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This is a discussion archive first created in February 2013, although the comments contained were likely posted before and after this date.

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Announcements

Index fill gadget (development)

Latest comment: 12 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion

New gadget available, tested though still needs broader testing before being moved from development. We have Phe (talk • contribs) to thank for this lovely tool.

The "Index fill" gadget allows for the population of the Index: fields when creation a new Index: page. It imports the relevant metadata that is stored in the {{book}} template. From there, any further wiki formatting will still need to occur. — billinghurst sDrewth 01:11, 11 November 2012 (UTC)

AJAX patrol

Latest comment: 12 years ago2 comments2 people in discussion

Hello, I see that you use AjaxPatrolLinks. I have good news for you: AJAX patrolling is now in core! On Wikimedia projects, it should arrive with MediaWiki 1.21wmf5, between 2012-11-26 and 2012-12-5. You should disable this gadget when the new feature change is enabled, because it will become redundant and to avoid double patrolling. Thanks, Nemo 08:03, 21 November 2012 (UTC)

Disabled the gadget, and will delete it into the future. I presume that it is worthwhile turning it off prior its deletion. — billinghurst sDrewth 13:50, 1 December 2012 (UTC)

mw:MediaWiki_1.21/wmf5 imminent

Latest comment: 12 years ago8 comments4 people in discussion

Relevant changes for wikisource include (but are not necessarily limited to):

LabeledSectionTransclusion:
- Now allows multiple inclusions on a single page
- Now allows <secton> tags to be used from a template and/or parser tag (e.g. {{#tag:section|...}}
- Will show a clearer error message when a template loop is detected.
ProofreadPage:
- New OAI-PMH API (see bugzilla:38498)

See mw:MediaWiki_1.21/wmf5 for a complete list of included changes. wmf5 will be deployed on http://test.wikipedia.org, http://test2.wikipedia.org and http://mediawiki.org later today, and here on wednesday. Valhallasw (talk) 18:09, 26 November 2012 (UTC)

wmf5 is now live. If you see any problems with LST, please report them at bugzilla or here. Please also leave a message on my talk page if you report a bug here. Thanks! Valhallasw (talk) 20:49, 28 November 2012 (UTC)

Reported bugzilla:42527 which reports that where we have section transclusions we are also transcluding the <noinclude>'d header/footer files. It may be ProofreadPage rather than LST, however, I will let them work out which is the issue. I estimate that this would impact up to 100k pages, I rated it critical, and that if there is no ability for a quick fix that the upgrade is rolled back.

Fyi - a patch for this has been developed and deployed already. Everything on this front seems to back to normal. Thank you all.

A reminder: We still need to document the new LST features/changes -- George Orwell III (talk) 22:51, 29 November 2012 (UTC)

Noting above about "section transclusions"... Did this bug, etc. have anything to do with my and issue (sorry if you have to wade through my mess)? The problem seems to have gone away. If so, good deal :) Londonjackbooks (talk) 23:06, 29 November 2012 (UTC)

At this point, who can say for sure? It is possible that this bug affected formatting and/or rendering to some degree but something like mis-matched thumbnail images between edit & view modes sounds more like the typical caching issue that we all seem to expierence in some form or another around here. I've had what you described happen to me many times - it always seem to resolve itself in a day or two. I guess just report it if it happens again (i.e. nothing more we can do about except compare notes). -- George Orwell III (talk) 23:33, 29 November 2012 (UTC)

All's well that ends well. The images-in-view/edit-mode issue is, I believe, a separate issue from the sectioning issue,—and one that I won't lose sleep over if no one else will either. Thanks, Londonjackbooks (talk) 23:45, 29 November 2012 (UTC)

Because of performance reasons, the LST changes mentioned above will be rolled back - it caused the itwikisource main page to time out in rendering. I'll let you know if and when an improved version will be deployed. The problem that appeared is now part of the tests that are run, so that won't happen again. Valhallasw (talk) 18:05, 30 November 2012 (UTC)

Special:TemplateSandbox

“

"TemplateSandbox" lets you preview a page with a change in a template it uses.

At the bottom of the edit form in the Template and Module namespaces, a new box will appear that allows you to preview other pages as they would appear if you saved the template/module you are currently editing. Example: try editing the sample "thank-you" template https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Template:Thankyou . On the edit form, under the Save button, you'll see "Preview page with this template" -- try User_talk:Example_user

... and give it the "sandbox prefix" User:Sharihareswara (WMF)/sandbox and tell it to "render page" User_talk:Example_user . You'll see the ugly changes I made to the template in my sandbox.

More information at w:Wikipedia:VPT#New_feature_needs_testing

”

—Sumana viâ Wikitech-ambassadors Archives (adapted)

One that we will need to do is to look to see how we can best work with the change and how we adapt our template sandboxes, and the testcases that we often use.— billinghurst sDrewth 03:40, 30 November 2012 (UTC)

Purge Tab gadget

Latest comment: 12 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion

New gadget available (Interface section of the Gadgets tab in your User Preferences settings) that adds a tab [ * ] under the MonoBook skin or adds the [ Purge ] option to the pop-down menu of the 'Actions' tab under the Vector skin. Allows for the purging of a page's cache when followed. -- George Orwell III (talk) 00:22, 2 December 2012 (UTC)

Proposals

Adding Books to the sidebar menu

Latest comment: 11 years ago17 comments7 people in discussion

I've talked to a couple people now who have told me that they've come to Wikisource hoping to find some classic books to download for their Kindle or iPad, but got completely lost and gave up. This made me realize how unfortunate it is that Wikisource:Books is so obscure and hard to find (and under-utilized by the community). We spend so much time transcribing and proofreading, but if the public can't find our finished products, it seems like a waste of effort. I would like to propose that we add Books as a new item to the sidebar (that links to Wikisource:Books) and that we make an extra effort to fill out that page with more of our finished works. Thoughts? Kaldari (talk) 08:56, 12 December 2012 (UTC)

I believe the default settings, include the print/export toolbox, which include a link to Book creator, which has "See the help page about books for more information."at the bottom, the Help:Books has in the header of it is also a link to Wikisource:eBook & Wikisource:Books. Though we have many more works then are listed on Wikisource:Books. I am very much in favor of making our works available to a wider audience. And I agree that it is not always easy to find what your looking for. Just not sure your suggestion is a solution. JeepdaySock (AKA, Jeepday) 11:45, 12 December 2012 (UTC)

I support this proposal if it will help. If I recall correctly, links to Wikisource:Books were removed a while ago because the book tool was not compatible with Wikisource at that time. The bug was only fixed at the beginning of this year, which is probably why the tool has not really taken off on this project. I do have a small reservation in that the book tool is still very bad at producing Wikisource books and produces an OK but slightly amateurish product. (I've mentioned it elsewhere but it still assumes a collection of disparate articles rather than, for example, chapters; subpages have to be manually altered or the full path appears in the book; it doesn't get the list of contributors correct in its backmatter because they are in the Page namespace; and it always adds a copyfraud licence.) WSExport works better (at the moment; the book tool could always be improved). Additionally, if people are not using the "Download as X" links in the sidebar, they might miss the less obvious "Books" link as well. That said, a Books link wouldn't hurt and could still be helpful to readers. - AdamBMorgan (talk) 14:01, 12 December 2012 (UTC)

Those 'Download as X' links are not always helpful. In fact I would argue that in many (most?) cases they merely cause people frustration. The Download as PDF only gives you a PDF of that page (i.e. a table of contents), and in many cases Download as EPUB does not give you the entire book either. I just tried it on Les Misérables and only got the list of Chapters. Wikisource:Books seems to be the only venue we currently have that will provide a reliable experience for Joe Public who just wants to browse books to download. An alternative suggestion would be to create a prominent link to Wikisource:Books from the Main Page, which I would also be open to. Kaldari (talk) 20:03, 12 December 2012 (UTC)

PDF is tied to the book tool's problems: it wasn't built to understand subpages. The Les Misérables error is probably because that is a copy-and-paste job and not a proper proofread-and-transcluded work, which is odd as I hadn't noticed the link appearing on c&p works before now. I've used both tools and the standard book tool is, frankly, a bit rubbish. That doesn't change my vote though. It's better than nothing. Part of the problem, of course, is we have two tools that between them can work well but knowing which to use requires background knowledge and prevents the click-and-go approach a reader might expect. (NB: For EPUB, try the link on the main page for the featured text). - AdamBMorgan (talk) 20:24, 12 December 2012 (UTC)

Finding works

Half the problem is finding works, I did not realize how bad it was until just now. Example I remember working on book about Joan of Arc a while back, started looking for it.

Enter "Joan of Arc" in search window > the auto complete leads me to Joan of Arc, no mention of what I am looking for. I also just realized that the the thing the covers the search button, is a link "containing… joan of arc"
Main_Page to Site Index > books, no mention of what I am looking for.
Main_Page to Site Index > works > Category:Fiction, no mention of what I am looking for.*
Main_Page to Site Index > works > Authors > Authors-T finally I find Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc!

Seems like after about the second or third failed attempt, a casual visitor would assume we don’t have the work. All of those paths should have lead me to the work. But the first 3 are dead ends, no amount of drilling past the last step leads me to the work which surely should have included it. This work is just one of thousands (tens of thousands?). JeepdaySock (AKA, Jeepday) 16:15, 12 December 2012 (UTC)

In this case, Joan of Arc should be a disambiguation page (which should also link to Author:Joan of Arc and some other works). On the second path, the pagename "Books" might be a little confusing without context. If a reader assumes we means "works" (which usually come in book-form), and does not know about the Wikimedian use of the term, they are likely to reach a dead end. I've added the Category:Historical fiction but you would still have to go a few more clicks on the third path. - AdamBMorgan (talk) 17:44, 12 December 2012 (UTC)

You are correct Joan of Arc should be a disambiguation page. I looked around at Project Gutenberg and the work did not fall in my lap there either so the problem is bigger then just us. When I Google "joan of arc" top return is w:Joan of Arc which has a {{Sister project links}} to Joan of Arc. So did I just pick a luck example that need to be a disambiguation, or do we have a bunch of pages that need disambiguation? is there anyway to identify pages that should be disambiguation pages but are not? JeepdaySock (AKA, Jeepday) 11:33, 13 December 2012 (UTC)

At this point of time I do not support the proposal in the format proposed. We hardly have any works in Wikisource:Books, and it is a nuisance to get them into a PDF format, which I am not sure is the format of the future for Ebooks (something that we have discussed recently). For every work there is already an export format in the left sidebar which enables them to export to EPUB, and I would like to see other formats available. I would much prefer that we had a move obvious export functionality, and perch it at the top of the page as has now been done with featured text. As others have stated I believe that it is more to the findability of works, and maybe that is what is necessary here. We have defined means, however, they are all pretty cumbersome when we rely on wikitext editions for the curation. Clearly a smarter means is via metadata and something long discussed, but not something in which many of us are more than neophytes. — billinghurst sDrewth 13:22, 13 December 2012 (UTC)

There are a few problems with your suggestion. First, even if we put large flashing export buttons at the top of every page, that still doesn't solve the issue of providing users a venue for browsing finished books they can download. Second, the export links are not reliable. In most cases, they will not give you a book you can actually read (please correct me if I'm wrong, but that's been my experience so far). Third, there's no reason for us to concentrate on supporting the eBook formats of the future, when we don't even properly support the eBook formats of the present. PDFs work fine on all eBook readers and computers. Why not take advantage of this and start sharing what we have with the public? Fourth, the reason we hardly have any works in Wikisource:Books is because no one knows about it. It's a simple chicken and egg problem. If we add the link to the sidebar, I will personally pledge to build 5 books for the page. Others could easily do the same. Kaldari (talk) 06:01, 16 December 2012 (UTC)

My experience with PDF from Wikipedia on the kindle is that it made a picture of the page, it did not present as text. Granted this was only one experience, and as previously discussed it may be wrong to assume consistency of results when using any tool. Jeepday (talk) 12:41, 16 December 2012 (UTC)

I've had no problems with downloading books in EPUB format for my Sony eReader using the "Download as EPUB" link in the print/export box both via my computer and directly to the Reader. The books have all had chapters on sub-pages and have behaved well when reading. Having just scanned through the help pages for Wikisource:Books, this looks far too messy and time-wasting for me to bother fiddling with. I would rather get on and start proofreading the next work on my list. Beeswaxcandle (talk) 06:26, 16 December 2012 (UTC)

(edit conflict) I disagree with the basis of the argument and feel that you are mixing the basis of the argument of tools versus accessibility…

EPUB tool is available for every work (irrespective of validation status) and it is in situ.
Tpt's EPUB tool, as it exists today, offers a one click means to generate a copy of a work and its subpages (how we build our works). It does not require multiple wanderings through chapters to build a PDF. For me it seems to work fine, and better and easier than the Collections tool has ever. What evidence or history is there to state that it has been unreliable? Can you provide examples? As the tool is reasonably new, we should looking to improve its reliability.
Ebook tools of present and future? What the heck? The tool itself has the means to export formats, and presumably this can be readily built upon. Obviously not all yet (and no thanks to WMF who have been slow to the game). I would see that we would be far better to look to develop a means that directly threw a PDF download, than have to go through an unnecessary construction process of Special:Book which just replicates each book's existing chapter architecture.
Browsing works. Wikisource:Books is just a construct, and no different from our existing constructs that we have in place from which to browse. At this point every work at enWS is linked from somewhere at enWS whether it be another work (main namespace) or either of our collection namespaces (Author and Portal). Then we have the works categorised as well. Now the suggestion is that Wikisource:Books be another manageable and curated process, presumably which would at least contain our validated works (currently 910) and proofread works (currently 540) that have been through the side by side process. The proposal doesn't cover how or why adding them there is a benefit beyond another listing, nor make them any better curated than they are already elsewhere. It just becomes another selective list. Further, at this point we have something like 270k pages in the article space, many from original sources, like Wikisource:WikiProject Barack Obama. Listed or not? I truly don't think that we want yet another place to be adding and maintaining works. We need something better, something smarter than thinking of more pages to add works. In some ways it is the conundrum of libraries being tips of icebergs. — billinghurst sDrewth 13:29, 16 December 2012 (UTC)

I tend to agree with billinghurst on this one. We need a better way to make our works available without, adding a bunch of work for our limited resources. Preferably by not re-inventing the wheel, nor leveraging unduly on a proprietary system. In my personal life off of Wikisource -

I find that Project Gutenberg (PG) has a good method of making alternate formats available at a click, but this requires the creation and maintenance of multiple files for each work, which I am not sure fits into Wikisource methodology.
I find Internet Archive (IA) is a great resource for finding available works. I don’t recall ever coming across a Wikisource work at IA.

Is possible for Wikisource works to be made available on IA or some other existing tool for finding works? We are of course available via Wikipedia, and other sisters projects. JeepdaySock (AKA, Jeepday) 11:53, 17 December 2012 (UTC)

Browsability: Your defense of our current browability seems pretty weak to me. The only reason I started this thread was because I was tired of hearing people complain that browsing on Wikisource doesn't work, i.e. people can't find what they're looking for. Yes, every work is linked from somewhere, but that is not helpful to someone who wants to quickly find a selection of books they can download (in a finished state). Sure we have Category:Index Validated and Category:Index Proofread, but you can't seriously expect a non-community member to know about those. If you're an experienced Wikisource community member I'm sure you can find whatever you're looking for and probably have a good idea of what things are in a finished state. But try to look at the site for 2 minutes from the perspective of someone who has never seen it before. It is utter chaos and confusion. You can tell me that my proposal isn't useful or that you have better ideas, but you can't tell me the problem doesn't exist.

Download as EPUB: As I've explained further up in this thread, EPUB generation is not reliable. Besides that, EPUB isn't supported on Kindle or Macs. PDF has a much wider range of supported devices (basically everything).

I realize the Book Collection Extension isn't perfect, but it is useful (if we actually use it). You say that "We need something better", but don't offer any suggestions. Meanwhile the eBook/tablet wave is passing WikiSource by. You compare WikiSource to a library, but we're more like a book factory with a few finished products laying on the floor. You suggest that our works are already adequately curated, and this will just be another list to maintain. Where are these other curated lists you speak of? I don't care if 'Books' links to WikiSource:Books or some completely different list of finished books. If you know of something better, please tell me. Kaldari (talk) 00:37, 18 December 2012 (UTC)

I use Calibre to upload files to my Kindle Touch, and it handles EPUBs just fine. The Kindle Fire will display EPUB with the addition of a free app. Whereas my Kindle Touch has crashed and forced a hard reboot to recover from PDF files several times, and at best PDFs are awkward and hard to use. For any eBook/tablet besides Kindle, EPUBs are going to be friendlier than PDF; Androids won't read either natively, and the EPUB readers are equally free and more convenient. Does the Mac come with a PDF reader? Even if it does, an EPUB reader is just a free download away. If we want to target ebooks, we need to support EPUB.--Prosfilaes (talk) 01:07, 18 December 2012 (UTC)

Re browsing. I think that one major improvement would be the ability to easily combine some of the different categories or search within a category. So if I am looking for a work of early modern fiction I can easily from fiction get a list of works that are from 1900-1910, or have been validated, or are short or are by German authors etc. If there was an easy way when searching/browsing to find only those books that are proofread/validated, that would help find it, or go to fiction and then search for, for example, Germany, 1910 etc. I will also point out that a standard library might shelve all their fiction just by author's last name or using Library of Congress classification (i.e. a string of numbers, not clear for a novice), so they are not exactly role models in being easy to browse. MarkLSteadman (talk) 03:11, 18 December 2012 (UTC)

Merge and redirect Wikisource:Requests for assistance to Wikisource:Scriptorium/Help

Latest comment: 11 years ago2 comments2 people in discussion

Confusing to have two pages for what seems to me to be the same thing. Moondyne (talk) 03:26, 18 December 2012 (UTC)

Probably right. Sounds sensible and doable. Just need to watch the archives. — billinghurst sDrewth 05:13, 18 December 2012 (UTC)

End-of-year Archiving

Latest comment: 11 years ago3 comments2 people in discussion

This page (along with /Help) has become larger & larger in the past few months even though archiving has regularly taken place every 30 days or so. I propose we start the coming year "fresh" by having Sanbeg archive everything that exists in both pages on the final day of the cycle.

Clearing the Scriptorium (and its Help subpage) in full does not mean we are prohibited from adding back any Hey; where'd my question go.... or open proposals as needed afterward, but wiping the slate clean would go a long way in synchronizing all the discussions occurring in the coming months back to relatively the same time-stamp/date-range (and eventual archiving 30 days later). Thoughts? -- George Orwell III (talk) 08:43, 18 December 2012 (UTC)

There is no point, the ~~world~~ universe is going to end this Friday thought the article w:Maya calendar hardly mentions it. JeepdaySock (AKA, Jeepday) 11:30, 19 December 2012 (UTC)

Ok seriously, Calendars are just time keepers, change one is like changing your clothes, it happens predictably, no reason to do anything different, just because there is a calendar change. JeepdaySock (AKA, Jeepday) 11:30, 19 December 2012 (UTC)

Twitter cards

Latest comment: 11 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion

Bugzilla:43436 was entered in the past day, and while not being really twitter literate, I think that this is potentially an opportunity for us to better promote and share our works. If there is anyone who is twitter competent, then please free to add some knowledge and ideas to the bugzilla. — billinghurst sDrewth 08:59, 27 December 2012 (UTC)

Versions guideline

Latest comment: 11 years ago65 comments7 people in discussion

I have written Wikisource:Versions as a guideline for different versions or editions of the same work on Wikisource. This includes a "no synthesis" clause that is a convention here but not actually an agreed policy. I started this page a few months ago but the recent "Hans Andersen's fairy tales" discussion reminded me that it still needs to be approved. Please feel free to amend or expand the guideline if anything is missing or disputed. - AdamBMorgan (talk) 22:26, 30 November 2012 (UTC)

Support -- Looks good to me. -- George Orwell III (talk) 01:14, 1 December 2012 (UTC)

not so sure anymore in light of some changes made since. Please pick up that discussion on the WS:Versions' talk page rather than below. -- George Orwell III (talk) 21:06, 2 December 2012 (UTC)

Support Good work Adam. Jeepday (talk) 11:55, 1 December 2012 (UTC)

Support reflects the now nicely — billinghurst sDrewth 23:38, 1 December 2012 (UTC)

Oppose I support the use of the main namespace for comparative versions, which would be at odds with the language in the last paragraph of the "No synthesis" section. Example1 Example2 --BirgitteSB 20:16, 9 December 2012 (UTC)

None of those composite works are transcluded from Page: namespace nor transcribed from scanned pages. The concern is over taking a scan with missing pages, inserting the replacement pages from some other edition and then transcluding the whole as singled edition or taking 2 Index: scans and merging the missing pages from into the transclusion of another to the main namespace. -- George Orwell III (talk) 21:00, 9 December 2012 (UTC)

Those works pre-dated the existence of the Page: namespace. They were done as proofs of concepts back when Wikisource was perceived as offering no value or a negative value to the larger realm of free content. That Wikisource could never do anything except duplicate the work being done at PG or other free content projects.

Danny (a former admin) and I, feeling some pressure from those viewpoints, presented at Wikimainia about (among other things) the technical roadblocks Wikisource was facing that prevented us from doing things that seemed of obvious value within a digital format which no one else was doing. Sanbeg, who heard our presentation, spoke to us further and went on to code LST in order to remove these roadblocks. We developed those pages shortly afterward to both test and showcase the robustness of LST. If Proofread Page had been in use then the pages would be transcluded from scanned text in the Page: namespace. A straightforward reading of the proposal would seem to forbid such presentations.--BirgitteSB 21:14, 1 January 2013 (UTC)

Look, I'm mostly of like-mind and sympathize with the viewpoint for simply copy and pasting works like before into the main namespace but its been proven over and over again that minus the scans to verify such works independent of the original contributor's input or at various points in the passage of time, they are of little worth to the possible visiting public at large. You either have to be around every day to be able to defend or justify one thing or the other for those who question the validity, fidelity and/or credibilty in a work or have the scans available to do it for them instead without the need for further invetigation, discussion and the like (i.e. to those who aren't familar - you & I are only as good and trustworthy as our last mistake was). I'm all for changing the wording to make it more clear that the policy does not cover "grandfathered" works, but I'm not for changing the wording behind the premise of the policy at all. Its all about moving forward; not preserving the past. -- George Orwell III (talk) 01:20, 2 January 2013 (UTC)

Oppose—We usually do not know how the author of a certain work would have wanted their work to be presented hypertextually! There can be many didactically useful ways of presenting a text and hence, many potential versions to be made from one scanned edition. In October 2007 Birgitte was describing here on the Scriptorium how a periodical might be presented on Wikisource through transclusion. Eclecticology remarked that standardizing the structure that Birgitte described might not be intuitive to new users and would seem to defeat the purpose of the transclusion tools, so he opined that she might be overemphasizing structure. Birgitte replied in a way that made a lot of sense to me then and now:

I am not putting more emphasis on structure than content. I am saying anyone willing to put work into content should please themselves as far as structure goes, since all the various structures can be accommodated. They are not mutually exclusive, so we can make everyone happy and there is no reason to argue over structure at all. Transclusion is not limited to templates. See Elegie II and Elegy II (1896) which are both transcluded at Elegy II Comparative text. That is basic transclusion which would suffice for magazine articles. There are also fancier varieties of transclusion for more complicated things. Whoever wants to work on the content: Pick your favorite structure! Whoever wishes to see it organized differently: Go for it! Got a third way of organization that is the greatest thing since sliced-bread: Go for that as well!--BirgitteSB 21:05, 16 October 2007 (UTC)

ResScholar (talk) 07:24, 10 January 2013 (UTC)

I am not certain that the main namespace is the place to compare works side by side, nor to put commentary. For me, this is either the job of a toolserver tool, OR a modification to mw:Extension:Doublewiki so we can go do internal comparison rather than just interwiki OR we just get a namespace created where these comparisons can be done. To me this seems more like an earlier discussion that we have had about annotated and commentated works. To make it easy and inclusive, (and knowing that getting tools is too hard) I feel that we just get an extra namespace, that just requires community agreement. Personal opinion, what has been done with the comparative variations of the bible I don't like, not that my opinion is particularly pertinent—unsigned comment by Billinghurst, 22:31, 10 January 2013‎

I've made a few changes to try to resolve some objections. I have:

Added a "in a nutshell" summary message box with two bullet points. The idea comes from Wikipedia. It might seem to be a little redundant to the header but it could help to emphasise points. One or two more bullet points should be OK if they could help.
I've added a specific exemption for comparative texts. The "no synthesis" issue is to avoid things like people stitching together Frankenstein-like synthetic editions, either by editing the scans or using a mixture of different scans on one page (or otherwise misrepresenting scans and our texts, or passing off later editions as the original and so on). As long as the comparative versions are clear about the sources, which the examples above are, it should be OK. I've sometimes thought a new namespace would help with things like that but it would be a lot of work for not much gain at this stage. However, I think transcluding two scans to one page will still cause problems. For example, the "source" link at the top of the page will be incorrect and misleading.
I've removed the contentious examples from the final section. It now just states that there could be reasons without spelling the out.

Hopefully this will help. It's not a departure from our current practice and I would prefer we have something in writing. As it stands, a hypothetical good-faith new user currently risks deletion and/or disappointment with no reason to know any better. - AdamBMorgan (talk) 21:21, 10 January 2013 (UTC)

Frankenstein?! Frankenstein?! This is WikiSOURCE not WikiSCAN. Our first priority should be being true to the source, not the scan. ResScholar (talk) 23:46, 10 January 2013 (UTC)

That makes no sense. If we remained true to GoogleBooks' [source] disclaimer, we'd never host any of those works [scans]. -- George Orwell III (talk) 00:42, 11 January 2013 (UTC)

By source, I meant the author and their original works; and the disclaimer restricts the downloader from Google from commercially exploiting the works. It doesn't explicitly forbid adding value to it and passing it to others who may choose to ignore a Google non-commercial exploitation request attached to it. ResScholar (talk) 05:02, 11 January 2013 (UTC)

My mistake. -- George Orwell III (talk) 07:09, 11 January 2013 (UTC)

You guys have clearly lost me for what I thought we have been looking to discuss in versions. Versions is about having the different editions of text available. The cited 'Frankenstein' version was pages from different editions (year and country of publication) being presented as a work, hence the 'synthetic' connotation which was not see as true to a published text. — billinghurst sDrewth 03:43, 11 January 2013 (UTC)

But it also says the version has to match the scans--no improvements in clarity or aesthetics. And I was trying to point out that there could be a one-many relationship from scan to editions--also squelched. ResScholar (talk) 05:02, 11 January 2013 (UTC)

I can live with stuff like that as long as its shown/made known to deviate from the original work as published (or scanned if you like). I don't believe that is what was being described earlier either. -- George Orwell III (talk) 07:09, 11 January 2013 (UTC)

This is a policy statement on Versions, not the Style guide. I would not expect nor take any style guidance from this page, and if it has those connotations, then we should be rewording/removing/(whatevering) so that it is about versions (KISS). — billinghurst sDrewth 11:17, 11 January 2013 (UTC)

I am possibly not explaining things properly. I need a formal version of "Please don't copy and paste together a lot of different scans and then try to pass off the result as an accurate and faithful version of a real work." (Although repairing a scan using parts of different scans of the same edition should usualy be OK.) - AdamBMorgan (talk) 12:40, 11 January 2013 (UTC)

No, you had it right from the start in my view - folks kept reverting to eras or scenarios that largely don't apply in moving forward & I thought it was pretty clear those instances won't fall under this guideline as is the case with most of the now grandfathered approaches to adding works. Support your last revisions as well in case that was not made clear earlier. -- George Orwell III (talk) 19:44, 11 January 2013 (UTC)

Agreed! and I knew where you were coming from, though others interpreted it differently. I reckon that we pretty well agreed on the approach, just need to get the words agreeable to all to give clarity to our meaning. — billinghurst sDrewth 17:25, 12 January 2013 (UTC)

(More verbiage) This policy is meant to be quite enabling, and I feel that it is. To me it invites people to have a second copy of a work if they can see half a valid reason that the another version (edition) is their passion, and it is meant to be clean in that regard, and informative where people are choosing to do so. It does restrict people making editions. If you think that there is any thing that restricts or pushes policy outside of versions, please go and put strike it out (<s>) and let us see if it is a clarification or a removal that works. It is NOT meant to be touching policy on annotated versions, etc. though it may need to mention how they fit into the mix. — billinghurst sDrewth 11:29, 11 January 2013 (UTC)

I'm not adverse to working on the text, but now that a position has been struck that directly contradicts the objections I made and placed in a nutshell, I will have to take that position back out of the nutshell, compare it against my objections, see what remains, and mold it back into a nut. I don't know how quickly I can do all this. I will give an update Monday, if it takes that long. ResScholar (talk) 01:33, 12 January 2013 (UTC)

I feel that has been the misunderstanding all along, in how you are interpreting it wasn't the intent, hence why we would like to see your words there. It is important, not urgent. — billinghurst sDrewth 17:25, 12 January 2013 (UTC)

Rather than me composing language to adjust the rules in dark privacy and submitting it to a deservedly skeptical reception by you, for the reason of not being sure what classes of new editions I am trying to introduce or strain out, allow me to try a more open approach and relate to you some of the challenges I am facing in presenting editions of texts here aided by wiki tools:

Caught in a citestorm

I think we've all been there: we're reading a piece of literature or maybe even a science text, when suddenly the author releases a cascade of allusions, summons a panoply of great events of the past, drops names by the bucketful, orchestrates a rhapsody of historical voices all in service to accompany an authorial conceit. You don't know any of them, and while you might enjoy the parade of names suggestive to your imagination, you get the feeling that you missed the circus altogether. Maybe the author will console you with a simple restatement of what (s)he was trying to get at, but you're conscious that there's a level that you missed.

I am going to begin a summary of some of the authors who have done this and the things I've done to editions to protect the reader from citestorms.

Herodotus

According to Funk & Wagnall's New Encyclopedia, Herodotus's History of Herodotus is "the first known creative work to be written in prose", so its ancientness might make the names and places Herodotus uses unfamiliar, and also nearly everything that is written afterwards about the region Herodotus covers is almost like a commentary on this work, and since every proper name has been known for at least 2400 years, there is probably a lot to be said about each of these ancient names, or at least a great majority of them. So I have started to wikilink every proper name. The result so far has been fairly successful: The chapter containing all the wikilinks I've added so far is 1225th place in a recent ranking of most-visited pages on Wikisource.

