Hi,
As far as I can see, the Collection extension, which provides the Special:Book page, is deployed on nearly all Wikimedia wikis.
Is there data that shows how often do people actually use it?
-- Amir Elisha Aharoni · אָמִיר אֱלִישָׁע אַהֲרוֹנִי http://aharoni.wordpress.com “We're living in pieces, I want to live in peace.” – T. Moore
The correct question is: does it still do anything of value?
Here is what I see on rowiki: Due to severe issues with our existing system, the Book Creator will no longer support saving a book as a PDF.
There is also a link to PediaPress which doesn't seem to work and I can't choose any output format.
Regards, Strainu
Pe sâmbătă, 16 aprilie 2022, Amir E. Aharoni amir.aharoni@mail.huji.ac.il a scris:
Hi, As far as I can see, the Collection extension, which provides the
Special:Book page, is deployed on nearly all Wikimedia wikis.
Is there data that shows how often do people actually use it?
Amir Elisha Aharoni · אָמִיר אֱלִישָׁע אַהֲרוֹנִי http://aharoni.wordpress.com “We're living in pieces, I want to live in peace.” – T. Moore
Even with all output options broken it is still a decent user interface for creating and organizing collections of articles.
On Sun, Apr 17, 2022, 09:29 Strainu strainu10@gmail.com wrote:
The correct question is: does it still do anything of value?
Here is what I see on rowiki: Due to severe issues with our existing system, the Book Creator will no longer support saving a book as a PDF.
There is also a link to PediaPress which doesn't seem to work and I can't choose any output format.
Regards, Strainu
Pe sâmbătă, 16 aprilie 2022, Amir E. Aharoni amir.aharoni@mail.huji.ac.il a scris:
Hi, As far as I can see, the Collection extension, which provides the
Special:Book page, is deployed on nearly all Wikimedia wikis.
Is there data that shows how often do people actually use it?
Amir Elisha Aharoni · אָמִיר אֱלִישָׁע אַהֲרוֹנִי http://aharoni.wordpress.com “We're living in pieces, I want to live in peace.” – T. Moore
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
On Sun, Apr 17, 2022, 09:29 Strainu 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>:
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, 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 “We're living in pieces, I want to live in peace.” – T. Moore
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 (Please see language sidebar for other languages) Regards.
রবি, ১৭ এপ্রিল, ২০২২ তারিখে ৯:১৮ PM টায় তারিখে Galder Gonzalez Larrañaga < 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):
On Sun, Apr 17, 2022, 09:29 Strainu 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>:
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:
- "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, 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 “We're living in pieces, I want to live in peace.” – T. Moore
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
Pe duminică, 17 aprilie 2022, Tito Dutta trulytito@gmail.com a scris:
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
(Please see language sidebar for other languages)
You could probably go though all the pages in all the equivalent categories and have a histogram of usage based on page creation time.
Strainu
Regards.
রবি, ১৭ এপ্রিল, ২০২২ তারিখে ৯:১৮ PM টায় তারিখে Galder Gonzalez Larrañaga <
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):
On Sun, Apr 17, 2022, 09:29 Strainu 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>:
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:
- "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).
- "Extensions used by Wikimedia - Main" group in 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 “We're living in pieces, I want to live in peace.” – T. Moore
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
On 17/4/22 17:40:35, Strainu wrote:
Pe duminică, 17 aprilie 2022, Tito Dutta <trulytito@gmail.com mailto:trulytito@gmail.com> a scris:
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)
You could probably go though all the pages in all the equivalent categories and have a histogram of usage based on page creation time.
This sounded interesting, so I made the histogram, just for enwiki, here it is: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Book_collection_enwiki_histogram.pdf
The count is pages created per month.
Key dates: - February 2009 - initial peak, tool enabled? - May 2013 - rapid increase, it became more visible? - October 2014 - peak usage (1145/month) - End of 2017 - rapid decrease, reduced visibility? - January 2020 - drop to close to zero, tool disabled?
Thanks, Mike
1000 per month! Interesting. Do we have readership / download data for those created?
On Sun, Apr 24, 2022 at 4:24 AM Mike Peel email@mikepeel.net wrote:
On 17/4/22 17:40:35, Strainu wrote:
Pe duminică, 17 aprilie 2022, Tito Dutta <trulytito@gmail.com mailto:trulytito@gmail.com> a scris:
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)
You could probably go though all the pages in all the equivalent categories and have a histogram of usage based on page creation time.
This sounded interesting, so I made the histogram, just for enwiki, here it is:
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Book_collection_enwiki_histogram.pdf
The count is pages created per month.
