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PageImages does not consider Wikisource page covers when selecting image
Open, Needs TriagePublicFeature

Description

Feature summary (what you would like to be able to do and where):
When DesktopImprovements (Vector 2022) search is used on Wikisource, instead of showing a blank image for every page, we could show the user the cover page for the book.

Given that some Wikisources (en, bn, fr definitely do) already mark the cover page of the book in their index pages, it would make sense to use these as thumbnails for books.

Screenshot from 2022-11-22 18-18-03.png (716×1 px, 208 KB)

Use case(s) (list the steps that you performed to discover that problem, and describe the actual underlying problem which you want to solve. Do not describe only a solution):

  • Making it easier to distinguish different editions of the same book with different cover art.

Benefits (why should this be implemented?):

  • From a reader's POV it makes the experience of finding a book a lot simpler.
  • A editor might get confused between two editions of the same book, this would make it harder to make that mistake (especially if the cover art is different)

Event Timeline

Jdlrobson subscribed.

This is actually an issue with the PageImages extension. Presumably that needs to be updated to be aware of Wikisource covers https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/War_and_Peace_(Tolstoy)?action=info

Jdlrobson renamed this task from Use cover page/image as thumbnail for search to PageImages does not consider Wikisource page covers.Nov 28 2022, 5:48 PM
Jdlrobson renamed this task from PageImages does not consider Wikisource page covers to PageImages does not consider Wikisource page covers when selecting image.

Question. Is there ANYTHING other than convention, which indicates that something is the cover of a book ? I currently see.. a cover is defined by the community as:

  • The first page transclusion on a book page,
  • should be the front cover,
  • which is a transcribed version of the book cover
  • generally this page has a an associated image, which is the n’th page of a upload

I’m seeing several problems that have to be solved.

  • page images has no concept of or way to address, a page within a multi page files right now
  • covers of books are not actually images transcluded on the book pages (they are transcribed wiki pages, which might look like a cover image)
  • page images of books are hard to guess (conventions fail)

There is no data that says: “book x: cover is page y of z” ? Hmm. The Index page seems to have a field for cover, but then the book page, doesn’t seem to have a back reference to the index in a reliable way ?

I think it were best if there is a hook for page images, that the Wikisource extension can hook into, to provide the image to page images extension directly, but even then it might not be simple.