There are some particularly conspicuous cases of name-dropping however; in section 28 there is a list of Croesus's conquests in Asia Minor, it reads:

28. Croesus afterwards, in the course of many years, brought under his sway almost all the nations to the west of the Halys. The Lycians and Cilicians alone continued free; all the other tribes he reduced and held in subjection. They were the following: the Lydians, Phrygians, Mysians, Mariandynians, Chalybians, Paphlagonians, Thynian and Bithynian Thracians, Carians, Ionians, Dorians, Aeolians and Pamphylians.

Going to each linked page might still leave one confused where each tribe is in relation to one another. It just so happens that there was a map in Wikimedia Commons that displayed the locations of ~~all~~ a lot these tribes in Asia Minor, and I added it to the History of Herodotus page, along with a few other maps.

Now there is a case to be made here that different versions of this work cardinal to Western Civilization may be desirable from a single scan. Some may find the wikilinks distracting or difficult to bring to their word processing program. Some may wish to have access to footnotes made by the translator, others may wish to be immersed in the story told by this ancient author and find the footnotes take away from that experience, or they may wish the author solely to be allowed to speak for himself. Some may wish to have maps excluded for similar reasons or perhaps because they wish to read a faithful rendition of the translator's work and nothing more.

This is what I meant by allowing for editing a scan to improve the clarity of a work, and having more than one edition, even what one could call a new edition, per scan. Of course, right now there is NO scan that the one version that now exists is attached to. But if one were ever to add a scan, under the proposed rules, the footnotes would have to be added, the links and pictures removed, and no alternatives would be allowed to exist. ResScholar (talk) 05:51, 22 January 2013 (UTC)

Strictly speaking, this comes under the Annotation policy, rather than the Versions guideline, which is an entirely different (and heavily disputed) area. You are right that original elements should not be added to a scanned version (a de facto policy at the moment, this guideline just puts it in writing). However, if and when a scan of the History of Herodotus is uploaded, it would make more sense to move the current page to The Annotated History of Herodotus (or similar). In this case, it would be important to disambiguate because I imagine that there are several versions of this text available in the public domain, each with their own quirks and footnotes, each of which can be hosted on Wikisource. Adding our own material to one of these misrepresents the original author's work (or translator/interpreter/editor, depending on your point of view). We are somewhat misrepresenting George Rawlinson at the moment, actually, as the header credits him with the current version of the text; "based on a translation by..." might be more accurate for the header. There is also the possibility of a Wikisource-original translation of the original Greek.

As an aside, the annotation policy is still being disputed. It was actually unblanked and then blanked again in the last few days. The discussion has disappeared into the archives but, to summarise: Some users opposed the use of any annotations whatsoever (including any and all wikilinks in the body of the text, which they were removing) to maintain the purity of the originals. Other users thought we should be able to add value, partly because this is a wiki. Some said annotations were a job for Wikibooks, others disagreed. There were discussions about what counted as an annotation and what was acceptable (I think adding maps was deemed extreme). The whole thing stalled with no consensus and the page was blanked. We should probably return to that some time soon. - AdamBMorgan (talk) 12:01, 23 January 2013 (UTC)

Three questions about the versions policy

How about Errata? Would it be possible to create a version of a work, such as this one with all of the errata fixed in the text.
I assume this means that if you have an anthology or a collection of works you can't transcribe the original version into it (even with a disclaimer because the page numbering might be different). For example, if one wanted to host a Complete Works of Thackeray one could not transcribe the already proofread and validated Vanity Fair, but would have to proofread and validate a new version, even if the text is identical (except for pagation)?
Is it possible to set a primary version like with a disambugation page you can set a primary topic with a link to other topics on top? That way you write a link to Sonnet 18 without being presented a giant list of every single version of it excerpted in every general poetry anthology on WS? MarkLSteadman (talk) 13:24, 23 January 2013 (UTC)
Technically, this is another annotation issue. In general, no, unless the errata is part of the original edition. We leave typographic errors as they were in the original; larger corrections would be incongruous.
Agreed, this is not what the versions guidance is meant to be addressing. Versions is published versions, not what we do with them. Re the annotations guidance, this is an unresolved issue (hotly debated/causing schisms) of how and what the community wants. We need to get back to it, however, we all find productive things to do instead. Truly unresolved. For the DNB when there was a published set of errata, the correcting are being transcluded to the bottoms of the respective articles, rather than corrected. Check out {{DNB errata}}

Yes. This has happened a few times already, albeit usually with shorter works. I might be tempted to abuse the match & split function in these cases but you can't really be sure that no changes or edits have been made to the different texts and typography.
Do we have evidence that the version of the anthology is an exact replica? Same editor, etc.? No variations in spellings? Pretty well why we have had redirects from root level through to subpages, and when we get multiple versions that we have then disambiguated at the root.

If it has ever been done, I've never seen it. I have no problem with that personally, although we may have arguments over which version is primary in some cases. - AdamBMorgan (talk) 00:14, 27 January 2013 (UTC)
What makes a primary version? We chose to not follow the enWP model of dominance for disambiguation as 1) it led to fights about which was more dominant, how to measure, etc. (note American people generally won by weight of numbers); 2) We have also versions, different translations, and then also versions that were parts of other collections. So ... we chose to have the root to be the disambiguation, and if it was only the one work was a subpage, it them became a redirect. We also have things like Night. <shrug>. FWIW part of why I argued for this means was as I was doing a lot of the disambig clean up, it was my experience that we got a cleaner tidy and easier to identify the misplaced (ie. they point to root). If you think that there is a singular famous work under the name, then that can be directly linked from enWP, or it can be noted within the notes section of the disambiguation page, even put it at the top of the list. — billinghurst sDrewth 03:39, 27 January 2013 (UTC)

For example, right now we have 3 at least 4 versions of Sonnet 18 by Shakespeare: Page:Oxford_Book_of_English_Verse_1250-1900.djvu/216, Page:Oxford_Book_of_English_Verse_1250-1918.djvu/228, The Worm Ouroboros/Chapter 33 and Sonnet 18 (Shakespeare). So presumably, this page Sonnet 18 (Shakespeare) should be replaced by a version page? Or am I missing something about the policy? I understand that the current redirect Sonnet 18 could become a disambiguation page in the future (e.g. between Shakespeare's Sonnet 18 and Petrarch's Sonnet 18). My idea would have the current Sonnet 18 (Shakespeare) be the primary version and the result of a redirect/disambiguation from the page Sonnet 18. The others versions would then be listed on a page like Sonnet 18 (Shakespeare) (versions) MarkLSteadman (talk) 04:37, 27 January 2013 (UTC)

Absolutely right! Sonnet 18 (Shakespeare) should be headed with {{versions}} and then point to the various pages. I would even say that we ditch the existing text as it is neither backed by scans, nor sourced. Wherever the versions exist they should be header with {{other versions|Sonnet 18 (Shakespeare)}}. Not sure what to do about the footer directory, and happy for suggestions of leave, or add to the [18]. — billinghurst sDrewth

My main concerns is with this passage: 'Each work on Wikisource should be directly linked to a specific publication of a specific work...' A straightforward reading seems to me to prohibit new translations of existing works (which I thought was acceptable), so clarification might be good. My sense is that there is a difference between annotation and versions. As you mentioned, most often corrections and additional material could be handled by annotation. But they can also be handled by a new version. Presumably I could find, upload and proofread an already existing fixed printed edition of Maxwell's work. I could in principle, write a fixed edition, have it published by a reputable publisher under the appropriate license, and that would be ok as well. But I can't create a copy of an existing transcription, fix errors and call it Treastise on Electricity and Magnetism (corrected), or add material and call it Foo (expanded), leaving the original version unchanged and cleary showing that it wasn't the original version of the scan and any new errors were not Maxwell's fault (if that is the main concern). MarkLSteadman (talk) 03:09, 27 January 2013 (UTC)

Yes, though this is Versions not Annotations. Annotations (review with prior statement) is still contentious, though any annotations to a work are to a specific publication of a specific work, so it is not contrary to the versions guidance. Whether we allow user contributed annotations is separated from the published version. Yes, if you published an annotated version of Maxwell's work, and it was licenced so we could host it, that is what would happen, it becomes its own version, and would be listed on a versions page. As mentioned we still debate (or avoid debate) on Annotated versions of works here, see Wikisource talk:Annotations and Annotation's history — billinghurst sDrewth 03:57, 27 January 2013 (UTC)

Would it help if we stated that "Versions" means "Published versions" — billinghurst sDrewth 03:59, 27 January 2013 (UTC)

I think that would work i.e. an explation that it is about works that claim to be a published version, rather than a derived work / translation etc. that claims to be a new, WS version of a work. I just want clarification about the policy so that it doesn't unintentionally cause controversy later about what it might mean, or discourage or prevent someone from making a valuable contribution. Overall, I think it is a great idea. MarkLSteadman (talk) 05:04, 27 January 2013 (UTC)

Or even just that new, WS versions of a work are allowed, as long as they come from a specific published version, so that they are not themselves created from a random assortment of editions, and are clearly marked. MarkLSteadman (talk) 05:20, 27 January 2013 (UTC)

I agree that 'Each work on Wikisource should be directly linked to a specific [published version] of a specific work...' Before scans were available it was encouraged to list a reference to that published version of the work in the notes section as a matter of routine bibliographical courtesy. Scans have allowed us to offer even greater security to the users of these works, and in my opinion future users who only bring their works to "text complete"

or less should in the best case be prepared to have their works split into scans, and if there gets to be too much clutter and easily available scans, be prepared to have them outright deleted. And even a translation should refer to the edition(s) from which it is being translated.ResScholar (talk) 05:55, 27 January 2013 (UTC)

But the nutshell says Each version should match a specific edition of the original work. If it means "Each published version should match a specific edition of the original work" it's a tautology! That's partly why I would prefer Each version should be directly linked to a specific [edition or published version etc.] of [the/an] original [work or edition of the work etc.] ResScholar (talk) 06:57, 27 January 2013 (UTC)

I come away from the "nutshell" with something more like... Each WS hosted version of a work should match a complete, unique, and formally published ~~edition or version~~ content-entity of that work - ideally, backed by locally hosted scans or, at worst, directly linked to easily verifiable, well-recognized sources. -- George Orwell III (talk) 08:00, 27 January 2013 (UTC)

That's fine, George, but that annotations aren't going to "match" the work (that is, they will be in addition to the work) is one of my points, and why I prefer the other wording in that respect. ResScholar (talk) 08:21, 27 January 2013 (UTC)

What's the problem? Doesn't whatever work in question need to exist first in the "as published" unaltered state before we usually host an annotated derivative of that work? -- George Orwell III (talk) 08:40, 27 January 2013 (UTC)

To be blunt: screw what the nutshell says, that is an attempt to summarise, and if it not correct, it can/should be updated, I will delete it and we can reword it. We are trying to discuss principles about what is a version, and as I see it a version is a published work <see above definition>. — billinghurst sDrewth 09:22, 27 January 2013 (UTC)

That is too vague, imho. We should be strictly defining version in this case as it applies to our hosting policy and practices only - anything beyond that can be easily misconstrued depending on the situation. Is there any point in hosting both the 1881 second edition of a book published by a New York-based publishing house as well as the 1881 second edition of the same book published by a London-based publishing house? While they are both of the same edition - and certainly formally published - it cannot be said they are the same version -- in spite of the fact even the errata may be exactly the same in the two books.

Amended: Each WS hosted version of a work should match a complete, unique, and formally published content-entity of that work - ideally, backed by ~~locally~~ hosted scans or, at worst, directly linked to easily verifiable, well-recognized sources. Content-entity is not the best phrase to use there, I know, but it gets us away from the terms most likely to put the policy or practice into some sort of contradiction or controversy. -- George Orwell III (talk) 10:07, 27 January 2013 (UTC)

I am comfortable with a tight definition, and have no problem with the amended version, though struck out "locally" as hosted should implicitly mean local/WMF; and don't want that to be misconstrued as enWS only. Re if someone wishes to do both a UK and a US version of the same edition, I would not encourage it, in fact I would discourage it, BUT if that is their passion, then good luck to them, though I doubt that it will happen, especially for a large work, maybe it would with poetry. Dunno. — billinghurst sDrewth 13:14, 27 January 2013 (UTC)

I'd have no problem with anybody adding both books in my example IF there was a good enough reason to if ever challenged --> let's say one had 550 pages while the other had 576 pages -- all exactly the same content, just a different type-set (font) was used between the two publishing houses; that would be "enough" to prevent deletion of one or the other transcription for me.

At the same time, if I introduced a third variant to the previous example, an 1899 Australian based reprint of the 1881 second edition of the same book as published in New York but by the London-based publishing house also in 1881, I'd have to say nope, there is no point in hosting this reprint. (unless someone has vested caveat to provide if challenged in the matter, of course).

Poetry is altogether another matter and agree it is more likely that those cases can and will run into multiple hosted version by us, but the complete, unique and formally published principle should still hold for those cases regardless. In fact, it might be enough justification to host multiple versions just to diffuse the apparent ascendancy of one copy becoming considered as the "primary" due little else but the lack of any other copies existing on en.WS (though I'd loathe the eventual abuse of such justification - Shakespeare is one thing, Pearshakes would be totally another if you follow my meaning). -- George Orwell III (talk) 14:21, 27 January 2013 (UTC)

User annotations by our definitions are 1) subset of a hosted work; 2) they do not qualify as a version under this guidance note (well not yet); 3) they sit in a blackhole as an uncertain and unresolved issue at enWS hence they cannot sit within this guidance note. Can we agree to the versions stuff, and if it is desire we can then go and smash upon Wikisource:Annotations. — billinghurst sDrewth 09:22, 27 January 2013 (UTC)

Agreed. -- George Orwell III (talk) 10:07, 27 January 2013 (UTC)

Billinghurst, I must ask could we regard removal of annotations from a work as a subset of a hosted work by our definitions? ResScholar (talk) 11:29, 27 January 2013 (UTC)

For example, the Loeb Classical Library contains works on one side of the page in Greek and Latin and the translations with annotations on the other. Maybe we would want to do without the philological commentary. ResScholar (talk) 12:05, 27 January 2013 (UTC)

I don't see that this guidance note has any effect, p+ve or n-ve, to such works, that is not the purpose of the guidance. I also don't believe that any changes would be made to annotated works until we have readdressed the disputed guidance on annnotations. For Loeb Classical Library I have seen discussion about whether these multilingual works should be hosted here, or at mulWS, but on that I have no informed opinion, and as I have seen no formal proposals, I pretty well intend to be without opinion. — billinghurst sDrewth 13:14, 27 January 2013 (UTC)

I think some wording to that effect in the guidance would satisfy my concerns. Since the only exception listed is side-by-side comparison, it is easy to interpert that to mean that everything else is forbidden. I think either clarification of what versions are covered (i.e. that this guidance does not apply to versions that do not claim to be published versions), or some such wording to the effect of: "For new annotated versions see Wikisource:Annotations and for new translated versions see Wikisource:Translations" or even just "For new versions of existing works that do not claim to match existing published works see WWSI" to clarify that it does not take a stand on these issues and leave it at that. MarkLSteadman (talk) 17:36, 27 January 2013 (UTC)

I don't feel that we can point to Annotations, or mention them (as there is no agreement), so we remain mute, and rely on the definition from GO3 above. We can do a "see also" to WS:T. Best that I could see that we could possibly do is to talk more generally about Wikisource generated derivative works that are to be based on Each WS hosted version of a work should match a complete … and state that at this time the community has an agree approach to translations (and then be mute). Side-by-side? Lost me where do we say that? It is late, I will reread tomorrow to see whether it is just me. — billinghurst sDrewth 15:49, 28 January 2013 (UTC)

Sounds fine with me. If there is a way that includes the definition from GO3 above great. If not, we can always point to this discussion in the future. Even just a mention about them in vague terms as a possibility would also be great. Support the proposal. For the side-by-side I meant the comparative pages exception under the no synthesis part. MarkLSteadman (talk) 16:21, 28 January 2013 (UTC)

As long as it's understood that the issue of annotations is not purported to be prejudged by the policy, I'm willing to withdraw my opposition, unless Birgitte wants to say something more about the comparative versions issue she brought up early on. ResScholar (talk) 18:25, 29 January 2013 (UTC)

Comparative (C), Annotated (A), and (our) Translations (T) to me deserve a separate discussion and while may touch Versions but not rule the guidance. I truly would like to have that CAT discussion separate, from first principles and ensure that a couple of the predominant positions can be stated in terms of positions, see where we align, and then work on the differences. — billinghurst sDrewth 13:11, 31 January 2013 (UTC)

Serial Works Combined

One last thought I had. Does this guidance cover taking works published serially, e.g. chapter 1 of FooBar in issue 1 of a magazine BarFoo, chapter 2 of FooBar in issue 2 etc., and making a complete work of them in the main namespace (i.e. making a new work called FooBar in the mainspace, and having chapter 1 transcluded from issue 1, followed by chapter 2 transcluded from issue 2, etc.)? I can see it all being the same version calling it the BarFoo version (just as Vol. 1 and Vol. 2 of a work are considered part of the same version and can be combined in the mainspace). I just want to make sure that this interpretation is correct. MarkLSteadman (talk) 19:24, 29 January 2013 (UTC)

No, not in that sense. Two issues of the same journal ... then yes, that is multiple published versions

If a work is published in a periodical, we would expect to see it displayed in situ within the journal (through the editions). Whereas this guidance neither prevents nor forces an alternate presentation of the work; and to note that we still just have one version of the work, there is just a means of alternate presentation through the transclusion. I believe that we have done some of that with PSM for articles in three or four pieces. Similarly where a poem has been included within a work, we have been known to use #LST to extract that to root level.

As a separate comment, to note about major works published in parts/volumes, we don't even necessarily require them to be reproduced in the parts, as it may make sense to ignore the parts, and just reproduce as chapters that span multiple volumes. Text is king! — billinghurst sDrewth 13:04, 31 January 2013 (UTC)

Hmmm. I'm somewhat confused by this. Does it all hinge on whether what is published in the issues are parts of a chapter/whole work? So if half of a piece is published in issue 1 and half is published in issue 2 they can be transcluded together and count as part of the same version? Or, are they different versions, and then clearly could not be either combined in a djvu file or transcluded onto the same page in the Main:NS? But if they are separate chapters they count as different versions?

I can see several different levels where the no synthesis plays a role, and I would think that the phrase "Each work on wikisource" would cover all of them. As explained in the guidance, you have within a djvu file and from transclusion from the Page:NS to the Main:NS. But you also have the relation of these Main:NS pages to each other in works with multiple components. It would seem to me that if these parts came from different versions, they also cannot be combined, as then you would no longer have the link to a specific publication. I cannot have chapter 1 from one edition, chapter 2 from a different edition, chapter 3 from a third edition etc. Similarly, I cannot have volume 1 of a work from a 1901 British edition and volume 2 from a 1920 American edition combined in a single "work" under the same root, right? Or is this all just "presentation," and not covered by the guidance?

I understand completely that for works published in a magazine or for example a monologue/speech/poem etc. that is part of a larger work that you need to maintain them as part of the larger work as well. If you extract out to root part of a work using #LST, you still have to have it as part of the larger work where the larger work is transcluded. MarkLSteadman (talk) 19:57, 31 January 2013 (UTC)

That looks like agreement, can we get the text updated, and close this discussion. — billinghurst sDrewth 12:21, 7 February 2013 (UTC)

I have started an attempt to distil this conversation into an updated Wikisource:Versions. I have added the new nutshell, tried to adapt some of the discussion into an explanation of "content-entity" and standardised some of the terminology (version/edition/content-entity). I have replaced the previous "Comparative pages" subsection with a "Derivative works" section, which mostly links to other policies and guidelines to keep this guideline on-topic and [attempt to] prevent confusion. I have started an entirely new page, Wikisource:Comparisons, which is currently adapted from the previous "Comparative pages" section, so it would conform to the other forms of quasi-accepted derivative works. In order to summarise "Serial Works Combined" I have started yet another new page, Wikisource:Serial works, which will be a completely non-binding essay. - AdamBMorgan (talk) 21:47, 8 February 2013 (UTC)

Adam's revisions look good to me (<groan> though I was hoping somebody else had something just as reasonable if not better than "content-entity"). Can some of you provide some additional feedback here on the latest (no pun intended) version of the Versions guideline? The sooner a consensus is reached the sooner we can move on & archive this. -- George Orwell III (talk) 21:34, 13 February 2013 (UTC)

I added a proposed clarification to the "Different Editions" section preamble in brackets. ResScholar (talk) 08:19, 14 February 2013 (UTC)

Here is the sentence with the proposed clarification:

Note that Wikisource should ~~not~~ have <neither index pages nor individual name-space presentations drawn from> more than one copy of a specific content-entity of any work.

I want to make it clear that "no multiple copies" means "no multiple scans of one edition" not "multiple index pages". And that it doesn't prejudge multiple name-space annotation presentations of the same edition. Accidentally, this would also allow individual volumes of one same multi-volume edition to be drawn from different libraries. ResScholar (talk) 04:44, 15 February 2013 (UTC)

It might be even better if the rule was written in the context of what was being discussed here:

Note that Wikisource should ~~not~~ have <neither index pages nor individual name-space presentations drawn from different content-entities of the same work or even> more than one copy of a specific content-entity of any work.

ResScholar (talk) 05:07, 15 February 2013 (UTC)

I am happy with Adam's revisions. I do agree the wording could be improved, but I am lacking in any better ideas than those provided. Thanks to all for working on this. MarkLSteadman (talk) 09:27, 14 February 2013 (UTC)

BOT approval requests

AuCoBot

Latest comment: 12 years ago8 comments6 people in discussion

Hi, I have a tool to add Authority control data, like VIAF, to pages. I also have a bot account, AuCoBot, which can do the appropriate edit automatically. It already has a bot flag on German Wikipedia, and I would like one here as well. All edits will be human-supervised, and only people with a TUSC account can operate the bot (you get a pre-filled edit box by default), so each can always be tracked back to an individual user. A demo edit is here. I will add a few more demo edits to convince you it's safe :-) --Magnus Manske (talk) 13:10, 5 November 2012 (UTC)

Oh very sexy! As I have been wandering through doing the pages on the sub-categories to Category:Authors-M I have noticed that there are some cases where we need to expand names to get the beasts fitted, and the VIAF lookup is imperfect with names, so occasionally need to manually manipulate searches. Will there be the possibility to have these logged where they have been checked and failed to find the AuthCon? I know there are numbers with initials that I have been able to dig through and identify the authors. — billinghurst sDrewth 14:06, 5 November 2012 (UTC)

At the moment, only the information if the page has received AC data, or if it was decided that no data was available, is logged (green and blue counters in the top bar). You can of course find the VIAF data in a different tab and manually them to the form, then do the edit (bot or pre-filled edit box); currently, I don't offer a "manual search". There's >10K author pages lacking AC, even more on the Wikipedias; my approach is to go through the low-hanging fruit quickly, and tackle the hard cases later. --Magnus Manske (talk) 14:16, 5 November 2012 (UTC)

Support, I reviewed those edits which had not yet been marked as patrolled, accuracy seems fine. Definitely a need. I had considered doing it manually... JeepdaySock (talk) 15:37, 5 November 2012 (UTC)
Support - I was (and still will be) doing this manually. Manual still seems more accurate and open to fudging (searching for "Surname, Initial" or using wildcards, for example) but the bot/tool will help. - AdamBMorgan (talk) 19:40, 5 November 2012 (UTC)
Support—saw this on RC yesterday and it seemed to know what it was doing. Beeswaxcandle (talk) 02:50, 6 November 2012 (UTC)
support It is a guiding tool, rather than a bot. — billinghurst sDrewth 11:37, 9 November 2012 (UTC)
I've granted the bot flag as there has been no disagreement for almost two weeks.—Zhaladshar ^(Talk) 16:10, 17 November 2012 (UTC)

Bot Confirmation

Latest comment: 11 years ago5 comments3 people in discussion

A discussion at Administrators' noticeboard brings up for consideration a bot confirmation similar to Admin Confirmation. Basic points suggested are.

Bot and/or owner active on WS in the last year for auto confirmation (follows Admin logic)
Bot owner is above admin (stewards, crats, developers, etc.) and active across wiki sisters in the last year for auto confirmation.
Bots deflagged for inactivity may apply for reactivation.

Jeepday (talk) 00:47, 20 November 2012 (UTC)

Can I change the emphasis to a review and prompt process (KISS principle). We don't make the flag process that hard to get, so it shouldn't be hard to remove. [noting that a flag for a bot allows faster edit rates, larger result pull and avoids usually visible RC AND also noting any admin-flagged bot undertakes a yearly confirmation process with its admin owner]

Either user or their bot active at enWS within the past two years (retain flag);

If fail above (2 years of inactivity [to me this is the control point decision]), then

Prompt user, give 90 days of notice to demonstrate requirement for bot flag
- response and use (retain flag); otherwise
- no response or no use (trigger flag removal)

Reapplication always available, abbreviated approval process possible. We can do this once or twice a year, so it becomes less burdensome. — billinghurst sDrewth 07:50, 20 November 2012 (UTC)

I support this proposal with the above amendments included. -- George Orwell III (talk) 02:36, 21 November 2012 (UTC)

Any other comment before we conclude and act? — billinghurst sDrewth 23:25, 1 December 2012 (UTC)

Posted to Wikisource:Bots#Confirmation. JeepdaySock (AKA, Jeepday) 16:00, 24 December 2012 (UTC)

Bot Confirmation January 2013

Latest comment: 11 years ago41 comments5 people in discussion

This is the first semi annual Bot confirmation in accordance with Bot Confirmation Policy. All the bots up for confirmation are eligible for auto confirm, as either they or their owner have been active on Wikisource in the last two years.

Value of "Inactive" or "Active" under status, represents value of {{Bot}} on User:FooBot, generally set by the bot owner and does not correlate with status for auto confirmation. Jeepday (talk) 12:43, 5 January 2013 (UTC)

User:BenchBot

Bot flag will be reconfirmed automatically unless at least three established users oppose, which will trigger an election with decision by simple majority. Loss of flag does not prevent edits, only impacts recent change visibility.

