This is so cool Felipe! Agreed there's a whole lot that can be done via JS. I know a few other wiki-maintainers who have used or continue to be interested in such tools; copying one :)

SJ

On Sun, Jan 7, 2024 at 8:57 AM Felipe Schenone schenonef@gmail.com wrote:

Hi! Today I coded a simple template that is able to generate something like a book and prompt the user to print or download it. See https://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/Template:Download_PDF for usage and https://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/MediaWiki:TemplateScript-DownloadPDF.js for the code. As you can see, I put it on the English Wikiversity rather than the Basque Wikipedia. This is because template scripts https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/TemplateScripts are not yet enabled on the Basque Wikipedia. If you see potential in this approach, you may want to write to your community and have template scripts enabled there. Then you can copy-paste the template and code and improve upon it. I too miss the Collection extension, but it's been too long to hope for a fix. Perhaps this approach holds more water, at least in the short/mid term. There's quite a lot that can be done via JavaScript like this. Cheers!

On Wed, Dec 27, 2023 at 4:01 PM Galder Gonzalez Larrañaga < galder158@hotmail.com> wrote:

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Dear all, Some years ago, when we started the Education Program at the Basque Wikipedia, we used a lot the Book Creator (or Collections) extension. It allowed to bind some articles and download them in PDF or DOC/ODT formats for further editing (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Book). This was a great feature, as it allowed us to send the teachers and students a collection of articles they had created. The teacher could create free learning materials from the articles created by their students, and download them in DOC/ODT format allowed to edit them, rearrange and add other materials. Some teachers said us that they have created learning materials using Wikipedia articles created by their students.

Anyway, in 2017 the Wikimedia Foundation decided to break the book creator, because there were some errors in the PDF creator. So they disabled the book creator and added a note saying that the system is "Undergoing changes". The message is still visible, but no changes are being done. (You can follow the last messages of redesigning the book creator here:https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T175681).

I know that this is not the most important feature that is broken. There are many other broken things. But creating materials for students, and being able to read them offline or edited by teachers is a feature that aligns with our mission and vision. As always happens, no one is accountable for having something broke for six years. And it doesn't seem that this feature will return in the future. At least, the PediaPress link is still working, but there you can't edit your book, only pay for have it printed.

I think no one knows what will happen with this feature. I write this message simply to say that I miss it a lot.

Thanks

Galder Gonzalez _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list -- wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l Public archives at https://lists.wikimedia.org/hyperkitty/list/wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org/... To unsubscribe send an email to wikimedia-l-leave@lists.wikimedia.org

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That's better than nothing, but still not the best solution. The book creator had options to download in odt format, so anyone downloading it could edit the content. That's what teachers actually need, if we want to be the central infrastructure of free knowledge.

Thanks

Galder ________________________________ From: Felipe Schenone schenonef@gmail.com Sent: Thursday, April 18, 2024 5:20 PM To: Wikimedia Mailing List wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Cc: Karl Fogel kfogel@opentechstrategies.com Subject: [Wikimedia-l] Re: The Book Creator

Hi again, Galder! I just "globalized" the template gadget for downloading PDFs, so now it can be easily installed in the Basque Wikipedia if you feel like it. See https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Template:Download_PDF for the documentation. Cheers!