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Investigate moving Wikisource Page namespace to mainspace
Closed, DeclinedPublic

Description

Problem:
Majority of Wikisources work on books in the page namespace, one "book page" in one wikipage. Then all of the wikipages of an chapter are transcluded to an chapter wikipage in the mainspace, making it easy to get to the post-expand include size limit.
Posted in response to T275319

Check if this solution is any better:

  • Move all of the wikipages in the "Page" namespace into mainspace, so that all of the pages of each chapter are in one wikipage, thus eliminating the need for transcluding from the "Page" namespace to mainspace. Wikipages that can include only one book page are: "Table of Contents" (often only one book page), the titlepage and frontpage.
  • Have each of the book pages as an section in mainspace, which are separately editable, but without having actual headers on the wikipage - preferrably no headers at all, but at a minimum not visible in viewing mode.
  • Change each of the links in the "pagelist" from each index page, so it goes to the section of said book page in mainspace, and then when clicking the edit section link in mainspace go to that section with the relevant scan to the side. (see video)
  • The left and right arrow links in the page namespace became redundant.
  • Main namespace pages should have an up arrow to the Index page, in those cases where an Index page exists.
  • Delete the Page namespace as it is now redundant

An alternate version is to only use this system for large books, and leave the small ones on the current system.

Video:
First page is the Index page, then I go over to the section of that book page, which is in the mainspace, I then click to edit that section (might want an actual edit link here), which shows me the scan on one side and the text of that book page on the other side.

Effects:
Transclusions in the main namespaces are vastly decreased, leaving mostly templates as the main use of transclusions.

Event Timeline

As I understand it, the limit is applied to the expanded size. I believe it does not make a significant difference whether the size is exceeded through {{Page:Foo}} or through the article itself being that large.

If this task is mainly motivated by T275319 and the performance limits, than I suspect it might be misunderstanding that limitation.

Having said that, I have no opinion or objection to the proposal as a community proposal for how Wikisource organises its information. If you believe it would benefit the reading or contributing experience on Wikisource, by all means, go ahead. I'm not a frequent visitor of Wikisource myself, but it seems at glance that people may wish to keep aggregate pages for entire chapters or even entire books when they fit, and that it might be beneficial for the editing experience to internally keep these as their own "Page" as well, so that there's no need to lose editing history or have to merge/split pages to accomodate the reading experience and performance limits, but instead only worry about that in the aggregate pages.

Krinkle subscribed.

IMHO, this is a very bad idea. There are more than one reason for that.

  1. Page namespaces are for editors to proofread and NS:0 are meant for readers. This helps editors work in their own space in the background, which does not get unwanted attention from everyone visiting the site. Transferring page namespaces into NS:0 will blur the distinction.
  2. The third step in the proposal (as shown in the video) adds one more click to reach the proofreading interface from index pages unlike the current system which gives direct access to the proofreading interface from index pages.
  3. The books or their sub-pages are currently kept in main namespaces when they are ready for readers i.e. when proofreading is complete. In this new proposal, scanned pages not proofread with lots of OCR errors will be displayed in main namespace and will irritate the readers. Wikisource will eventually its viewers eventually when they will find bad quality contents are displayed.
  4. In this new proposal, hypothetically, if a chapter which will have some existing proofread/not proofread pages and some pages which are not created at all (very common scenario), readers will get incomplete chapters while checking Wikisource. That is also bad for the viewership.
  5. All the tools, lua modules, gadgets, templates etc. will have to rewritten again. That's creating another set of huge problems and it would be frustrating for the entire community.
  6. Statistics will be completely broken and we will lose all our stat logs until now.
  7. Deleting page namespaces will delete all kinds of editing history happening there till now.
  8. The workflow of the community will be disrupted and Wikisource might lose editors because of that.
Xover subscribed.

Since the reporter unsubscribed from this task, and it seems unlikely to be ever implemented in its current form, I'm going to be bold and close this as declined. Feel free to reopen if you disagree, of course, but this proposal seems like it would be better developed on-wiki for a while before possibly re-filing a request for development.