Community Wishlist Survey 2017/Wikisource/Improve export of electronic books

Improve export of electronic books

  • Problem: Imagine if Wikipedia pages could not display for many days, or would only be available once in a while for many weeks. Imagine if Wikipedia displayed pages with missing informations or scrambled information.
This is what visitors get when they download books from the French Wikisource. Visitors do not read books online in a browser. They want to download them on their reader in epub, mobi or pdf.
The current tool to export books in these formats has all those problems: last spring 2017, it was on and off for over a month; since october 2017, mobi format does not work, then pdf stopped working. I did not publish a book because the electronic formats has different problems. (I have made a list of these problems if required.)
  • Who would benefit: The end users, the visitors to Wikisource, by having access to high quality books. This would improve the credibility of Wikisource.
This export tool is the showcase of Wikisource. Contributors can be patient with system bugs, but visitors won’t be, and won’t come back.
The export tool is as important as the web site is.
  • Proposed solution: We need a professional tool, that runs and is supported 24/7, as the different wikimedia web sites are, by Wikimedia foundation professional developers.
The tool should support different possibilities of electronic book, and the evolution of ebooks technology.
The different bugs should be corrected.
  • More comments: There are not enough people in a small wiki to support and maintain such a tool.
Wikisource should not only be considered a web base platform: the ebooks are as important, and even more important for visitors.

Discussion edit

For some information the current problem (only the last episode of a long and sad road of problem) is phabricator:T178803. The problem is ongoing for almost a month now and we have a lot of complaints from readers. Cdlt, VIGNERON * discut. 13:01, 21 November 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Voting edit