User:GorillaWarfare/GSoC

Hi! I'm Molly White, a sophomore computer engineering student at Northeastern University and active Wikipedian and Wikisourcerer. I'm hoping to participate in Summer of Code 2013 or Outreach Program for Women.

Improvements to Extension:Collection
The Collection extension is a valuable tool that allows users to save articles to PDF, ODF, XML, or ZIM, or order a printed book from PediaPress. It can be used for a single article, or as the name suggests, compile a collection of articles. There are quite a few features that could be added and improvements that could be made to this tool; too many to take on in a single GSoC project. These improvements include:

Ease of use
Many Wikipedia readers do not realize that Collection exists. A survey performed two years ago indicated that Wikipedia readers are very interested in having the ability to use Wikipedia offline, save articles for later viewing, and download/print articles. Ideas have already been proposed for a Collection Extension 2, but the project is stalled. It suggests improvements to the placement, layout, and wording: change the confusing book metaphor to a reading list metaphor, move the print/collection functionality to the main article area, and create an improved "manage collections" page.

More output formats
Collection can currently create PDF, ODF, EPUB, XML?, and ZIM files. There are a good number of other formats that could be added, many of which have already been requested:
 * Plain text
 * HTML
 * Interest demonstrated by Extension:Collection/Wishlist
 * LaTeX
 * Interest demonstrated by Extension:Collection/Wishlist,, Extension:Wiki2LaTeX, Extension:WikiPDF, and meta:Grants:IEG/LaTeX Export.
 * Relevant discussions: Scriptorium
 * None of the existing extensions are suitable in their current form (Wiki2LaTeX has a security issue, WikiPDF is unstable) though wb2pdf might be worth looking into
 * FictionBook
 * (Limited) interest demonstrated by Extension:Collection/Wishlist

Add formatting options
Allow the user to optionally change some of the output options, such as:
 * Grayscale/color
 * Include/exclude TOC with page numbers, anchors
 * Set base font size
 * Option to exclude links
 * Exclude sections that aren't as useful in printed versions (e.g., external links, see also)
 * Exclude images (particularly useful for wikis like Wikinews that include large numbers of images, often resulting in several pages of nothing else)
 * Begin new page for every article

Interest: Extension:Collection/Wishlist, Extension:Collection/Wishlist, Extension:Collection/Wishlist

Better support for wikis with their own methods of collecting articles
The Collection extension is designed to export groups of articles, but does not translate well to wikis that have their own ways of collecting articles (Wikisource, Wikibooks, Wikiversity. The "Create a book/collection" and "Download as PDF" links in the sidebar simply create a PDF version of that particular page, usually just a sort of index/landing page. The expected result would be to create a PDF version of the full book.

Relevant bugs:
 * Make Collection extension to automatically create collections for existing books on Wikibooks/Wikisources
 * Wikibooks/Wikisource needs means to associate separate pages with books
 * Protect, watchlist or delete a whole book at once
 * Create a set of special pages for handling meta-organization of books
 * List, count and search all books

Miscellaneous improvements

 * Currently no support for Extension:Quiz, which is an issue for Wikiversity (Extension:Collection/Wishlist)
 * Format math equations in TeX (currently rendered as bitmap images)
 * Test and improve support for frequently-used templates
 * Infoboxes
 * Quote boxes
 * EPUB formatting improvements
 * Various entities (tables, infoboxes, code snippets, even blocks of text) split across pages are broken

Requests for feedback

 * At the Extension:Collection talk page: Thread:Extension_talk:Collection/Google_Summer_of_Code_project
 * On Wikisource's Scriptorium: Wikisource improvements for Summer of Code 2013