Hello Wikisourcerers,
We have some announcements to make from our end related to the Wikisource reader app.
-
The Wikisource reader app entirely depends on the WS-export https://ws-export.wmcloud.org/ tool while downloading the books. As the maintainers of the WS-export tool are currently working to make it more robust and dependable than before, we have decided to wait for them to finish their work and slightly postpone the launch of the app on play stores for everyone to use. -
CIS-A2K has sponsored the development of the app. As some of you might know from recent official communications coming from them that they are recently in a critical situation. That jeopardises the future maintenance of the app for the next few years. We have explored a few stable Wikimedia affiliates from different parts of the world who can host and help maintain the app in upcoming years, but as we have received repeated assurances from the current leadership of CIS-A2K team, the app will be hosted by them under their play store account for now, until it cannot be sustained there. The app will also be available on F-Droid. -
We have worked on a few improvements including fetching titles and thumbnails, localising language names, improving text selection options, etc. -
For titles, as discussed on the Meta-Wiki talk page, the app will query in the following manner, -
Title (P1476 https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Property:P1476) in native language -
label in native language, if the above is not present -
label in multiple language (mul), if the above is not present -
For thumbnails, the app will query in the following manner -
Image (P18 https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Property:P18) -
title page number (P4714 https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Property:P4714) qualifier used in P996 https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Property:P996, if the above is not present -
Apart from the existing language support for Bangla, English, French, Hindi, Marathi, Punjabi, Spanish, Tamil, Telugu, we have added Assamese, Indonesian and Malay after getting requests from some of the participants of the Wikisource conference speaking these languages. The app interface is also available in all these languages to some extent. -
We are also working towards localisation of the app, however it will require some time from our end to host the strings on TranslateWiki. Meanwhile, you can reach out to us if you are interested in assisting us with localisation. -
Now that the core development is done, future work will be done voluntarily. We are more than happy to invite the Wikimedia developer community to send bug reports https://github.com/cis-india/Wikisource-Reader/issues, fixes, and features. We are also looking forward to including app related development in upcoming hackathons and internships. -
We will also be publishing some tutorials and guides to easily structure wikidata items related to works on Wikisource. We hope the community takes interest in improving Wikidata items so that we can bring more works into the app and also into broader access. -
The app now lists 6,577 completed works in 12 languages 🎉 -
Assamese - 23 -
Bangla - 457 -
English - 1785 -
French - 3690 -
Hindi - 1 -
Indonesian - 21 -
Malay - 9 -
Marathi - 65 -
Punjabi - 23 -
Spanish - 345 -
Telugu - 77 -
Tamil - 81
Regards,
Bodhisattwa and Sai Phanindra