This app looks great! Very exciting.
On the topic of OPDS: there was some experimenting a few years ago with
the OPDS feeds that ws-export currently produces, and the open source
FBReader app which supports them: https://fbreader.org/book-sources
The main issues seemed to be around the actual navigation of the
catalogue (people generally don't want to browse books alphabetically by
title!). And that when OPDS feeds get too big they should ideally be
broken up into subsidiary ones (e.g. by topic, for non-fiction, or genre
for fiction). But those are not too hard to solve, and it does sound
like building them from Wikidata data would be better (although I know
there are disagreements about how much cataloguing to have on Wikidata
vs Wikisource — that some Wikisources don't want topic, genre etc. to be
decided by Wikidata).
There are various issues still with ws-export's stability, and
reliability for exporting large or image-heavy books. I'm hoping to work
on some of that this month (or rather, upgrade it to Symfony 7 first and
then work on that stuff). I wonder if we should be looking again at
caching the fully-generated epubs too (although that implies having
fewer build-time options maybe).
On 18/1/25 01:22, [email protected] wrote:
[picked the wrong mailing list the first time, sorry for that]
This is amazing! Congrats to the team.
Magnus is raising a good point (thanks!), there is a standard API to integrate catalog into epub reader apps. It's called OPDS [1] and some Wikisource(s) publishes one [2] since a decade. However, it's not very user friendly and we never made outreach to integrate it natively into apps so it's not much used. This OPDS feed is not based on Wikidata but on metadata present inside of Wikisource.
I still think having our own Wikisource branded app is relevant for outreach and visibility, maybe building on OPDS instead of doing something bespoke would allow to reuse even more code?
Congrats again,
Thomas
[1] https://specs.opds.io/
[2] https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Help:OPDS
Le vendredi 17 janvier 2025 à 15:37, Magnus Manske
<[email protected]> a écrit :
This is great!
Silly question: Considering that the reader app will display epub format, is
there no existing (open source) epub reader app that could use Wikisource as a,
well, source? I would be surprised if there is not a single app where you can
set/add an API URL, we would just have to be compatible with that API spec.
This could avoid a whole load of development and technical debt.
On Fri, Jan 17, 2025 at 7:07 AM Bodhisattwa <[email protected]> wrote:
Hello Wikisourcerers,
We are excited to announce that we have been developing a Wikisource reader app
for Android mobile users for the last three months and the beta version of the
app is almost ready for testing. The development of the mobile app was a
much-awaited request from the Wikisource community and when fully released,
hopefully, it will help bring more readers to Wikisource platforms.
Necessary links of the reader app
- A documentation page is in draft on meta wiki here -
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikisource_reader_app
- The Github repo of the code is here -
https://github.com/cis-india/Wikisource-Reader
Wikidata integration
We have been using the FRBR data model used in the Wikidata WikiProject Books
to handle the descriptive metadata needed for filtering and categorizing the
contents of the app. To be included in the app, an edition should have
- fully proofread or validated
- transcluded into the main namespace or NS:0
- a Wikidata item with descriptive metadata property like title, author etc.
- Wikisource index page url (P1957) property linked with that item
- Wikisource sitelink for the NS:0 transcluded page linked with that item
- a proofread and/or validated badge linked with that sitelink.
Here are a few example of the book editions which are included in the app
- An example of a Bangla book edition is this one
- A list of all French books to be included in the app can be found here -
https://w.wiki/CkMP
Pilot languages and API
In the beta version, we have piloted with English, French and Bangla as these
three languages are storing their metadata on Wikidata. We will roll out for
other languages gradually. An API was built using Django and deployed on
Toolforge which serves a catalogue of books following the data model described
above. It periodically runs a set of SPARQL queries to retrieve data, processes
that data and updates the database.
- Link - https://wsindex.toolforge.org/books/
- Repo - https://codeberg.org/ph4ni/wsindex
Features
We have decided to display the books in epub format which will be generated
through WS-export tool. Any issues related to epub generation can be reported
here.
Right now, the following features are available
1. Browse through a list of works which are completely proofread or validated.
2. Filter based on the language or literary form of your choice.
3. Search for books by title or author.
4. Download books to your local device for offline access.
5. Share links to the Wikisource page of each book.
6. Read, delete, and track completion percentage of books in your local
library.
7. Change font size, look up words, and access a dictionary.
8. Switch between dark and light themes for comfortable reading.
9. Use the app in multiple languages.
Currently, we are working on the following areas
- Internal epub reader which can render the styling of the contents as much
as possible
- Design of the contents and metadata within the app
- Fixes here and there
Next steps
In coming days, we will
- start conversation with the Wikisource communities to make aware about the
app, share the workflow needed to include contents there and get feedback for
further development. (We had one call with the Marathi Wikisource community
already).
- Next community conversation hour
- Sunday, 26 January 12:00 – 13:00 UTC
- Video call link: https://meet.google.com/khd-qvfy-nsr
- discuss with all stakeholders regarding necessary steps.
- register for Google Play Store and release the stable version of the app
there
- release the app in other play stores gradually.
We would like to specially thank Sai Phanindra, who has developed the app as an
assignment from CIS-A2K.
Regards,
Bodhisattwa
(Part-time consultant, CIS-A2K)
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