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Wikisource:Wikisource vision development/Wikisource development

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Below you will find a list of suggested projects to transform the core values into a reality. Feel free to create subpages, add more ideas, or discuss existing ideas in the corresponding subpages.

High quality digital books

  • Visual index: One of the biggest hurdles for newcomers is to get familiar with the formatting templates that we use on Wikisource. A way to ease the learning process could be to create a visual index.
This a proposal to create a visual index for Wikisource's format templates. It would feature a page with lorem ipsum text with as many format features as possible. On mouse over it would highlight the feature, and on click it would redirect to the corresponding template. Here there is an example for a visual index used by a music writing software.

How

The simplest way would be a static image with links on certain positions. A more complex way could be an animated svg (examples on commons) or a Flash animation that would react "on mouse over".

Challenges

  • Even if the text is standard for all wikisources, the links to the templates would have to be localized. See also Wikisource:Wikisource common template set.
  • If the Visual Editor is implemented, the situation may change and some templates would be no longer necessary.


Embrace standards

TEI stands for Text Encoding Initiative, which is a consortium that from 1980 maintains the TEI guidelines used in Perseus Project, British National Corpus, FreeDict, and many other projects to encode text in an XML based format. In the frame of the Wikisource vision development, we are evaluating if it would make sense to support this format with an exporting feature, and adapting the guidelines to wikitext in the form of templates where it makes sense so. Initially we would aim for TEI Lite and eventually we would add the function to export ebooks as TEI XML.

How

This can be done using data-* HTML5 attributes for the TEI tags, either implemented in existing templates or in new ones if necessary. Later on the tags can be used to export as TEI XML.

Current situation

There is no XML export format supported. Tpt just made a draft of a XSLT stylesheet, inspired by the docbook one of the TEI project: https://github.com/Tpt/tei2wikitext/blob/master/tei2wikitext.xsl The stylesheet does only the basic conversions and needs to be improved. At one time, it could be tested here: https://tei2wikitext.toolforge.org/

Difficulties

The TEI guidelines are huge, therefore the first step would be to implement a reduced set of the guidelines called TEI Lite.

The other problem that we face is that each Wikisource has their own set of templates, which means that any change or correction should be synchronized across wikisources. To minimize the effort it is suggested to use this approach: Wikisource:Wikisource common template set.

Moreover, the idea of using TEI tags inside the wikitext is problematic. The best approach would be to allow a particular layer or namespace dedicated to TEI, to avoid confusion of normal users (who don't know it) and even problems with TEI/XML parsers.

  • Text exporting: EPUB (already supported), ODT (already supported), TEI (not supported yet). There are XSLT 2.0 specifications to transform TEI XML documents to XHTML, to LaTeX, to XSL Formatting Objects, to OOXML (docx), and to ePub format.
  • Djvu viewer: both DJVU and PDF formats are supported, however we don't have any web DJVU viewer. It is suggested to adopt the Internet Archive Book reader.
The Internet Archive BookReader is an open source book viewer developed in HTML/JavaScript by the Internet Archive. It currently serves as front end for millions of books in archive.org, plus other organizations. It has been suggested to support it in either on Wikisource or on Commons to provide a better experience when reading DjVu files, which it might support (not natively according to 2011 docs though). As of 2016, the Internet Archive no longer has interest in using DjVu files at least for themselves; it's not clear whether other users of the bookreader adapted it for direct usage of DjVu files. As of 2015, there are no plans for PDF.js to support DjVu. It may be easier to convert Magnus' book2scroll to a MediaWiki extension.
  • Citation: Wikisource should be able to serve book quotes on demand without the need of adding anchors to the text. There are no standards in this field, but there have been some developments already. WS could implement a solution like hypothes.is, Textus, or develop its own.
  • Book authority control: Wikidata will allow us to make our book database available to the world, and so other servers can understand that a certain book is the same they want, we need to use common book identifiers. For modern books that will be the ISBN, for older books we'll have to append to our book data OCLC or LCC number. See Wikidata:Books task force for more information.
  • Metadata exporting: Wikisource has an OAI-PMH beta export tool which uses the data in the index pages. Once Wikidata is ready, OAI-PMH harvesters will be able to read our metadata so users in other websites can find our digital scans and transcriptions easier.
  • Catalog browsing: by creating a OPDS catalog (http://opds-spec.org), readers will be able to browse our book collection using apps like MegaReader, PageTurner, etc.