Key dates:
- February 2009 - initial peak, tool enabled?
- May 2013 - rapid increase, it became more visible?
- October 2014 - peak usage (1145/month)
- End of 2017 - rapid decrease, reduced visibility?
- January 2020 - drop to close to zero, tool disabled?
Thanks, Mike _______________________________________________ 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
Hi,
Realising I am late to this exchange, but I just wanted to share that I used this tool 2 years ago: I (as a volunteer of WMNL) printed the Wikipedia article about the Dutch city of Hengelo through PediaPress, to celebrate the anniversary of collaboration with the library in the town. They had been organising monthly Wiki-gatherings for 5 years and did a lot of work on describing their districts' local heritage: this was how we thanked them for their work.
The book itself was not fabulous (because there were very few corrections I could make to the not-so-perfect visual presentation), but what is a greater gift to a GLAM, or an individual volunteer, than to see the outcome of their years-long work in print?
Just an idea on how this can (also) be used again in the future, if there is a way to fix or re-design the extension.
Best, Ciell
Op ma 25 apr. 2022 om 00:53 schreef Samuel Klein meta.sj@gmail.com:
1000 per month! Interesting. Do we have readership / download data for those created?
On Sun, Apr 24, 2022 at 4:24 AM Mike Peel email@mikepeel.net wrote:
On 17/4/22 17:40:35, Strainu wrote:
Pe duminică, 17 aprilie 2022, Tito Dutta <trulytito@gmail.com mailto:trulytito@gmail.com> a scris:
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)
You could probably go though all the pages in all the equivalent categories and have a histogram of usage based on page creation time.
This sounded interesting, so I made the histogram, just for enwiki, here it is:
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Book_collection_enwiki_histogram.pdf
The count is pages created per month.
Key dates:
- February 2009 - initial peak, tool enabled?
- May 2013 - rapid increase, it became more visible?
- October 2014 - peak usage (1145/month)
- End of 2017 - rapid decrease, reduced visibility?
- January 2020 - drop to close to zero, tool disabled?
Thanks, Mike _______________________________________________ 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
-- Samuel Klein @metasj w:user:sj +1 617 529 4266 _______________________________________________ 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
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 _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list -- wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org <mailto:wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org>, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines> and https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l> Public archives at https://lists.wikimedia.org/hyperkitty/list/wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org/message/ZH47KTOZZA24W5OJN4Z7KJPNQ7ET646J/ <https://lists.wikimedia.org/hyperkitty/list/wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org/message/ZH47KTOZZA24W5OJN4Z7KJPNQ7ET646J/> To unsubscribe send an email to wikimedia-l-leave@lists.wikimedia.org <mailto:wikimedia-l-leave@lists.wikimedia.org>
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A zim collection tool, hooked into / upgrading the current collections extension, would be the best of many worlds. S
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 _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list -- wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org <mailto:wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org>, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines> and https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l> Public archives athttps://lists.wikimedia.org/hyperkitty/list/wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org/...
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I used to use it, but then it broke so I stopped using it. Just one of the things that died out because no-one could be bothered to maintain it. Cheers, Peter
From: Galder Gonzalez Larrañaga [mailto:galder158@hotmail.com] Sent: 17 April 2022 17:47 To: Wikimedia Mailing List Subject: [Wikimedia-l] Re: Collection / Special:Book usage
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):
On Sun, Apr 17, 2022, 09:29 Strainu 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>:
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, 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 “We're living in pieces, I want to live in peace.” – T. Moore
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At appropedia.org I developed a simple but effective JS script that:
1. Gathers all links in the current page 2. Transcludes them all though an API call 3. Replaces the content of the current page for the transcluded content 4. Calls window.print() so that the user can download or print the transcluded content 5. Restores the content of the original page
See https://www.appropedia.org/MediaWiki:Book.js for the script and https://www.appropedia.org/Solar_book for an example. We're quite happy with the script. Easy, simple, maintainable, versatile, etc. Maybe someone wants to adapt it to the Wikibooks use case?
El mar, 19 abr 2022 a la(s) 06:04, Galder Gonzalez Larrañaga ( galder158@hotmail.com) escribió:
The problem is not that it was "Just one of the things that died out because no-one could be bothered to maintain it", it is worse: it was broken on purpose, and not recovered, because the WMF decided that no one cares about it.
