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Community Wishlist Survey 2020/Wikisource/Ajax editing of nsPage text

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Ajax editing of nsPage text

  • Problem: Dealing with simple pages editing, much user time is lost into the cycle save - load in view mode - go to next page that opens in view mode - load it into edit mode.
  • Who would benefit: experienced users
  • Proposed solution: it.wikisource implemented an ajax environment, that allows to save edited text and to upload next page in edit mode (and much more) very fastly by ajax calls: it:s:MediaWiki:Gadget-eis.js (eis means Edit In Sequence). It's far from refined, but it works and it has been tested into other wikisource projects too. IMHO the idea should be refined and developed.
  • More comments:
  • Phabricator tickets:
  • Proposer: Alex brollo (talk) 07:16, 25 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Discussion

  • I enthusiastically support - I have often wished that I could move directly from page to page while staying in Edit mode - it would be particularly useful for error checking: making sure, for instance, that every page in a range which could have been proofread by different people over a number of months or even years all conform to the latest format/structure etc. CharlesSpencer (talk) 11:03, 25 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  • I think this is a very good project specific improvement that can be made within the remit of community wishlist. Seems feasible as well. —TheDJ (talkcontribs) 12:55, 4 November 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  • This would be a great first step towards something like a full-featured dedicated "transcription mode", that would likely involve popping into full screen (hiding page chrome, navbar, etc.; use all available space inside the browser window, but don't let the page scroll because it conflicts with the independently scrolling text field and scanned page display, in practice causing your whole editing UI to "jump around" unpredictably), some more flexibility and intelligence in coarse layout (i.e. when previewing a page, the text field and scanned page are side by side, but the rendered text you are trying to compare to the scanned page is about a screenworths of vertical scrolling away), prefetching of the next scanned page (cf. the gadget mentioned at the last Wikimania), and possibly other refinements (line by line highlighting on the scanned page? We often have pixel coordinates for that fro the OCR process). Alex brollo's proposal is one great first change under a broader umbrella that is adapting the tools to the typical workflow on Wikisource, versus the typical workflow on Wikipedia-like projects: the difference makes tools that are perfectly adequate for Wikipedia-likes really clunky and awkward for the Wikisources. Usable, but with needlessly high impedance. --Xover (talk) 12:53, 5 November 2019 (UTC)[reply]
    @Samwilson: Could s:User:Samwilson/FullScreenEditing.js be a piece of this larger puzzle? I haven't played with it, but it looks like a good place to start. If this kind of thing (a separate focussed editing mode) were implemented somewhere core-adjacent, it might also provide an opportunity to clean up the markup used ala. that attempt last year(ish) that failed due to reasons (I'm too fuzzy on the details. Resize behaviour for the text fields got messed up, I think.). Could something like that also have hooks for user scripts? There's lots of little things that are suitable for user scripting to optimize the proofreading process. Memoized per-work snippets of text or regex substitutions; refilling header/footer from the values in the associated Index:; magic comment / variables (think Emacs variables or linter options) for stuff like curly/straight quote marks. In a dedicated editing mode, where the markup is clean (unlike the chaos of a full skin and multiple editors), both the page and the code could have API-like hooks that would make that kind of thing easier. --Xover (talk) 11:20, 9 November 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  • Thanks for appreciation :-). Really the it.wikisource eis tool - even if rough in code - is appreciated by many users. I like to mention too its "ajax-preview" option, that allows to see very fastly (<1 sec) the result of current editing/formatting and that allows too some simple edit of brief chuncks of text nodes (immediately editing the underlying textarea). Some text mistakes are much more evident in "view" mode that in "edit" mode, but presently Visual Editor is too slow to be used for typical fast editing into wikisource. --Alex brollo (talk) 09:43, 7 November 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Voting