Increase organization and volunteer participation

What do you think about creating a Wikisource Association?

The Wikisource User group is a user group that support the Wikisource vision.

The activities are:

  • Outreach - attracting more active community members and raising awareness of Wikisource, collaborating with GLAM Wiki as much as possible
  • Community support - supporting volunteer editors in order to contribute more effectively
  • Communication: facilitate discussions and flow of information between Wikisource communities and the Wikimedia movement
  • Software development - supporting the development of MediaWiki features to accommodate the specific needs of a Wikisource
  • Fundraising - raise funds both from the Wikimedia movement and from external and partner organizations

More efficient way of working

  • Customized Book Uploader: It is not possible to undertake big modifications, but the current Commons uploader allows for some scripting that doesn't need code review.
The book uploader is a proposed customisation on the Extension:UploadWizard targeted to fulfill the needs of the Wikisource community. This is a proposal part of the Wikisource vision development.

Current situation

When a user wants to upload a book, he or she has to go through steps thought for the upload of pictures, therefore there are no specific fields for book data. Moreover, the user has to create an "Index:" page for the file with exactly the same data as in Commons, since the data is not propagated.

Proposed project

This project can be deployed either as modification to the UploadWizard:

  • On the "Upload" screen there would be another button labeled as "Import book" which would activate a similar functionality as now provides the "Internet Archive Import tool".
  • On the "Describe" screen there would be an additional option to import external metadata from external sources either in MARC, BibJson or others. Currently MARCsman exists as a standalone tool
  • Extra data fields for books
  • Store all book meta data in the commons Template:Book
  • Create automatically an "Index:" page on Wikisource with the relevant data.
  • FUTURE: When Wikidata is deployed on Commons and Wikisource, create an item in Wikidata with book meta data and link the fields both in Commons and in Wikisource.

Risks

  • The changes needed on the UploadWizard need code review.
  • Wikidata is still not deployed on sister projects


  • Wikidata & metadata auto spreading: when uploading a document, besides of importing the metadata from external sources or not, it should be possible to create automatically the index page.
  • Wikisource common template set: If TEI is a wanted option, it would be interesting to use the same templates in all projects to keep the maintenance effort to a minimum. Building blocks: translation extension, lua scripting (when needed), a bot to synchronize templates across wikisources.
  • Implement book quote server: This depends heavily on which quotation standard is used
  • Automatic transclusion pages (using TEI markers): It would be a bot that would scan the pages for chapter markers and would create those subpages automaticaly. In WS-FR there is already a bot that does something similar with sections (used for generating encyclopedic articles).
  • Author creation form (for linking/creating authors in Wikidata): It would be a form to create simultaneously an Author page and a Wikidata article. See WS-IT Author pages (edition mode) for some ideas about that kind of form.

Work with other entities to the same goal

  • Measuring tools: after contacting some organizations, some typical question that arise are: "how do volunteers know which books are more demanded for transcription?" "How do you measure the times a transcription has been downloaded or viewed?" We don't have tools to collect that kind of information (yet).
  • Open Library partnership: Ongoing conversations about a possible partnership between OL and WS.
  • Google Books dialogue: there has been some dialogue with a Google engineer about ways of collaborating. Biggest stumbling block at the moment for running some experiments is that we don't have proper way of synchronizing data bases, for that it is necessary to have a book authoring in place (see above) and use OCLC or LCC identifiers as matching codes. Wikidata and the Books task force are the key to solve this.
  • OCLC connection: Wikipedian in residence Max Klein has offered support to increase interaction with OCLC.
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