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>rg>; Nicolas VIGNERON
<vigneron.nicolas(a)gmail.com>om>; 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@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/T97672
https://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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