Talk:Requests for comment/Book management

Ideas from Aubrey

 * Include national authority control (GND, BNF, SBN, ecc.) in the metadata
 * OAI-PMH compliance
 * repeatable and optional metadata (as Dublin core are)
 * Dublin Core compliant

(moved here from here for clarity's sake) – GorillaWarfare (talk) 01:55, 25 June 2013 (UTC)
 * Hi GorillaWarfare, sorry if I edited your page :-) --Aubrey (talk) 08:28, 25 June 2013 (UTC)

Metadata to give visibility to
A few ideas:

Very useful

 * Author's years of birth and death (simply like this: 1421-1503)

Useful

 * Text's first publication date
 * Text's last publication by original author corrected date. [//flaubert.univ-rouen.fr/jet/public/feuilletoir/feuilletoir.php?f=bibliotheque/feuilletoir/flaubert_education_sentimentale#205 Example: here is the last correction of L'Éducation sentimentale ] by the author Gustave Flaubert.

These dates are different from the book's date (for instance an edition of Fables de Jean de La Fontaine in the 19th century is not the same thing as an edition of Fables de Jean de La Fontaine published during the author's life and corrected by the author himself. In fact it can be very different, because many editors have corrected texts for a variety of reasons, and seeing the corrections is interesting too.

May be useful too

 * Other publication by original author corrected dates


 * --Zyephyrus (talk) 06:23, 25 June 2013 (UTC)

Interoperability
In reaction to the RfC: Please ensure that books play nicely together with other extensions that may affect the contents of a book. In other words, use the parser results and not the mediawiki source to e.g. export a book to PDF. AFAIK the Collections extension does not do this and uses its own parser. Therefore, extensions such as Semantic MediaWiki cannot be used in a book since the Collections parser does not known how to handle SMW queries.

Remco de Boer 13:52, 25 June 2013 (UTC)
 * Yes, that is a good point. At the current moment I'm hoping to work with other extensions (like ProofreadPage) but not create any dependencies on them. – GorillaWarfare (talk) 17:27, 28 June 2013 (UTC)

Main book page?
I was very excited when I saw this project in the list of GSoC projects and I think it has a huge potential for Wikisource (which I am primarily interested in) which has been needing something like this for years. The mockups you're proposing are mouth-watering.

I have a technical question though: when you talk about the "main book page", where we will find the metadata editing form and json block of metadata, do you see it as something that will be edited directly on Wikibooks/Wikisource? The reason why I'm asking is that on Wikisource, the scanned editions are hosted on Wikicommons (see e.g. ), and then the metadata is edited on Wikisource's Index pages (see here). Do you have any idea about how the BookManager could integrate with (or even replace ?) the way metadata is currently handled and edited on Wikisource?

Also, note that the metadata is something generic about the book, and ideally should not be located on a single Wikisource, but rather on a shared metadata repository like Wikidata. I realize that this is a long term plan and that location of metadata is not the primary focus of your project, but do you have any thought on that as well?

Zaran (talk) 12:29, 28 June 2013 (UTC)


 * For the moment, I'm planning to store the metadata locally, instead of on Commons or Wikidata. I agree that it would be awesome to have the metadata stored somewhere like Wikidata, and indeed there are people working towards that goal, but I don't know if it's feasible for such a short-term project. As for integration with the current metadata handling, I'm still discussing that with my mentors. Matthew mentioned briefly the idea of trying to use the current Index: pages created by ProofreadPage, which I think would be awesome. I do, however, think it's important to avoid any dependencies on ProofreadPage or other extensions, because many wikis (e.g., Wikibooks) won't have it installed. – GorillaWarfare (talk) 17:54, 28 June 2013 (UTC)

Internal JSON Storage
I'm assuming a new Content type for ContentHandler will be defined for the main book page? If not I recommend this be considered (and even made part of the RFC).

current status (needs new champion)
I asked Molly about the current status of this RfC and she said:
 * Unfortunately with the semester I have right now and the arbitration work I'm doing on enwiki, I don't find myself with much extra time. I don't think I will be available to contribute substantially to this project for a while, so I'm not sure I should take any action on the RfC. I see that the project is up for continuation with the next round of GSoC/OPW, so I'd absolutely welcome any of those participants to run with it. That said, marking it as implemented would be premature.

Sharihareswara (WMF) (talk) 13:05, 12 March 2014 (UTC)