On Sun, Apr 17, 2022 at 2:23 PM Emmanuel Engelhart <kelson@kiwix.org> wrote:

Hi

A few things I can share from openZIM/Kiwix perspective on this:
* This, special:book feature, was a good tool 10 years ago
* This would have deserved to be improved/maintained/developed over years
* Today it looks abandoned and I hardly see how we could live a revival
from the Wikimedia side
* We, at openZIM/Kiwix, have been doing Wikipedia selections since 15
years for the WP1 project
* This is something we want to improve and we want to allow more people
to do their own selections automatically, half-automatically or even
manually.
* We even have a stub at https://wp1.openzim.org/ (not really usable,
but the software foundations are there).
* We believe we could provide something even better than what the
Collection extension was.
* Basic Idea is to make a clear separation between (1) selection
platform providing an API (2) Mediawiki Gadget for manual selection on
the Mediawiki instance (3) external rendering platforms... and we are
interested in the ZIM rendering of course but we could think of
enrolling any compatible with the API.

A bit of technical insight can be found here
https://github.com/openzim/wp1/issues?q=is%3Aissue++label%3Aselections+
with these tickets around selection of latest Google Summer of Code.

If someone is interested to have a talk on this topic, feel free to
contact me.

Regards
Kelson

On 17.04.22 18:12, Tito Dutta wrote:
> Hello,
> This was a very useful tool for the readers. I used it a lot when it was
> working.
> User namespace books page category shows 50,000 subpages:
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:User_namespace_book_pages
> <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:User_namespace_book_pages>
> (Please see language sidebar for other languages)
> Regards.
>
>
> রবি, ১৭ এপ্রিল, ২০২২ তারিখে ৯:১৮ PM টায় তারিখে Galder Gonzalez Larrañaga
> <galder158@hotmail.com <mailto:galder158@hotmail.com>> লিখেছেন:
>
> No one or very few use it, because you can't save a book. I had some
> teachers in our university courses who used it to download what
> their students did, but since the WMF decided to break it, evidently
> they are not using it anymore. I repeat: it worked and it was broken
> in purpose. So now we have an option to create a book but no actual
> book can be created, besides printing it with PediaPress.
>
> 2022(e)ko api. 17(a) 09:59 erabiltzaileak hau idatzi du ("Amir E.
> Aharoni" <amir.aharoni@mail.huji.ac.il
> <mailto:amir.aharoni@mail.huji.ac.il>>):
>
> > On Sun, Apr 17, 2022, 09:29 Strainu <strainu10@gmail.com
> <mailto:strainu10@gmail.com>> wrote:
> > >
> > > The correct question is: does it still do anything of value?
> > ‫בתאריך יום א׳, 17 באפר׳ 2022 ב-10:42 מאת ‪Jan Ainali‬‏
> <‪ainali.jan@gmail.com <mailto:ainali.jan@gmail.com>‬‏>:‬
> >
> > Even with all output options broken it is still a decent user
> interface for creating and organizing collections of articles.
>
> This may well be true, but I'm wondering how much is it
> *actually* used. I know I never use it, but it's possible that
> thousand of other people do. If it's true, then everything is
> fine. I can't find a log of its usage, or a statistics page that
> shows how often do people use this feature.
>
> It currently appears in at least two prominent places:
> 1. "Create a book" link in the desktop sidebar (in some wikis; I
> don't see it in the English Wikipedia, but I do see it in
> Swedish and Basque).
> 2. "Extensions used by Wikimedia - Main" group in
> translatewiki.net <http://translatewiki.net>, which means that
> volunteer localizers are asked to translate it with (relatively)
> high priority.
>
> If only, say, five people use it in the whole Wikimedia
> universe, then perhaps someone should consider downgrading its
> prominence or maybe removing it entirely.
>
> On translatewiki, I can move it from "Extensions used by
> Wikimedia - Main" to "Extensions used by Wikimedia - Advanced"
> or even to "Extensions used by Wikimedia - Legacy", but again,
> before I do this, I'd like to make sure that it's not actually
> used by a lot of people.
>
> --
> Amir Elisha Aharoni · אָמִיר אֱלִישָׁע אַהֲרוֹנִי
> http://aharoni.wordpress.com <http://aharoni.wordpress.com>
> ‪“We're living in pieces,
> I want to live in peace.” – T. Moore‬
>
>
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