Jump to content

Community Wishlist Survey 2020/Wikisource/Index creation wizard

From Meta, a Wikimedia project coordination wiki

Index creation wizard

  • Problem: The process of turning a PDF or DjVu file into an index for transcription and proofreading is quite complicated and confusing. See Help:Index pages and Help:Page numbers for the basics.
  • Who would benefit: Anyone wanting to start a Wikisource transcription
  • Proposed solution: Create a wizard that walks an editor though the process of creating an index from a PDF or DjVu file (that has already been uploaded). Most importantly, it will facilitate creating the pagelist, by allowing the editor to go through the pages and identify the cover, title page, table of contents, etc, as well as where the page numbering begins.
  • More comments: This is similar to a proposal from the 2016 Wishlist, but more limited in scope, i.e. this proposal only deals with the index creation process, not uploading or importing files.
  • Phabricator tickets: task T154413 (related)
  • Proposer: Kaldari (talk) 15:32, 30 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Update June 2020: a project page has been set up for this at Wikisource Pagelist Widget.

Discussion

  • A wizard for initial setup is a good start, but an interactive visual editor for Index: pages, and especially for <pagelist … /> tags, would be even better. The pagelist is often edited multiple times and by multiple people, and currently requires a lot of jumping between the scan and the browser, mental arithmetic and mapping between physical and logical page numbers, multiple numbering schemes and ranges in a single work, etc. etc. A visual editor oriented around thumbnails of each page in the book and allowing you to tag pages: “This thumbnail, physically in position 7 in the file, is logically the ‘Title’ page”; “In these 24 pages (physical 13–37) the numbering scheme is roman numerals, and numbering starts on the first page I've selected”; “On this page (physical 38) the logical numbering resets to 1, and we're now back to default arabic numerals”; “This page (physical 324) is not included in the logical numbering sequence, so it should be skipped and logical numbering should resume on the subsequent page, and this page should get the label ‘Plate’”. All this stuff is much easier to do in a visual / direct-manipulation way than by writing rules describing it in a custom mini-syntax. --Xover (talk) 11:40, 9 November 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Voting