Bot Username	Tasks	Last Confirmation	Next Confirmation	Status	Owner
User:BenchBot	Adding Supreme Court cases from http://bulk.resource.org/ that have been formatted according to the guidelines of Wikisource:WikiProject U.S. Supreme Court cases.	July 2010 granted bot flag	2013, January	Active; last edit April 2011	User:Slaporte

kept no objections made to continuing permission. — billinghurst sDrewth 13:27, 14 February 2013 (UTC)

User:CandalBot

Bot Username	Tasks	Last Confirmation	Next Confirmation	Status	Owner
User:CandalBot	interwiki maintenance	Sept 2011 granted bot flag	2013, January	Active; last edit within 24 hours of current 20:02, 31 December 2012 (UTC)	User:Candalua

kept no objections made to continuing permission. — billinghurst sDrewth 13:29, 14 February 2013 (UTC)

User:File Upload Bot (LA2)

Bot Username	Tasks	Last Confirmation	Next Confirmation	Status	Owner
User:File Upload Bot (LA2)	Unclear	not found	2013, January	Inactive; last bot edit September 2005, last owner edit November 2012	User:LA2 and User:LA2-bot

Remove — Bot inactive for 2 years or more. -- George Orwell III (talk) 13:52, 5 January 2013 (UTC)
Remove - Bot page redirects to "User:LA2-bot", implies bot no longer active, and continued flag not needed. Jeepday (talk) 15:04, 5 January 2013 (UTC)

Owner indicates "The LA2-bot account is sufficient for my needs"[1]. JeepdaySock (AKA, Jeepday) 15:45, 14 January 2013 (UTC)

Remove not a needed functionality — billinghurst sDrewth 12:04, 7 January 2013 (UTC)

Decision: removal of bot flag — billinghurst sDrewth 13:31, 14 February 2013 (UTC)

Account never had bot flag. Hesperian 12:14, 16 February 2013 (UTC)

User:InductiveBot

Bot Username	Tasks	Last Confirmation	Next Confirmation	Status	Owner
User:InductiveBot	Category work: creation, moving and renaming Trivial but numerous replacements, additions or formatting of templates.	May 2010 granted bot flag	2013, January	Active; Last edit July 2012	User:Inductiveload

kept no objections made to continuing permission. — billinghurst sDrewth 13:41, 14 February 2013 (UTC)

User:JackBot

Bot Username	Tasks	Last Confirmation	Next Confirmation	Status	Owner
User:JackBot	Creates some categories from a template	Jan 2011 granted bot flag	2013, January	Active; Last edit November 2012	User:JackPotte

kept no objections made to continuing permission. — billinghurst sDrewth 13:42, 14 February 2013 (UTC)

User:JVbot

Bot Username	Tasks	Last Confirmation	Next Confirmation	Status	Owner
User:JVbot	Automatically patrols pages listed on the Whitelist	Sept 2007 granted bot flag	2013, January	Active; Last edit April 2011	User:John Vandenberg

kept no objections made to continuing permission. — billinghurst sDrewth 13:48, 14 February 2013 (UTC)

User:Mjbot

Bot Username	Tasks	Last Confirmation	Next Confirmation	Status	Owner
User:Mjbot	Not run unattended	July 2008 granted bot flag	2013, January	Active; Last edit January 2011	User:Mattwj2002

Remove — Bot inactive for 2 years or more. -- George Orwell III (talk) 13:54, 5 January 2013 (UTC)
kept objections below threshold, continuing permission. — billinghurst sDrewth 13:50, 14 February 2013 (UTC)

User:Pathosbot

Bot Username	Tasks	Last Confirmation	Next Confirmation	Status	Owner
User:Pathosbot	Multiple housekeeping tasks	March 2006 granted bot flag	2013, January	Inactive; last bot edit September 2008, last owner edit December 2012	User:Pathoschild

Keep — Bot inactive for 2 years or more but is doing beneficial work elsewhere that might require it use here. -- George Orwell III (talk) 13:57, 5 January 2013 (UTC)
kept no objections made to continuing permission. — billinghurst sDrewth 13:51, 14 February 2013 (UTC)

User:Phe-bot

Bot Username	Tasks	Last Confirmation	Next Confirmation	Status	Owner
User:Phe-bot	Performs match & split tasks set by users	August 2010 Full support	2013, January	Active; Last edit within 24 hours of 20:35, 31 December 2012 (UTC)	User:Phe

kept no objections made to continuing permission. — billinghurst sDrewth 13:51, 14 February 2013 (UTC)

User:Sanbeg (bot)

Bot Username	Tasks	Last Confirmation	Next Confirmation	Status	Owner
User:Sanbeg (bot)	Labeled Section Transclusion, such as adding section markers around existing verses and generating sets of individual verse pages. Archive work	November 2006, implied approval	2013, January	Active; last edit December 2012	User:Sanbeg

kept no objections made to continuing permission. — billinghurst sDrewth 13:52, 14 February 2013 (UTC)

User:SDrewthbot

Bot Username	Tasks	Last Confirmation	Next Confirmation	Status	Owner
User:SDrewthbot	Multiple housekeeping tasks	February 2009 full support	2013, January	Active; Last edit within 24 hours of 20:59, 31 December 2012 (UTC)	User:Billinghurst

kept no objections made to continuing permission. — billinghurst sDrewth 13:53, 14 February 2013 (UTC)

User:SKbot

Bot Username	Tasks	Last Confirmation	Next Confirmation	Status	Owner
User:SKbot	Interwiki script	June 2010 granted bot flag	2013, January	Inactive; last bot edit September 2010, last owner edit December 2012	User:Sergey kudryavtsev

Remove — Bot inactive for 2 years or more. -- George Orwell III (talk) 13:59, 5 January 2013 (UTC)
remove inactive — billinghurst sDrewth 12:07, 7 January 2013 (UTC)
Keep, the owner remains active on WS, implies current with expectations. No indication of lack of things to do for the bot. JeepdaySock (AKA, Jeepday) 15:50, 15 January 2013 (UTC)
kept objections though below trigger threshold; continuing permission. — billinghurst sDrewth 13:55, 14 February 2013 (UTC)

User:TarmstroBot

Bot Username	Tasks	Last Confirmation	Next Confirmation	Status	Owner
User:TarmstroBot	Correct obvious OCR errors	March 2009 granted bot flag	2013, January	Active; Last edit June 2012	User:Tarmstro99

kept no objections made to continuing permission. — billinghurst sDrewth 13:57, 14 February 2013 (UTC)

User:ThomasBot

Bot Username	Tasks	Last Confirmation	Next Confirmation	Status	Owner
User:ThomasBot	OCR service	Pre March 2006 implied approval (first bot on Wikisource)	2013, January	Inactive: last bot edit August 2011, last owner edit march 2011	User:ThomasV

Remove — Bot inactive for 2 years or more. -- George Orwell III (talk) 14:01, 5 January 2013 (UTC)
remove owner gone, and no evidence that the will be returning — billinghurst sDrewth 12:09, 7 January 2013 (UTC)
Remove Owner reports moving on [2], no expectation the bot will function on WS again. JeepdaySock (AKA, Jeepday) 15:53, 15 January 2013 (UTC)

Meets trigger for Community decision. Vote required — billinghurst sDrewth 14:13, 14 February 2013 (UTC)

User:WikitanvirBot

Bot Username	Tasks	Last Confirmation	Next Confirmation	Status	Owner
User:WikitanvirBot	Add, modify, or remove inter-wiki links, whenever applicable. It is a global bot, therefore may not need a local flag on this wiki to work.	not found	2013, January (per Meta Global user list, many bots operating here are global, confirmation for bot flag at Wikisource still required)	Inactive; last bot edit November 2010, last owner edit December 2012	User:Wikitanvir

Remove no indication the bot has Wikisource community approval for the flag, nor has the bot edited in over 2 years. Jeepday (talk) 15:10, 5 January 2013 (UTC)
comment account has no account locally, accordingly it hasn't edited. I don't think that it needs a bot flag at this point of time. We can review it when it does edit — billinghurst sDrewth 12:28, 7 January 2013 (UTC)
Addendum. enWS is not part of the global bot set at Special:WikiSets, so it would need to be flagged locally to act with all the rights of a bot. — billinghurst sDrewth 12:31, 7 January 2013 (UTC)
Remove — Bot inactive for over 2 years. -- George Orwell III (talk) 16:11, 7 January 2013 (UTC)

no approval to act as bot, no bot rights actually assigned, no further action required. — billinghurst sDrewth 14:04, 14 February 2013 (UTC)

User:Xenophon (bot)

Bot Username	Tasks	Last Confirmation	Next Confirmation	Status	Owner
User:Xenophon (bot)	repetitive changes	June 2006 granted bot flag	2013, January	Inactive; last bot edit April 2010, last owner edit January 2011	User:Bookofjude

Remove — Bot inactive for 2 years or more. -- George Orwell III (talk) 14:03, 5 January 2013 (UTC)
Remove — completely AWOL unfortunately — billinghurst sDrewth 12:16, 7 January 2013 (UTC)

kept objections did not meet the threshold to discontinue permissions. — billinghurst sDrewth 14:10, 14 February 2013 (UTC)

User:ZSBot

Bot Username	Tasks	Last Confirmation	Next Confirmation	Status	Owner
User:ZSBot	Interwiki linking and extracting text from DJVU text layers	August 2007, grante bot flag	2013, January	Inactive; last bot edit April 2009, last owner edit December 2012	User:Zhaladshar

Remove — Bot inactive for 2 years or more. -- George Orwell III (talk) 14:05, 5 January 2013 (UTC)
remove inactive, and not particularly required activity since we have the built-in layer scraper — billinghurst sDrewth 12:18, 7 January 2013 (UTC)
I'll willingly relinquish the bot flag for my account. I have no intention of using a bot at this time or any time in the near future that I can tell. With the many bot operators we've got already, I can't do anything they aren't doing anyway.—Zhaladshar ^(Talk) 00:20, 21 January 2013 (UTC)

Decision: removal of bot flag — billinghurst sDrewth 13:31, 14 February 2013 (UTC)

Bot flag removed.[3] Hesperian 12:20, 16 February 2013 (UTC)

Other discussions

BUG: Transcludable sections in tables/templates

Latest comment: 12 years ago4 comments3 people in discussion

The_Statutes_at_Large_(Ruffhead)/Volume1/Statutes_of_Merton translcusding sections from - Page:Ruffhead_-_The_Statutes_at_Large,_1763.djvu/60

doesn't work if the section code is inside a template call. - Suggestions? Sfan00 IMG (talk) 23:43, 8 October 2012 (UTC)

That is such a convoluted load of coding and is somewhat the antithesis of the "keep it simple" approach that we encourage people to undertake. I don't think that we should be spending the time trying to sort out that sort of issue if that is how you wish to undertake it. I know that I don't have the time among many tasks to be done.

My challenge to you is how is that going to look on a wide variety of devices and screens that would be used. How will it look in a EPUB format, in a PDF, etc. Our aim is to replicate the text, not slavishly have a facsimile of the work. — billinghurst sDrewth 12:01, 10 October 2012 (UTC)

OK Well I'll use a different tactic... The layout I was planning on using elsewhere was practically an originally typesetting

ANYWAY! Sfan00 IMG (talk) 23:58, 10 October 2012 (UTC)

The current LST code does not support transcluded section tags (nor section tags that have been created using the #tag parser function. In the last weeks, I have been writing code to support transclusion, and that code is (as of today) part of the main LST code. This means it will be deployed on wikisource in about two weeks (26 nov, if I understand the deployment schedule correctly). Valhallasw (talk) 21:40, 17 November 2012 (UTC)

Copyright(?) status of letters written 1923/1924

Latest comment: 12 years ago11 comments5 people in discussion

I have a few typed/signed letters written by Florence Earle Coates in 1923/24, and I was wondering if those can be uploaded/transcribed. Also, what if a pre-1923 book is inscribed by an author post-1923... what of that? Please let me know if I should be asking at Commons or elsewhere here. Thanks, Londonjackbooks (talk) 01:17, 10 October 2012 (UTC)

Presumably the letters did not have a copyright notice attached to them at any time. If not, then you can upload them under {{PD-US-no-notice}}. With respect to the inscription of a book post-1923: it doesn't matter as that is part of the ephemera of the book that won't be transcribed and transcluded. Beeswaxcandle (talk) 01:51, 10 October 2012 (UTC)

{{PD-US-no-notice}} requires United_States_Code/Title_17/Chapter_1/Section_101#publication Legally Published. I believe there would need to be some evidence of publication. Recall the recent discussion The_Diary_of_Jack_the_Ripper. JeepdaySock (talk) 10:50, 10 October 2012 (UTC)

Depending on the artistic merit of an inscription at the lead of a work, surely most would not be under copyright, remember it means the right to make a copy. The letters as I understand the copyright laws of the US at the time basically make them the property of the estate until published, but to me there is so much that is unexplained about the rights in that space. The current page at Cornell says 70 years post mortem, so in lieu of better advice, I suggest that we just go with that. — billinghurst sDrewth 11:49, 10 October 2012 (UTC)

Thank you. As a courtesy, I'll be seeking the previous owner's permission to post first. Like a kid in a candy store, I'm seeing the cart before the horse. Londonjackbooks (talk) 13:26, 10 October 2012 (UTC)

We don’t have a license for author 70 years post mortem. We used to have {{Author-PD-old-70}} but since 2007 it redirects to {{PD-old-70}} which has warnings about checking publication dates. I completely agree that Cornell says 70 years post mortem, and is likely accurate. Unless someone has no argument license, we should probably move this discussion to Wikisource:Possible copyright violations also Category:License templates header needs to be updated for the author templates when we have a solution. Jeepday (talk) 01:02, 11 October 2012 (UTC)

I would suggest we use {{PD-US-unpublished}} if it is to be hosted — billinghurst sDrewth 10:23, 11 October 2012 (UTC)

I have uploaded four letters to Commons using the suggested {{PD-US-unpublished}} tag, and have added the content to WS (1 2 3 4). I am not very knowledgeable about the formatting of letters, so suggestions are welcomed. Also, a question: In the past, I was able to type in "jpg" as the 'Scans' option on the Index:page (as opposed to djvu or pdf). We now only have the (drop-down) option to choose from djvu or pdf. Is there a way that "jpg" can be added to the drop-down menu?—Even if it doesn't actually [blue]link to anything at Commons? Thanks, Londonjackbooks (talk) 22:36, 26 November 2012 (UTC)

Thanks, Billinghurst for looking into the jpg aspect. I'm signing off for now, so I wanted to get a Thanks in even though you're still working on it. Londonjackbooks (talk) 01:41, 27 November 2012 (UTC)

Pretty certain that I have it sorted. I was going to clump them, however, I have just gone for a straight list. There are still a few allowable formats that I have not added. — billinghurst sDrewth 02:44, 27 November 2012 (UTC)

Grazie. Londonjackbooks (talk) 15:13, 27 November 2012 (UTC)

NOP

Latest comment: 12 years ago7 comments3 people in discussion

It seems like {{nop}} is misbehaving see Latin for beginners (1911)/Preface between vi and vii there is line, if the leading space is removed from Page:Latin for beginners (1911).djvu/13 the entire first paragraph loses formatting. JeepdaySock (talk) 10:57, 11 October 2012 (UTC)

End-of-line spaces will do that. There was a space left after the {{nop}} which caused the error. Londonjackbooks (talk) 11:21, 11 October 2012 (UTC)

Hmm... It looks good in Chrome now, but in IE, the 'line' (more like a dotted box) is still visible between the pages. I'll bow out, 'cause I have no idea... Londonjackbooks (talk) 11:27, 11 October 2012 (UTC)

Bowing back in,—if you remove the <div style="margin-left: 3em"> tag in the Main, the issue goes away in IE (and still renders correctly in Chrome). Londonjackbooks (talk) 12:17, 11 October 2012 (UTC)

Looks good in FF 15.0.1 :-) — billinghurst sDrewth 14:30, 11 October 2012 (UTC)

Ditto for IE; just seems to have gone away. Londonjackbooks (talk) 15:32, 11 October 2012 (UTC)

Thanks :) JeepdaySock (talk) 10:24, 12 October 2012 (UTC)

On This Date in history

Latest comment: 11 years ago53 comments10 people in discussion

Is there some place on Wikisource where we can start collecting important historical dates and then add wikilink/s to the books we transcribe?

Examples of this date in history:

Oct 13, 1792: White House cornerstone is laid in the nation's new capital, Washington, D.C.

Oct 13, 1775: Continental Congress authorizes first naval force

Can these not catch the eye and lead passers-by to Wikisource books for detailed information? While I do not know details of the Whitehouse cornerstone I do know a fair amount of history on the laying of the Washington Monument's cornerstone and the Masons ceremony. Within that cornerstone is a time capsule and in that time capsule are works by many people. This includes several items placed within that were written by Commander Matthew Fontaine Maury and I have seen a .pdf file of this on Internet Archives where it goes into great detail. It just seems to be that these short and important dates can pull in via wikilinks our books that can provide further information as well as catch the eye of passing-by readers. These short and important dates are like the tip of a spear, or the "tip of an iceberg" if you want to match the WS logo to the idea. This could advertise a lot of the works we have completed on Wikisource. —William Maury Morris II^Talk 12:31, 13 October 2012 (UTC)

My first thought is "sounds like an interesting idea". A Google search for On This Date in history finds over 3 million hits, and finds many similar ideas in play http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history and http://learning.blogs.nytimes.com/on-this-day/ as two examples. To make it work here, I think you would need to add a category and identify dates with specific works or chapters. Or make a list and include hyper links to specific areas of text. Given the volume of hits on Google, not sure it would be anything to drive people to Wikisource, but it might make for fun links to follow from a main page widget. JeepdaySock (talk) 15:24, 15 October 2012‎ (UTC)

We could make it unique in some way. For example, On this date in Confederate History the inventor, Horace Hunley, drowns in a test dive with his submarine. On this date in ~~Yankee~~ U.S.A. history, President Abraham Lincoln was encouraged to grow a beard in a letter he received from 11-year-old Grace Bedell (1860) While it is true that many sites provide these dates they do not all link to an entire book that gives the whole story, or an article, and delves into details. Typically they just state that on this date in 1917 Mata Hari was executed as a World War I spy. These are the times I go to wikipedia for the details and images. But books and articles from wikisource may fare well too. I feel that Wikipedia & Wikisource have unique materials to offer and can expand upon just about anything. I didn't look up any of this on Google (yet). I thought of it when working on Confederate materials here and specifically Confederate Portraits and the Southern Historical Society's "Papers" when I was working specifically on "The Battle of the Crater". I had no idea of the many details that exist that I have never known and I have been there when I lived in Virginia. It's a matter of turning a blurt into a blurb or article, or book/s. Amusing things catch the attention and curiosity steps in for more information then information can be provided. Are you aware that the "reflecting pool" in Washington DC was once a small and dirty creek that traveled that route? That prompted someone to think of not only piping it away but of using the same area for the reflecting pool. In all that you looked at in those google searches I would be willing to bet that you did not see that detail I mentioned about the cornerstone of the Washington Monument laid by Masons in ceremony and the materials placed within that cornerstone nor of DC's reflecting pool. I don't know about others here but there are some people that collect these unique tidbits of History that are but the tip of the iceberg. I suspect that many of us do this while others never know. Respectfully, —William Maury Morris II^Talk 16:16, 15 October 2012 (UTC)

I was not aware of Lincoln's reply to Miss Grace Bedall was on Wikisource until moments ago when I did a search on Grace Bedall. I picked the first option and haven't yet seen the other results. However, in this choice I found Lincoln's reply to 11 year Grace Bedall and here is a piece of that reply where it appears to me that Lincoln is hesitant to grow "whiskers" plus I learn Lincoln had always shaved even as a railsplitter (BTW, railsplitter = name for WW1 and WW2 army divisions. My father wore the WW2 "Railsplitter Patch" Belgians called them "Hatchet Men", Phantoms, &c.. )

"...having never worn any, do you not think people would call it a piece of silly affectation if I were to begin it now?

Your very sincere well-wisher,

A. Lincoln.

https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Page:Life_and_Works_of_Abraham_Lincoln,_v8.djvu/65

Since Google had so many hits what does that tell you? It tells me that these tidbits of history are very popular and also that some people will take those bits and turn them into blurbs, articles, illustrated articles, websites and/or lead to books. All of it is learning more that what one knew before. Too, it is possible to host the overall idea on Facepage or some other social media and link back to Wikipedia and/or Wikisource. —William Maury Morris II^Talk 17:19, 15 October 2012 (UTC)

All that is really required is to make it happen. Per Help:Namespaces we don’t have a specific space to begin the work, but maybe someplace in Portal:History would be a good place to start. I guess the very first thing you would need is a list with at least one thing for each of 366 days. Once you get it up and running I imagine it would take off, like w:Wikipedia:Did you know. JeepdaySock (talk) 10:36, 16 October 2012 (UTC)

All that would be required is a community effort relating what we each know and linking to their own, or other's works. For example, Do you know the connection between Sarah Bernhardt and (LondonJackBook's) Coates poems? She probably does and it links to her beautiful, ornate and voluminous poetry. You won't find that on other "On this day" sites. We would have to be more creative and link to articles and/or books on WS which makes the idea unique. The standard lists of "On this day.." can be included but the gist of the overall idea is to connect to our works here on WS.

From the History Channel you listed: Civil War 1859 : Abolitionist John Brown leads a raid on Harpers Ferry http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/john-browns-raid-on-harpers-ferry

I did a detailed article on the hanging of John Brown (which came on a later date)on WS. The VMI Virginia Military Institute Cadets under to be "Stonewall" Jackson were marched to that event and watched it. Brown stood there on the edge of eternity and never was his legs seen shaking. He was apparently totally unafraid. That bravery led to songs praising him in the north.

Edmund Ruffin collected the pikes and went to every governor in the Southern states giving each one of them a pike that John Brown's men hoped to silently slay whites with. Remember, the South was 50/50 white and black and the whites feared blacks being freed—because what would they (blacks) do for a living? I see no community interest here and that is why ideas die. —William Maury Morris II^Talk 11:09, 16 October 2012 (UTC)

CHAPTER X

EXECUTION OF JOHN BROWN — CADETS PRESENT — COMMISSION TO ARRANGE FOR ARMAMENT OF STATE — MAJOR JACKSON’S EXPERIMENTS WITH PAROTT GUN — CADETS ORDERED TO RICHMOND 1861 — MARCH UNDER MAJOR JACKSON — MCDOWELL — NEW MARKET.

https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Virginia_Military_Institute%E2%80%94Building_and_Rebuilding/10

—William Maury Morris II^Talk 11:27, 16 October 2012 (UTC)

"CHARLES TOWN, DEC. 2, 1859.

"The execution is over; we have just returned from the field, and I have sat down to give you an account of it...

"Once I thought I saw his knees tremble, but it was only the wind blowing his loose trousers. His firmness was subjected to still further trial by hearing Colonel Smith announce to the sheriff, ‘We are all ready, Mr. Campbell.’

The sheriff did not hear, or did not comprehend; and in a louder tone the same announcement was made. But the culprit still stood steady until the sheriff, descending the flight of steps, with a well-directed blow of a sharp hatchet, severed the rope that held up the trap door, which instantly sank sheer beneath him, and he fell about three feet; and the man of strong and bloody hand, of fierce passions, of iron will, of wonderful vicissitudes, the terrible partisan of Kansas, the capturer of the United States Arsenal at Harper’s Ferry, the would-be Catiline of the South, the demi-god of the abolitionists, the man execrated and lauded, damned and prayed for, the man who in his motives, his means, his plans, and his successes, must ever be a wonder, a puzzle, and a mystery—John Brown—was hanging between heaven and earth."

We do not find materials like this "On this Day in History" sites partly because they copy each another with a list. But it is here in Wikisource. It may well be because that we tend to work more on what we like for ourselves. But anyone and everyone should be capable to contribute something small they have learned in their many projects and provide a link back to the larger WS materials. —William Maury Morris II^Talk 11:49, 16 October 2012 (UTC)

It's a little rough right now but try Portal:On this date in history. There is a list of days on the subpage Portal:On this date in history/list. All the links are red links at the moment but if a page does exist, it will be shown on the portal on the appropriate date. I've added a section for the month as well because that made the way I set up the page structure easier; it can cover things that don't easily fit into a single day (or it can be removed and ignored). I'm not sure how you want to write the entries. You started with a bulleted list, which will probably work well for this. How do you want to include links to works? Do you want to use quotes at all? - AdamBMorgan (talk) 16:49, 16 October 2012 (UTC)

Adam, many if nor most things are a bit rough when first started. I have many different ideas bouncing around in my head as to how to approach this and yet make it specific to Wikisource as much as possible. Idea for many items: On/this date/month author Edgar Allen Poe wrote the Raven & link to https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Raven_(Poe) and we have many authors listed on Wikisource we can do this with as well as their publications. Using the previous examples I placed above on a whim, cannot they also be applied in a similar manner? It seems to me we can also backstep to what has been posted here on Lincoln and the 11 year old girl. She also wrote then President Lincoln" a 2nd letter that was found only recently. Can and will you create these examples to be used as templates for what can be added. We are not confined to anything that I can think of but we should, I believe, remain linked back to Wikisource articles and books that are specific to Wikisource with details that are not usually found on the many "This Day in History" lists. They cannot go into great detail like Wikisource can -- except perhaps for *illustrations* which is a terrible loss to Wikisource. birth dates, death dates, and more can be linked back to Wikisource articles and/or books. We have the materials. How to go about this in unique way is a tad befuddling but adhering to WS works itself would be our guide. I have to go out into the real world to do errands now but I will be back as soon as possible. This vague idea specifically connected to WS is becoming exciting. We would need to work as a community (example) just as we all add to the Authors and then list them alphabetically or just as we submit books in rotation as the Raven is now shown as a Featured Text. These are only my thoughts as they are lie a storm with the clouds swirling about trying to finally work out real paths of thoughts as to how and where to proceed. Others in the WS community will have other and perhaps better ideas. Whatever works for Wikisource is the right path. Most Respectfully, —William Maury Morris II^Talk 18:15, 16 October 2012 (UTC)

Adam, looks good. I searched for 17 October (as the page is currently empty), and we have lots of stuff with that date. Not having content should not be an issue. JeepdaySock (talk) 10:53, 17 October 2012 (UTC)

I'm sorry to challenge this fun idea, but why on wikisource? One of the best versions in the world already exists on Wikipedia. Lookup w:October 17 for instance or any other day you care to name. It has 36 events, 190 births, 178 deaths and links to 3 other (presumably copyright) lists. This compares with 13 on the fledgling Portal:On this date in history. It's much more flexible in that all the standard rules of wp apply. Basically it's wikipedia's job. Chris55 (talk) 16:25, 17 October 2012 (UTC)

I think this is a neat idea, but I think it might be hard for us to fill the lists with anything but historical documents and well-known publications. Lesser-known authors/books come with a date of publication, at most a particular month maybe. I feel like just historical documents is good, but not great. - Theornamentalist (talk) 20:17, 17 October 2012 (UTC)

Theornamentalist, you hit my vision of the goal perfectly "I think it might be hard for us to fill the lists with anything but historical documents", Wikisource, the free library (of public domain documents) is exactly the place for listing historical documents and less well-known publications by date. Imagine going through A Voyage Towards the South pole and Around the World (1770s) and listing some of the key dates in it, to specific parts of the book. Then imagine the someone else finding that link and following it. Sure you can find, a movie about the topic on the history channel, and you can read an article about it on Wikipedia, but on Wikisource you can get it straight from James Cook. JeepdaySock (talk) 10:52, 18 October 2012 (UTC)

Well-stated JeepdaySock, I really do like your way of stating what you have said, "straight from James Cook himself and telling his story internationally across the time barrier.—William Maury Morris II^Talk 14:02, 18 October 2012 (UTC)

Primarily, Wikipedia's list would link to Wikipedia articles. Wikisource's list links to Wikisource texts. Trying to get Wikipedia to link to Wikisource, especially a lot of links to Wikisource in one place, will be an uphill battle. Readers of Wikipedia are also likely to expect to remain in Wikipedia and the two sisters are similar enough that they may not notice the switch and become very confused. In addition, Wikipedia is not going to allow anything along the lines of "X wrote a letter to Y about Z" (in which we can link the letter itself as well as Author:X, Author:Y and maybe even Portal:Z). The phrases "UNDUE" and "Non-notable" would be applied (or misapplied in the latter case). Purely historical events without links can go in Wikipedia, however. - AdamBMorgan (talk) 21:00, 17 October 2012 (UTC)

This great nation started with only 13 fledgling colonies that fought against the Great British Empire but it grew into a super power. Probably everything is a fledgling in the beginning. (Someone place Edison's lightbulb image here and show me a history book in text behind that science and scientist). —William Maury Morris II^Talk 21:28, 17 October 2012 (UTC)

But we do need a lot more links from Wikipedia to Wikisource. They are most effective in driving people here. I'm not suggesting that we shouldn't provide the equivalent on Wikisource, but let's not miss the fact that most of the items already mentioned are already in the corresponding date's entry on Wikipedia, and if they aren't, it's a good opportunity to put them there. Remember there's an excerpt on the front page of Wikipedia every day. Chris55 (talk) 09:50, 18 October 2012 (UTC)

Chris55, we "need" links from Wikipedia? I do not believe that. I have been placing text and authors in "On This Date" and I haven't had any need for Wikipedia in this. I think Wikipedia relies more upon Wikisource. Wikipedia is already well-known and is is good for short articles but Wikisource has the transcribed (that is what we have been doing for many years here) books written by the people who actually did the deeds in science, poetry, history and more -- "Straight from the horses mouth as it were." As advised, by Adam, you can still create whatever you prefer on Wikipedia.—William Maury Morris II^Talk 14:02, 18 October 2012 (UTC)

TL;DR. Before you start doing this, how about you put forward the concise proposal, without the requirement of having to wade through the above. At this point in time it doesn't to be of value with relation to our works, which are published in a year, or on day, and cover events across a range of dates. To me, if there is already something existing at enWP, then add it there, and either use a local work as a reference, or point to it with an anchor. Otherwise it just seems to be "make work". We already have Category:Works by year, Category:Births by year, and Category:Deaths by year and I see no value in what is being proposed, especially when the existing components are not included; and that it doesn't seem to relate to promoting works or their transcription. — billinghurst sDrewth 09:54, 20 October 2012 (UTC)

Billinghurst, I do not know who TL & DR are but what I have placed in that area promote the Wikisource works here on Wikisource and link to both author and works but also a specific work. If this isn't good enough, and I don't think you have looked at the entries, then feel free to go ahead and destroy the entire thing. The only "work" done has been made by AdamBMorgan and myself and we haven't complained. —William Maury Morris II^Talk 17:31, 20 October 2012 (UTC)

"TL;DR" = "Too long; didn't read" - AdamBMorgan (talk) 02:37, 21 October 2012 (UTC)

On this one I'm in full agreement with Chris55 and Billinghurst. A very good functioning "On this day" is operating on our sister site at enWP. All we need to do is to add links to our works on their list. Those links will lead people to our works.

The best way to build up our customer footprint is to add links throughout enWP to our Author pages and our Works. enWP demands Reliable Sources, that's what we provide—in fact it's why we exist. I believe that no work is truly completed here until there are links to it from enWP.

