Community Wishlist Survey 2020/Archive/Wiki-based slideshows/posters

From Meta, a Wikimedia project coordination wiki

Wiki-based slideshows/posters

NoN Merged with Wikiversity/Sample skins for presentations

There is often a small screen facing the presenter, and a big screen facing the audience; the presenter's screen may show slide notes and timing information
  • Problem: Currently, if you want to upload a presentation to Wikimedia, you convert it to a PDF and put it on Commons. This format is not easily modifiable, reusable, or accessible. If you want to display Mediawiki pages on a big screen, you can use the F11 key to fullscreen the browser content (try it now; hit F11 again to return). But that leaves the screen cluttered with Mediawiki sidebars, and there are no convenient navigation functions for switching between slides.
  • Who would benefit: Anyone wanting to give a slideshow talk, or reuse wiki content in a talk, or vice-versa. Wikiversity users have a particular interest in putting lecture slides online.
  • Proposed solution: A Mediawiki implementation of a web-based slideshow, allowing wiki pages to be used as fullscreen presentation slides. A good addition would be a download/export function to get a flat file containing the presentation. Ideally, there should be second screen capability, so that the presenter can also see a countdown timer and a short set of point-form notes per slide.
  • More comments: Mediawiki obviously already renders in browsers, so this might be a fairly easy way to provide a really useful functionality. It could also attract users and content to Wikiversity.
    • The same format could be used to display an academic poster, made with existing Wikiversity tools, on a screen. SVG already does this well, but less wiki-reusably.
    • The W3C has a (flat-file) format and freely-licensed implementation, HTML Slidy, which might be useful. It exports/is XML; PDF export might also be useful, and might overlap with the article-export proposal.
    • I'm not sure whether it would be appropriate to do this with a skin (skin experts, I'd welcome your comments). If a skin with slide-navigation functions would be OK, then we could do the rest with a template taking, as parameters, a list of the wiki pages/sections to be used as slides, and displaying a slide-thumbnail menu with switch-skin links. Any page with that template would then become a slideshow. Perhaps second-screen capability could be done with a popup?
  • Phabricator tickets:
  • Proposer: HLHJ (talk) 23:45, 3 November 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Discussion

Your proposal could be found in these proposals:

Juandev (talk) 10:00, 6 November 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Sorry, Juandev, just saw this. I'd be happy to merge to this proposal with the sample-skins one. I think the article-PDF proposal has a different goal, although it would be possible to use some of the same technical tools in doing both. I've tried to separate the wish from possible implementation methods, as I am not the best judge of the latter, but I've mentioned the possible overlap in the proposal. HLHJ (talk)
Thanks to Bawolff for assessing the technical difficulty ("at a glance sounds do-able and an apprppriate difficulty level for community wishlist"). HLHJ (talk) 18:37, 9 November 2019 (UTC)[reply]
We agree that this proposal is very similar to Sample skins for presentations, so I am archiving this one (with our system we cannot simply redirect, I'm sorry to say!). @HLHJ: Please feel free to copy over whatever information you'd like to the new proposal. Thank you both for participating in the survey! MusikAnimal (WMF) (talk) 16:15, 15 November 2019 (UTC)[reply]