Mailing List Archive: Book creation

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_Functionality>team, 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.

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_Functionality>team, 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.

>
>
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