Beeswaxcandle (talk) 00:34, 21 October 2012 (UTC)

re: TL; DR: If something is to long it is a given that most people wouldn't read it unless it's the Rise and fall of the Roman Empire or War and Peace that everyone has read. I thank you for that explanation Beeswaxcandle. Respectfully, Maury (—William Maury Morris II^Talk 09:21, 21 October 2012 (UTC)

While similar, I don't think the Wikisource pages will duplicate the Wikipedia pages. It is worth trying to add links to Wikipedia's lists but I suspect they will be removed. I'm not sure if Wikipedians will accept "foreign" entries on their pages, for a variety of reasons, but it could be easily tested. I was, however, considering a level of detail that is not compatible with Wikipedia's pages in their current form. This portal is not my idea but I imagine we could include, for example: "January 22, 1837: HMS Sulphur and HMS Starling reach Port Royal, Jamaica", or possibly, with the work more explicitly named: "January 22, 1837: HMS Sulphur and HMS Starling reach Port Royal, Jamaica. (Narrative of a Voyage Round the World by Edward Belcher)." That does not match the higher level used on Wikipedia. I'm all for adding links to Wikisource from Wikipedia and I try to do so whenever I can (although I don't often get the opportunity). I'd also like to see Wikisource cited more but it will take some education and changed practices; the current "citations" are mostly just external links appended to article footers (and a few Wikipedians don't even think Wikisource counts as a reliable source). That is, however, a different topic. - AdamBMorgan (talk) 02:37, 21 October 2012 (UTC)

Whatever you say, Adam, I will naturally go along with. BTW, I had never seen or known about Wikipedia's "On This Day" until it was mentioned here. I prefer the way the History Channel mentions the events and then does an illustrated article on the events. Wikipedia is NOT "#1" in a Google search. Personally, I have never seen or known of some of the things I have placed in "On This Date" i.e. What Slaves Think of the 4th of July by Frederick Douglass. What does that have to do with WP? Sure, WP links could come here but I don't believe we need them. Wikisource should be able to stand on her own but yet assist WP if they wish to link to WS's works. That was and remains a very powerful speech! I admire that Frederick Douglass and I read of his life long ago. Most Respectfully, Maury (—William Maury Morris II^Talk 09:21, 21 October 2012 (UTC)

What then? Add links back to WP for more information on Belcher, H.M.S. Sulphur, H.M.S. Starling, and Port Royal, Jamaica? What if Captain Beechey's log winds up stating they arrived the 21st contrary to Belcher's claim it was the 22nd? Sorry - the premise seems flawed since we are not the encyclopedic authority nor entity that could or should address those questions if and when they arise. Wikipedia is where such information should be proposed, vetted and then approved for article inclusion; not here. -- George Orwell III (talk) 03:12, 21 October 2012 (UTC)

There is no need to add links back and forth to Wikipedia. We can remain in Wikisource's homeport. The idea, as I think about it, is to present our authors and their writings here on WS. We are not to be encyclopedic which is what WP is. Why do some people fear trying new ideas? What is there to lose? Look to the ways of the present but also to the future. Kind regards, —William Maury Morris II^Talk 09:21, 21 October 2012 (UTC)

No, the idea, if I understand it correctly, is to present authors and their writings using dates as a reference point for linkage. Once you use fixed dates as a reference for anything you are being encyclopedic in my view. Any good reference needs an corresponding citation to help insure its validity. Some works we host will have this weight but I'm afraid the vast majority will not. Its as simple as that. -- George Orwell III (talk) 15:18, 21 October 2012 (UTC)

Not in my view but I understand your point. No encyclopedia connects to and thus becomes part of an entire book. I thought I had some vague idea as to how to better, or promote, Wikisource. You are not interested in this and you are opposed to it. Still, from the outset, I stated it would have to be a community project or it would fail. I see no interest but rather I do see disinterest. A chance, in this or any form, to promote Wikisource is once again lost. Little wonder Wikipedia is so well known while Wikisource remains but archives in the background of darkness. Still, Kind regards, George 3rd., you are a good worker for Wikisource. —William Maury Morris II^Talk 22:38, 21 October 2012 (UTC)

As I read the comments of the opposed on this discussion, they all seem to focus on, why here? it can and is done better else where. So what? Commons, Internet Archive, & Amazon (to name a few) all have better more organized selections of public domain work then Wikisource does. Everyone here is a volunteer, nothing suggested is counter to WS:WWI, the whole thing is list of WS works in a different format then categories, with no requirement to keep updated. There is potential for it blossom into something more, and potential for it to stagnate into nothing. Either way the volume of negativity is counter to maintaining a positive volunteer environment. JeepdaySock (talk) 11:00, 22 October 2012 (UTC)
- Jeepdaysock, I have not seen what there is to lose in trying. It is strange for Wikisource fearing to try something new but it appears some do fear trying and in that, I do not understand because I have always felt Wikisource was progressive and I have felt proud of being a part of that. Now I view Wikisource as stagnant except for our recent rotation of Featured Texts which pleases me as being modern and even a bit futuristic. It seems that some of our fellow Wikipedians do not want to advance what we have here. Often in experimentation there are blunders and with that comes new insights and/or ideas that have never been used before. I do not see what there is to lose in *trying*. What the Helios IS there to lose in trying? That "volume of negativity" that you have mentioned is about old ways -- don't try something new -- and it is an out-dated idea running alongside the swift advancing of technology of today and of the future. —William Maury Morris II^Talk 08:18, 23 October 2012 (UTC)
  - Concur :) JeepdaySock (talk) 10:41, 23 October 2012 (UTC)
    - The following is not presently on Wikipedia but they may well grab it after I present it. It is a piece of unique American history. On the date of October 27, 1659 two Quakers were executed for religious beliefs. William Robinson and Marmaduke Stevenson, two Quakers who came from England in 1656 to escape religious persecution, were executed in the Massachusetts Bay Colony for their religious beliefs. The two had violated a law passed by the Massachusetts General Court the year before, banning Quakers from the colony under penalty of death. They were hanged from an elm tree on Boston Common in Boston and were the first Quakers to be executed in America. —William Maury Morris II^Talk 11:37, 23 October 2012 (UTC)

I'm sorry if my comments added to the sense of negativity for you Jeepday (or anyone else for that matter). On the contrary - I'm all for improving the visibility of Wikisource by any and all means available. I've just never been part of a website that substantially improved traffic consistently over time by taking the existing content and/or structure by rehashing it/them into some new presentation or format I guess. Never. Never seen anything done internally that amounted to something approaching to the old slogans of 'new and improved' or 'under new management' achieving much more than a temporary blip on the radar of an online lifetime. To be clear, my problem with using fixed dates is not an opposition to creating such a Portal in general - just don't used fixed dates as the jump point and the encyclopedic land mines are easily avoided. Any user or users are free to indulge in such Projects if that is what they want to and as long as it does not run contrary to WS policy or practices.

At the same time, I wholeheartedly believe such a Portal will not accomplish the desired up-tick in permanent interest or traffic that is sorely needed on en.WS. Only a meaningful breakdown of our existing traffic, how and where that traffic originates from and then a responsive, proactive plan that can be developed then tracked through those same statistics will ever improve our "visibility" over time. Much of this, from my experience, has very little to do with the actual content being hosted here or how it is organized. The trick always seems to have been the know how of how to get the search engines to present what we have seamlessly with their crawls, formulas, etc. by default, and then not to let it get stale from month-to-month & year-to-year. I don't have this specific know how but I have been witness to it - if not a direct facilitator of it - a couple of times now in my online travels aside from en.WS. I'm sorry if this personal perspective comes across as a 'negative Nancy' more often than not but, in my opinion, it would be worse to clam-up and not speak to what I believe "I know" just for the sake of polite perceptions or whatever. -- George Orwell III (talk) 23:44, 24 October 2012 (UTC)

George, the situation was that I did not know that Wikisource could not be bettered in some way using that vague idea. When Adam created the Portal, I started working on it. I would follow Adam in probably anything he wanted to do even though the initial idea that flopped was my own. I was not cognizant of all of our Categories and many Portals already in place. Still, unless used in some manner they are nothing more than archives. There is no way to present them or the works within them aside from listing the categories. I am aware that I felt inspired by the illustrated "Featured Texts" rotation idea. So, it's over and there are still books to work on so they too can be archived unless they become a Featured Text. Personally I was not worried about your personal perspective and in part because you and others pointed out several things that make sense. In short, it is over. Kindest regards to a good worker, —William Maury Morris II^Talk 01:36, 25 October 2012 (UTC)

Offshoot

An offshoot of this discussion: I wanted to mention something that I am hoping might bring in new editors. Since Wikipedia is in almost all-ways the gateway for most in the Wikimedia community, I think utilizing that site for our end is within our reach. On the main page, the "Did you know" section is great for quick visibility; after proofing a work, if we create an aerticle on the book, work, document, it will almost certainly get views in the thousands if the "hook" is good. An example of the last thing I did is this Halloween DYK on Betelguese. My hope is that this effort might bring some editors here to Wikisource. - Theornamentalist (talk) 22:49, 26 October 2012 (UTC)

I did address this at a previous time with one of our occasional users about how to DYK and the response is at User_talk:Victuallers#Hold_my_hand_with_DYK — billinghurst sDrewth

Now THAT makes far more sense to me and is something more along the lines of what is needed to build up traffic around here (seeding us through a more popular site). Prior to Alexa's switch to a more limited view for stats (See HERE, then find the 'clickstream' tab), the aggregate amount of visitors coming in from all Wiki-related domains added up to somewhere between ~20-30% total with Wikipedia generating the most click-ins behind all of Google's domains so there is some actual statistical evidence to support this action.
At the same time, admittedly Alexa is not the ultimate resource for stuff like this - but unless somebody creates there own data tracking routine for us - it is the only 3rd party resource with any clout that is free. Add to that the fact the language neutral Wikisource.org domain name was bastardized some time ago to accommodate a whole other purpose (i.e. Multi-lingual) than just being the default portal-face like every other sister site has, we (en.WS) are forever doomed to be confused statistic-wise (in some areas) by 3rd parties with OldWiksource irregardless until they get their own "language" prefix designation to separate us properly once and for all!
So I say go ahead with this with all possible effort. If it works as we hope, we should surely see an uptick in traffic using the busted yet somewhat still functional 'Page view statistics' for Theornamentlist's work soon after. -- George Orwell III (talk) 00:35, 27 October 2012 (UTC)

A bit lower key, but in the same vein as Theornamentalist's suggestions above: Why don't we make a bit of an effort to add (appropriate) links from WikiPedia back to WikiSource? We are all fairly reliable (at least I hope I am) in adding links to there when appropriate (e.g. Author: namespace and gadget support thereof.)
A prime example, Index:A Girl of the Limberlost.djvu is currently in "To be proofread" status. Should it ever complete validation etc., how about linking the existing entry w:A_Girl_of_the_Limberlost back here? Surely being able to provide page scans qualifies as "encyclopaedic"-or even better? MODCHK (talk) 00:12, 27 October 2012 (UTC)

Sure - this is primarily done by Sister-site templates like we had before it got incorporated into the header template as a parameter See this Example on Wikipedia. The problem, at least in my travels, is that there is little in the way of a guideline or a standard on how, when and where to apply these templates in WP articles. As in the linked example, folks keep moving the template "down" until it is somewhere near the very bottom where most folks will never see it. I try to do that and inline wikicite back to en.WS when it makes sense to. Some projects, like the Dictionary of National Biography (DNB), have even more customized templates and citation-like standards in place that have pretty much become recognized as a "reliable source" for those who deal mostly with some specific topic or area all the time but I see they frequently get 2nd class treatment too no matter how much one tries to explain that we actually have the scans - folks insist on creating refs using sites that are far inferior to the original books/entries anyway. -- George Orwell III (talk) 01:08, 27 October 2012 (UTC)
I see what George Orwell III means. Surely as a "sister site", WS deserves better than being lumped in with "External Sites." At least on the Author: and other header templates Wikipedia/WikiQuote etc. links appear on the top of the page. MODCHK (talk) 02:37, 27 October 2012 (UTC)
I had tried to reason with the "folks" over on WP to at least let these sister-link banners reside in the See also section because at least that part comes before the References section and folks have better shot at seeing it there, but apparently there is no reasoning with those folks. In your case, the WP article has an image of the book cover at the start of the page; I've argued in those cases (or even when its just an infobox) our sister-link banner fits nicely right under it in most cases by default. Same unhinged opposition to that as well (so the cover image can be hosted on commons, is not considered an external link and can be placed pretty much anywhere on the page but the scans & the transclusion of book itself on Wikisource is an external site and should be relegated to "back matter" at best in other words). -- George Orwell III (talk) 04:36, 27 October 2012 (UTC)

Wikipedia's {{infobox book}} may be something that we could look to utilise where the books have an article at enWP. I have started a discussion w:Template talk:Infobox book#Adding a Wikisource link to the template to get that community to consider that inclusion. I can see value in that, and we can even help at our end about leading people to use template where they create a page there. — billinghurst sDrewth 06:48, 27 October 2012 (UTC)

Though I remain optimistic, have we gotten any stats on (hopefully) increased site traffic due to it's DYK visibility? It actually received one of the top scores for views. - Theornamentalist (talk) 21:31, 10 November 2012 (UTC)

Stats on Wikipedia 1,569 views per hour / 12,551 total views since Oct. 1, 2012 thru today.

Well that is impressive... but not so much for en.WS traffic.

September (mainspace article finished off, but not advertised on DYK yet) 131 views.
October (mainspace article static, start of DYK advertising) 470 views.
November (mainspace article moved? for name change, trailing end to DYK advertising) 108 views at the time of this post.

We got a bump compared to the month before and for this month (so far) but I doubt the trend will be much different from the 3 month sampling in the coming months. Thoughts? -- George Orwell III (talk) 00:12, 11 November 2012 (UTC)

Of the views it received on wp, I'd say it is definitely not impressive :)

You may be under the illusion that ~500 views a month is low. I urge you to look at recently finished works, both "featured" as well as the "quietly completed", and you will see far smaller numbers per-month as well as from month to month. I just wish whoever it is that runs that site would refresh the yearly totals for 2011 & 2012 already. -- George Orwell III (talk) 01:22, 11 November 2012 (UTC)

However, the newly additioned parameter "wikisource=" in the infobox was not added until it was on the main page. For an experiment, it did increase the page views moderately compared to previous months (as I imagine many of the views in September were a result of my editing and such) but I didn't "strike gold." I will most likely continue this effort since I enjoy writing wp articles on books. - Theornamentalist (talk) 00:48, 11 November 2012 (UTC)

I think this type of contribution and analysis is helpful so I hope you continue to experiment with it. Halloween was pretty shrewed selection for a trial but Wikipedia "works" best when the traffic it generates stems from current events and that puts us at a disadvantage for the most part. -- George Orwell III (talk) 01:22, 11 November 2012 (UTC)

Another one on the main page got 245 views. Regarding the current events, I suppose it wouldn't hurt to watch some of the items in wp's "News" section, see if we can get any supporting documents especially for government related texts/speeches. I think as far as a tactic for visits, it's not bad to note that these kind of things will work to some degree. - Theornamentalist (talk) 03:24, 11 November 2012 (UTC)

It did better when it was listed as a "new text" thru the rest of the month of March, 2012 after your last touch on March 2nd. I've always suspected that by using templates to "add" new and/or featured texts to the Main Page listings via template transclusions rather than partial substitutions (or even sub-pages that "act" as a template) might be the logical route for us to take here locally, but not so much when it comes to external entities. I bet most search engines won't consider the main page as having changed at all because it's last real edit date is pretty much static (until recently that is). At the same time, that new text template is always changing with new works being added but I've never seen a template come up in Google search results unless specifically asked for. So there must be a better way to get at least the main page into a better search result position with more frequent crawls of it somehow. -- George Orwell III (talk) 06:57, 11 November 2012 (UTC)

Dead?

Is this a dead project? Portal:On this date in history/list has lots of red links. Jeepday (talk) 01:35, 5 January 2013 (UTC)

Yes, it was created by an administrator, entries were done by him and myself, and then was killed by a different administrator. I think it was Billinghurst that said we couldn't have it (see archives) or didn't need it ( & Chris 55 on WP) due to Wikipedia's similar and extensive project. —Maury (talk) 05:05, 5 January 2013 (UTC)

FYI Wikisource:Proposed_deletions#Portal:On_this_date_in_history, Jeepday (talk) 12:10, 6 January 2013 (UTC)

Traditionally published

Latest comment: 12 years ago3 comments3 people in discussion

GO3 brought up a point at Wikisource:Administrators'_noticeboard#Nominating_to_get_OTRS_feed where he felt that WS was at risk from the "wingnut brigade" if we don’t limit to traditionally published sources. While it is clear that WS has been a targeted for some self promotion example, and potentially will be again. There is a strong trend towards self publication in electronic format only, which will potentially continue to climb. There was a minor discussion at WWI. Does the community want to define publication requirements for WWI or continue to deal with on a case by case bases at Wikisource:Proposed_deletions? JeepdaySock (talk) 16:22, 6 November 2012 (UTC)

I'm in favor of including electronically published works. I have no doubt we are at the beginning of an era of electronic publishing, and some notable works have already been published only in electronic format. Granted, most are not freely licensed. However, electronic works are more likely to be freely licensed than traditionally published works. All in all, I think electronic publishing signifies an important opportunity for WS to host more contemporary works. The difficulty will be in determining qualifications for an electronic work to be included at WS. They should include some combination of author notability, publisher notability, and use of the work in secondary sources. --Eliyak T·C 23:11, 6 November 2012 (UTC)

Is not traditional to have an editor oversee or review, if not outright make edits to, an author's work before it is published for public consumption? Remove the editor component and all you have is somebody's blog post/Kinko's book in my opinion. Just because a work is electronically published somewhere on the internet with a release into public domain is not enough for me to consider the work for inclusion here. If a work is published electronically by a host site with some gravitas in relation to the subject matter and is a well-established domain that has some sort of editorial process in place, then that is a different matter - one where I'm more inclined to accept its inclusion here. Again, all I'm looking for is some sort of standard with a matching amount of the needed oversight for these additions by the community at large - not open the flood gates blindly because it feels right or is in line with some idea of free speech on top of the fact we are kind of light in the number of regular contributors as it is. -- George Orwell III (talk) 02:45, 7 November 2012 (UTC)

Self-published but yet peer reviewed original research

Latest comment: 12 years ago14 comments7 people in discussion

There is currently a bit of a contradiction in the section of Wikisource:What Wikisource includes#Scientific research in that the first two entries emphasize peer review and the last one emphasizes notability of the author. However, even a scholarly peer reviewed thesis may not be previously published and its author may not be "notable".

As an example of a work whose inclusion in Wikisource I believe is justified by the former inclusion-criterium, I've made a prototype study called Average weight of a conventional teaspoon made of metal, which has undergone peer review and subsequent peer review verification as archived in the OTRS system. I think this peer review verification system provides an opportunity to add knowledge about subjects that for various reasons have not achieved publication elsewhere, and without that reason being bad study quality (but rather, for this example, the absence of peer reviewed scientific journals in the subject of cutlery). In fact, the high transparency in this peer review process may make the works even more reliable than works in many "peer reviewed" journals. Yet, I'd like us to reach a consensus regarding what quality level is required on the various steps of peer review verification in order to justify the inclusion of a previously unpublished work in Wikisource, which may include, for example, credentials of the author of the work (such as academic degrees and/or previous experience across Wikimedia projects), credentials of the peer reviewing entity, state of the peer review certification, and/or the importance of the subject at hand (such as an existing Wikipedia article on the matter).

In my opinion, I think a previously unpublished scientific work that has undergone peer review verification can be included in Wikisource if the peer reviewing entity is trustworthy and the following are stated in the peer review certification:

The presence or absence of any relation between the peer reviewing entity and the author that would constitute any potential conflict of interest in issuing the certification
The presence or absence of any reasons to believe that the author has any conflict of interest in relation to this subject to the degree of significantly affecting the validity of the study
A statement the peer reviewing entity considers the method and interpretation of the results to properly support the conclusion of the study.

Any other ideas? Mikael Häggström (talk) 17:44, 6 November 2012 (UTC)

Personally, I am uncomfortable with WS including previously unpublished materials, even when peer reviewed. I feel this goes beyond the scope of a library and into that of a publishing house. I am not uncomfortable with including works that were published electronically, as mentioned above, but setting notability qualifications for those works may be difficult. --Eliyak T·C 21:59, 6 November 2012 (UTC)

What about Wikibooks, Eliyak? ResScholar (talk) 06:20, 7 November 2012 (UTC)

Not sure what you mean. I wouldn't host Wikibooks books here. Since they are evolving works, it makes more sense to keep them in one place. --Eliyak T·C 06:28, 7 November 2012 (UTC)

I was just trying to suggest you steer Mikael there if his work fits Wikibooks' inclusion criteria. But maybe neither of us knows Wikibooks' exact inclusion criteria. ResScholar (talk) 06:38, 7 November 2012 (UTC)

Thanks for the suggestion, but even after having had a look at both Wikibooks and Wikiversity I still think Wikisource would be the most appropriate place for this kind of work. Our hospital library features locally produced original research as well, so this project does not necessarily threaten the "library" status of Wikisource. Anyway, I think it's worth a shot, and we'll be able to evaluate the additions as they come and then perhaps impose more stringent criteria, delete some works and, in a worst case scenario, perhaps move the whole project to another domain. Mikael Häggström (talk) 07:46, 7 November 2012 (UTC)

Wikisource, at best, can only be considered a general library so the comparison to a specialized library such as your hospital one is flawed. I'm of the same view as Eliyak; this is just not the place to first publish a work - electronically or otherwise. -- George Orwell III (talk) 08:14, 7 November 2012 (UTC)

If that's the consensus I'll turn to another domain for such works. Still, I believe the process of peer review verification is useful for additional quality insurance of other works in Wikisource, so I moved this example study to make it a subarticle to that project page for demonstration. Mikael Häggström (talk) 13:00, 7 November 2012 (UTC)

hmm, Wikisource:Peer review verification/Average weight of a conventional teaspoon made of metal is not another domain, it is different place on Wikisource. Jeepday (talk) 19:01, 7 November 2012 (UTC)

I am skeptical over the whole peer review concept. How do you guarantee that someone will not modify the text after the peer review has been done, invalidating the review process? If there is no official reference (i.e. published work/source) to compare with, it will be tough. I tend to agree with the comments above.--Mpaa (talk) 21:39, 7 November 2012 (UTC)

I've made a separate section for that topic below, since this one now focuses on previously unpublished works rather than the peer review process itself. Mikael Häggström (talk) 07:23, 8 November 2012 (UTC)

I think that this sort of thing totally fits in with Wikiversity's mission. - Theornamentalist (talk) 23:06, 7 November 2012 (UTC)

Also see Peer review from external entities. - Theornamentalist (talk) 23:09, 7 November 2012 (UTC)

Thanks for the guidance

I'll suggest this peer review verification system there. Mikael Häggström (talk) 07:23, 8 November 2012 (UTC)

A peer review verification process

Latest comment: 12 years ago15 comments4 people in discussion

I believe the process of Wikisource:peer review verification is still useful for additional quality assurance of other works in Wikisource. Surely, the text may be modified afterwards, but at least they can be tracked in the page history and be given an addendum note on the page, perhaps even motivating a new peer review if there are too many changes. Mikael Häggström (talk) 07:23, 8 November 2012 (UTC)

Why would the text be modified? JeepdaySock (AKA, Jeepday) 11:36, 8 November 2012 (UTC)

As Mpaa pointed out, it cannot be guaranteed that someone will not modify the text after the peer review has been done. I can only guess what reasons there would be, but still, if it's just about correcting spelling errors or similar small errors that may be noticed first after the peer review then it shouldn't matter. Mikael Häggström (talk) 17:24, 8 November 2012 (UTC)

This is stretching the scope of WS in part we expect only static works (i.e. WS:WWI#Evolving_works) and the other is validation. The general expectation is that there is a published and available for scan and compare; copy of the original work some place. Much of our recent edit change patrol is reverting the well meaning edits of random editors who correct typos in published works. Can you speak to how we might address these issues? JeepdaySock (AKA, Jeepday) 11:47, 9 November 2012 (UTC)

Thanks for pointing that out. With that in mind, I'm now leaning more towards edit protection of a page after peer review has been performed. Mikael Häggström (talk) 12:40, 9 November 2012 (UTC)

Where is the original version? How could a WS version be compared to the original to ensure it is accurately reproduced? Validation requires two unique individuals to proofread the text. Additionally edit protection is counter to the intent of the Wiki in Wikisource, so it is a choice of last resort, not a common practice. JeepdaySock (AKA, Jeepday) 14:00, 9 November 2012 (UTC)

Indeed it's a problem to know if the WS version is identical to the purported original, but it appears to me like a universal problem to almost any file in Wikisource, regardless of peer review status. Also, with the community already working towards minimal modification of pages, any status of peer review verification doesn't seem to add that much to the issue. Mikael Häggström (talk) 16:16, 9 November 2012 (UTC)

Hi. I think you are trying to hammer down into WS something that, as pointed above, is more suitable for other wikis. Several persons have already expressed their negative opinions and concerns on hosting these kind of works here and given suggestions on other places to host such works.--Mpaa (talk) 20:13, 9 November 2012 (UTC)

I have to agree with Mpaa, I am just not seeing how it fits into WS. Pretty much every response you have, brings me to more points in conflict with WS. Jeepday (talk) 22:03, 9 November 2012 (UTC)

I'm sorry, I believe my addition of this section as a subsection to the one above has made the topic a bit too confusing, and I've now attempted to make it a bit less so by formatting the header of this section to a main one. My point here is, I accept the consensus in the previous section that peer review verification itself does not justify inclusion of works in Wikisource, but what I'm suggesting in this section is that the peer review verification process itself may still be useful for additional quality assurance for works in Wikisource that already meets existing inclusion criteria. Mikael Häggström (talk) 06:34, 10 November 2012 (UTC)

(un-indent)

Can you provide and example of an existing work on WS, that would benefit and how? Jeepday (talk) 11:30, 10 November 2012 (UTC)

I'd say that many works in Category:Research articles would benefit from this, such as for example Assessing the accuracy and quality of Wikipedia entries compared to popular online encyclopaedias, since it does not currently present any verified peer review, so having it pass this process would make its results more reliable. Mikael Häggström (talk) 16:40, 11 November 2012 (UTC)

For your example there is nothing to address for it’s reliability as a source of information from a WS perspective. Our goal is to faithfully recreate as HTML from the published work that is available at Index:EPIC Oxford report.pdf so it is available in electronic format. WS is a library not a research improvement project. If the document was peer reviewed and there was a secondary published document that meet our copyright requirements we would probably be interested in hosting it, IF someone was motivated to go through the process of scanning, uploading to Commons, and proofreading it here. I put a more current welcome template on your talk page. I think your perception of WS is not as accurate as it might be. Jeepday (talk) 22:48, 11 November 2012 (UTC)

Or, to express this another way: we can't alter the quality of published works. We only upload them, format them, and host them. If an article on the archaeology of western Asia was published in 1899, and is now in public domain, we would consider including that article here. But we would not alter the text or try to "improve" it in any way. The most we might do is add links to articles, authors, etc. that are also included on Wikisource. In any case, the article that we host was already published, and either went through a peer review or not, depending on the place of original publication. Wikisource does not write original research articles. The closest thing that we do is to sometimes translate non-English works into English, but even then, the original would have to have been published somewhere, and we would try to translate it faithfully. Answer this question: how would peer review in any way affect our copy of the 1961 publication of Eurypterids of the Devonian Holland Quarry Shale of Ohio by Erik Norman Kjellesvig-Waering? What exactly would be reviewed, who are the peers, and what would be the process of review and goal of having the review? I don't see that such a thing could be meaningful. --EncycloPetey (talk) 05:42, 12 November 2012 (UTC)

Thanks for your input. Now, what I think we need to decide is whether to keep the project page or not, so I made an entry for it at: Wikisource:Proposed_deletions#Wikisource:Peer_review_verification. Mikael Häggström (talk) 07:53, 12 November 2012 (UTC)

Dewey Defeats Truman

Latest comment: 12 years ago2 comments2 people in discussion

I imported a copy of Interest and Effort in Education by John Dewey at Index:John Dewey's Interest and Effort in Education (1913).djvu. It was one of about nine copies, and wouldn't you know it, but the one I picked had two pages missing. I am following George Orwell III's directions and stopping immediately and reporting it here at the Scriptorium.

Fortunately, perhaps, this is only a 100 page work, and the missing pages occur towards the end. Please, if you are knowledgeable about how to fix this, let me know how I can help you facilitate your assistance, which would be most appreciated. ResScholar (talk) 06:38, 7 November 2012 (UTC)

Done - Source file replaced. Thank the Lord it was a small file to begin with with plenty of full copies on GoogleBooks to choose from. And bless you for following the previous concerning these instances - thanks to that, only one page needed moving after the DjVu source file's replacement. -- George Orwell III (talk) 07:55, 7 November 2012 (UTC)

Wikilivres link in header templates

Latest comment: 12 years ago2 comments2 people in discussion

I've added the option to link to Wikilivres in {{plain sister}} along with the other sister projects. This is enabled on the four main header templates (eg. Author:Robert Ervin Howard). As well as being generally useful, it should help with the addition of links made by Wikilivresians (and creation of pages just for those links in at least two cases). I have no idea why or when anyone would need to link from a {{process header}} to Wikilivres but the option is there if it ever comes up.

As far as I'm aware, Wikilivres is being adopted (or is likely to be adopted) by Wikimedia Canada, so it does technically qualify as part of the Wikimedia family. If not an actual sister project, it could be called a cousin project, or possibly a half- or step-sister project.

Incidentally, we have a wikilink project code for Project Gutenberg. For example, gutenberg:2701 (that is, [[gutenberg:2701]] as with a normal wikilink) links to their copy of Moby Dick. I'm not sure if our community would want or accept this but the option is there to include Project Gutenberg in these links, should we ever choose to do so. - AdamBMorgan (talk) 20:44, 7 November 2012 (UTC)

These are defined in m:Interwiki map‎‎, and requested on the talk page. [[gutenberg:xxxx]] and [[wikilivres:xxxx]] are both there. — billinghurst sDrewth 10:07, 8 November 2012 (UTC)

In the Dark

Latest comment: 12 years ago3 comments2 people in discussion

I have completed proofreading an indexed version of Byron's "Darkness". We already have a "Darkness (Byron)", which was a Featured work here at one time... I have been overwriting the majority of [unindexed] WS works by Byron with indexed/proofread ones from his Works, but because "Darkness" is tagged as being featured, I hesitate to go further with poem/title usurpation (at least in this case, as I can't/perhaps shouldn't) until I ask for opinions. Should a versions page be created to house the featured version as well as the indexed one? and if so, what should the versions page title be? Or should I just list the newly indexed version, along with the featured version, on the "Darkness" disambiguation page? The indexed version is at The Works of Lord Byron (ed. Coleridge, Prothero)/Poetry/Volume 4/Darkness. Thanks, Londonjackbooks (talk) 16:18, 8 November 2012 (UTC)

I went ahead and created a Darkness (Byron, versions). Thought that would be okay; input still appreciated. Londonjackbooks (talk) 18:15, 8 November 2012 (UTC)

If it were up to me, I'd overwrite the existing one with the transclusion. Merge the histories and call it a day. - Theornamentalist (talk) 13:46, 9 November 2012 (UTC)

Large donation of scanned documents from the Gerald R. Ford Presidential Library and Museum (in the US) being uploaded to Wikimedia Commons

Latest comment: 12 years ago2 comments2 people in discussion

To whomever it concerns,

I'm a member of the Michigan Wikipedians student organization at the University of Michigan, and we've begun a collaboration project with the Gerald R. Ford Presidential Library and Museum (in the United States) that has been uploading a significant number of files from their collections to Wikimedia Commons. While much of these collections consist of photographs, a large part also consists of documents, the vast majority of which are PDF files of primary sources from Ford's term as President of the United States (please see this category). While I have plenty of experience with photographs and Commons, I'm a complete newcomer on Wikisource, so I though I'd just let you know what is going on and ask for advice on what (if anything) to do with it. They are all primary source documents, so of all the Foundation wikis I'm pretty sure that this is the right one, but please correct me if I'm wrong. Thanks so much and take care!

Michael Barera (talk) 01:31, 9 November 2012 (UTC)

PS: The best way to contact me is to follow the links on my userpage and either leave me a message on English Wikipedia or on Wikimedia Commons (whichever you prefer: it makes no difference to me). Thanks again!

Greetings. I am with User:Michael Barera. As a case study to what he brings up, I have created this transcription, which is the first page of this pdf, although I know not if I have done this correctly. Thanks all, Arbitrarily0 ^(talk) 01:37, 9 November 2012 (UTC)

Err... not exactly. I'm having JavaScript issues at the moment but in short all PDFs should start in the index namespace. See Index:Carter Interview with Harry Reasoner (Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter 1st debate)(Gerald Ford Library)(1554406).pdf for starters. Hopefully other folks will see this and chime in on the rest of what we do here. -- George Orwell III (talk)

John Cassell's Illustrated History of England ( 8 volumes & many excellent illustrations ) Can we get them ?

Latest comment: 12 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion

These highly illustrated volumes are a prize even for those who are not Englishmen. The U.S.A. started with England sending people to start Jamestown, Virginia May 13, 1607. England is this nation's "mother country" and our history starts with England. There are 8 excellent volumes that covers the history of England which leads to the U.S.A. Take a look and decide if you wish to have these excellent volumes here on EN.WSource. This will enhance our en.ws Library.

