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Proposal:Tool to import from other open-content textbook projects

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  1. Achieve continued growth in readership
  2. Focus on quality content
  3. Increase Participation
  4. Stabilize and improve the infrastructure
  5. Encourage Innovation



Summary

There are plenty of open-content textbook projects other than Wikibooks, and many of them use CC-BY-SA or other compatible licensing. However, if the strength of the open-content textbook ecosystem is proliferation, the weakness is a lack of interoperability, or fragmentation. Importing content from other efforts to write textbooks into Wikibooks would give us a big boost in the amount of content we can deliver to our readers.

Proposal

Write pywikibot (or perlwikibot) modules to translate and import textbooks from other common formats.

Motivation

  • Importing content from other open-source textbook efforts allows us to capitalize on their efforts, many of which concentrate on writing to standards in a way that Wikibooks doesn't.
  • This would help overcome the fragmentation in the open-content textbook ecosystem, including to some extent the lack of interoperability.
  • Wikibooks would be able to deliver more and better content to our readers.
  • Making these texts available in a (MediaWiki) wiki environment could attract new contributors from those textbook projects.

Key Questions

  • How reliably can we translate from $format to wikitext?
  • How easy or hard is it to write a python or perl module that does this translation?

Potential Costs

  • Specs on the various formats we want to import.
  • A semi-automated way to get texts from other projects would be nice.
  • One developer, or a small team of them, either volunteer, or partially funded.

References

  • There have probably been bots and/or scripts to handle this in the past. Ask Andrew.

Community Discussion

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