On Mon, Nov 10, 2008 at 12:41 PM, j.w. thomas <jthomas(a)bittware.com> wrote:
IMO, Wikibooks should continue using Featured Books.
Each book
(featured or not) should provide a link to an associated collection. I
see the collections feature as completely replacing the "Print version"
stuff we had before and which I thought never worked very well in the
first place.
You're right Jim, featured books is still the way our community
reviews and approves books of a certain quality. However, there is
probably also some value in recognizing or even just advertising books
with good collections, as opposed to old crufty collections as I am
sure we will see in the months ahead. How to resolve this problem, if
we resolve it at all, is to be seen. As far as Heiko and PediaPress
are concerned though, this is really a community issue and probably
not one that can be tackled by them technically.
I also agree with the point about print versions, I think the
collections extension is their death knell. The benefit of using
collections in the first place is that we can generate things like
PDFs that reflect the accurate state of the book. Prior to this
extension, PDFs were almost universally out-of-date because they never
reflected the most recent versions of the wiki pages. Print versions
bridged that gap because through transclusions they were always
up-to-date with most recent changes on the wiki and they were
(usually) good enough to be printed or converted to a PDF. With the
collections extension now, I think this is a lot less necessary then
it was. However, print versions still do support some things that the
collections extension doesn't yet: user-specifiable page breaks
(through some fancy HTML), more precise rendering of HTML/CSS objects,
including taking clues from site-wide, per-user, and per-book CSS
classes, WYSIWYG printing, because the browser handles the rendering
instead of the mwlib parser, etc. If we could get some better
formatting in collections in general, or more options to allow the
author to direct the layout of their book, we could definitely shut
print versions down for good.
To this end, I created a template called
[[Collection]], and WK
subsequently improved it. It can be placed on the front page of a book
and it announces the existence of an associated collection - the thought
being that a reader first finds a book that catches his interest using
the traditional routes - then discovers that it has an associated
collection.
There is still some work to be done on that template, and I want to
use some DPL to create lists of books with collections that we could
post around, but this is definitely a good start.
I think it would be great of the "Printable
version" link would somehow
link to a collection - or at a minimum, create a collection with only
that page in it.
A little bit of unification between these two features would be nice,
yes. Hijacking the "printable version" link in the toolbox to
automatically create a PDF of the current page with an attached GFDL
notice would definitely be a good thing.
I have plenty more feedback that I am going to post later, but I
wanted to reiterate some of the things Jim was talking about here
because I think they're all valuable.
--Andrew Whitworth