Done I vote "YEA" —William Maury Morris II^Talk 07:19, 9 November 2012 (UTC)

John Cassell's Illustrated History of England

vol.1 http://archive.org/details/johncassellsill01unkngoog

all 8 volumes http://archive.org/search.php?query=John%20Cassell%27s%20illustrated%20history%20of%20England

John Cassell's Illustrated History of England on HathiTrust.Org

Latest comment: 12 years ago6 comments3 people in discussion

This may be better as it is an update from the previous volumes. —William Maury Morris II^Talk 08:09, 9 November 2012 (UTC)

http://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/005945104

Full view v.1 (original from University of Wisconsin)
Full view v.2 (original from University of Wisconsin)
Full view v.3 (original from University of Wisconsin)
Full view v.4 (original from University of Wisconsin)
Full view v.5 (original from University of Wisconsin)
Full view v.6 (original from University of Wisconsin)
Full view v.7 (original from University of Wisconsin)
Full view v.8 (original from University of Wisconsin)
Full view v.9 (original from University of Wisconsin)

Hey WMM2. I doubt that anyone would be against us looking to have these works in the wiki as they would be considered highlights to the collection. From my experience, these multi-volume works do take time and are best when there is someone passionate about the work, and who will lead in what would seem to be a collegiate project, and maybe even a formal one Wikisource:WikiProjects, especially with the requirement for the quality reproduction of the illustrations. I could see that we could look to highlight one volume as something like PotM, however, that would leave 8+ vols. I would encourage for the works to be added to Commons, and the Index pages created, and other components to be constructed. If someone drives it, it will happen; if someone doesn't drive it, it will dawdle. — billinghurst sDrewth 10:16, 9 November 2012 (UTC)

Yes, I know you are correct and I thought of it when I posted about it. I don't know how many are here that love English (British?) history but I posted to see what interest there might be. (I never know whether to use "British" or "English") But England, as I am sure you know is the beginning of the United States of America. It is our "mother country". I do not think I could handle all of the text and images in all of those volumes alone. Perhaps I can but it would be a long and slow process. The images are fantastic as is the history. I had only one course of it when I was in a university and it was fascinating then too. I would not want to say that I can do them all because I don't know if I can or not. Nobody would until they tried. I would not want to "lead" anyone. I view it as work that anybody can join in on wherever that wanted. Some places in history are more fascinating than other areas of history therefor people should choose their own interests and curiosity. Too, the text is not confusing with that old letter s that looks like a large f and other British trip-me-ups. The illustrations, although discolored somewhat, are excellent. I played with a few for the past few minutes and they are not difficult to clean. By us conversing here, and I do thank you, others will see this conversation and perhaps be as interested as I (and you) am/are. I also happen to know that you are good with image work. But you have many duties as administrator on every wiki area that God ever created so you have too little time hopping from one place to another. I will wait to see what others think and learn if they are interested. If it comes down to it, I just may be willing to take on these beauties of history alone. They are worth it—I just don't know if I can handle it all. Perhaps one-by-one in volumes will work. I plan to continue living here until I die anyhow. I have a small project now here on en.ws that I must finish. It is about the Founding of Jamestown—by England! All were Englishmen. My Morris ancestry goes back into Wales and England. My French ancestry fled to safety in England from Catholic France after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes. Good ole Henry 8th created a safe-haven for Huguenots (French Protestants) so it is true that English history holds a fascination for me. I will wait and see what others may say here on this subject. I especially value whatever AdamBMorgan can cook up. I know him as always being the best cook around when it comes to organizing a good meal. The following idea may seem absurd to you but I sincerely believe that if you can create a really good "award" similiar to "Proofread of the Month" but not that same ole gold star with a green check mark on it—more like the British Coat of Arms, something that really stands out, and offer that to proofreaders, I firmly believe many here would want one! I would!! Afterall, this is ENGLISH Wikisource. England is the birth of the United States of America starting at Jamestown, Virginia May 13, 1607. Let's make it happen and let's create a really stand-out out-standing award for this as being special in its own right but please let AdamBMorgan set it up if he is willing. I know how he works and I know how skilled and organized he is. I cannot emphasize enough a special British-looking award for these volumes as we try them one-by-one. Those barnstars with a green check-mark are old and dull and meaningless compared with what I am thinking of. BTW, in Virginia those barnstars, and here in the "Lone Star State" are everywhere. In Texas they use them to to point out Texas as the Lone Star State. It was once a nation by itself. In Virginia they were used in the old days to hold up walls of buildings. There were long rods that went from one wall to another and on the end of those support rods they were threaded. On the outside of the brick buildings those barnstars were screwed onto the threaded end of the support rods. I would like to see something in "Redcoat" Red. ((wink}} What do you, Billinghurst, think of all this? Is it worth an English looking award for those who work on this volume-by-volume? I got the idea long ago from Napoleon (handing out many medals) and I am not kidding. Respectfully, WMM2 (—William Maury Morris II^Talk 11:08, 9 November 2012 (UTC)

Billinghurst, start up all that you have stated you will/can do. I have had my nap and am am ready for the volumes. I will start on the images while all else is being set up. They are very dynamic images. Respectfully, WMM (Maury) —William Maury Morris II^Talk 17:20, 9 November 2012 (UTC)

Although I've already undertaken to begin my own magnum onus (Prescott's Ferdinand and Isabella, 10th ed., in 3 vols.), I could see tackling one of these volumes after finishing the first of Prescott, as a way of keeping some variety in my wiki-work here. I'd be partial to the period anywhere from Richard the Lionheart to the English Civil War, with preference for the period of the Shakespearean kings (Rich. II to Hen. VIII), as that is the period where I have the most interest and familiarity. That is, assuming all ten volumes aren't finished in the next couple of months by dozens of eager volunteers. ;) But this will also depend on the length of the proposed volumes, complexity of formatting, how busy I become off-line by then, and whether some other desperately needed work doesn't call out for my attention. Already, I've found at least one topical area where we seem to have nothing on WS, even though there are three superb PD works on the subject at IA. At least one of these will be proposed next year as a PoTM, possibly in March. --EncycloPetey (talk) 02:37, 10 November 2012 (UTC)

I am lost and have been struggling on how to get these volumes here on en.ws. I have a very strong desire to get them here however I can. I have downloaded many pages as images in volume 1 of 9 volumes. I will place these into pdf format. I may or may not try to remove all gobble et all watermarks by hand before I place the images into .PDF format and uploading to archives.org so the various formats can be created there. I do not know if this will work but I am going to try. I am highly determined to get this job done. I have also been wondering if after all images are placed on Commons whether I will have a good "text layer" or not. I think that will not be a good text layer. I wonder, do I have to have a text layer? Once the images are on Commons I can type in all of the text and I am very willing to do so. IS it absolutely necessary to have a text layer? Why cannot I just type in all text here. All images would be shown so why cannot I just type I all text? Would that work with a "transclusion"? If not I can still get all images shown with the typed in text beside the images. This seems to be an is an excessive amount of work but I know no other way and still, I am willing and wanting to do this. This is not a casual desire within me. This is a very serious desire within me. I just have to figure what to do so that I can get everything on en.ws starting with volume one. After volume one I fully intend to do volumes 2-9. I just do not know if any of this will work. I know I can get the images on Commons. I know I can type in every piece of text. I know myself and I know the pride I get with good work even when it seems impossible. Mountains can be dug away with a spoon as long as that spoon holds up and one lives long enough. Boulders can be broken up piece by piece as long as one can endure. Whatever I cannot do I will at least have tried and perhaps I can leave something worthy behind. I aim to get all 9 volumes here on en.ws as long as there are no rules blocking me such as "you are not allowed to type in all text" -- for whatever that reasoning might exist. In 2009 using the names William Maury Morris and Brother Officer I placed several books here on en.ws and with no images added as "proof" of accuracy. Two of those are Exploration of the Amazon Valley volumes I and II. The 1st was by Lieutenant William Lewis Herndon. The 2nd volume was done by Lieutenant Lardner Gibbon. If all else fails, I figure I can place all images on Commons and then type out these volumes like those two volumes I have just mentioned. I am struggling and I am confused as to what I am allowed to do and not allowed to do in this manner. Meanwhile I have been downloading Vol.I page-by-page and will continue. If all ideas fail here I can create a website with these volumes. I get these volumes one-by-one and page-by-page. It is just a matter of what am I allowed to do. I have also considered placing them on Project Gutenberg. Whatever it takes I am determined to get this done. These volumes are English history. But England had a lot of colonies -- 13 in what became the United States of America. Australia and more. Wherever we were born we were born there because of England. England's history is our history. England, Scotland, Ireland, and Wales are the homelands of my ancestry. Thus England is also my homeland as are others I have mentioned. I may fail but I seriously doubt it. There is always a way and I will try and in trying I never doubt that I cannot succeed one way or another. Anyone who wants what I refer to and does not at least try is a failure. I do not intend to fail and I am strong-willed on such things. The greatest tasks reap the greatest victories, pride, and honor. These volumes with their information and illustrations are about the world of our ancestors. They are about us their descendants and how our world was created. This effort, this dream and desire, for me, beats the Hades out spending money while in great debt just to explore Mars. But to each his/her own. God created us this way and we have the freedoms to live this way which is why we all are here. If I should fall short then at least I will have given this project a try and in that I will never be a failure. —William Maury Morris II^Talk 05:42, 10 November 2012 (UTC)

Odd edit window behavior

Latest comment: 12 years ago10 comments5 people in discussion

I've noticed that for several pages of P. G. Wodehouse's Mike, the wrong DjVu page is displayed alongside the Page text in the edit window, even though the correct DjVu page is displayed when viewed in the Page namespace. Example: Page:Mike (Wodehouse).djvu/127. Is this a problem in the software, in the file, or perhaps a transient problem related to the recent insertion of the missing images into their correct locations in the DjVu file? --EncycloPetey (talk) 02:23, 10 November 2012 (UTC)

fwiw... I recall the same thing happened around the last time Daylight Savings Time weekend & and its changes came and went too. Stuff didn't get refreshed for a week or two after that for some folks; for others, the cache lag seem to catch up almost immediately. Go Figure. -- George Orwell III (talk) 02:51, 10 November 2012 (UTC)

Always worth firstly purging the file at commons … purge … if the page image and the text don't align, and then see if we have an issue. Similarly if the text layer doesn't show, a purge is always useful. — billinghurst sDrewth 04:38, 10 November 2012 (UTC)

Should be a cache issue. Try the image link in a separate window (http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/8/89/Mike_%28Wodehouse%29.djvu/page127-1000px-Mike_%28Wodehouse%29.djvu.jpg) and try to play with the size in px (e.g. 1000px->999px). The right image shows up as probably new thumbs are generated.--Mpaa (talk) 12:05, 10 November 2012 (UTC)

@Mpaa: Using a separate window does nothing. As I say, the right page is there at first, in the Page namespace where the text is side-by-side, but the wrong page appears when I go to the edit window. So, it's not a cache problem. Your link, above, produces the wrong page as well. --EncycloPetey (talk) 18:02, 10 November 2012 (UTC)

That is what I meant. That link is what is used to get the image in the edit window and points to a not yet refreshed image. Put the link in the address bar, change 1000px to 999px in the link in the address bar and you should get the same (correct) image as you see in view mode. And there is no reason why a size change should change the image unless the one we see in edit mode is old.--Mpaa (talk) 19:10, 10 November 2012 (UTC)

@billinghurst: Purging made no difference either. --EncycloPetey (talk) 18:03, 10 November 2012 (UTC)

What browser are you with problems using? I am using firefox and have not noticed a problem. Jeepday (talk) 20:14, 10 November 2012 (UTC)

Ditto, I have checked ten pages and not seen an issue. Your initially linked page is not a problem for me. — billinghurst sDrewth 00:42, 11 November 2012 (UTC)

The problem seems to have resolved itself now, but while the problem was still on-going, I was having the same problem in two different browsers (Firefox and Safari) in two different operating systems running on two different machines. --EncycloPetey (talk) 16:18, 11 November 2012 (UTC)

* * * The Illustrated London Reading Book * * *

Latest comment: 12 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion

A very nice book for EN.WS regardless that Project Gutenberg has completed the same. The illustrations are excellent. Take a look. —William Maury Morris II^Talk 11:38, 10 November 2012 (UTC)

http://books.google.com/books/about/The_illustrated_London_reading_book.html?id=kR0CAAAAQAAJ

A new category structure?

Latest comment: 12 years ago18 comments6 people in discussion

Several other Wikisource editions have catchall year categories (such as es:Categoría:1863 and no:Kategori:1863). They tend to just consolidate all the author birth, author death, and work categories. We already have (to maintain the same year) Category:1863 works, Category:1863 deaths, and Category:1863 births; would it be beneficial to have year categories?

...and if so, did I just sign myself up for a massive amount of wikignoming? :) EVula // talk // ☯ // 20:39, 10 November 2012 (UTC)

The idea sounds like a no-brainer. I would have though that we could bot it. — billinghurst sDrewth 00:21, 11 November 2012 (UTC)

~~I don't exactly see the benefit(s) of consolidation myself but if it makes sense to others, then I have no objection. -- George Orwell III (talk) 00:31, 11 November 2012 (UTC)~~

Oppose - What was originally proposed & expected seems now to be only the first step on the way to something far more comprehensive (as well as intrusive) to our current structural approach than the simple insertion of single parent category as first discussed. The rationale now seems to be all about continuity or something across other language wikis at the expense of what I believe the typical English-only users would normally seek out within or have come to expect from en.WS to date. -- George Orwell III (talk) 06:48, 18 November 2012 (UTC)

We'd have two choices: (1) consolidate the three categories into one, thereby eliminating the existing ones, or (2) Insert a year category as the parent of the three existing categories. Either option would provide useful cross-wiki linking capability. I think I prefer the second option as it (a) requires less work, and (b) preserves information someone might find useful. --EncycloPetey (talk) 16:15, 11 November 2012 (UTC)

I don't really consider the first option to be viable, but the second is how the other projects handle the organization (and is how I was imagining it'd be implemented here). It'll be a bit of a bitch to keep organized, interwiki-wise; something I discovered the other day was that a few projects use the year-only category name as the equivalent to our "year works" categories (for example, fr:Catégorie:1863). However, I do think it would be a nice alternative, and serve to mesh some of the categories together differently. EVula // talk // ☯ // 03:18, 13 November 2012 (UTC)

I wouldn't have thought that it would have been that hard to keep synchronised, though as you indicate it is a nicety with regard to xwiki, whereas here it would be another means to tie together a range of date related categories. To me it is a more relevant means to demonstrate "what happened in XXXX" than trying to create a Portal for such events.

As long as this topic has started... I've been looking at how we categorize (or fail to categorize) our works, and have found it woefully lacking. After playing around with options for a bit, I decided to have a look at how LCCN is handled and to begin thinking from there. I now think I have a start on a plan, but it would be a massive undertaking, would need feedback, and would be better if we could coordinate the idea across four or five major language projects—at least Chinese, French, German, Italian, & Russian, as these are the largest Wikisource projects to date. The idea would be to create a somewhat consitent backbone category structure for topics and literature that would (a) make it easier for readers in one language to find corresponding works in another language through basic inter-language consistency, (b) simpler to expand categories as they grow larger, so that the structure remains consistent as it grows.

I have a full week off work starting next weekend, and will have additional time off over the end-of-year holidays to work on presenting this, but do not have all the contacts I'd need to necessarily get a group together to make this work. I do have practical expertise in library cataloging and classification systems, but that alone won't necessaily make this feasible nor practical—the input of a broad range of folks will be needed. Nor do I expect the whole thing can be done in short order, but by starting on a piece of the problem, such as the classification of literary works, and organizing a small work group to get this project off the ground, further work can be accomplished more easily.

Are there people here interested in such a project, as active thinkers, careful reviewers, or helpful translators/contacts? --EncycloPetey (talk) 16:15, 11 November 2012 (UTC)

Call me if needed: I can translate into French and Italian as well as manage categories at the Italian Wikisource—there I planned a completely automatic categorization of authors.--Erasmo Barresi (talk) 16:56, 14 November 2012 (UTC)

I am against the execution of this plan.

For one thing Adam has already organized our books into topics: the very Library of Congress Categorization scheme you refer to. Before you begin some grand scheme, don't you think you would have at least acknowledged his work?

For a second thing, different languages have different priorities for the books they wish to have. We could end up with a single category in which a foreign language would contain hundreds of books while its English counterpart would place one or two books into that same category, orphaning them from related books.

For a third thing, bearing in mind these differing priorities, we might have a category with a lot of books about a certain subject that would lend itself to division on Library of Congress or other natural kinds of divisions if there got to be too many in the aforesaid divisible subject, but until that happens, they would be poorly served by us pre-emptively making subcategories, again, orphaning certain works into small categories.

For a fourth thing, this approach resembles Theornamentalist's forays into sweeping design changes right after he became an administrator, proposing to redesign the main page and assigning himself the duties of organizing an immediate plebescite between his sole no-bid plan and the then-current one. Theornamentalist even went to Spanish Wikisource to announce a different unsolicited plan to change their entire Author structure with a bot with the language of presuming it to be a settled matter so long as he didn't receive any immediate objections. Folks, when you see these "modest proposals" and EncycloPetey already starting to set armies into motion on a similar interlingual project, you have to ask yourself whether he is really looking to serve the interests of Wikisource or is instead looking to pad his résumé at slightly slower pace than Theornamentalist and whether Theornamentalist has somehow cloned himself or at least his approach.

I can't help but notice that this approach also gratuitously tries Billinghurst's patience once again, even after Billinghurst had graciously supported EncycloPetey at his nomination. Patience already proven in a variety of administrative applications unequalled by anyone else here. In the future, I will encourage my fellow administrators to be more cautious and restrained in supporting the nominations (and renominations) of individuals to the administrative role (as well as their projects) prior to knowing Billinghurst's opinion of their suitability. ResScholar (talk) 08:23, 17 November 2012 (UTC)

Ouch! What did I do or say? My opinion is no more valid than anyone elses, especially with my being busier being editor, and checkuser, than forefront admin, here at this point of time (and busy stewarding xwiki). I like GO3's points below that high level proposals need higher prominence. I like the fact that we can propose and start a conversation in general through Scriptorium to start and guide thinking, though feel that full-on proposals need full-on thinking and wide agreement AND need to show real benefit for the effort. I know that it can be tiresome and boring doing the longer proposals, and often can scare some people off, there is benefit, and we see the value of the longer sort consensus. — billinghurst sDrewth 14:13, 17 November 2012 (UTC)

@RS: If it sets your mind at ease, I have no inclination to redesign the Main Page, as that sort of thing is both unnecessary (it was just redesigned) and not within my particular skill set.

I don't understand the reason for all the bile in your comment, but your issue with new people having more energy and eagerness to work is a feature found on all the wiki-projects. As editors become older and more experienced, they also tend to become less interested and stale. Neither are you the first person to point this out Albert C. L. G. Günther said the same thing of taxonomists, and of the great Cuvier in particular, in his textbook An Introduction to the Study of Fishes back in 1880: "Cuvier himself, at a late period of his life, seems to have grown indifferent..", so it's not a new phenomenon. The newly active pupil in what is, for him, a shiny new playground, often will have far more enthusiasm for a task and will be burdened by less skepticism and bitterness from the burden of former work than will the long-time specialist.

To reply to Thing 2 and Thing 3 above, as these seem to me the only real issues raised: that is precisely why I call this idea "simpler to expand". The idea is not necessarily to proceed to create all the possible interwiki categories 'now, but to have a carefully and consistently structured system (that is also clearly explained somewhere) on each wiki, so that when categories are created later, they will be created in a similar fashion on the various wikisources. Yes, there are problems in trying to coordinate something like this as, for example, here we would put all Serbian poetry into a category like "Poetry originally in Serbian", but the Serbian wikisource would put exactly the same content into "Poetry" (with a Serbian title). And of course the relative sizes of such categories can be hugely different, so that one wikisource will have such a category rigorously subdivided while another has barely enough in the primary category to even warrant the category. That's why some sort of collaborative discussion is needed, in order to work out how we can best handle such problems. It's no good to say we shouldn't work on something simply because problems exist; it because there are problems that we have something to work on. --EncycloPetey (talk) 19:40, 17 November 2012 (UTC)

There is no merit in weighing in on what amounts to just an idea piggy-backed on top of another well intentioned (but still misplaced proposal). All proposals causing major changes to the current state of en.Wikisource should be formally proposed in the appropriate Proposals section, not lost somewhere in the sea of posts that this section typically turns into from month to month. Inserting an additional, non-disruptive parent category is one thing; transplanting "backbones" is quite another. -- George Orwell III (talk) 08:50, 17 November 2012 (UTC)

But, George, the title of this thread is "A New Category Structure?" yes?
Yes it is, which begs the question does your tangent to the modest original proposal amount to jusifying its addition here without even a sub-section to differentiate the two suggestions this section now contains. "Going by" the section title is akin to judging a book by its cover (imho). -- George Orwell III (talk) 21:11, 17 November 2012 (UTC)

That is exactly what this inquiry is about. And I'm asking about interest before making any actual proposal. There's no point in making a full-on proposal if I'd be going it alone. Also, I don't have a specific thing yet to propose, and without that I can't post anything under Proposals. The goal here is to look across the major Wikisources and see what we can coordinate, and what might need to be changed. Some things might not need to be changed here at all, some things might be lacking enormously. Some things might only need more interwiki crosslinking, some might not. And it is precisely the combination of need to investigate, and the need to coordinate before making any such changes, that I have asked about people's interest in the matter. --EncycloPetey (talk) 19:40, 17 November 2012 (UTC)
I was only trying to buffer the comments made prior to mine using reason. Now, seeing the need to be more blunt - Want to discuss radically changing category "backbones"? Start a new section about it!
Again, using your logic on title-dictates-discussion plus your deviation to something entirely different from the actual substance of the O.P.'s rather minor suggestion since, in order to oppose your suggestion(s) I must unfairly oppose EVula's as well thanks to what amounts (politely) to your (for lack of a better term) hi-jacking of this discussion, no? That is what I meant by "no merit" in addressing your point(s) in this instance; in my opinion - you were 'out of order' to borrow from parliamentary rules. -- George Orwell III (talk) 21:11, 17 November 2012 (UTC)

But the query is not a "deviation" or "entirely different". The proposal is entirely related to the particular question originally raised. The differences in use between Wikipedias (for categories of essentially the same name) is the underlying problem of which Year category differences is only one symptom. Rather than proposing we treat a symptom, I have asked whether there are people here interested in addressing the cause. --EncycloPetey (talk) 05:58, 18 November 2012 (UTC)

So, uh, back to year categories...

...I wasn't trying to organize some cross-wiki reorganization of content, I really was only curious if people thought that local year-centric categories were a good idea. (and in retrospect, yeah, I could have put this under the Proposals heading, but the "new topic" button puts new threads at the bottom, and frankly, all those other headings on this page are kinda confusing to me).

I'm not saying that the above idea does or doesn't have merit, I'm just saying that it doesn't affect my suggestion at all, as I'm talking about categorizing categories, not categorizing works. EVula // talk // ☯ // 21:23, 20 November 2012 (UTC)

Support - as long as all that is being done is inserting a single-parent category; nothing else. -- George Orwell III (talk) 02:28, 21 November 2012 (UTC)

Better sorting out gadgets — feedback sought

Latest comment: 12 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion

I am certain that there is a better means to present our gadgets, though for the life of me it isn't coming to me. I was wondering whether some of our newer bodies would mine reviewing the gadgets, review the text, and the groupings and provide feedback on what is not helpful and suggestions for improvements. Feedback onto MediaWiki talk:Gadgets-definition would be appreciated. — billinghurst sDrewth 10:27, 11 November 2012 (UTC)

Publishers marks

Latest comment: 12 years ago4 comments3 people in discussion

There seems to be a bit of back-and-forth debate over whether or not the Title page of Index:Mike (Wodehouse).djvu is problematic. The only item missing is a publisher's mark. Do we include those marks; is it legal for us to include them; and what therefore is the condition of the title page for Mike? --EncycloPetey (talk) 17:39, 12 November 2012 (UTC)

Done, pulishers mark is now included on the title page thanks to Theornamentalist. JeepdaySock (AKA, Jeepday) 11:29, 13 November 2012 (UTC)

That doesn't answer my question about the legality of putting a publishers mark on something housed here. A publisher's mark is trademarked and owned by the publisher. Can we legally house such an image on Commons or display it on works here? Apublisher's mark is not part of the work, was not owned by the owner of the copyright, and so does not enter public domain simply because it was used to mark a publication now in public domain. That is, just because the copyright on the work has expired does not mean that the trademark protecting the publisher's mark has expired. --EncycloPetey (talk) 12:04, 13 November 2012 (UTC)

For information about trademarks and their use at WMF wikis, I would encourage you to read Commons:Commons:Non-copyright restrictions. If Commons allows them, then we can use them. If they are on general works that were published before 1923, that meets the same publishing criteria and copyright, so no problems. If they are on works solely published after 1923, then that will depend on whether they violate copyright. Republishing them in situ is okay as we are replicating the works, so not breaching trademark. To whether you have to reproduce them, I would class it as "nice to do so". If I validated the page, I would probably add {{page contains image}} though wrap it in <noinclude> and still upgrade the proofreading status. I don't get too hung up about their absence, and will rely on the (main) transcriber's preference. — billinghurst sDrewth 13:17, 13 November 2012 (UTC)

WS to eBook

Latest comment: 11 years ago40 comments8 people in discussion

What if WS as an entity, published (for free or low cost) some of our better works on Amazon, Smashwords and/or other ebook sites? There are a number of hurdles, just getting from WS to Kindle is something of a pain. Ignoring the hurdles for now, is this something the community would be interested in looking into? Jeepday (talk) 01:56, 14 November 2012 (UTC)

What are our "better works"?--the same-old—same-old publications that have been around for a hundred years or more i.e. Poe, the Classics i.e. A Tale of Two Cities, -- the same old poems and poets. Everything everybody is already familiar over and over from high school through the university and sitting on bookshelves with a pretty new and glossy eye-catching color cover. In other words, "the usual". That is what would be chosen from WS whereas the unusual would be better. Really, if you want to get the word out about Wikisource then one of the best methods are websites done in hypertext markup language and illustrated works that point people in this direction. Since illustrations are a problem for Kindle then that is what should be shown, illustrated and unusual works. I agree with the idea of our "featured texts" as long as they are not what I just wrote about being the "usual." Maury (—William Maury Morris II^Talk 02:34, 14 November 2012 (UTC)

@jeepday. [calibre-ebook.com]? Told that it does a decent job. — billinghurst sDrewth 12:02, 14 November 2012 (UTC)

Billinghurst, you were "told" but download that program to know for yourself. Since it is freeware it still needs to support itself and it does so with free advertisements. I have google ads and many more even now as I type this. I must not have removed all of the parts yet. One of the things that program (Calibre) does is highlight many words in orange color with double lines under it. They are hyperlinks and when you place your mouse cursor over any of them ads show. I just started on the Illustrated History of England yesterday and had made the page I was working on as my home page. Yet keywords were there and highlighted in orange, and still are even now, that are advertisements to various places. Logging in I saw that the word computer was highlighted and there was a store selling computers. These highlights are frequent although I do not see them here as I type. Try downloading the Calibre program. It is a Library storage program for books and they can remove their software if they so choose. Headed offline to try to uninstall the parts I missed. I don't now all that they do. w+m m m 2

Whew! It installed a sweepstakes program, a shopping for items program, a QwikLinks(sp) program and more. I hope they're all removed now. —William Maury Morris II^Talk 16:30, 14 November 2012 (UTC)

Publishing eboooks sounds interesting. However, we might need approval from the Wikimedia Foundation if these ebooks are going to be published by Wikisource (using the WS name, logo etc). I agree that publishing the classics might be both redundant and futile but I strongly doubt we have many classics in any condition better than average. By nature, we, as a project, tend to concentrate on more niche publications. - AdamBMorgan (talk) 13:05, 14 November 2012 (UTC)

Niche reference works - yes. The DNB alone affords numerous opportunities. Charles Matthews (talk) 15:30, 14 November 2012 (UTC)

We should be reading mw:Extension:Collections and also be expressing opinions over at mw:Extension talk:Collections. Then putting requests for stretching the capability of the extension into Bugzilla: against that extension. — billinghurst sDrewth 13:51, 14 November 2012 (UTC)

I had a quick chat with a developer and they said that they thought that Kindles could read EPUB format that we produce. Is that not the case? — billinghurst sDrewth 15:20, 14 November 2012 (UTC)

Kindle devices do not support the EPUB file format used by many other e-book readers, looking now to validate on Amazon. The can be in HTML, word or txt to be published [4]. JeepdaySock (AKA, Jeepday) 16:29, 14 November 2012 (UTC)

My understanding is that the Kindle Fire supports epub but the kindle devices such as the regular kindle, kindle touch can only read pdf and the amazon formats, not epub. Calibre allows converts epub to those formats. There may be other tools and since Calibre is GPL licensed software one might be able to take their conversion routines as well. MarkLSteadman (talk) 16:33, 14 November 2012 (UTC)

Validated EPUB is not ok for Kindle. [5]

   Documents: Kindle (.AZW). Text (.TXT), Unprotected Mobipocket (.MOBI, .PRC)
   Audible: Audible (.AA, .AAX)
   Music: MP3 (.MP3)

JeepdaySock (AKA, Jeepday) 16:36, 14 November 2012 (UTC)

Amazon's own KindleGen tool accepts epub as a input format so that might work as well to create a kindle readable book. MarkLSteadman (talk) 16:47, 14 November 2012 (UTC)

there are two different discussion cross occurring above. Created sub headings, but did not move anything. JeepdaySock (AKA, Jeepday) 16:53, 14 November 2012 (UTC)

Moving Books from WS to some ereaders

The KindleGen that Mark mentions above is for publishing to Kindle, it is not a resource for the casual reader. Some research that I have done recently indicates that proper formatting for the different ereader formats requires some level of skill, but is not very difficult. Books that I have created on Wikipedia, and moved to the Kindle are ok, for casual use but are not "well formated" and are somewhat labor intensive to create. Depending on how you value your time, it is of questionable cost effectiveness, for anything that is available already published. Jeepday (talk) 01:50, 16 November 2012 (UTC)

