Handling quotes

[claell]

Currently quotes seem to just be read out like normal text. That makes it hard to recognize them as quotes. It would be cool to have some better indication like a short introduction that now a quote will follow.

[petergtz]

Hey @claell, it also always bothered me that this information gets completely lost. Unfortunately, there is no built-in reading style or similar to signal Alexa when a quote starts.

So the alternative would be to let her say "quote" (or "Zitat" in German) before the quote starts. I wasn't sure if this is good English or German and therefore left it untouched so far.

Let me spend a little more time on this. In the meantime, I'll move this issue from "New issues" to backlog.

[claell]

I guess at least in German using "Zitat" is ok to use. Having some kind of indication is better than no hint at all.

[petergtz]

I gave this a little more thought and it turns out (again) not to be a trivial issue :-). You can't just prefix every quote with a "quote" or "Zitat". Check e.g. https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baum and see how many quotes are used for words. Now, of course we could build in a heuristic saying e.g. if there's just a single word within the quotes do not prefix it and so on. But it seems very error prone when done naivly and could, in a first shot, actually make the reading much worse.

So I still agree with you that the current way is not good, but fixing is probably much harder than I (or we?) thought :-). Leaving in backlog for now. If you have good ideas how to make it work, I'd love to hear them.

[claell]

I had this article in mind when creating this issue: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Schopenhauer

So I was only thinking about those indented quotes on Wikipedia.

I thought there would be some special "quote" format for them on Wikipedia that can then be detected. However I am now not sure whether there is such special format nor whether it can be detected when using the API you currently use. But maybe there is hope :)

[petergtz]

I thought there would be some special "quote" format for them on Wikipedia that can then be detected.

Yes, that would very nice. But I just noticed, you actually revealed even more problems. Check out:

https://de.wikipedia.org/w/api.php?format=jsonfm&action=query&prop=extracts&titles=Arthur+Schopenhauer&redirects=true&formatversion=1&explaintext=true&exlimit=1

The indented quotes are not even part of the result of that API call. So currently, these kinds of quotes are completely broken in my skill. Hmmm...

[claell]

Oh, really? That would explain, why the read out text felt a bit wrong there.

Maybe another bug in the Wikipedia API.

[petergtz]

Probably. Interestingly, while the other bugs are listed even on the extension page, missing quotes seemd to be missing from that page: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:TextExtracts#Caveats

[claell]

I saw the same. So it is probably a new bug, I filed a report for that: https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T236283 although it is probably also not fixed by them.