You can read about the process here: https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T186740
2022(e)ko api. 19(a) 09:00 erabiltzaileak hau idatzi du (Peter Southwood < peter.southwood@telkomsa.net>):
I used to use it, but then it broke so I stopped using it. Just one of the things that died out because no-one could be bothered to maintain it. Cheers, Peter
*From:* Galder Gonzalez Larrañaga [mailto:galder158@hotmail.com] *Sent:* 17 April 2022 17:47 *To:* Wikimedia Mailing List *Subject:* [Wikimedia-l] Re: Collection / Special:Book usage
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):
On Sun, Apr 17, 2022, 09:29 Strainu 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>:
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:
- "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).
- "Extensions used by Wikimedia - Main" group in 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 “We're living in pieces, I want to live in peace.” – T. Moore
[image: AVG logo] https://www.avg.com/internet-security
This email has been checked for viruses by AVG antivirus software. www.avg.com https://www.avg.com/internet-security
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On Tue, Apr 19, 2022 at 11:04 AM Galder Gonzalez Larrañaga < galder158@hotmail.com> wrote:
The problem is not that it was "Just one of the things that died out because no-one could be bothered to maintain it", it is worse: it was broken on purpose, and not recovered, because the WMF decided that no one cares about it.
That is patently untrue. The book renderer (OCG) was, due to the lack of maintenance, increasingly causing problems for the operators of Wikimedia production services, and the approach it was based on (converting wikitext to LaTeX) resulted in an endless stream of discrepancies in the PDF output. It was replaced with another PDF rendering service that used a headless browser - an approach that resulted in much more faithful rendering (basically it outsourced the cost of maintaining a good PDF generator to browser vendors) but didn't scale well and wouldn't have been able to handle large collections of articles.
I'm not fond of that decision but it obviously wasn't about disabling something that worked before, just for fun. The Foundation had to choose between risking platform stability, a significant time investment to modernize the service (at the detriment of other projects that time could be invested into), and shutting down a feature that saw relatively little use, and chose the third.
FWIW there was a volunteer-maintained service doing LaTeX-based multi-article book generation which might still be functional: https://mediawiki2latex.wmflabs.org/
Here is a regular reminder that: - You can't throw money at a problem and expect it to be solved automatically. - $100M is a lot of money but 1- Not all of it goes to personnel, especially engineering personnel. 2- It's not that much money compared to the rest of technology companies and their personnel expenditure especially the ones with similar scale.
On Wed, Apr 20, 2022 at 11:14 PM Galder Gonzalez Larrañaga < galder158@hotmail.com> wrote:
We may differ in what was first: abandoning it or closing it, but the process is available at phabricator.
Here it wais said FOUR! years ago that the service would be closed and done by PediaPress (what didn't happen): https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T184772#4116906
Here, we have a more detailed post saying that the functionality would be back: https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T184772#4119731
The last details were provided 3 years ago, when it was said that the PediaPress "solution" didn't happen: https://m.mediawiki.org/wiki/Topic:Uxkv0ib36m3i8vol
We migh also have a different view on priorities, but a Foundation with 100 million dollars in a vault can pay for someone to solve this issue, no doubts. The problem is again that we have a vehicle, but no maintenance and no one driving it down the slope.
By the way: the Proton PDF render is also failing if the article has a gallery. But no one cares about it. It used to work, it was broken, and no one was responsible for the fail.
Sincerely
Galder
2022(e)ko api. 20(a) 17:02 erabiltzaileak hau idatzi du (Gergő Tisza < gtisza@gmail.com>):
On Tue, Apr 19, 2022 at 11:04 AM Galder Gonzalez Larrañaga < galder158@hotmail.com> wrote:
The problem is not that it was "Just one of the things that died out because no-one could be bothered to maintain it", it is worse: it was broken on purpose, and not recovered, because the WMF decided that no one cares about it.
That is patently untrue. The book renderer (OCG) was, due to the lack of maintenance, increasingly causing problems for the operators of Wikimedia production services, and the approach it was based on (converting wikitext to LaTeX) resulted in an endless stream of discrepancies in the PDF output. It was replaced with another PDF rendering service that used a headless browser - an approach that resulted in much more faithful rendering (basically it outsourced the cost of maintaining a good PDF generator to browser vendors) but didn't scale well and wouldn't have been able to handle large collections of articles.
I'm not fond of that decision but it obviously wasn't about disabling something that worked before, just for fun. The Foundation had to choose between risking platform stability, a significant time investment to modernize the service (at the detriment of other projects that time could be invested into), and shutting down a feature that saw relatively little use, and chose the third.
FWIW there was a volunteer-maintained service doing LaTeX-based multi-article book generation which might still be functional: https://mediawiki2latex.wmflabs.org/
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
On Wed, Apr 20, 2022 at 11:14 PM Galder Gonzalez Larrañaga < galder158@hotmail.com> wrote:
We may differ in what was first: abandoning it or closing it, but the process is available at phabricator.