What are your thoughts on Calibre? It automates the process of conversion so it goes rather quickly. I have not had the problems that were reported above (although according to the website of Calibre there are outfits that make versions of Calibre with malware so make sure you get an official version.) That said, texts with images, complicated formatting etc. are the ones that might need more work to publish correctly. MarkLSteadman (talk) 04:36, 16 November 2012 (UTC)

Also just wanted to mention that Amazon's Kindle Previewer[6] also contains KindleGen, but provides a GUI which might be more appropriate for the casual reader who does not want to work with the command line. Finally, the original Amazon azw format is just a modified mobi format, so any program that can create mobi files will work with that (along as you aren't using DRM...) The new kindle format has more features but isn't compatible with older kindle devices. Anyways, overall I have been happy with the formatting produced by 1) Download as EPUB 2) Convert to azw3/mobi using Calibre, for my Kindle Touch MarkLSteadman (talk) 06:17, 16 November 2012 (UTC)

I don’t have an opinion on Calibre, but WMM2’s experience would be enough that I would not recommend it to anyone. JeepdaySock (AKA, Jeepday) 11:33, 16 November 2012 (UTC)

MOBI is an acceptable Kindle format, no need to convert MOBI to AZW. JeepdaySock (AKA, Jeepday) 11:33, 16 November 2012 (UTC)

When I'll have finished to add support of epub 3 to wsexport I'll add the support of mobi. But if you want to use mobi now, you can use calibre converter tool that works very weel with epub 2 books. Tpt (talk) 16:42, 16 November 2012 (UTC)

Thanks again for developing wsexport! Even without mobi support the better formatting and additional features of epub 3 will help when converting. MarkLSteadman (talk) 19:46, 16 November 2012 (UTC)

Publishing as an entity

RE: "approval from the Wikimedia Foundation if these ebooks are going to be published by Wikisource" (Adam). Yes but first we would need to decide if we wanted to pursue it. The biggest hurdle that most free or low cost PD works available at Amazon have is editing. Books need to be properly formatted or they are worthless. Presumably some formatting above our standing finished work would be required. JeepdaySock (AKA, Jeepday) 16:53, 14 November 2012 (UTC)

Normally I'd suggest a trial run with a few texts but that will be difficult with the Foundation requirement. Anyway, I do think it's a good idea and something the community could pursue. I agree that some editing may be necessary to adapt the text to Kindle but I'm not sure what or how much of this will be necessary. I use a Beebook One, a big reason for choosing this was the range of formats it accepted, so I mostly read in EPUB. I've noticed a few things (e.g. drop initials don't work properly, although I'm not sure if that is due to the format or the machine) but mostly the texts display quite well. - AdamBMorgan (talk) 22:24, 14 November 2012 (UTC)

Publishing WS work at several ereader sites, can be done without Foundation approval, it only requires attribution with CC BY-SA 3.0. But publishing as WS would require foundation approval. My biggest concern would be making sure WS publishes good well formatted books. There is a market for putting the work out there. Black Beauty is available for free ereading from several locations but there are several version on Amazon [7] ranging in price from free to $9.99. I am not suggesting this title for us (now) just using it as an example. I think there is strong market potential to publish PD works at the $2.99 to .99 cent range that are well formatted, with a recognizable entity as the publisher. WS gets advertising the foundation gets royalties (forever) and as indiviuals we get more of what ever it is that keeps bringing us back here, year after year. Jeepday (talk) 01:38, 16 November 2012 (UTC)

I think that for books available via wireless such as the Kindle store there would be a demand in that range for PD books. People pay $10 for PD books in the book store and many people prefer it on the kindle anyways. Especially, ones that have proper pagination, images, formatting etc. There are minimum pricing policies on the kindle store (based on the size of the book $.99 < 10MB)[8]. One issue is that they will not accept PD works that are too similar to works already available in the Kindle store; with certain exceptions (e.g. with illustrations, annotations, new translations etc.) or superior for some other reason [9]. MarkLSteadman (talk) 06:41, 16 November 2012 (UTC)

I think claiming CC BY-SA 3.0 on a public domain work would be a mild form of copyfraud. As far as I am aware, Wikisource has not done anything under US law to warrant additional licensing, so it remains simply public domain (as per whatever license template is included at the bottom of a given page). I am curious if anyone already re-publishes our texts (on Amazon or elsewhere). They are under no compulsion to attribute it to Wikisource, the Foundation or any individual contributor beyond the original author; so it would be hard to trace it back to us. - AdamBMorgan (talk) 12:14, 16 November 2012 (UTC)

The Mysterious Individual is published at Amazon with WS listed as the translator. A search finds 5 references to Wikisource (only the one in english) and 190 for Wikipedia. For 99 cents a month you can get a subscription to Featured Wikipedia Articles - Daily Reads notice that publisher is listed as "Wiki", so I don’t think this is the foundation. JeepdaySock (AKA, Jeepday) 11:55, 19 November 2012 (UTC)

I think the concern would be the use of Wikisource and other Wikimedia foundation trademarks, not the text per se (at least for texts which are not new translations and still under copyright). See the trademark policy which prohibits for-profit activities. MarkLSteadman (talk) 13:03, 19 November 2012 (UTC)

Perhaps Wikisource should get into publishing for a small fee. I dislike Amazon using Wikipedia and Wikisource articles and books and selling them. It's a gold mine for them and other publishers who don't do things for free. I like the idea of giving for free but for a "small fee" I would prefer that Wikisource can grow. Wikisource itself costs money and could pay for itself. I dislike the begging for money ads on Wikipedia but it has to be because of the way it is set up and publishers on and off Internet, on paper and on Internet, profit from wp and ws and in various languages. wp and ws is a gold mine for all publishers of many types including texts with a Google ad beside that free text. ws and wp should be able to pay for themselves as opposed to constant offensive begging banners aka "nag screens" as we called them on programs in the old days of BBS' (bulletin board systems). —William Maury Morris II^Talk 13:25, 19 November 2012 (UTC)

Foundation Approval

I looked around at Meta, trying to figure out how and where to raise this issue. It seems there is some historical attempt to sell Wiki content for foundation benefit m:WikiReader. There are pages m:Fundraising ideas, m:Meta:Requests and proposals, m:Meta:About, m:Fundraising & m:General requests but none seemed like the right place to ask for permission. The page m:Fundraising 2012 seems to be about decisions already made. So looking through m:Category:Wikimedia Foundation staff, I find m:User:Zackexley is the Leader of the fundraising department, so posting a question to his talk page seems the best place to start. Jeepday (talk) 09:51, 21 November 2012 (UTC)

Thank you for the research and feedback Jeepday. I had never heard of WikiReader but I think it is a good title. If only.... Kind regards, —William Maury Morris II^Talk 10:05, 21 November 2012 (UTC)

Discussion underway with Foundation via Email. Jeepday (talk) 12:18, 22 November 2012 (UTC)

Foundation response

I'd like to thank Jeepday for bringing this to our attention. In response to his inquiries, I sent him the below text today, which he asked me to paste here, so as to not violate my copyright.

Hi Jeepday,

I wanted to follow up with you on this.

I discussed it with the legal team this week. We applaud the creativity, but are afraid that it's not something the WMF can support, for a couple of reasons.

First, our mission is to bring the sum of human knowledge to people for FREE - this feels like it would be in contradiction to that. While we know there are people who are willing to pay for the product, it just feels like an abdication of our stated mission. Second, we're concerned that we simply don't have the staff to do the necessary due diligence in setup for it. Trademark reviews, contracts, articles of incorporation - all of this would need to be factored in, and we simply have no excess capacity to handle it right now.<br />

Thank you for asking our opinion, though, and please know that we respect the work that you do tremendously. Volunteers like you keep the projects running, and we never forget that.

Thanks,
Philippe (WMF) (talk) 22:54, 28 November 2012 (UTC)

Thank you Philippe for championing the proposal at the foundation.

So both of these are show stoppers for the proposal, Even if we wanted to give the work away for free at major ebook retailers, most of them require that there be an initial asking price of at least 99 cents, which can later be lowered (in some instances) so there is no way to post them without the possibility of accidentally making money.

The second would be setting up: the potential for finding volunteer resources exist to meet most of these documentation requirements. But given the first hurdle it would be easier to set up a completely unrelated entity that harvests wiki family work, sells it and funnels the profits to metawiki as donations.

Given the resources we currently have, I don’t see a way to make it happen as envisioned. Of course there is nothing keeping an individual from doing this, but the market is all ready crowded with free and lost cost eBooks harvested from PG and Wiki’s for personal profit. JeepdaySock (AKA, Jeepday) 11:56, 29 November 2012 (UTC)

Ebook readers

Stumbled across a review that talks about some choice of ebook readers

Five of the better desktop ebook readers

I wondering whether we have the scope to build introductory pages that actually talk about book readers Wikisource:Ebook readers and Wikisource:Exporting ebooks from Wikisource. Something for our To do lists? — billinghurst sDrewth 05:51, 28 November 2012 (UTC)

Also, it doesn't talk about junk in Calibre that someone said they saw when they installed it. — billinghurst sDrewth 05:52, 28 November 2012 (UTC)

My first thought was that w:E-book reader should have something, but it is rather slim, and adding much detail on "how to" would fail WP:WWI. w:Wikipedia:Books is different then our Wikisource:Books (for oblivious content type reasons), maybe a fork off our Wikisource:Books is best. I think your suggestion at the very least falls into "Something for our To do lists". I lean towards one page to start maybe Wikisource:eBook? There are many options for capitalization of the first two letter in ebook, not sure which is most correct. Depending on what the foundation has to say to the proposal above I have a couple of ideas brewing. JeepdaySock (AKA, Jeepday) 11:54, 28 November 2012 (UTC)

Singular page is probably a good start, and if enthusiasm strikes us ... — billinghurst sDrewth 12:56, 29 November 2012 (UTC)

I was the person who downloaded Calibre but there were also free add-ons to try -- other programs advertised outside, or within, it that I removed. The "review" mentioned in the intro above was very interesting. It has been a long time now but once a good edition on Wikisource could not be downloaded without a lot of "junk" along with it including material on the left side and a list of all contributors and more useless material whether it was a PDF one-by-one or by "making a book" from many pages chosen. I haven't looked back since. There was a publishing company attached to it as optional where I would pay to have the supposed "book" and they would keep a copy of what I had chosen. Back then I copy/pasted and printed that to a .PDF without all of the extra materials. I am planning on finally purchasing an iPAD due to that "review"

"Stumbled across a review that talks about some choice of ebook readers Five of the better desktop ebook readers. I found fantastic materials on National Geographic. When looking at works like that Wikisource seems overly "static", dead in the water. To be able to publish, as has been discussed here recently, would enhance Wikisource. I agree that a singular page would be a good start. The statement, "if enthusiasm strikes us" is, I think a very negative statement for promoting & upgrading Wikisource. How can there be no enthusiasm for the many people here who love Wikisource and want to enhance Wikisource as best as it can be done? Happy Holidays to all, —Maury (talk) 18:28, 29 November 2012 (UTC)

I don’t think we need to be overly concerned with Computer eBook Readers (as opposed to eBook formatting) eBook readers for reading books that are in one of the eBook Formats on your computer. Everything we have is already easily readable any any computer with a browser (pretty much all of them).

Making our works available to eBooks (hand held devices) with a simplified conversion process is what I see as the goal. If we were going to sell them the level of quality would need to be very high, but as that is not case, we don’t need super high quality only good or great quality. I am thinking that Wikisource:eBook will have an overview, then sections for converting to most common formats. Probably also a section that mentions PG & IA or other places where you may find the work for free already formatted for your eBook. Keeping in mind that what separates Wikisource from the rest of the electronic library world is that our works represent electronic version of the books as they were produced originally (typo’s and all).

The big question at this point is do we want to host (here or at commons) converted files or do we want to empower end users to create their own file (or some combination of both)? Jeepday (talk) 00:23, 30 November 2012 (UTC)

I have Wikisource:eBook laid out and partially populated. I have previously done research on convert to MOBI and upload to kindle which I will be leveraging on to fill in those parts. If anyone has expertise on this or other areas please drop a note at Wikisource talk:EBook so we can coordinate research and peer review. JeepdaySock (AKA, Jeepday) 12:02, 5 December 2012 (UTC)

New help page index

Latest comment: 12 years ago13 comments6 people in discussion

I have drawn up a help page index which could replace the existing one in Help:Contents. I hope that you will like it and that it will be adopted.--Erasmo Barresi (talk) 17:13, 14 November 2012 (UTC)

I think it looks grand! We are forever flooded with text to read and these iconic images bring a bit of eye relief from a flood of text everyday. You younger people out there should remember that the "baby boom generation" can get sore eyes from so much text without some pleasing images every once in a while! Besides, many in the younger generations have to wear eye-glasses. I don't need eyeglasses (yet) @ age 65 because I take more caution with my eyesight by the use of things like what Erasmo Barresi has created. Yeah, I also eat carrots.

Now doesn't that wink icon look better than just text? Now take your eye glasses off and answer. "wink" —Rebus, ( —William Maury Morris II^Talk 17:55, 14 November 2012 (UTC)

I like the new version; it looks clear and a little more inviting, which should be a bonus with people looking for help. - AdamBMorgan (talk) 22:19, 14 November 2012 (UTC)

Support - I think you've done a great job of organizing the pages. - Theornamentalist (talk) 23:46, 14 November 2012 (UTC)

Provisional support - for us regulars, could an option/gadget be added that would have all [show] sections expanded in one go, or by default? I really dislike having to pop open lots of windows just to find what I'm looking for. --EncycloPetey (talk) 00:09, 15 November 2012 (UTC)

Support —William Maury Morris II^Talk 07:51, 15 November 2012 (UTC) Why not have new icon page and old all text page by a link?

Echoing EncycloPetey, "Show all, button", regardless of that, looks like a great bit of work went into it, and even if the format is changed, the additional help links are really needed. My choice would be to default to all open, and have a hide all button. JeepdaySock (AKA, Jeepday) 11:59, 15 November 2012 (UTC)

So I'll make another page without the "collapsible collapsed" classes. But I'd use the collapsed sections as default: they seem better-looking to me.--Erasmo Barresi (talk) 19:39, 15 November 2012 (UTC)

Better looking, yes, but far less practical. I'm all for improved appearances, but the point of having the page is for it to be used, not just looked at, yes? --EncycloPetey (talk) 20:06, 15 November 2012 (UTC)

Done--Erasmo Barresi (talk) 15:15, 16 November 2012 (UTC)

Support, That is excellent! JeepdaySock (AKA, Jeepday) 15:51, 16 November 2012 (UTC)

Support, beautiful and functional. All we have to do is give a creative fellow a chance. If someone fails nothing is lost. —William Maury Morris II^Talk 16:35, 16 November 2012 (UTC)

Done: I've replaced the page. Thank you for feedback and advice.--Erasmo Barresi (talk) 20:05, 19 November 2012 (UTC)

British Library scans

Latest comment: 12 years ago6 comments3 people in discussion

Hi all,

Back in September I posted to ask for some advice in terms of releasing digitised material from the British Library which might be useful for Wikisource. After more time than I had meant (many apologies! institutions move slowly, and October was much busier than intended) I've managed to get a system worked out - the PDF scans don't work well with MediaWiki, but I can convert them back into DjVu and that seems to work okay.

I've put a first example up at Index:Kennedy, Robert John - A Journey in Khorassan (1890).djvu, and proofread about twenty pages to try it out - the quality of the OCR is substantially better than I expected, though this may just be a quirk of this particular text (it's very clear type). Comments and feedback appreciated!

I've agreement from the BL to upload a handful of examples and see how it works out, and I'm happy to take requests for them.

Unfortunately, there's (currently) no accessible list of what books are scanned and available. If there are any particular authors or works you'd like me to look for, please shout and I'll take a look! The existing collection available for release covers a large chunk of 19th century literature, tending more toward the second half of the century but with some pre-1800 material; it includes both fiction and nonfiction, and is skewed towards English-language material from UK publishers (as you might expect from the BL's collections). Andrew Gray (talk) 22:56, 14 November 2012 (UTC)

It looks really good and I look forward to seeing more from and with the British Library. While I am interested in Imperial history in Asia—I was planning to add some works related to the Sikh Wars at some point, which might fall into the BL's purview—I sadly don't have time to add to my current projects. There is also one other area in which I am interested but I would not recommend it as the first request—it might seem frivolous and undermine the Library's impression of the project: penny dreadfuls and other story papers, such as the Boy's Own Paper and Girl's Own Paper (or equivalent annuals). I believe the BL has some, although possibly not the BOP or GOP. This is in line with my current work on 20th century American pulp magazines. These works could be described as pseudo-lost works; they obviously aren't actually lost, as they are held by a library, but they were rarely reprinted and are so relatively inaccessible to most people that they might as well be lost for most practical purposes. The frivolousness of the material is probably part of the reason for this. (I actually own a BOP and a GOP annual from the 1916-1918 period, and a few issues, but it will be a while before I can scan them myself). - AdamBMorgan (talk) 17:17, 15 November 2012 (UTC)

You will be thrilled (perhaps) to know that we have a full 89-year run of the BOP, and a 70-year run of the GOP (after which it was renamed), all carefully stored for the delight of future researchers. Unfortunately, they're not in this collection - it was taken from the monographs rather than serials, which are physically in a separate site. There are ongoing newspaper digitisation programs, but I think they focus on local newspapers - that's where the demand is, thanks to genealogists.

We do have some mid-century penny dreadfuls, though - they're not explicitly marked in the catalogue, but the names do stand out! I'm currently looking at a scan of The racy adventures of Tom Galloway the boy jockey (1867), for example, which is just about as dreadful as you might expect, though it's not always clear if we actually have a complete set of the parts. Andrew Gray (talk) 17:50, 15 November 2012 (UTC)

Andrew Gray, do you have any works circa 1800s on Clipper ships (preferably racing one another, or other nations,) in the China Tea Trade, (or Spices)? Kindest regards, Maury ( —William Maury Morris II^Talk 18:34, 15 November 2012 (UTC)

Good question. There is one work with "clipper" in the title, but it seems to be a more leisurely voyage in the South Pacific. Plenty of loosely titled works about sea voyages from the 1840-1870 range, which was the heyday of the trade, but hard to tell quite what's in them without individual examination - vaguely-titled travelogues seem to have been all the rage in those days. I'll see what turns up. Andrew Gray (talk) 11:27, 17 November 2012 (UTC)

Andrew Gray,

Asian countries, and I know Vietnam, had teas long ago that both American and British Clippers would race for. The race broke up the monotony of being on the high seas (which was extremely important—I am former U S Navy and did sea travel & we were kept very busy for good reasons. In the old days there was mutiny due to monotony) but also increased speeds to and fro brought riches to ship owners, insurance companies, nations and individuals.

I just now took a look at our own sister, Wikipedia, on this subject and here is what I found although this is only about 1866:--

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Tea_Race_of_1866

" The Great Tea Race of 1866 was an unofficial competition between the fastest clipper ships of the China tea trade to bring the season's first crop of tea to London in 1866[1].

" Fierce competition existed year round to be the vessel first back to London with the new shipment of tea; extra incentives were added in 1866, when heavy bets were made in England on the winner.

" The tea clipper races had by this time become a tradition in the tea trade between Britain and China. The winning vessel was awarded an extra pound sterling for every ton of freight delivered, and the captain of the winning tea clipper was given a percentage of the ship's earnings.

________

There is more in the above but I seek an old book that you may have on all of this. After all, this is about "London 1866" and "England" in general so the British Library should certainly have an old book on its own history. Keywords may be Clipper+London+race+tea et cetera.

Perhaps a focus upon the above mentioned "The Great Tea Race of 1866". Kind regards, Maury ( —William Maury Morris II^Talk 12:29, 17 November 2012 (UTC)

New § Help: Removal of adv. marks on files

Latest comment: 12 years ago5 comments2 people in discussion

Somewhere around the area on OCR work, i.e. Help:Digitising texts and images for Wikisource, instead of fancy and expensive company scanners I would like to see methods on how to remove text and watermarks by "Google" & "University of Whatever" from .PDF files. Thank you, —William Maury Morris II^Talk 11:02, 15 November 2012 (UTC)

Still? Again, you need Acrobat 9(?) or later to do this. After opening an offending PDF file, do you have a black margin about an inch wide on the left hand side holding the icons for the various navigation panes - the default view being "Page Thumbnails" - or not? -- George Orwell III (talk) 03:16, 16 November 2012 (UTC)

George Orwell III, I do not know what you mean by "Still?" because we have not had such a conversation in detail about a "black margin" and all needed details. You should remember that it was I who told you of the newer version of Adobe Acrobat and you then upgraded yours. Presently, I still have version 10.1.4 (10X is the latest version) We had this conversation when Billinghurst asked if "some kind soul" would upload a book for him. That book was entitled "The Coming Colony" and is about Australia. You were able to get a .pdf version and a .djvu version uploaded to Wikisource for Billinghurst and you stated that Billinghurst needed to "choose" which one he wanted to work with. But Billinghurst must not have been around and you got very annoyed. Because you get overly annoyed I tend not to ask you anything but instead I avoid asking you anything. I think you stated, in caps, "it is not my problem!", and no, it never was your problem. But it was a problem for Billinghurst who initiated that conversation with a polite request and it was, and remains a problem for Wikisource -- aside from the fact that everyone sees your statements, an Administrator's statements, when you are apparently under stress. People will avoid asking you questions (or ask very carefully) and I suspect "lurkers" on Wikisource would certainly avoid asking you questions and even can assume that is the way (all or most) "administrators" are on Wikisource. Those people would then leave or stay and read what other administrators are like. The position of administrator carries with it a responsibility to everyone to remain polite. However, we who know you also know you are too valuable to lose. Note that my statement at the very beginning of this starts with "Somewhere around the area on OCR work..." and avoids asking you directly both here or on your Talk Page regardless of your knowledge on how to handle the Google markings which would benefit the rest of Wikisource as well. Perhaps you and I are the only two people who own the correct version of Adobe Acrobat here on Wikisource and use it for removing Google markings on files. It would be good for others if you would place the details on Wikisource in the proper area. I myself now no longer need nor want an answer. I really never did need an answer but I once thought I did. I prefer to dodge an exchange with power over me in any form.

Regardless of the above statements, the answer to your 2nd statement and questions in reference to "Page Thumbnails" is that I know what they are and can view them but there is no single black line on any of the thumbnails I choose. There is a rectangle surrounding each thumbnail showing what portion of any chosen thumbnail would be seen in full page view. Each "Page Thumbnail" can show this rectangle one at a time and relates to the page being viewed in full page. Both can be opened at the same time, thumbnail view as a window beside full page view as long as full page view is small enough. The Full Page view and the "Page Thumbnails" can show side by side as window panes. That is all, it is over, and I prefer no reply. I have 9 volumes on English History to work on. I've asked and am asking nothing. G'day, sir. —William Maury Morris II^Talk 07:23, 16 November 2012 (UTC)

.... Right click on the black margin and a menu of all the possible views should pop up. Select "Contents". This should change the view in the menu bar from Page Thumbnails to Contents (i.e. the content that makes up each page and ultimately the whole PDF file). Scroll through the pages and the contents within each page using the plus or minus signs to navigate the tags found on any given page. Then move through the tags in the menu until the object you want deleted (i.e. a Google watermark) is highlighted in the main view window. Click delete - it should be gone. Repeat as needed. This can be achieved from the menu bar along the top. If you don't have either of these menu bar's, along the top or black bar down the left hand side, adjust your preferences. If you don't know how to work Acrobat see their help site. -- George Orwell III (talk) 07:51, 16 November 2012 (UTC)

Thank you George. I did find the correct Adobe help area but only very recently. —William Maury Morris II^Talk 10:40, 16 November 2012 (UTC)

Walters Art Museum seeking to partner with WikiSourcers

Latest comment: 12 years ago12 comments5 people in discussion

Hi everyone. The Walters Art Museum is looking to work with the WikiSource community to translate and transcribe Gloss on the Lamentations of Jeremiah, a Medieval book. You can find the book here, on the Walters website. The book is in Latin, so this could be a unique partnership between Latin Wikipedia and WikiSource, perhaps. The Walters will need assistance in knowing what type of document needs to be uploaded and where, too. Please ping me if you'd like me to put you in touch directly with the staff member leading this project. The Walters recently donated over 20,000 high resolution photographs to Commons and changed the licensing agreement on their website making everything CC BY SA and/or PD. So this is a leader in the museum world in regards to open culture. Ping me - I hope you can help! SarahStierch (talk) 03:24, 16 November 2012 (UTC)

I will post this to la:Wikisource:Scriptorium. — billinghurst sDrewth 13:48, 17 November 2012 (UTC)

Here on the English Wikisource, the document has to be entirely (or primarily) in English. A book in Latin would be hosted on the Latin Wikisource (not Wikipedia!). However, in my experience, the Latin Wikisource does not have many active members, and there hasn't been much activity there in the past week [10]. Until today, I wasn't even certain that they had a sourced document procedure set up the way that we do. Be that as it may, they seem to do, and I might be able to assist in getting the work started, as long as someone with more technical expertise assists with the initial steps. Ideally, what we'd need is a clean DjVu file with an OCR text layer. That part of the process I can't help with because it's beyond my expertise. But, I can help with the process beyond that point, as I am familiar with upload procedures at Commons, Index file setup, and I know some Latin. After that, I could offer some limited advice, but I hardly edit at all on the Latin Wikisource and am not as familiar with that community. --EncycloPetey (talk) 19:10, 17 November 2012 (UTC)

I can do the prep work and conversion of the PDF file, but I have limited connection speeds and somewhat restricted internet access. It would be helpful to me if we upload the PDF in question locally to en.WS and delete it after I access/download it. I don't think we'll have much luck creating a clean text layer - most free services cover the most common of fonts/type-sets and primarily in modern English only. Won't know unless we try. -- George Orwell III (talk) 19:45, 17 November 2012 (UTC)

Never mind. I've uploaded the PDF to File:Gloss on The lamentations of Jeremiah.pdf on Commons and after inspection, I'd say its going to be a tough one to transcribe. Conversion to DjVu is pointless - the chances of a hand-written, 12th century, Latin, 3-column manuscript generating a workable text layer via the available OCR routines are slim to none. Transcription & translation will have to be done manually unless a plain text body can be scraped and imported from somewhere first. The Appropriate place to create the Index for this file would be on Latin Wikisource (the first dozen or so pages are the only ones in English). -- George Orwell III (talk) 20:35, 17 November 2012 (UTC)

I know people (not on Wikisource) who read and transcribe medieval Latin on a regular basis, and who are therefore familiar with medieval hands and fonts. If needed, I can inquire through some of them to see if we can get assistance through one of them. --EncycloPetey (talk) 20:50, 17 November 2012 (UTC)

Dominic and Sarah put me in touch directly with the museum several days back before this thread got going and I've just seen the response here. I am working to get some folks together for this but would like discussion to transfer for the most part to la.ws as it's not an English work and there are editors at la.ws, just not much ongoing discussion; but none of them except me and John Vandenberg would be likely to look here and even we wouldn't be likely to look for an latin work. Please see: la:Vicifons:Scriptorium#Walters_Art_Museum_seeking_to_partner_with_WikiSourcers
GO3, where did you get the pdf? did you find a place to download it or did you scrape the jpegs and convert them? If the latter, could you upload the jpegs? There are some significant images here that we'll need those for. Thoughts on the format would be welcome (but please at la.ws). EncycloPetey, anyone you know who is competent to work this, please send them our way, la.ws has only a couple editors who can work with any latin at an academic level and that will be necessary for the final validation at the very least. The two we have aren't very active and I'm not sure that they are available for this project. I'm also not sure they are up to working with medieval manuscripts.--Doug.^{(talk • contribs)} 15:42, 23 November 2012 (UTC)
Duh. There's a download link on the page.--Doug.^{(talk • contribs)} 03:20, 24 November 2012 (UTC)
- Oh, but there was some discussion by Dominic of an interest in a translation being desirable to the museum; that effort, if anyone wanted to attempt it, would belong here. First things first, though, the latin work should be transcribed. If we can get that accomplished though, does anyone have any ideas on whether it would be feasible to display the transcribed latin text side-by-side in proofread page mode? Side-by-side translation is useful, but doing so with the manuscript would be a lot more work than it would be if the transcribed text were in that view.--Doug.^{(talk • contribs)} 16:31, 23 November 2012 (UTC)
  Isn't that part of the reason we can export works to PDF files? Export your transcribed text to a PDF, uploaded it here locally on en.WS using the same file name as the one currently on Commons, translate the transcription to English, transclude translation to mainspace, delete the local interim source file and, finally, use double-wiki to see the two finished products side by side. (example of Double wiki) -- George Orwell III (talk) 04:11, 24 November 2012 (UTC)
  I didn't know that was part of the reason. It sounds horribly inefficient, considering the transcribed text exists on a sister project. I could display the transcribed text here with no difficulty, I'd just like to be able to display it where the image normally goes. Maybe I'll have to design a new tool for that. :-(--Doug.^{(talk • contribs)} 03:34, 28 November 2012 (UTC)
  I'd oppose any such addition to en.WS. Its unfair to us to carry the load for somee sister site that doesn't want to do the work everybody else does. I didn't pick a dead language - you did. Inefficiency sounds like the price one should gladly pay to still dabble in a dead language. I'm mean its not like it will ever need to work in the reverse right? -- George Orwell III (talk) 06:06, 28 November 2012 (UTC)

Categorising biographical works and parts

Latest comment: 12 years ago6 comments4 people in discussion

We now have many biographical works, with many many biographical sub-works. I was looking to propose that we actually categorise these subparts into one mega category, something similar to what is done with Commons:Category:People by name. Works that use their own modifications of {{header}} eg. {{DNB00}} are easy to do, works that are subpages like The Dictionary of Australasian Biography can by done by bot run(s), or at the time of the works. There are a few things to work out still, though I was wondering on the general opinion of the community before starting down this line of thinking. I see value in having this category for visitors, and especially for search engines. — billinghurst sDrewth 13:46, 17 November 2012 (UTC)

I think I see where you're going with this, but I want to be sure. Are you proposing to tie all biographical works of a single person together with something like "Category:PERSON'S NAME" or do you have something else in mind?—Zhaladshar ^(Talk) 16:57, 17 November 2012 (UTC)

Hmm... just to point out, but this could get really messy in a hurry unless articles have an identifying code for each individual. Even for the biographical works we're already using, there are over 20 individuals known as "Eusebius", with or without distinguishing epithets. --EncycloPetey (talk) 18:59, 17 November 2012 (UTC)

@Zhaladshar, no, that was a step further than I was thinking to take, and obviously my late night expression of an idea was not there. I am just looking to create a longitudinal (easy?) place to group and find biographical works, and a means to place adjacent works about the same, or similarly named (and maybe to address EP's point), people in whichever biographical work it was generated.

