Community Wishlist Survey 2020/Wikibooks

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Community Wishlist Survey 2020
Wikibooks
4 proposals, 88 contributors, 126 support votes
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Project specific maths commands/macros

  • Problem: When writing maths content, frequently used constructions and expressions can be quite long. This makes typing conventions which are used throughout the entire project cumbersome to use. Moreover, changing a notation turns into a correction nightmare, as one has to find all occurrences of the old notation, especially ones containing small deviations. The usual solution in LaTeX would be to define your own macros to abstract these constructions.
  • Who would benefit:
  1. The authors of a project on wikibooks can write more consistent, concise and readable <math> content inside articles.
  2. The readership sees more consistent notation in articles.
  • Proposed solution: Allow project maintainers to add custom entries to the maths configuration which is used in their project. A first solution would be that project administrators can add new LaTeX commands to Extension:Math. A site like b:MediaWiki:Gadgets-definition might be used to add custom LaTeX commands.

A better solution would be that certain LaTeX commands get activated when the current site title match a certain prefix (e.g. the project name). This allows Wikibook projects to add their own LaTeX commands for math formulas. On en.wikibooks.org the LaTeX commands can get activated when the title starts with Social Statistics. Thus on each page like b:Social Statistics/Chapter 2 of the book b:Social Statistics the project specific commands are activated.

Discussion

  • Might be also useful for other Wikimedia projects. For example Wikipedia community can handle the same mathematical notation better and a Wikisource book can better define the same notation for a certain mathematical concept (which might not be in use today). -- Stephan Kulla (talk) 22:39, 8 November 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Voting

Display popups across wikis (interwiki popups)

Interwiki popups concept
  • Problem: At the moment, many pages in various Wikibooks contain a huge number of links to Wikipedia. Most often, these links are needed only to describe the term used in the textbook. But because of this, we have to redirect the user to another project - Wikipedia. This action always negatively affects the user experience, especially in our situation when the links are quite similar. Pop-ups will help to deal with this problem.
Pop-ups have two main attributes that can change user experience:
  1. A piece of the preamble, which may serve as a definition of the term
  2. An explicit indication that the user will move to another project if he clicks on the link.
  • Who would benefit: Wikibook non-prof users
  • Proposed solution: Continue to develop interwiki pop-ups and launch it in Wikibooks. For mobile users: it is necessary to make functionality similar to the functioning of notes in the mobile version.
  • More comments: The screenshot shows the version for Wikipedia, but it also applies to Wikibooks.
  • Phabricator tickets: T67117, T190549 (related:T188871)
  • Proposer: Iniquity (talk) 19:32, 24 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Discussion

  • Might be useful for Wikisource and Wikinews too. And for wiktionary links on Wikipedia too. JAn Dudík (talk) 11:46, 25 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  • Good idea. Urhixidur (talk) 14:16, 25 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  • This is a really good idea -- and would make links across wikis way more helpful for users, Sadads (talk) 13:49, 26 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  • This would also be very valuable for Wikiversity. Additional related proposals:
    1. When editing in visual editor and inserting an interwiki link, list possible existing interwiki target pages just like internal wikilink suggestions are listed.
    2. It would also be ideal it'd it were possible to define a namespace or include a header template that made all wikilinks by default point interwiki to wp. I.e. [[link]] -> w:link.
T.Shafee(Evo﹠Evo)talk 12:07, 28 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Voting

Deletion of subpages

  • Problem: Wikibooks are currently structured mostly on subpages where the [[Book]] is the main page of the book or cover, and [[Book/$subpage]] hosts most of the contents. If we have to delete a Book, we have to manually fetch and delete all of its subpages one by one, which is very tedious if the Book has a large number of subpages. While it might be possible to do this via scripting or a bot, that is not affordable for every administrator out there; so it'd be better if MediaWiki could do this without the need to recourse to external tools.
  • Who would benefit: Administrators; Wikibooks, Wikisource.
  • Proposed solution: I propose that when we open the delete tab, the form let us see and select a list of subpages to delete them altogether with the main page.
  • More comments: Would also benefit Wikisource, given that they use similar structures for handling contents.
  • Phabricator tickets: task T236469
  • Proposer: —MarcoAurelio (talk) 10:55, 25 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Discussion

