The WS Contest tool was breaking on Index pages that don’t yet have any (existing) pages. The problem was in the usage of the dflydev/dot-access-data, which is a thing for pulling values out of deep arrays. It’s sort of useful, but not widely used so does feel a bit weird. Maybe we should remove it from wikisource/api.

Actually, scratch that: I just went to look, and it’s got eighty-three million installs on Packagist. So I guess it’s more widely used than I’d thought. I’ll leave it in for now.

Wikisource Contest tool version 2.2.0 is released now. It fixes up the wikitext-export feature, which makes it easy to post contest results on a wiki. Thanks to Bodhisattwa for prompting this fix.

The 5th Wikisource Triage Meeting is coming up soon. There’s a poll up now to try to figure out when to hold it.

I finally installed Koreader!

Here’s some notes of what I did:

Downloaded koreader-kobo-v2022.03.1.zip from https://github.com/koreader/koreader/releases and extracted to the root of the device.

Add the following to .kobo/Kobo/Kobo eReader.conf:

[FeatureSettings]
ExcludeSyncFolders=(\\.(?!kobo|adobe).+|([^.][^/]*/)+\\..+)

Restarted, and it ended up back in the normal system. Oh, I didn’t follow the instructions… try again with downloading OCP-KOReader-v2022.03.1.zip from that forum post, and extracting that to the root. Unmounted the device, and it did much more flashing and gurgling this time. When it restarted, there was a new Koreader item in the main menu! Wonderful.

To enable OPDS, go to the search menu (the magnifying glass icon) and down to “OPDS”. Then add a catalogue URL. Wikisource is https://ws-export.wmcloud.org/opds/en/Ready_for_export.xml — unfortunately, it seems the only way to get it in there is to type it in by hand, and I kept making mistakes. I tried three times before I realised that it was possible to long-press on a catalogue name to get to an edit dialogue.

Then, I had access to 45 pages of Wikisource’s works. Unfortunately, they’re in alphabetical order by title so it’s a bit weird to browse them in this way. But, still, it’s a terrific start and much easier than copying epubs from my laptop.

All in all, Koreader seems much much faster, and has many more features… and why didn’t I do this ages ago?!

In a bit over three weeks’ time we’re going to have the first of what will hopefully become a series of Wikisource “triage meetings”, in which we’ll go through the backlog of Phabricator tickets relating to Wikisource tech. It’s basically an idea to get some clarity around what needs doing, what is being worked on, and probably what things are out of date and can be closed. Read more and sign up here: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikisource_Triage_meetings

Wikisource technical contributors are not vast in number, but there are still quite a few of us! So hopefully through some judicious collaboration we can continue to slowly and steadily (and without too much disruption!) improve Wikisources’ software.

There’s been too much going on lately, for me to post anything on my blog. I’ve got nothing to say — but that has never stopped me in the past!

I’ve been working on adding 2FA to Twyne, but it’s slow going because there’s too much else happening. I’ve got all the details figured out, and it’s basically working, I just need to find a day or two to get back and tidy up the patch. The rest of Twyne is going well, especially the uploading-with-duplicate-detection: it’s meant I’ve been able to process a good 20GB of stuff in my ~/life/unsorted/ directory!

Mostly, Wikisource OCR has been top of the list. It’s pretty much done, and can be used while editing any Page namespace page on any Wikisource. See a random example here: https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Special:Random/Page?action=edit

In this episode we talk to Gavin Willshaw about using WikiSource in the Library of Scotland.

Rebecca explains the Pokemon test and the hero of the Episode are the organisers behind the Arctic Knot conference.

We’ve pretty much finished the transcription on Wikisource of Lilian Wooster Greaves’ 1927 book of poetry Wongan Way: https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Wongan_Way

The new version of Wikisource Export has been released. The main user-facing improvement is a wider selection of fonts, but there’s been lots of work done on the back end (we migrated it to Symfony).