What was first was regular production incidents caused by OCG, which would have required a rewrite (and to some extent rearchitecting) to operate smoothly. That would have been a major project, plus the service had a constant maintenance cost (it was a node.js service, and node is relatively maintenance-heavy), and the WMF did not want to maintain two different renderers forever.
We migh also have a different view on priorities, but a Foundation with 100 million dollars in a vault can pay for someone to solve this issue, no doubts.
Yes, or the money (probably a quarter-year work for a team, at least, so that might be something like $300K?) can be used on something else. There are a huge number of things to spend money on, and IMO it's hard to argue for the strategic importance of PDF book rendering. It wasn't used much, it would have been work-intensive to maintain (every new wikitext feature would have required special handling for the LaTeX transformation, and there are all kinds of wikitext/HTML constructs which are not easy to express in LaTeX), and there isn't much value in a PDF of Wikipedia articles when the originals are freely available over the internet (and for people with difficulties accessing the internet, there are better alternatives). (Personally, I don't think Proton was worth the investment, either - it doesn't give much value beyond the PDF generation that most browsers are already capable of doing.)
By the way: the Proton PDF render is also failing if the article has a gallery. But no one cares about it. It used to work, it was broken, and no one was responsible for the fail.
I assume that refers to T209837 https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T209837? The drawback of Proton is that since it uses a headless browser for PDF rendering, there isn't much room to influence how the rendering goes (beyond CSS tweaks or upstream bug reports), so issues like that might not be easily fixed. (OTOH it at least displays galleries, which OCG didn't https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T74386.)
For those who haven't tried it out, here's what the PediaPress output looks like (after it's done compiling the book, it'll give you a preview): https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Book&bookcmd=order_co...
That specific book is a good example of the problems that we've always had with PDF generation by way of LaTeX, such as complex tables. Also note the intermittent appearance of unsupported tags in the output.
As far as I know, the renderer they use is still partially proprietary. I'm not sure if it would still be seen as valuable to open source fully, given that LaTeX is indeed probably a technical dead-end for these kinds of conversions, and given that the codebase is very old.
If you're mainly using English Wikipedia, you might be under the mistaken impression that the book creator is hidden from view. But it is in fact still linked from the sidebar of many of the largest Wikipedias, including French, Arabic, Spanish, Italian, Dutch, Japanese, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Swedish, Ukrainian, and Vietnamese. A link on every page - that's quite a bit of exposure!
I agree it's a fair question what should happen to it: removal, replacement, or repair. In general, I do think there's a strategic case to be made for a more user-friendly way to create custom collections and share/export them in multiple formats (and to point people towards Kiwix and the ZIM format, which are indeed awesome for educational and offline use cases), and it'd be great to see direct collaborations with the OpenZIM/Kiwix community on this as Emmanuel suggests.
Warmly, Erik
Better PDF rendering from browsers themselves by their print functionality (with CSS3’s Paged Media Module[1]) could be another method. There’s often less friction when using features integrated in the browser, and with the much better general rendering and support through HTML engines over other projects like LaTeX (no matter how much I use it myself).
Sadly there doesn’t seem to be much currently done in this track, at least in Chromium[2].
[1]: https://www.w3.org/TR/css-gcpm-3/ https://www.w3.org/TR/css-gcpm-3/ [2]: https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=368053 https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=368053
Étienne
Le 22 avr. 2022 à 16:35, Erik Moeller eloquence@gmail.com a écrit :
For those who haven't tried it out, here's what the PediaPress output looks like (after it's done compiling the book, it'll give you a preview): https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Book&bookcmd=order_co...
That specific book is a good example of the problems that we've always had with PDF generation by way of LaTeX, such as complex tables. Also note the intermittent appearance of unsupported tags in the output.
As far as I know, the renderer they use is still partially proprietary. I'm not sure if it would still be seen as valuable to open source fully, given that LaTeX is indeed probably a technical dead-end for these kinds of conversions, and given that the codebase is very old.
If you're mainly using English Wikipedia, you might be under the mistaken impression that the book creator is hidden from view. But it is in fact still linked from the sidebar of many of the largest Wikipedias, including French, Arabic, Spanish, Italian, Dutch, Japanese, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Swedish, Ukrainian, and Vietnamese. A link on every page - that's quite a bit of exposure!
I agree it's a fair question what should happen to it: removal, replacement, or repair. In general, I do think there's a strategic case to be made for a more user-friendly way to create custom collections and share/export them in multiple formats (and to point people towards Kiwix and the ZIM format, which are indeed awesome for educational and offline use cases), and it'd be great to see direct collaborations with the OpenZIM/Kiwix community on this as Emmanuel suggests.
