On Feb 15, 2023 at 3:45:23 PM, Samuel Klein meta.sj@gmail.com wrote:
I ran across another reference to our lovely, important book creation tools of yore, on a global Open Education forum https://connect.oeglobal.org/t/what-happened-to-wikipedia-book-creator/4341/2 .
What is the best place to discuss the broad, important version of this?
- How we support conversion to standalone formats, for reading and
printing
- Clarity for Dirk (M2L https://mediawiki2latex.wmflabs.org/),
PediaPress, the PDF-feature https://m.mediawiki.org/wiki/Reading/Web/PDF_Functionalityteam, and other maintainers
This is important to a wide range of reuse, and the uncertainty around what is possible, what is planned, and what is desired by various audiences makes it hard to make progress even when it's obvious that is important.
Why is it important if virtually no one used it over the years it was available? The forum itself points out that very few people ever used these tools. (I was one of them back in the day, and it worked ok but the use cases were super limited, and that was true even a decade ago when smartphones were far less ubiquitous globally.)
Generating a series of print/PDF format articles from the browser is 80% as good with far less effort. We should take all of the engineering resources it would require to resurrect investment in the Book creator, and instead apply them to things like a 10X better offline reader mode for Wikipedia apps and making sure that our apps and mobile website work incredibly well on lower end devices. Both of those things would be much higher impact for reaching readers who might have limited connectivity and therefore find utility in alternative ways to access content.
Wikitech-l mailing list -- wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe send an email to wikitech-l-leave@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/postorius/lists/wikitech-l.lists.wikimedia.org/