I am still thinking along the lines of how in the hell do curate people information, we have done excellent work in transcribing, but a crap job at curating. This may in turn be a crap idea, and not something to progress, hence the discussion, and why I want people to beat upon it. At the moment Category:Biographies is butt ugly, I have just linked Category:DNB biographies to it, then consider Category:Biographical dictionaries, Category:Collections of biographies, Obituaries, ... I would guess that we have close to 40k pieces of biographical work, and no systematic process to even put works about the same person next to each other.

The more that one thinks about it, the bigger the task becomes and the more that we run back to the safety and productivity of our current transcription. It is probably in need of a proper Request for comment which we are also not well designed to handle. — billinghurst sDrewth 23:51, 17 November 2012 (UTC)

Once more I get the feeling I'm losing my mind.... aren't "we" really waiting for WikiData to be developed to the point where one thing or another can be compiled on the fly upon user request rather than further reliance on a framework that even when done well is more problematic than resourceful for most folks? From what I understand, as long as every mainspace page has its own unique id assigned to it, advanced customization & classification to that person, place or thing becomes far more possible (not to mention unified across all the sister sites at the same time). I'd rather wait to see where WikiData leads us than go about making major changes to the current structure only to find it just as lacking, subjective or incomplete in some way as it was before the change. -- George Orwell III (talk) 01:17, 18 November 2012 (UTC)

No idea, that amount of spare time eludes me. m:Wikidata/FAQ and d: are the ways in. We'll see who will be our expert and attract their attention to our needs. — billinghurst sDrewth 03:58, 18 November 2012 (UTC)

Author Guide lines

Latest comment: 12 years ago8 comments5 people in discussion

We don’t seem to have guide lines for author pages. WS:Author, HELP:Author & Portal:Author are all red links. Jeepday (talk) 13:49, 18 November 2012 (UTC)

There is Help:Author pages. Perhaps redirects or supplementary pages would be useful here. Also, do you want a Portal:Author and what would that be (as lists of authors by name are already covered)? - AdamBMorgan (talk) 16:16, 18 November 2012 (UTC)

Thanks I was looking for our help pages on Author pages, and was not finding it, created redirects for for the first two, the portal was just a thought. Not sure why I did not look at Help:Contents, it is clearly listed there. JeepdaySock (AKA, Jeepday) 11:35, 19 November 2012 (UTC)

To note that there is stuff at Template:Author that co-joins with the other pages. At this point we still have Wikisource:Authors which there may be value in create x-namespace redirects from Portal:Author(s) as I don't think that we want extra places to maintain. Truly! — billinghurst sDrewth 03:09, 20 November 2012 (UTC)

Special Cases of Authorship: Standard Titles?

Reading through Help:Author pages, I am struck by the omission of how to handle authors whose primary contributions were as editors; either collectors of other works, or in the journalistic responsible-manager-of-a-newspaper sense.

The structure at least is clear: treat similarly to Translators. What I am looking for is inspiration as to what the standard sub-heading should be... "Editorships" or "Collations" are too clumsy to be usable. Any thoughts, please?

Under the section "Works", could be the subsection, "As editor", "As illustrator", etc. I think that's how I have handled it in the past. (seems to have been used a few times: [11]; my personal opinion being that the addition of "Works" in the subsection title, however, would be redundant if already under the "Works" section) Simple enough... but perhaps there is a better way... Londonjackbooks (talk) 14:35, 19 November 2012 (UTC)

Also, perhaps adding a pointer to one or more "choice" examples might be worthwhile: I dip my hat to anybody who can figure out how to sensibly use (for example: invert_names) from the description given without extensive and frustrating experimentation! (And yes, it is now another low-priority personal to-do.) MODCHK (talk) 14:14, 19 November 2012 (UTC)

It is under developed, though we do have plenty living examples of how to address these. Where they have the occasional foray we have prefixed the line for the work with (ed.) (tr.) (illus.). Where there is a significant corpus of work to group, then we have put in a third level header, be it as an editor, or as a contributor to something like DNB. As invert_names was my hack, I will have another look, the problem is that we always labelled first and last name, rather than personal and family names which is a little more specific, and able to be explained.

Re the TO DO list. AdamBMorgan has created a some TO DO lists as part of the maintenance work section, and these may be worth plugging in there. — billinghurst sDrewth 03:16, 20 November 2012 (UTC)

I was largely teasing, referring to parameter invert_names. Of course it works and works well. However the documentation is not so hot; and the Wikipedia page referred to w:Personal_name#Name_order is currently a less-than reassuring (or even enlightening) mess. I can only hope it used to be clearer once. In any case, the sensible rule would be to name the Author in terms of usage in the works in question e.g. "Mao Tse Tung" even if current standards lean toward "Mao Zedong". Unless the name concerned is really well-known, there is often no way of detecting whether the original work had already reversed the name parts. Pop quiz: is "Chan Lean Fore" or "Lean Fore Chan" more correct? How do you know? The fact there is currently an Australian family with the space-containing surname "Lean Fore" is a (misleading) hint! MODCHK (talk) 10:21, 20 November 2012 (UTC)

Getting a means for Mc that does superscript but not too high?

Latest comment: 11 years ago13 comments5 people in discussion

At the moment the current superscript <sup> pokes letters quite high, pretty well too high for something like M^c eg.. Anyone able to work out a means to elevate the letter but only to top align the elevated letter? It would be useful if we could template it, even if we just do a template for Mc, though I am concerned that we may end up causing search engine problems if keep wrapping Mc in code. — billinghurst sDrewth 02:49, 20 November 2012 (UTC)

Like so: Mc--T. Mazzei (talk) 03:30, 20 November 2012 (UTC)

Page:McCosh,_John_-_Advice_to_Officers_in_India_(1856).djvu/15 Here is an example within the page where the name is MCCOSH. Perhaps we can employ a small graphic? —William Maury Morris II^Talk 04:05, 20 November 2012 (UTC)

I don't think that we really want to be going down the graphics line … not searchable. @T._Mazzei will that will size proportionally with all our regular relative size templates? — billinghurst sDrewth 07:24, 20 November 2012 (UTC)

I've created a template {{^}}. The formatting used should scale fine: (Mc), can be used for any letter or combination of letters (Mac), you can adjust the letter up or down as desired by adjusting the "vertical-align" percentange (Mc, Mc), and I shouldn't think it will cause search engine issues (doing a page search for "Mc" does find the formatted text).--T. Mazzei (talk) 04:11, 23 November 2012 (UTC)

I held off expecting somebody else to suggest this, but whatever is wrong with good old Unicode? Mᶜ looks like Mᶜ. Ought to adequately address all auto-scaling issues and should not be too hard to put in a template?

For the curious, my reference (GNOME Character Map 3.4.1 - yes; old!) describes entity ᶜ as "U+1D9C MODIFIER LETTER SMALL C." MODCHK (talk) 09:59, 20 November 2012 (UTC)

Additional thought. Be wary (well, I have been caught out) of old publications which use the form "M'". Sometimes this is because the old typesetters were facing the same problem billinghurst raises (although in typeface technology!) But just sometimes there are (mainly) Scottish names (like Author:William Symington M'Cormick) where substituting MᶜCormick will get you gently reprimanded, if tolerated at all (e.g. try searching for this person in the PDF at [12] (page 107) and note their correction!) MODCHK (talk) 10:42, 20 November 2012 (UTC)

Thanks MODCHK. Because I couldn't find it! Searched for elevated c, and other combinations not just "small c" Re Mac|Mc|m' note that I am being pure

. I added this character to Mediawiki:Edittools (first drop down at the end of the "miscellaneous", suggest a better place if you can think of one. Many thanks. — billinghurst sDrewth 11:29, 20 November 2012 (UTC)

Glad to be of assistance (though I think you are being kind as well.) "Miscellaneous" looks as good as anywhere to me―well I probably won't be searching for it; because I've had it on the key-combination '-shift-control-meta-INSERT for literally years now, and wouldn't think of the other!

One proviso just hit me. The NLA's proofreading software (whatever it is/was) up until a couple of years ago gets completely confused by this character. I think they must have it mapped internally to some kind of white-space, because it (used to, maybe still does) breaks word-searches in things like their Trove system. I raised the matter at the time and was treated with truly government-level ingore.. I could get nasty, so had better not go on. {{wink}} does not remotely suffice. MODCHK (talk) 17:19, 20 November 2012 (UTC)

AND MY RELEVATION is that it does not display well in all font types on all machines. PDF export … FAIL! epub export … FAIL! It isn't going to work. I will move to the template situation. Like picking the smaller of two Curculionidae bugs, the lesser of two weevils. Oh dear. — billinghurst sDrewth 11:18, 5 December 2012 (UTC)

Apologies for having led you astray. Please believe me it certainly was not intentional.

On a (possibly related?) note, I more recently discovered that including an elevated "O" (either ᴼ or ᵒ I honestly cannot remember which one!) seems to affect template recognition (see history of Author:Archibald David Constable.) There appears to be something decidedly dodgy about handling of some of these high-Unicode characters! Bug (as in Hemiptera-"sucking mouth parts" seems so appropriate, if rather unpleasant) or simply avoid using? As you so rightly state "Oh dear." MODCHK (talk) 21:50, 5 December 2012 (UTC)

Do we not have a template {{Mc}}? Why not create one for this sort of situation? --EncycloPetey (talk) 21:23, 21 November 2012 (UTC)

{{mc}} Mc

Done I leverage the {{{1}}} template, though I pushed it to have c elevated at size=69%, equivalent of our x-smaller. — billinghurst sDrewth 11:42, 5 December 2012 (UTC)

Marking a suspect spelling

Latest comment: 12 years ago26 comments8 people in discussion

Is there any way we can mark a suspect spelling? In "The Illustrated History of England" I encounter Roman names and Celtic (Keltic) names as well as places. There are some spellings that are not all that clear so I take my best shot when looking at a spelling. However for those who will validate the work later I would hope that my spellings are correct but I would like to alert any validator to a word that I had to take a shot at being correct so they can focus upon any possible word that may be misspelled and thereby correct it. The only thing I can think of is to place the suspect word in bold so a validator will notice it and take a close look him/herself, remove the bold and correct any possible incorrect spelling. Maury ( —William Maury Morris II^Talk 15:26, 21 November 2012 (UTC)

I use {{sic}} immediately following the word to indicate this. Be aware that this is a different template to {{SIC}}. Beeswaxcandle (talk) 18:00, 21 November 2012 (UTC)

Okay, I will try it in a few minutes. I hope it leaves more than the very small dotted blue lines ( 8<...... cut here.....>8 ) because they are not as easy to spot when validating. I think that in validating people often "skim" (not "scan") a work of many pages as opposed to actually looking closely at every word on every page. Thank you, —William Maury Morris II^Talk 18:32, 21 November 2012 (UTC)

Ugh, that's a pet peeve of mine. Whenever I proofread, I actually read the entire page. (if I just skimmed, I'd easily have three times as many Page namespace edits) EVula // talk // ☯ // 20:56, 21 November 2012 (UTC)

Likewise, I scan, but my experience here has been that punctuation is often overlooked. The most common error in a text that I've seen other editors miss is where a period or comma is misrendered as the other. So, a tiny dot prodiuced by {{sic}} is likely to be missed. Another possible way to indicate the issue is to post an explicit section note on the Source talk page. Anyone proofreading then has the opportunity to know this is a systemic issue requiring care on the part of all those who work on the effort. I try to do the same thing when I notice that a work regularly includes special characters, or had oddities of punctuation, that are otherwise likely to be missed. --EncycloPetey (talk) 21:19, 21 November 2012 (UTC)

If there's any call for it, I can create a new template for this. It would probably be similar to {{illegible}} but rendering the suspect text instead of the word "illegible". - AdamBMorgan (talk) 23:25, 21 November 2012 (UTC)

@EVula, I actually read the page too when I am proofreading. But I wrote about validating. I know for positive that not everyone reads and compares when validating. In fact, not long ago I had a strong difference of opinion with some people about exactly that. If suspect words are not somehow marked by a proofreader then a validator may miss the word that was guessed as being correct. If we are to be more professional on so many things then when working on more complex spellings of Romans and Celts, names and spellings, as I have encountered then I would like for what I proofread to be validated properly. Skimming a page with no possible alert of a possible misspelling is not good enough. A suspect word should be ? coded somehow to alert the validator to take a very close look at some specific spellings. Beeswaxcandle presented a good solution earlier today with tl|sic which appears in blue much like a link. It works.

@ AdamBMorgam the word illegible as I have seen it, on recall, is raised and colored red. The word illegible itself is too long. sic is much shorter. Names and places are often side by side and I think it would appear too crowded. I think that if it is possible sic in red would be excellent. Take a look at the spellings of these Roman names and places and these Celtic names and tribes and places and you will know what is best. I prefer the shorter sic in red if possible. Nobody would miss that! Short and sweet. This 1 of 9 volumes of the "Illustrated History of England" is fantastic! I hope to see it as perfect as possible. I find it to be excellent reading of a long-ago history of Celtic (Keltoi) tribes being conquered one by one by Roman Legions but the Kelts of Breton, Briton, Wales, Scotland (Calidonia){{sic}} (not how faint the alert "sic" is to the left) gave the Romans fierce battles. We today can easily be part Roman. —William Maury Morris II^Talk 02:06, 22 November 2012 (UTC)

Maury, you've just worried me. The whole point of the sic template is that it doesn't appear in the rendered text either in the Page namespace or in the Main namespace. It's just a flag in the text when one clicks "Edit". If it is appearing in the rendered text it isn't being used properly. This suggests that Validators are comparing the rendered text with the scan. This is a good way to miss punctuation errors and spelling mistakes. I also found when I did it that way that I would forget to change all the errors that I'd spotted. Validators should be comparing the raw marked up monospace text in the edit screen with the scan. Beeswaxcandle (talk) 03:04, 22 November 2012 (UTC)

I didn't mean to "worry" you, Beez. That wasn't intentional ergo I am innocent. I wasn't thinking of the "whole point" of sic, even had I known that point now explained. I was only *focused* upon a way of marking text including after I had read the points above your statement such as Adam's statement about "illegible" when I paused and just thought sic is much shorter. Also, I stated, "Beeswaxcandle presented a good solution earlier today with tl|sic which appears in blue much like a link. It works." Now, you should know that there is always a chance that other solutions can pop up that would work better when people gather together and converse. That is all that has occurred here so be worried no more. sic is still faint though and can disappear more with brighter blue hyperlinks around it. I have no idea as to how all validators work but I can guess they are not all the same, nor are administrators, et cetera. Oh, P.S. You can cause people not to dare to ask questions or make suggestions however silly they may be by saying, "You've just worried me." You may have thrown fear into my (and other people) psyche and stomped on my fallen and crushed already frail ego. Thankfully, I have always known you as a very nice person who has no malice aforethought. Or do you?

Smile Bro., the sky is not falling! Now be a good chap governour and go validate me hard-worked Anglish editing, eh?

Respectfully, Maury (—William Maury Morris II^Talk 04:32, 22 November 2012 (UTC)

With regard AdamBMorgan's kind offer to create another template, please don't! Off the top of my head there are already: {{illegible}}, {{Symbol missing}} (a.k.a. {{?}}), {{redact}}, {{popup note}} and {{definition}} where, respectively you cant read something (and optionally want to leave a hint for the next guy); can't read a foreign character; want to note scan has deliberately deleted text; general notes; and a whole pass-on-something interesting case. Oh, and of course {{sic}} (this is how it was really written - look I noticed!) and {{SIC}} (where you have the option of recording what you guessed the original typesetter meant to put down as well as what they actually did do.)

I simply cannot envisage a situation like Maury has described where one or the other of the above is not already applicable. MODCHK (talk) 04:00, 22 November 2012 (UTC)

I cannot envision it either, MODCHK. In the beginning here I have stated that Beeswaxcandle told me about the use of tl|sic and I specifically stated, "it works". I have already used it. You should be able to see that where I recently saved a page tonight showing that use in the Summary line. Kindest regards, Maury ( —William Maury Morris II^Talk 04:42, 22 November 2012 (UTC)

Jeepday (talk) 11:53, 22 November 2012 (UTC)

So do I occasionally. See, yet another alternative already exists! MODCHK (talk) 22:12, 22 November 2012 (UTC)

Ahahaha, "a long description of wierdness!" That's funny because the text I am editing is already filled with it without me adding to it. But on the serious side, I do see your point. It is amazing the answers we all provide. I plan to stick with Beeswaxcandle's idea. Your method points out any validation that was not truly proofread when validated. It's a trap for anyone who validates without actually reading the text and seeking any mistakes. The thing about {{sic}} is that it is so light colored. I would prefer something short and colored red so it will stand out easily and be corrected if that is the case. Even an asterisk in red would stand out on the page. I think making text colored red is a long piece of code but I don't know.

Perhaps AdamBMorgan's idea of a word colored (red) in a template would be good -- or make sic colored (coloured) red! Why would sic in red not work? Would it not still function the same? Respectfully, Maury ( —William Maury Morris II^Talk 16:27, 22 November 2012 (UTC)

Already available. {{redact|color=pink|text=Hey, look, I done a misteak here!}} produces Hey, look, I done a misteak here! MODCHK (talk) 22:12, 22 November 2012 (UTC)

On top of this, I was going to use {{namespace detect}} to show highlighted text in the page space but normal text everywhere else (such as transcluded to the mainspace). - AdamBMorgan (talk) 22:49, 22 November 2012 (UTC)

I drop my opposition. This is a wholly different aspect, and makes sense to me. MODCHK (talk) 23:00, 22 November 2012 (UTC)

Adam, please go ahead and make what you know will work. I personally really do want something that marks well enough to spot it easily. It is not a matter of a misspelling but rather pointing to a possible misspelling. Validators will be able to easily spot the colored text and decide one way or another on what the correct spelling is. Nobody has to use the new template if they don't want to. It is an option just as many other templates are options. Most Respectfully, Maury ( —William Maury Morris II^Talk 02:10, 23 November 2012 (UTC)

OK, {{suspect}} should do this job. It is based on namespace detect and redact. Use is as {{suspect|suspicious text}}. - AdamBMorgan (talk) 15:40, 23 November 2012 (UTC)

suspicious text test 1

suspicious text test 3

By George, this one works! —William Maury Morris II^Talk 17:24, 23 November 2012 (UTC)

Have a look again (unless I've done something really stupid to {{suspect}}; I think you will find it works the way William Maury Morris II wants it to for demonstrations in Scriptorium―in fact all of the wikisource namespace―now.) MODCHK (talk) 06:01, 24 November 2012 (UTC)

Here are some softer colors. Which one shall we choose to use? For sure, anyone validating pages would have to be blind not to see a colored word. None of that, "I missed it too!". Also, there should not be an overuse of these but rather they should be used as sparingly as possible. I have used none yet. Thank you one and all. Maury ( —William Maury Morris II^Talk 11:04, 24 November 2012 (UTC)

By George, this one seems too bright!
By George, this one works!
By George, this one works!
By George, this one works!
By George, this one works!
By George, this one works!

MODCHK, I personally want this only for the complicated spellings of Breton, Keltic, Roman names and places, in Volume I. of IX. volumes of "The Illustrated History of England." Others need not use any of these colors (colours). But it is a long work with words that are unfamiliar and sometimes difficult to read. I may guess as best as possible and be wrong about a spelling. I would love to do better than that. I want the spellings to be correct. The illustrations are superb as is the history. If ever I can do this as correct as I intend these volumes will be a grand asset to en.WS and I suspect it would get published and end up on Amazon for sale by some re-publishing company and they may even credit "Wikisource" as some works on Amazon presently do. I hope that someday WS will have it's own published works and WS can draw water (sources) from many springs (books) here. We all know that technology and what is done with technology changes and changes fast. These volumes are really that grand. Maximus Glutinous Meningitides Laryngitis Decimus is an example of where often in this volume the n and the u letters get reversed or scrambled so that one cannot ascertain which is the correct letter. I plan to (and have been) cross-reference some of the spellings with those on Wikipedia. P.S. My editor consistently shows that "colour, &c." all British spellings are incorrect. I also wish to state that I did not initially intend for my name to be so long. When I first started editing on Wikipedia I used only what I have been always been called by family and friends, "Maury". But I forgot the password after a trip overseas and I could no longer use "Maury" including "Globally" on all Wiki areas. Otherwise it is what I would be using now. Kindest regards to all, Maury ( —William Maury Morris II^Talk 12:03, 24 November 2012 (UTC)

Aha. I think you have put your finger on an important point. I (and I assume others) thought you needed some kind of deliberately garish marker to draw attention to a (possible) error item. I now see you really want a more toned-down indicator―is this correct? If so, I must warn you that colour (correct spelling to me!) design is definitely not my forté, and never has been. Sorry.

Oh, and thank you for your name clarification. I admit I had no idea what you wished to be called; so literal quoting was a bit unsubtle of me. MODCHK (talk) 22:46, 24 November 2012 (UTC)

"garish"!? Nononononono, that's only good (IMHO) for Baroque or Rococo architecture for old churches! Too, I was teasing about British spellings. "I stated that my editor consistently shows....." and it does -- thereby adding a tiny bit more confusion in the red underlined words in "The Illustrated History of England vol.I." I actually prefer the older spellings. But I am *stuck* with the long-winded name which is why I place my middle name, "Maury", in front of it when signing and I did not want to have to use an alias. There are many named "William" on both sides of my families and many have the surname of "Morris" which is abundant in England. So, my parents called me "Maury" to avoid having clashes with all of the others named William in my families plus Bill, Billy, Will, Willie, William. I have sons and I named none of them William or Maury. Kind regards, Maury ( —William Maury Morris II^Talk 23:36, 24 November 2012 (UTC)

Am I missing the obvious here?

if the transcription is suspect, the page should be marked as problematic, and if you want to annotate it, simply use <-- an html comment--> and or put a note on the Page talk: ns page.
if you cannot read it, the page should be marked as problematic, and it is illegible
if you can read it and it doesn't make sense, then SIC.

If it is terribly important to put something in the page ns: then just <noinclude> it. Let us not start getting all airy-fairy, or artsy-fartsy about transclusions across namespace, this colour tweak, which set of tinsel pasties; … It looks like we are creating problems for bleeding obvious solutions. Keep it simple people. — billinghurst sDrewth 13:41, 26 November 2012 (UTC)

Non-persons as authors

Latest comment: 12 years ago7 comments4 people in discussion

Can I have an author page for a non-human author, for example an organisation? In my specific case this is the Swedish Pirate Party, which releases all of its documents (such as Declaration of Principles) in the public domain. The documents cannot be pointed to a specific author - the author is the party member meeting. Quispiam (talk) 19:47, 21 November 2012 (UTC)

We've done that before. See Portal:Anonymous (group) as an example. --EncycloPetey (talk) 21:20, 21 November 2012 (UTC)

Usually non-human authors are listed as portals (eg. Portal:NASA) instead of authors. I thought I'd moved all of the non-human author pages a while ago; I must have missed one. I will probably move Anonymous too, although I'll leave it for the moment to avoid confusing the issue here. - AdamBMorgan (talk) 23:21, 21 November 2012 (UTC)

More than one, as I've just noticed Author:Stratemeyer Syndicate as well. Should we have notes on how to handle corporate and anonymous authors on the Authors Help page? --EncycloPetey (talk) 03:16, 22 November 2012 (UTC)

Updated Help:Author pages, but Wikisource:Portal is very weak on how or what to do for this. Jeepday (talk) 12:09, 22 November 2012 (UTC)

Now that Portal:Anonymous (group) has been moved to Portal:Anonymous (group), I've classified it as HVB (Criminology). This is the closest match I can find at the moment with the Library of Congress catalogue. I'm not sure if that's the best fit, though. If anyone has a better idea, please suggest it. - AdamBMorgan (talk) 07:04, 25 November 2012 (UTC)

Never mind, it occurred to me while doing something else the Societies (HV) would work. - AdamBMorgan (talk) 10:24, 25 November 2012 (UTC)

A touchy subject - categories

Latest comment: 12 years ago7 comments3 people in discussion

There are two nearly identical categories Category:Roman history and Category:Ancient Rome should be merged. My personal preference is Ancient Rome and I would change the Roman category articles. Any comments? — Ineuw talk 06:07, 26 November 2012 (UTC)

They're far from identical, judging by the name. The former is specifically the history of Roma, the latter is more generally titled and could include art, music, politics, literature, archaeology, etc. Or, to put it another way, you wouldn't merge "History of the United States" with "United States", would you? This is effectively the same situation. "Ancient Rome" is the name of a nation. You can't just call it "Rome" or people would assume it was the city. You can't call it "Roman Empire", because the Empire didn't exist until the time of Julius Caesar, and then what do you do with all the stuff that came before? Personally, I would place the former category (Roman history) as a subcategory of the latter, although we might retitle it as "History of Ancient Rome" for clarity. --EncycloPetey (talk) 06:23, 26 November 2012 (UTC)

Whichever way is fine with me but they should be merged. BTW, I am placing some articles into Category:PSM uncategorized articles. — Ineuw talk 06:35, 26 November 2012 (UTC)

Category:Roman history does seem to be mixing up works by Romans and works about them. I've changed it to a redirect and set up Category:History of Ancient Rome (Category:Ancient Roman historical works already exists). I'm in the process of recategorising everything that was in this category. - AdamBMorgan (talk) 13:32, 26 November 2012 (UTC)

The Category:Ancient Roman historical works would be histories written by ancient Roman authors, but not necessarily about Rome itself. There are some Roman-authored histories of the Greeks, for example. --EncycloPetey (talk) 18:39, 26 November 2012 (UTC)

Yes, and both could be described as "Roman history", depending on the categoriser's point of view. This seems to have been a problem in the past. I added a note to try to make the distinction clear. Regarding the works that were in this category: I've actually just separated the two out, although some works may count for both categories. (A potentially more serious problem is that a significant number of these works were incomplete without a source. I've tagged them in case anyone has time to fix that; and as a warning to anyone reading them.) - AdamBMorgan (talk) 19:20, 26 November 2012 (UTC)

And I've just pulled two non-historical works out of the aforementioned "historical works" category (apparently someone did not know the difference between History and Natural History). The Latin Classics are an interest of mine, and I'd be working on them if (1) I weren't already occupied with other projects, (2) They weren't so lengthy, and (3) There weren't already so many copies of translations available on-line. Perhaps once I've completed more works of (and about) the literature of East Asia, I'll tackle some of those next. --EncycloPetey (talk) 20:13, 26 November 2012 (UTC)

Tacitus: And Other Roman Studies (1906)

Latest comment: 12 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion

"The source document of this text is not known..."

http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Tacitus:_And_Other_Roman_Studies

Tacitus: And Other Roman Studies (1906) by Gaston Boissier, translated by William G. Hutchison

Source: http://archive.org/details/tacitusotherroma00boisuoft
—William Maury Morris II^Talk 18:22, 27 November 2012 (UTC)

Somes questions from a beginner

Latest comment: 12 years ago6 comments5 people in discussion

Hello, I "disturbed" Charles Matthews with some question and he advised me to inquire here. So I have several questions. I started to transcribe A Dictionary of the Biloxi and Ofo Languages and I do not how to manage sevral stuffs.

First how to manage the footnotes? I found that and I guess I should follow what is written. We have to use "automatic footnotes" and not "manual" ones (example). Am I right? And the book on which I am working uses "letter" symbols instead of "numeral" symbols. Does it matter?
How to manage text on several columns (example)?
How to manage this kind of pages?
How to transcribe a Table of Content (example)? Should I transcribe the content like for a "normal" page? Or is there an automatic stuff that I do not know?
Finally, if you have any remarks or comments on what I have already transcribe, please tell me.

Pamputt (talk) 12:02, 28 November 2012 (UTC)

Hi, I can't help with evwerything but here are a few answers:

Everything looks OK on the linked page. I wouldn't worry about the use of letters instead of numerals; the function of the footnotes is preserved and (depending on how many footnotes there are to a section) letters could be a problem if the quantity exceeds 26.
The best way is usually to just ignore the columns. Proofread the whole thing, with the second column following on from the end of the first column.
I'm honestly not sure. The best I can come up with at the moment is to use a table. It won't be great but it will keep the translated words in line with the originals.
There is no automatic stuff but templates can help format everything. I've started the page as an example. Feel free to change the wikilinks; I'm not sure how you want to structure the work when it is transcluded, I just included these links as examples.
Nothing so far. - AdamBMorgan (talk) 12:53, 28 November 2012 (UTC)

With regard to #3, User:Laverock did some formatting on this page, etc. in a PotM that might be illuminative where keeping certain text inline is concerned...(?) Londonjackbooks (talk) 13:10, 28 November 2012 (UTC)

That formatting is significantly different from what's going on here, where a translation of each word appears below in a smaller font. This sort of format occurs often enough in some works, that I might try creating a template for such things. I'll see what I can come up with later this ~~evening when I get home~~ week. --EncycloPetey (talk) 23:20, 28 November 2012 (UTC)

I created {{transl}}. Is a little tedious to use, but it works:

{{transl|Tcĕtkana′|Rabbit<br/>(person)}} {{transl|Towedi′|Frenchman}} {{transl|tĕnaxi′|his friend}} {{transl|ata′mĭni|to work}} {{transl|akĭtsiĕ|he helped<br/>him}} {{transl|ato′|potato}} {{transl|utcutu′|they <br/>planted}}.

Tcĕtkana′
Rabbit
(person) Towedi′
Frenchman tĕnaxi′
his friend ata′mĭni
to work akĭtsiĕ
he helped
him ato′
potato utcutu′
they
planted.

--T. Mazzei (talk) 06:41, 30 November 2012 (UTC)

Thanks I think it will be really useful. Pamputt (talk) 16:47, 30 November 2012 (UTC)

noinclude tag broken?