Warmly, Erik _______________________________________________ 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
Dear Erik, Dear list,
Am 22.04.22 um 21:35 Uhr schrieb Erik Moeller:
That specific book is a good example of the problems that we've always had with PDF generation by way of LaTeX, such as complex tables. Also note the intermittent appearance of unsupported tags in the output.
As far as I know, the renderer they use is still partially proprietary. I'm not sure if it would still be seen as valuable to open source fully, given that LaTeX is indeed probably a technical dead-end for these kinds of conversions, and given that the codebase is very old.
You might like to know that there is a more recent free MediaWiki-to-LaTeX project that is actively maintained by Dirk Hünninger and can be tried out on WMF Labs:
https://mediawiki2latex.wmflabs.org/
I understand that Dirk produced some PDF versions for German Wikibooks, but I do not know whether he is still contributing.
I put Dirk in CC to let him know we speak of matters LaTeX. Maybe he would like to join the conversation.
Best regards, Jürgen.
Hi Juergen,
the mediawiki2latex tool is still used see https://qa.debian.org/popcon.php?package=mediawiki2latex
it can handle complex tables. It is fully open source, distributed as a debian package, which can run on an OS as a docker container. Currently I am only investing little time to keep it working. Still I could do more if demand rises in the furtuer
Yours Dirk
On 22.04.22 22:19, Juergen Fenn wrote:
Dear Erik, Dear list,
Am 22.04.22 um 21:35 Uhr schrieb Erik Moeller:
That specific book is a good example of the problems that we've always had with PDF generation by way of LaTeX, such as complex tables. Also note the intermittent appearance of unsupported tags in the output.
As far as I know, the renderer they use is still partially proprietary. I'm not sure if it would still be seen as valuable to open source fully, given that LaTeX is indeed probably a technical dead-end for these kinds of conversions, and given that the codebase is very old.
You might like to know that there is a more recent free MediaWiki-to-LaTeX project that is actively maintained by Dirk Hünninger and can be tried out on WMF Labs:
https://mediawiki2latex.wmflabs.org/
I understand that Dirk produced some PDF versions for German Wikibooks, but I do not know whether he is still contributing.
I put Dirk in CC to let him know we speak of matters LaTeX. Maybe he would like to join the conversation.
Best regards, Jürgen.
How lovely. Thank you Dirk for your work on this. I was just today talking with a friend about how one might customize a beautiful wikibook and potentially give it its own permanent ID and, say, contribute it to the Open Library.
On Sat, Apr 23, 2022 at 10:14 AM Dirk Hünniger via Wikimedia-l < wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org> wrote:
Hi Juergen,
the mediawiki2latex tool is still used see https://qa.debian.org/popcon.php?package=mediawiki2latex
it can handle complex tables. It is fully open source, distributed as a debian package, which can run on an OS as a docker container. Currently I am only investing little time to keep it working. Still I could do more if demand rises in the furtuer
Yours Dirk
On 22.04.22 22:19, Juergen Fenn wrote:
Dear Erik, Dear list,
Am 22.04.22 um 21:35 Uhr schrieb Erik Moeller:
That specific book is a good example of the problems that we've always had with PDF generation by way of LaTeX, such as complex tables. Also note the intermittent appearance of unsupported tags in the output.
As far as I know, the renderer they use is still partially proprietary. I'm not sure if it would still be seen as valuable to open source fully, given that LaTeX is indeed probably a technical dead-end for these kinds of conversions, and given that the codebase is very old.
You might like to know that there is a more recent free MediaWiki-to-LaTeX project that is actively maintained by Dirk Hünninger and can be tried out on WMF Labs:
https://mediawiki2latex.wmflabs.org/
I understand that Dirk produced some PDF versions for German Wikibooks, but I do not know whether he is still contributing.
I put Dirk in CC to let him know we speak of matters LaTeX. Maybe he would like to join the conversation.
Best regards, Jürgen.
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
Le 17/04/2022 à 09:59, Amir E. Aharoni a écrit :
On Sun, Apr 17, 2022, 09:29 Strainu 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>:
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.
If it was working, I would use it.
Instead, I do "print a page" for each article, then "save as pdf" for each instead of printing, then I merge pdf manually to make the booklet...
This week, we shall do that with about 100 pages from Vikidia, manually collecting them, generating a pdf for each, then merging all pdf, to create the jury report document for the WikiChallenge contest. And every year, I look at the special:book feature and I sigh heavily.
Florence
It currently appears in at least two prominent places:
- "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 “We're living in pieces, I want to live in peace.” – T. Moore
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