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Wikisource Community User Group/January 2017 Hangout

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Event information

Check local time on the world clock.

To talk about various Wikisource things, such as:

Notes will be recorded on an etherpad.

If anyone has any trouble joining the Hangout, get on #wikisourceconnect on IRC and we'll try to sort it out.

Notes

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We had a good number of people turn up to the hangout, although some had some problems with receiving the audio. We turned off video to improve things, but it still wasn't great. How can we make this better?

Raw notes available at https://etherpad.wikimedia.org/p/wikisource-hangout/timeslider#2775

Participants

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  • Sam Wilson (WMF, in Community Tech)
  • Bodhisattwa
  • Nicolas Vigneron (bad connexion from Rennes public library)
  • Andrea Zanni (bad connection for me too :-()
  • Thomas Tanon
  • Peter Meyer — occasional user likes Wikisource a lot and uses it for research and fun and quasi-random reading

Apologies

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Good to see that you organized this "meeting". Unfortunately I'll not be able to attend, neither will Wilma. But we do have different things that we want to discuss, and of course we are willing to hear what other wikisourcers have on their minds. So we'll check this etherpad, after the session. And perhaps there can be a more or less regular thing like this in the near future. One thing for now: will Wikisource be present on Wikimania 2017 in Canada? And what is on the list for this event, as far as WS is concerned? Greetings to all. s:nl:Gebruiker:Dick Bos or s:en:User:Dick Bos.

Discussions

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Aiming to go through the Wikisource results of the Community Wishlist Survey.

Sam is sitting on the fence as a Foundation staff member as well as a community member, and will work on Wikisource things in both capacities.

Create new Han Characters with IDS extension for Wikisource

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Proposal; 53 votes; phab:T154044.

An unexpectedly-popular proposal! 中国语文 stuff was totally a surprise, came in under the radar.

(Andrea) that for me is a lesson. Nobody outside Chinese WS knew anything about that, and it's incredible we didn't even heard of that in the mailing list, or conference, or wikimania, or whatever. There was probably not many Chinese people there; there is probably something to learn from that!

Sam: the wishlist survey reached new people that weren't reached before?

A MediaWiki extension is already written, and a companion image-generating tool. But the tool is written in Java and Chinese, and there are some issues for the reviews before getting it into production.

The current plan is to translate the Chinese portion of the java code and have the security review done. Until then (and required anyway) it can run on Tool Labs and requires a caching system to be built into the extension.

Upload Wikisource text wizard

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Proposal; 24 votes; phab:T154413.

Is this feasible? Is it trying to do too many things? We don't want one tool that does all the things; better to have a) a tool for Internet Archive to Commons; and b) a tool to make it far easier to have good metadata on Index pages (i.e. pull from Wikidata).

Is the first of these solved by the IA Upload tool? Possibly it is, once Alex Brollo's better DjVu creation system is built into it (Sam is working on this now). The input to this process (into IA) can be a PDF or a set of scanned images in a zip file.

Another idea is to completely re-think the "upload book" tool, because even once it's working correctly it still makes people have to go away from Wikisource and know about IA and Commons and things that make it more complicated and far from easy. For example, have have to know the link to Tool Labs, and then how to format the book template on Commons, and then from there to link to the Index page and how to fill the metadata there. Not friendly to the end user.

A better system would be an Upload Wizard that runs directly in Wikisource and doesn't make the user to go to other sites. IA is important for GLAMs and provides important technical benefits for free like OCR, PDF, and a good viewer.

Would this look something like the Upload Wizard's campaigns? No, it's more complicated than that, because we need extra custom code to create DjVu files. This is more akin to the Flickr import system.

According to phab:T49561 it seems unlikely that anything Wikisource-specific will be built into UploadWizard.

All that aside, once the ia-upload improvements are complete, what's the next highest priority for this? Better metadata — improved connections (from Wikisource Index pages, and Commons book template fields) to Wikidata, which is where all the data should ideally be. Best to make this work just for newly-added works, and tackle the backlog after that.

A general bibliographic editing interface to Wikidata? Simplify the system of data entry, and people will get the data up to date. Then it can be used in the various places it's required.

The whole question of the impact of the upcoming structured data on Commons is still an unknown, but mostly for bibliographic data probably won't be huge.

Some metadata systems do or could link to Wikisource — the Italian and Australian national libraries. Then library searchers could find Wikisource texts alongside their normal search results.

Automated reader's portal

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This requires better metadata.

Make Wikisource "book-based"

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This requires better metadata.

Delete all NS:Page while deleting an index file

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Not so difficult, good idea, probably best implemented as part of the ProofreadPage extension.

Make the Page proofreading interface easier to use

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This is mostly related to VisualEditor and isn't something that people outside the VE team can easily work on.

AJAX editing of nsPage content

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Alex Brollo has made some proofs of concept of this.

Other discussions

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BUB (the book uploader bot): http://tools.wmflabs.org/bub has some bugs, especially https://github.com/rohit-dua/BUB/issues/53

Other wishlist items lower down are deferred for the time being.

Actions

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  • Sam to finish improving the ia-upload tool's DjVu generation. Test site is at https://tools.wmflabs.org/ia-upload/test/   Done
  • The upload text wizard: next step should be something to do with metadata (probably a bibliographic Wikidata interface).
  • Bub maintenance — fix some outstanding bugs
  • Draft a Wikisource song so we can sing it on exit from meetings. Need a musical person. "Deja vu, Wiksource forever ..."
  • Sam to clean up etherpad and send to list   Done
  • Schedule the next meeting; Sam will email the list and give more time-slot options than last time.   Done
  • On Monday, Sam and Andrea will have a call for discussing the Upload Wizard (Andrea will have a better connection). Others are welcome too.   Done
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