Hi

A few things I can share from openZIM/Kiwix perspective on this:
* This, special:book feature, was a good tool 10 years ago
* This would have deserved to be improved/maintained/developed over years
* Today it looks abandoned and I hardly see how we could live a revival from the Wikimedia side * We, at openZIM/Kiwix, have been doing Wikipedia selections since 15 years for the WP1 project * This is something we want to improve and we want to allow more people to do their own selections automatically, half-automatically or even manually. * We even have a stub at https://wp1.openzim.org/ (not really usable, but the software foundations are there). * We believe we could provide something even better than what the Collection extension was. * Basic Idea is to make a clear separation between (1) selection platform providing an API (2) Mediawiki Gadget for manual selection on the Mediawiki instance (3) external rendering platforms... and we are interested in the ZIM rendering of course but we could think of enrolling any compatible with the API.

A bit of technical insight can be found here https://github.com/openzim/wp1/issues?q=is%3Aissue++label%3Aselections+ with these tickets around selection of latest Google Summer of Code.

If someone is interested to have a talk on this topic, feel free to contact me.

Regards
Kelson

On 17.04.22 18:12, Tito Dutta wrote:
Hello,
This was a very useful tool for the readers. I used it a lot when it was working. User namespace books page category shows 50,000 subpages: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:User_namespace_book_pages <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:User_namespace_book_pages>
(Please see language sidebar for other languages)
Regards.


রবি, ১৭ এপ্রিল, ২০২২ তারিখে ৯:১৮ PM টায় তারিখে Galder Gonzalez Larrañaga <galder...@hotmail.com <mailto:galder...@hotmail.com>> লিখেছেন:

    No one or very few use it, because you can't save a book. I had some
    teachers in our university courses who used it to download what
    their students did, but since the WMF decided to break it, evidently
    they are not using it anymore. I repeat: it worked and it was broken
    in purpose. So now we have an option to create a book but no actual
    book can be created, besides printing it with PediaPress.

    2022(e)ko api. 17(a) 09:59 erabiltzaileak hau idatzi du ("Amir E.
    Aharoni" <amir.ahar...@mail.huji.ac.il
    <mailto:amir.ahar...@mail.huji.ac.il>>):

         > On Sun, Apr 17, 2022, 09:29 Strainu <strain...@gmail.com
        <mailto:strain...@gmail.com>> wrote:
         > >
         > > The correct question is: does it still do anything of value?
         > ‫בתאריך יום א׳, 17 באפר׳ 2022 ב-10:42 מאת ‪Jan Ainali‬‏
        <‪ainali....@gmail.com <mailto:ainali....@gmail.com>‬‏>:‬
         >
         > Even with all output options broken it is still a decent user
        interface for creating and organizing collections of articles.

        This may well be true, but I'm wondering how much is it
        *actually* used. I know I never use it, but it's possible that
        thousand of other people do. If it's true, then everything is
        fine. I can't find a log of its usage, or a statistics page that
        shows how often do people use this feature.

        It currently appears in at least two prominent places:
        1. "Create a book" link in the desktop sidebar (in some wikis; I
        don't see it in the English Wikipedia, but I do see it in
        Swedish and Basque).
        2. "Extensions used by Wikimedia - Main" group in
        translatewiki.net <http://translatewiki.net>, which means that
        volunteer localizers are asked to translate it with (relatively)
        high priority.

        If only, say, five people use it in the whole Wikimedia
        universe, then perhaps someone should consider downgrading its
        prominence or maybe removing it entirely.

        On translatewiki, I can move it from "Extensions used by
        Wikimedia - Main" to "Extensions used by Wikimedia - Advanced"
        or even to "Extensions used by Wikimedia - Legacy", but again,
        before I do this, I'd like to make sure that it's not actually
        used by a lot of people.

        --
        Amir Elisha Aharoni · אָמִיר אֱלִישָׁע אַהֲרוֹנִי
        http://aharoni.wordpress.com <http://aharoni.wordpress.com>
        ‪“We're living in pieces,
        I want to live in peace.” – T. Moore‬


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