Hello!
The New Readers team at the Wikimedia Foundation has been offered volunteer
development by a student group from UC Berkeley, called Diversatech.
They'll complete this work within their semester (ending in December).
Given results from the research into offline support in the Wikipedia
Android app
<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Apps/Offline_support/V1_User_resea…>
(which I shared recently on this list) and the many requests from this
group, they're going to develop a prototype for consideration around what a
tool might look like that allows content curators for offline files to
develop a list of articles.
I'd love your feedback for what considerations they should take into play
as they're looking at this. Remember that this work is exploratory and the
scope will end up being smaller than what I imagine we all would like from
a tool like this :)
If you're interested, you can out my quick pass at requirements, and add
requirements there or other thoughts to the talk page:
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/New_Readers/Offline/Content_curation
If we decide to invest further in something like this, we will be sure to
run a fuller consultation as well. I'm also going to encourage them to keep
their progress updated on that page, but can't guarantee that that'll
happen given the short timeline and exploratory nature of the work.
Thanks,
Anne
--
*Anne Gomez* // Senior Program Manager, New Readers
<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/New_Readers>
https://wikimediafoundation.org/
*Imagine a world in which every single human being can freely share in the
sum of all knowledge. That's our commitment. Donate
<http://donate.wikimedia.org>. *
Bjoern,
That looks like an great project! I spoke to some of our offline group, and there are a couple of people who know MWoffliner well, and who could help with this. I’ll be in contact to see if we can set up a Skype or other group call.
Cheers,
Martin
Prof. Martin A. Walker
Dept. of Chemistry
SUNY Potsdam
Potsdam, NY 13676 USA
+1 315 2672271
walkerma(a)potsdam.edu
ORCID: 0000-0001-9202-0356
(walkerma on Wikipedia)
From: Offline-l [mailto:offline-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Bjoern Hassler
Sent: December 06, 2017 07:31
To: Using Wikimedia projects and MediaWiki offline <offline-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
Cc: Olga Vasileva <ovasileva(a)wikimedia.org>; Nicolas VIGNERON <vigneron.nicolas(a)gmail.com>; textbook-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org; discussion list for Wikisource, the free library <wikisource-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
Subject: Re: [Offline-l] [Wikisource-l] FYI - WMF pausing and deprecating some functionality
Dear friends,
We use mediawiki to host teacher education resources for sub-Saharan Africa, see http://oer.educ.cam.ac.uk/wiki/OER4Schools. The teacher programme has had a wide impact, but on the technical side, we really struggle to maintain the site, especially with regard to export to PDF/ePub/ZIM. We've had some expert help some yeas ago from Emmanuel and a WMUK grant, and made some progress, but esp. the PDF export wasn't really ready for prime-time.
We would really appreciate a suite of tools that was well integrated into mediawiki, being able to produce good clean XML/HTML5 (per page), PDF/ePub/ZIM (ideally respecting the various 'hooks'). In fact, we're quite desperate to make progress on this, as we have a new programme starting in Zimbawe. Often it's said that Wikipedia/CC has a 'global reach'. However, we look at the 'legal freedom' (CC licensing, which gives "global legal freedom') vs. the 'technological freedom', the ability to export etc. Yes, "no connectivity" is very slowly disappearing, bu this isn't the issue: Connectivity remains expensive, intermittent, and slow for a large part of the planet, so "technological freedom" often remains elusive - many thanks to e.g. the Kiwix team working on such issues.
We do work in SSA day-to-day, and we'd also love for somebody to work with us to look at our requirements, and see whether they could feed into the overall requirements. If there's any way in which we can engage with those processes at WMF or elsewhere, we'd be very happy to do so.
Looking forward to your thoughts!
Bjoern
On 6 December 2017 at 11:28, Federico Leva (Nemo) <nemowiki(a)gmail.com<mailto:nemowiki@gmail.com>> wrote:
Nicolas VIGNERON, 11/10/2017 20:32:
should we try to integrate WSexport functionalities into more general tool? (for the second option, we need to exchange about our specific needs and desires).
This was already done with mwlib for ZIM and EPUB, but then WMF trashed it. Three years ago we were told "ePUB and ZIM are likely to return", now how much do you believe PDFs will ever work again?
https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-ambassadors/2014-September/0…https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T97672https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T73660
The Italian Wikisource users have used PDF exports nonetheless for a few things, although they are not as useful as the ZIM exports. Please don't rely on assumptions about uselessness of something for you to decide that it's fine to make that something worse.
Federico
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-------- Forwarded Message --------
Subject: Re: [Textbook-l] [Offline-l] FYI - WMF pausing and deprecating
some functionality
Date: Wed, 6 Dec 2017 12:28:13 +0100
From: Dirk Hünniger <dirk.hunniger(a)googlemail.com>
To: Wikimedia textbook discussion <textbook-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>,
Federico Leva (Nemo) <nemowiki(a)gmail.com>, Using Wikimedia projects and
MediaWiki offline <offline-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>, Jon Katz
<jkatz(a)wikimedia.org>
CC: discussion list for Wikisource, the free library
<wikisource-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
Hi,
my tool is also a solution to the problem.
https://de.wikibooks.org/wiki/Benutzer:Dirk_Huenniger/wb2pdf
Yours Dirk
On 06.12.2017 11:52, Federico Leva (Nemo) wrote:
> Jon Katz, 22/11/2017 03:29:
>> The issue you raise, is a known issue being tracked and worked on here
>
> The issue I raise is that you should not make a change that makes life
> worse for all users. The feature is currently useless in 100 % of
> cases, so you should have rolled back immediately to the previous
> system as long as it works even in 0,1 % of the cases.
>
> For now, I'm telling people to use the PediaPress book builder and
> ignore the PDFs produced by Wikimedia Foundation. This is not
> sustainable.
>
> Federico
>
> _______________________________________________
> Textbook-l mailing list
> Textbook-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
> https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/textbook-l
Nicolas VIGNERON, 11/10/2017 20:32:
> should we try to integrate WSexport functionalities into more general
> tool? (for the second option, we need to exchange about our specific
> needs and desires).
This was already done with mwlib for ZIM and EPUB, but then WMF trashed
it. Three years ago we were told "ePUB and ZIM are likely to return",
now how much do you believe PDFs will ever work again?
https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-ambassadors/2014-September/0…https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T97672https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T73660
The Italian Wikisource users have used PDF exports nonetheless for a few
things, although they are not as useful as the ZIM exports. Please don't
rely on assumptions about uselessness of something for you to decide
that it's fine to make that something worse.
Federico
Hey offliners,
In case you're interested, the Foundation will be working to replace OCG
over the coming months. I wanted to make sure you're aware in case you rely
on any of this infrastructure and/or have plans for further development
dependent on it.
What this means in the short term is that PDF book rendering (through Book
Creator) will be shut off for a few months at least while a suitable
replacement is researched, tested, and built.
Here's the full write up:
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Reading/Web/PDF_Functionality
Let me know if you have any questions or if this has major impact to your
work.
Cheers,
Anne
--
*Anne Gomez* // Senior Program Manager, New Readers
<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/New_Readers>
https://wikimediafoundation.org/
*Imagine a world in which every single human being can freely share in the
sum of all knowledge. That's our commitment. Donate
<http://donate.wikimedia.org>. *