author(s) in order to be able to provide these information in the exported files. The metadata have sometime to be input by the contributors (like the author of a Wikisource book) or to be get from MediaWiki (like the authors of Wikibook books that are the contributors of the book pages) or maybe, in the future, even get from Wikidata. 4. The extension must be simple to use. I believe that one of the main goal is to simplify the edition workflow. So, new wikicode syntax to learn for basic users should be avoided as much as possible (this doesn't concern syntax that will only be used in templates). A good way to archive these goals is maybe be to make book main pages not wikitext based pages, but a page that store in a structured format (like JSON) metadata of the book, a table of content and some free text spaces, all of that edited via a clever form. For that, we can reuse some code written for the Wikidata project (storage with the Content handler, Diff system, DataValue library...). Working in that way will allow to get nice and well-formatted metadata that can be used to improve cataloging of books and avoid the need for people to learn new tags, templates or parser functions in order to create a new books. But this will require more development time. What do you think about it? Thomas (I CC the members of the "Elaborate Wikisource strategic vision" group)