Voting

EPUB generation

  • Problem: Currently it is difficult to create a non editable version of a completed book. In the past it was already possible for a short time to create EPUBs (of minor quality), this is gone now for a long time. Different from sometimes available PDF-versions EPUB works pretty good for reading offline and on monitors without printing. Meanwhile EPUB got quite popular for digital books with lots of readers, viewers, extensions for browsers. Static, versioned EPUB variants can be downloaded immediately by the audience, can be referenced predictable as sources without the risk of further changes for example for scientific or educational purposes in schools or universities.
  • Who would benefit: 1. The audience gets a stable version of the book to read offline, independent from wikibooks. 2. Authors can provide stable versions of their books in a defined way, including version numbers to be referenceable. 3. EPUBs can be sent as well to libraries like DNB for permanent access for a wide range audience.
  • Proposed solution: Proper, automatic EPUB3 generation: Provide a simple method to generate (and save, provide) static EPUB3 versions of a book, including the option to provide proper metadata in the OPF-file, choice of linear or non linear reading order; automatic aggregation of the complete book (currently one has to add each single chapter of the book manually for the PDF version). Note that SVGs, if used in the book, should be added as SVG files or SVG data islands within a figure of a chapter to get a proper book. Formulars can use MathML for proper markup. Addtionally EPUB3 uses the XML variant of HTML5, therefore usage of semantic markup is relevant for a meaningful, accessible book (elements like section, article, aside, nav, figure, figcaption, data, time, audio, video, table with caption, head, foot, body etc). Usage of semantic markup will require an update of the wiki-system as well to allow authors to generate proper semantic markup with new HTML5 elements, maybe additionally by adding RDFa attributes as well or the specific EPUB:type attribute. Helpful as well: An option to add (alternative) stylesheets for the EPUB.
  • More comments: Might be in general interesting to have an option to provide a book specific stylesheet already for the wikibook as well (maybe another proposal?)
  • Phabricator tickets:
  • Proposer: Doktorchen (talk) 13:44, 23 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Discussion

  • We definitely need to do something here. Ever since we abandoned mwlib/PediaPress, things kept getting worse. The community has lost faith in any WMF-provided solution and has focused on tools like WSexport, which is great but probably harder to scale. Nemo 17:56, 25 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  • Agree. This would also be great for exporting wikijournal articles (currently hosted within Wikiversity and formatted using word documents). Ideally with some ability to edit the default formatting settings (e.g add custom header to each epub page from separate wiki page, definable text margins, definable image margins, single or double column). Also useful, but more difficult, the ability to modify the auto-generated epub (e.g. editable figure and table placement). T.Shafee(Evo﹠Evo)talk 12:15, 28 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]
    • It's shocking that any Wikimedia project should depend on proprietary software like Google to perform basic functions. We probably should provide hosted Nextcloud+Collabora to avoid such nefarious consequences in the interim, but an integrated solution is probably the only way to avoid the problem in the long run. Nemo 17:30, 28 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]
    • If one puts graphics and raster images within a figure element with a related class, it is quite simple to arrange this relative to the surrounding text with CSS, the same for margins different for semantic elementes like section, article, aside, blockquote etc. Rendition types like scrolling, columns can be suggested within the OPF-file, but are more critically for some user-agents, if the book contains more dimensioned features like figures, tables, long words etc. Different from word oder LibreOffice documents presentation can be quite different, much mor comfortable, flexible for the audience, therefore typically positioning of such objects might be restricted to simple media quieries to get something meaningful depending on the size of the viewport and user preferred font-size. If one has at least a generator to get all the content together within a basic EPUB, this would be already a good starting point to create a good EPUB from it manually with ebook-edit from calibre or a simple text editor. Therefore even the generation of a simple raw EPUB would be already a progress compared to the current situation. Doktorchen (talk) 17:52, 28 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  • I'd like to let my Wikibook accessible to print to my students or an EPUB format. Lgjunior

Voting

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