WISD00M wrote:

Noticed this one, on the WikiMedia Soc page:
http://tools.wikimedia.de/~magnus/wiki2xml/w2x.php

Mass compoment change: <some> -> Export/Import

http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Collection exists and is enabled in some Wikimedia projects.

(In reply to comment #3)

http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Collection exists and is enabled in
some Wikimedia projects.

Collection doesn't really do this AFAIK: [[mw:Extension:XML_Bridge]] is supposed to; but it's marked experimental and I've never seen it in use, so I can't tell whether it's what requested here.

True. Regardless of what http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Collection says, when creating a collection in Wikibooks the option I got were PDF, OpenDocument, openZIM and ePub.

http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Special:Book

Reopening and sorry for the confusion.

Then again... why is DocBook important? The reporter proposes it as a gateway to support PDF and other format with printing in mind. The Collections extension has solved the problem and now anybody can print and even publish a book with a few clicks.

DocBook is important for many reasons. The smartest (big) publishers are converting their traditional books to DocBook to have high-quality ebooks that can be converted in any format may arise in the next decades; wikis like userbase.kde.org convert their pages to DocBook format with some scripts for later reuse.

The problem with this is that wiki pages are like a low quality energy, which you convert to high quality energy i.e. DocBook with big losses and then becomes whatever you need... not so effective. Probably doesn't make sense if MediaWiki doesn't even have a concept of book in the first place; maybe GorillaWarfare has ideas on this.

molly.white5 wrote:

DocBook is different from wikitext/HTML/etc. because its tags mark what the content is, not how it should be displayed. Instead of using, for example, ==Chapter== and <h1>Chapter</h1>, it uses <chapter>Chapter</chapter>. Then the formats to which it is later converted can decide how they want to display chapter titles, if at all, without having to hope that every == or <h1> denotes the beginning of a chapter. Nemo's energy analogy is apt.

I do believe that DocBook should be added as an exportation format, although I disagree that we need to wait for a book concept to be added. DocBook is no more exclusive to books than it is to technical documentation; Wikipedia articles can just as easily benefit from this format. That said, it might be wise to wait until a better book representation is created before putting too much effort into implementing this for Wikibooks/Wikisource.

I'll CC jeremyb on this -- he's discussed his interest in this becoming a feature, and may have some further input.

Another scope of this bug is to solve a problem in the software documentation world.

DocBook is used for major products documentations (FreeBSD, PHP, OpenStack). These documentations projects could benefit a lot of a wiki to update the documentation.

A DocBook import/export isn't only useful for Wikisource, but for open source projects willing to allow any contributor to edit the documentation without edit a DocBook file, then a patch against the current documentation.

Could this project be started in the context of https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Google_Summer_of_Code_2014 ?

https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Mentorship_programs/Possible_projects

(In reply to comment #8)

DocBook is used for major products documentations (FreeBSD, PHP, OpenStack).
These documentations projects could benefit a lot of a wiki to update the
documentation.

And to translate it with [[mw:Extension:Translate]] of course! We're sometimes asked to host such projects on translatewiki.net, if they could use their own wiki (maybe with a content model for each format?) Translate could be used directly.

There are maybe some telepathy involved Quim, I were writing the bug 61047 to offer it as a GSoC project.

Nemo, er... could you discuss with SPQRobin and Romaine about the use of Translate extension on the Wikimedia Belgium wiki? The first thinks it's wonderful to translate full pages, the second thinks it's not intuitive at all for full pages (but likes it on meta. to translate interfaces elements) and prefers /fr /nl pages.

(In reply to comment #11)

Nemo, er... could you discuss with SPQRobin and Romaine about the use of
Translate extension on the Wikimedia Belgium wiki?

I did many times and I think I'm more up to date than you on their problems with it, from what you write. :) But it's offtopic here.