Latest comment: 12 years ago5 comments3 people in discussion

I see the latest 1.21/wmf5 update messed around with the 'noinclude' tag. Has it stopped working as before in transclusions or is it just me again? One or more of the 'noincluded' headers in the Page: namespace are being transposed along with desired content range to the main namespace instead of being dropped or ignored like they always were before today or so. ( example )

Pretty soon the only thing that we can edit without worry will be this page & this page only. -- George Orwell III (talk) 04:13, 29 November 2012 (UTC)

Whatever it is you're seeing, I'm not seeing it. Instances I've recently added of "noinclude" still do not transclude. I can't tell what is is you're seeing in the page to which you linked. --EncycloPetey (talk) 06:03, 29 November 2012 (UTC)

~~Why would you add additional noinclude tags in the Page: namespace beside the default generated ones for the header & footer fields?~~ On second thought, I'd rather not know.

The issue remains however - see above for the Bugzilla. I'm just not so sure it is only LST related since one of things mentioned in the core changes for 1.21/wmf5 had to do with open ended 'noinclude' tags or something. -- George Orwell III (talk) 06:42, 29 November 2012 (UTC)

It's a bug in the new LST feature. See https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=42527 for more details - I'm working on it. Valhallasw (talk) 10:26, 29 November 2012 (UTC)

Fyi - a patch has been developed and deployed. Everything on this front seems to back to normal. Thank you all. -- George Orwell III (talk) 22:46, 29 November 2012 (UTC)

Gender

Latest comment: 12 years ago8 comments6 people in discussion

Can we do anything to bring more works by women authors into Wikisource?—unsigned comment by 63.152.69.178 (talk) 06:10, 1 December 2012‎.

[question was by anonymous poster. —Maury (talk) 06:54, 1 December 2012 (UTC) ]

My guess is that there are some already here and if not then you can add some and work on them after a "bug" is worked out of software that Wikisource has to have. Are you planning to work on anything specific? —Maury (talk) 06:19, 1 December 2012 (UTC)

Maybe make a category under requested texts so that when people are looking for texts to start on they might work on them? Also maybe categorizing authors into a women authors category so that they are easier to find? MarkLSteadman (talk) 06:40, 1 December 2012 (UTC)

I personally am not a fan of creating categories by gender, race, or other foundations of bigotry. Jeepday (talk) 12:01, 1 December 2012 (UTC)

Really, the best way to add more works by women is just to start adding more works by women. That could be organised by, as suggested, a section on Wikisource:Requested texts, or perhaps a WikiProject. There needs to be a group of people willing to implement this, of course. WikiWomen events tend to focus on Wikipedia, like most Wikimedia projects, but it might be worth asking them (I can't find any official contact but User:SarahStierch seems prominent). I have no personal objection to demographic-based categories but I can see why other would have (not to mention the amount of work that would be involved in adding them to our existing author pages). Without them, however, we have no way of knowing if we actually have a deficiency of works by women authors. From the last data I saw on the subject, Wikisource actually has the second highest proportion of declared female active users on all of Wikimedia (Wikiquote is the one that beats us). I don't know if that actually affects our content but it is possible. - AdamBMorgan (talk) 21:16, 1 December 2012 (UTC)

—unsigned comment by 63.152.69.178 (talk) 06:10, 1 December 2012‎., As I previously stated, no books can be brought in to Wikisource at the present. Images and text come together, like a sandwich, and the software used here will not presently do that. It is temporary. Soon, I hope, it will and then you can add books about our fair ladies. Ignore those comments about "bigotry" and bring in all of the books you want about women. That's what Wikisource exists for and we have some excellent ladies that work here now. One often works on poetry and I ask again, do you have a preference of what book/s you would like to place on Wikisource? If you converse, we can assist in seeking out books you may want. If you remain silent we cannot help you with what you want. As far as we know you may have wandered away so please feel free to communicate. Meanwhile, there are probably books here on women that you can work on now. Our administrators would know about them. It is up to you whether you wish to promote women or not. Just post some details as to what you want. Kindest regards, —Maury (talk) 22:15, 1 December 2012 (UTC)

I would say that we often have attempts to try expand the diversity of the works that we host, be it by gender/nationality/view point of the author, be it by subject matter, year of publication, etc.. The avenue that we have used has been Wikisource:Proofread of the Month and I think that it will continue to be (check the talk page). As curators, we should be looking to expand the collection, though at the same time the works brought here have been those of interest to people. So to increase the collection in a certain area is, as usual, "INVOLVEMENT". Come and suggest works; do works; seek assistance where you have issues. — billinghurst sDrewth 23:23, 1 December 2012 (UTC)

there is the ada iniative, and WikiWomen's Collaborative. i've been talking up source at at editathons among the archivists, but i suspect it's down the list. having a project, circle might help with collaboration.

getting Godey's Lady's Book to work on would be a good bridge project. lot's of good material there but not all scanned. [13] Slowking4 (talk) 00:20, 2 December 2012 (UTC)

Successful Validation Month

Latest comment: 11 years ago2 comments2 people in discussion

Due to being without a computer for the past 6 days, I can't give you an exact figure of pages that were validated during Validation Month 2012. However, I can say that it was in the order of 4,500 pages, which brings us to a total of 96,339 Validated pages. In validating those pages we made another 21 works of varying lengths and topics available to our readers. And I think we got a new PSM project person as well. Thank you to everyone who was involved. Beeswaxcandle (talk) 03:55, 4 December 2012 (UTC)

Fan-bloody-tastic! (the validation count, not you without computer

) Thanks for your work in this space BWC, I see POTM as a gentle and enticing way to engage new people, for us to work cooperatively, and that we pick up works that are usually out of our own personal comfort zone. Nice job. — billinghurst sDrewth 10:48, 5 December 2012 (UTC)

Relaunching the project newsletter

Latest comment: 11 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion

December's maintenance task is a little different than previous tasks. This month we are planning and organising the relaunch of Wikisource:News. This is out project newsletter, which is linked from other parts of Wikimedia and used to be on the main page. You may not have heard of it because it has been dormant for a long time. For this month, we need to work out how this is going to work. We need to decide on the technical elements of the newsletter as well as the content and the organisation behind it. We are also going to need volunteers to run the newsletter when it gets started again (otherwise it will just become abandoned and dormant again). Discussions for this should take place on Maintenance of the Month. - AdamBMorgan (talk) 13:53, 4 December 2012 (UTC)

Public domain search

Latest comment: 11 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion

I've developed a public domain search engine, Appropedia:Public Domain Search - based on sites which are (mostly) public domain. That's mostly US Federal Govt sites, so I'm not sure if that's of interest to Wikisourcians(?), but I'd be happy if it's useful. Giving me feedback might motivate me to improve it.

It's useful (for my purposes, anyway) but does need work. If anyone finds value in it and would like to help refine it, please let me know. (Most reliable place to leave a message for me: Appropedia:User talk:Chriswaterguy.) --Chriswaterguy (talk) 07:46, 5 December 2012 (UTC)

Develop a Wikisource app.? MS- Windows has an app. for Wikipedia

Latest comment: 11 years ago3 comments3 people in discussion

Administrators, programmers, is it possible to develop a Wikisource app? It must be possible to do so but I wouldn't know how as I am not a programmer. I ask this question because people enjoy apps of all kinds and collect them for their devices. I ask too because I was surfing the net and encountered the following. http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/windows-8/apps - Wikipedia - The official app. 20 million articles in 280 languages. Happy Holidays to all, —Maury (talk) 19:20, 7 December 2012 (UTC)

Love me some Wikisource, but let's not pretend that we have the same size of audience as Wikipedia. I'd rather see the energy that could be spent developing a Wikisource app instead be spent on, you know, Wikisource. :) EVula // talk // ☯ // 19:49, 7 December 2012 (UTC)
(for what it's worth, I also don't think the WMF should develop their own apps; I think the third-party apps are far better than the official apps)

Looks like the foundation home of the project is meta:Mobile projects, Seems like there still might be a bug or two getting worked out, so maybe waiting for a while before asking for a Wikisource version might be a better choice. —unsigned comment by JeepdaySock (talk) .

You should ask to user:Tpt, he worked a little on the mobile frontend of Wikisource (which is no app, but at least is optimez for Source and not Pedia). We submitted some bugs, but a lot of work is still needed, please check: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimania_2012_Wikisource_roadmap#Mobile_version --Aubrey (talk) 20:11, 15 December 2012 (UTC)

How about an app for Mac users

Latest comment: 11 years ago2 comments2 people in discussion

Also how about an app for Mac users, I can't give you a link to the site because it's only available as an app itself on Macs. There are apps for Wikipedia there. --kathleen wright5 (talk) 21:19, 9 December 2012 (UTC)

There is also a Wiktionary widget, but it's not very useful. --EncycloPetey (talk) 03:02, 10 December 2012 (UTC)

New paragraph rendering using {{fs90}}, etc.

Latest comment: 11 years ago15 comments4 people in discussion

When applying {{fs90}}, a new paragraph is sometimes not recognized (see here [fs90/s/e] and here [fs90|]) in the usual way (blank line space). Other times, the new paragraph renders just fine (see here). Why might that be the case? And what essential differences might there be between {{font-size90%/s}} and {{fs90/s}}? I don't believe the former has the same paragraph-rendering issues as the latter (update: Yes it does... see here—which, when applied, renders just fine on the following page). Which one is preferred? Thanks, Londonjackbooks (talk) 20:22, 7 December 2012 (UTC)

The template uses a <DIV> to format the text between it's starting and ending variants. When the template is the first thing on a new line and the text comes immediately after it, that text is a <SPAN> when it should be a <P>. In the case where the pair of template tags wraps more than one block of text ( (see here ), only the second block is recognized as a <P> while the first block of text is still seen as a <SPAN> - note the difference in line-spacing between the 1st and 2nd paragraphs on /359).

The reason the 2nd paragraph merges into the first is because there is no "place" for the ending paragraph tag to exist so it all seems like one block of text. Insert a single line return before the template end tag in the footer and the closing paragraph tag (not seen) has a place to insert itself upon save. -- George Orwell III (talk) 02:06, 8 December 2012 (UTC)

The other page that you tweaked made no difference, however (was it supposed to?). Two paragraphs within the fs90 template(s) are still merged together. I'm trying to understand what you've explained above, but don't understand why it 'works' in some cases, but not others. Perhaps if I look at your explanation a bit longer, a light will eventually turn on... But for now, I have to call it quits. Thanks, Londonjackbooks (talk) 03:22, 8 December 2012 (UTC)

Placing the template calls on their own line fixes the issue with paragraph recognition. I.e. instead of {{fs90|some text}} use

{{fs90|

some text

}}

The reason this works is that it places the "div" statement (that formats the text) on a seperate line from the main body of the text, which allows for the proper generation of the html--T. Mazzei (talk) 18:57, 8 December 2012 (UTC)

A comment from Ineuw: After doing a variety of tests on the above mentioned two pages, the conclusion is as follows:

{{fs90}} works only on a single paragraph at a time.
{{fs90/s}} & {{fs90/e}} pair does not affect two successive paragraphs under any conditions. The non optimal solution was to place {{DoubleHeightRow}} (or {{Dhr}}) between two paragraphs. (see here). In this case the {{fs90/e}} is in the footer.
When placed in the header, {{fs90/s}} doesn't affect the first paragraph at the top of the page, but does affect the 2nd. Hence, {{fs90/s}} was moved from the header to the beginning of the first paragraph and the same solution was applied as above (see here).
I know that there are other split templates of this kind, but I have no experience with them. The problem seems to point to the header definition rather than the template. I write this because there are other issues which no longer work in the header as they did in earlier versions. — Ineuw talk 22:01, 8 December 2012 (UTC)

Other split templates deal with positioning more so than formatting. Its the application here that's making life difficult; font-size can be inheritable to children tags but line-spacing works better when assigned directly. The padding-top and padding-bottom settings only makes sense here for the first and last paragraphs, respectively, as well. This scenario (multiple paragraphs with reduced font-size & line-spacing differing from otherwise normal paragraphs) is a perfect candidate for Class definition in our Common.css first and a template based on those definitions created for the same ease of editing afterward. -- George Orwell III (talk) 22:25, 8 December 2012 (UTC)

You guys can work out the details, and I'll happily apply whatever is agreed upon to the work (after the weekend) :) Londonjackbooks (talk) 22:41, 8 December 2012 (UTC)

This is problematic because the whole raison d'être of the template is to reduce the line-height within the same paragraph to enhance the difference between 100% and 90% font sizes and the line-height. In the context of Windows OS (Firefox browser, Arial font), the line-height, which should also be reduced, is not visible by the 10% reduction in font-size.

To be even more specific, when I began to explore this issue here some years ago, the conclusion was that the line-height ratio is 140% to the 100% font size and this was confirmed by User:Inductiveload. In these templates, I reduced the line height to 125% which is 90% of 140%, and this looked good. The top and bottom padding of the template is to maintain the same clearance between paragraphs. You will notice in the templates' histories (of the 90%, 85%, 75%, and 70%), that I made incremental changes in the padding to improve the appearance.

For the sake of simplicity, my recommendation to Londonjackbooks is to use {{fs90}} on a paragraph by paragraph basis.— Ineuw talk 23:49, 8 December 2012 (UTC)

That's all fine for single paragraph (because you have the text right up against the template - not giving the wikicode a chance to insert paragraph tags; it becomes a span wrapped in a div & that div's setting mimic the normal paragraph margins [0.4 top, 0.5 bottom]). If fs90 was supposed to be for paragraph to paragraph differentiation, then a paragraph tag should have been used instead of the div -- but you also wanted to be able to use it for captions & junk where a span is prefered so its catch-22 (when you put the text right up against the template that is - when you put the template calls on their own lines, the wikicode automatic paragraph tag insertion is possible because the text is not constricted by the div wrapper that way). Like I said, its more the application of the template than the design thats making life difficult.

I added the definitions to our common.css so that all paragraphs wrapped between a div with the class="fslhInherit" will inherit the font-size & line-height set by that opening div tag. I added the class to fs90/s and re-did those 3 pages or so linked earlier. Follow? -- George Orwell III (talk) 00:29, 9 December 2012 (UTC)

Absolutely, and thanks. Londonjackbooks can continue as before. — Ineuw talk 00:42, 9 December 2012 (UTC)

Yes, thank you... and I'll continue as before on Monday—once I figure out what it is I can continue doing ;) Londonjackbooks (talk) 00:51, 9 December 2012 (UTC)

It means that you can use either of the two templates as you have (correctly) understood their use previously. {{fs90}} is good for a single paragraph only, and {{fs90/s}} & {{fs90/e}} in the header, the body of the text, or the footer for multiple paragraphs and/or paragraphs spanning over pages. ;) — Ineuw talk 01:20, 9 December 2012 (UTC)

Clear as a bell, thanks. Londonjackbooks (talk) 01:22, 9 December 2012 (UTC)

If you want everything between {{fs90/s}} & {{fs90/e}} to render as paragraphs, the start and end templates must exist before and after the block of text on their own lines (not up against the begining and end of the first or last sentences/lines). If you don't want the last line of a paragraph split over 2 pages to become a new paragraph, insert an extra blank line in the footer before the dummy end tag (quirk in Page: namespace only). -- George Orwell III (talk) 01:38, 9 December 2012 (UTC)

I placed a reference question on the Talk page for this work if anyone is willing to tackle it. Thanks, Londonjackbooks (talk) 14:29, 10 December 2012 (UTC)

Requested namespace alias WS:

Latest comment: 11 years ago6 comments3 people in discussion

I recently noticed that we had not had set up our aliases to namespace appropriately in that we could have set WS: to be equal to Wikisource:.WS cf WP In order to overcome that shortcoming, I have created bugzilla:42853 which will allows the shortcut of the namespace. — billinghurst sDrewth 07:24, 9 December 2012 (UTC)

Looks like this has happened and has broken somelinks. E.g. the WS:PotM link at the top of Recent Changes is now red. Beeswaxcandle (talk) 22:45, 12 December 2012 (UTC)

P.S. just found that WS:AN is also broken. Beeswaxcandle (talk) 22:47, 12 December 2012 (UTC)

Don't recreate them, we're going to ask a script to recover that. --Dereckson (talk) 23:23, 12 December 2012 (UTC)

Partially done. Please read https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=42853#c7 --Dereckson (talk) 23:48, 12 December 2012 (UTC)

Those on the bugzilla list are all functioning redirects. I have closed the bugzilla as complete. Thanks Dereckson for your work. — billinghurst sDrewth 13:52, 13 December 2012 (UTC)

Looking for a new category.

Latest comment: 11 years ago3 comments2 people in discussion

In PSM, there are numerous articles relating the African American experience after the Civil War. The articles encompass education, commercial participation, racial attitudes, social and economic conditions, etc., and I want to place them in one single category. I considered Category:Race relations in the United States Or, can anyone suggest a proper name for the category? Thanks in advance.— Ineuw talk 06:26, 10 December 2012 (UTC)

You're talking about the w:Reconstruction_Era_of_the_United_States in general so that would be a good place to start. See if WP has any categories in that vein first. -- George Orwell III (talk) 09:10, 10 December 2012 (UTC)

Thanks for the direction. The era covered is far more extensive than the Reconstruction. I also looked at other related categories, but they are too general. However, after searching in our categories, I discovered Social history and conditions of the United States which is sufficient and don't need create a category, at least until I tally up the number of articles. — Ineuw talk 09:33, 10 December 2012 (UTC)

Templates that refuse to behave as desired

Latest comment: 11 years ago4 comments3 people in discussion

I've tried various approaches to get the templates used here to format properly.

Page:Railways Act 1921 (ukpga 19210055 en).pdf/70

And so far ALL the approaches I've used inlcuding checking the template logic have failed to produce a fix.

I am therefore requesting deletion of the page, and ALL related templates it uses until someone can present a convincing argument as to what broke. Sfan00 IMG (talk) 20:55, 12 December 2012 (UTC)

Done for the page. If you want all the associated templates deleted you will have to mark each of them for speedy deletion as G7 (Author request). I have replaced the page with a simple proofread version. Beeswaxcandle (talk) 22:15, 12 December 2012 (UTC)

I already did that. Now if someone can explain how to split the {{cl-act}} templates into start and end versions so that they behave CONSISTENTLY... Sfan00 IMG (talk) 22:36, 12 December 2012 (UTC)

Start templates simply (generally) don't have the closing <div> component or sometimes closing part of a table. That is done by adding an end template that has that bit, so things like {{smaller block/e}}, {{div end}} are all the same, just paired by name, and hopefully redirect to the one, though I can bet that they are not. — billinghurst sDrewth 13:42, 13 December 2012 (UTC)

Dual Columnular layout in Ruffhead (and other legislation)

Latest comment: 11 years ago7 comments2 people in discussion

This was my atempt to get a 'dual' column layout based on {{cl-act-s}} : {{Cl-act-s/dual}},

I'd appreciate someone taking this template, combining it with the existing one so that there is one single cl-act-section template to use (see also above) :) Sfan00 IMG (talk) 12:32, 15 December 2012 (UTC)

Noting of course that the above doesn't fully solve the problem of 'columnular section break over paged layouyt'issue,

and I don't think that is easily solved.:( Sfan00 IMG (talk) 12:39, 15 December 2012 (UTC)

Why bother? What is the point of trying to replicate the layout; beyond a slavish stubbornness to accept that this is the internet in 2012 with widescreen and non-standard width monitors, tablets, smartphones and EPUB files. We are not a paper-based book; we are to remain true to the author and the words, we should not be overly fussed about the cost benefit analysis the printer had with their compositors and editors about getting it into a book form that had the right number of pages to be folded and cut and bound. Give it up, you are trying to replicate the artefact of the printing press for not only no benefit, but also the negative value of replicating the work on the web in a format that doesn't suit; the works don't present well, don't flow and fail on variable width screens. Note that pretty well nobody else does that level of replication, and if I see it I will do one of three things: remove it, or <noinclude> any column formatting, or just not validate the work. — billinghurst sDrewth 16:46, 15 December 2012 (UTC)

The dual column layout is because one side is an original and the other a translation. When building the final version. it will be slightly more complex ;) Sfan00 IMG (talk) 21:14, 15 December 2012 (UTC)

Latin pages belong at laWS, English pages here. The WS wikis have mw:Extension:DoubleWiki (Displays a page and its translation from another wiki on two columns of the same page) implemented to do the side by side interwiki display, so it is about matching headings etc. so they align well. It isn't my area of much knowledge, but you may be able to glean enough from a search → [14]. Look to keep it simple, your project has levels of difficulty, however, the components we have addressed. — billinghurst sDrewth 14:58, 16 December 2012 (UTC)

That makes things simpler - It means I only need transcribe the English language parts here:), One issue willbe matching up the sidenotes, which only appear in English. Sfan00 IMG (talk) 16:51, 16 December 2012 (UTC)

On a related note- I will assume you think it's a wasted effort to try and reproduce 'handed' pages. Sfan00 IMG (talk) 21:14, 15 December 2012 (UTC)

FYI Wikisource:Microformat

Latest comment: 11 years ago5 comments3 people in discussion

Not sure whether others had been paying more attention to some of Tpt (talk • contribs)'s hacking work than I had. Anyway, I went to ask some questions about the WSEXPORT process, and an issue that I was having, and he pointed the page oldwikisource:Wikisource:Microformat to me. It looks like something that we are going to need to all have an awareness, and some discussions about how what we are expecting to place locally. We may want to add some of this to Help:Proofread, or look to branch aspects of that page for where we are discussion transclusions. I think that initially we just need to work out what it means to us, and what tasks it presents to catch up. It could be that we 1500 proofread or validated works which may need updating, and then we may need to get some bot tasks running. — billinghurst sDrewth 14:50, 16 December 2012 (UTC)

This microformat is done to be included as much as possible in templates. Inductiveload (talk • contribs) have already added this microformat in some templates like Header. So, I believe before running bots the thing to do is to check if metadata can be added in template. In fr Wikisource we haven't change anything in content pages, edition of templates have made pretty all the work. Tpt (talk) 20:15, 16 December 2012 (UTC)

Shouldn't this data [pageinfo] be stored under &action=info so Wikidata might actually have a chance to incorporate it into a universal database one day? (via MediaWiki:Pageinfo-footer maybe?) The current approach seems kind of redundant anyway - in the aforementioned header template for example, {{{title}}} is initially assigned <span id="header_title_text"> so why bother [re]assigning it <span id="ws-title"> again only to hide it from view? Why not just rename the initial appearance in the template to the equivalent ws-microformat class/id to begin with? -- George Orwell III (talk) 00:27, 17 December 2012 (UTC)

I don't see what to want to talk about with "[pageinfo]". About Heater template, if you want you can do something like <span id="header_title_text" class="ws-title"> and it will work (I have forgotten to update the description page but this works since several months). Tpt (talk) 17:57, 17 December 2012 (UTC)

I know how how to make it "work" just fine - the point was to try and make it "work" for everybody and in the coming months/years on the whole. Sure we can get it store bits and pieces of data now; permanently & completely associating the data with specific person, places and things would have been optimal is all. I guess the development-quilt approach is unavoidable. - George Orwell III (talk) 18:25, 17 December 2012 (UTC)

Inconsistent template behaviour with respect to paragrpah breaks

Latest comment: 11 years ago10 comments2 people in discussion

In my sandbox: - User:Sfan00_IMG/Sandbox

{{smaller-block}} - Correctly recognises paragraph breaks

{{cl-act-section}} - Does not recognise a paragraph break.

At the very least I would expect CONSISTENT behaviour. Sfan00 IMG (talk) 11:03, 17 December 2012 (UTC)

If you go and build complex templates, expect that they will 'quirk'. Play at Special:TemplateSandbox and/or Special:ExpandTemplates. Otherwise look at the actual underlying code and work out what it is doing wrong. — billinghurst sDrewth 13:53, 17 December 2012 (UTC)

I'd already been doing that to try and figure it out. In the case of the former the underlying HTML code is generating

tags for each text paragraph. In the latter no

pairs are generated. This is despite the relevant 'markup' being passed as a template parameter in BOTH instances.Sfan00 IMG (talk) 14:12, 17 December 2012 (UTC)

I've now reverted most use of {{cl-act-section}} Sfan00 IMG (talk) 14:23, 17 December 2012 (UTC)

OK I took up your suggestion to use the expansion function above. In respect of the former a single div is generated which respects the paragraph boundary. In the latter (the innermost DIV generated by {{cl-act-section}} for the text) contains the exact SAME text sequence as the former, and yet doesn't see the paragraph break. Care to explain how the exact same text sequence inside different DIV's will generate different results despite identical text being generated? Sfan00 IMG (talk) 15:44, 17 December 2012 (UTC)

Is that somewhere what should be a line feed is getting stripped? Sfan00 IMG (talk) 15:45, 17 December 2012 (UTC)

And indeed a line-feed was getting stripped.. I'd now appreciate someone testing the current version of {{cl-act-section}} until it breaks, In fixing it some glitches with {{cl-act-s}} have seemingly also been eleiminated :) Sfan00 IMG (talk) 18:04, 17 December 2012 (UTC)

Last lines get stripped in transcluding wikitext, which is why we use {{nop}} to protect them. — billinghurst sDrewth 23:49, 17 December 2012 (UTC)

The current version of {{cl-act-section}} is here, It STILL doesn't work, so I'd now like a FULL exlplanation of how you are supposed to code 'paragraph continuation', because I've tried 3 different approaches, and I STILL can't get it to behave either consistently, or in line with what I was expecting to do. The current problem appears to be that despite it being coded not to insert paragrpah breaks, or line feeds when continuing, it STILL appears to.

~~It's time someone else had a look, because I am reaching the end of my patience to play 'hunt the qurik'.~~

~~I am also very frustrated that something that should have been relatively simple appears to be too difficult for Mediawiki to cope with in a sensible fashion.~~

Sfan00 IMG (talk) 17:02, 18 December 2012 (UTC)

OK Here's what broke - The user Sfan00_IMG 'broke' , One of the rules: NEVER assume you will find your own bugs! Sfan00 IMG (talk) 17:51, 18 December 2012 (UTC)

January's featured text

Latest comment: 11 years ago7 comments5 people in discussion

Wikisource:Featured text candidates could use a little attention on the January's text. We currently have a text lined up for this month, The Art of Nijinsky, but it has been suggested that this be postponed for another. January 2013 is the 150th anniversary of US Proclamation 95, aka the Emancipation Proclamation, so it would make an appropriate featured text for the month. There was a discussion but no actual votes. Which text does the community want featured in January? (NB: Nijinsky will still be featured either, albeit potentially in a later month.) - AdamBMorgan (talk) 12:38, 17 December 2012 (UTC)

Happy with a thematic and relevancy approach to FT. Nijinsky won't die waiting. — billinghurst sDrewth 13:49, 17 December 2012 (UTC)

I'd be OK either way, which is why I did not "vote". It is also possible that many people did not consider voting yet because the topic is under the header "February 2013 suggestion" rather than under "January". --EncycloPetey (talk) 02:23, 18 December 2012 (UTC)

Vote 'Emancipation Proclamation'. The recent release of the movie Lincoln dealing with the efforts to Constitutionally adopt what the proclamation first hoped to achieve makes it the logical choice imho. -- George Orwell III (talk) 08:22, 18 December 2012 (UTC)

Update

President Obama issued a Proclamation celebrating the 150th Anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation on December 31st; it should be formally published in the Federal Register on or around January 7th. Do we want to somehow incorporate this into this months Featured Text? -- George Orwell III (talk) 19:30, 3 January 2013 (UTC)

No reason (that I know of) why a "see also" note can't fit somewhere in the Featured Text section of the Main page(?). Londonjackbooks (talk) 01:24, 4 January 2013 (UTC)

150th Anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation Londonjackbooks (talk) 13:19, 8 January 2013 (UTC)

Thanks

Latest comment: 11 years ago6 comments4 people in discussion

I'm not sure what the best place for this is, but I just wanted to say hello to the WikiSource community. I've been diving in proofreading and validating the last month or two and trying my best to learn all the ins and out, all the while staying kind of quiet. During this time I've felt really welcome by some good and sincere advice from people in the community based on my edits, and I have been getting immense satisfaction from being a contributor to this project. So thank you being a great community. Marjoleinkl (talk) 13:17, 19 December 2012 (UTC)

This is the right place. JeepdaySock (AKA, Jeepday) 15:39, 19 December 2012 (UTC)

Sweet! Do pop past both Wikisource:Proofread of the Month (and especially talk page) and Wikisource:Featured text candidates, two places that can always do with fresh faces and opinions. And as Jeepday said, this is the place to ask questions and to express opinions. We value opinions, even when on occasions they might hit a tender spot or go against what we are (group-)thinking. Test and challenge always has its place. — billinghurst sDrewth 16:21, 19 December 2012 (UTC)

Thanks for the pointers, I've already been contributing to the Wikisource:Proofread of the Month, but haven't been participating in talk much (yet).Marjoleinkl (talk) 18:36, 19 December 2012 (UTC)

Support I agree a thanks to all is appropriate, we all work together to make the community as great as it is. Soo… Thank you community, this is a great place and everyone of you makes this a pleasant place to be. JeepdaySock (AKA, Jeepday) 15:39, 19 December 2012 (UTC)

Support Wikisource does become family and all the more so over time. As Jeepday says above, "we all work together" but we also have our own special projects that each of us likes to do. Do not feel constrained to any particular book you may not like because there are thousands or I suppose millions of books that can be your own special project choice. Right Jeepday? Right John Boy, and Mary Anne? —Maury (talk) 17:26, 19 December 2012 (UTC)

Quicker access to Commons images

Latest comment: 11 years ago6 comments3 people in discussion

Wikipedia image pages contain a Commons icon on the upper right side. When clicked, it takes the user to the Commons image page instead of having to scroll down and find the text link. Can this be added to our images here on WS? — Ineuw talk 05:47, 20 December 2012 (UTC)

Hmm, I copied w:MediaWiki:Sharedupload-desc-here over, but that didn't do it; I'm not sure where it is coming from (which is weird, because I remember making that edit, and saying so on the talk page, but it doesn't show up in my contribs or in the page history). EVula // talk // ☯ // 06:23, 20 December 2012 (UTC)

That is the standard link. There is a new one TAKE A LOOK at the small logo on the right hand side of the page name.— Ineuw talk 06:58, 20 December 2012 (UTC)

It's not the most elegant solution but (from a functional point of view) it's done. Is this OK? - AdamBMorgan (talk) 13:15, 20 December 2012 (UTC)

Awesome, thanks Adam. EVula // talk // ☯ // 17:01, 20 December 2012 (UTC)

Adam, we who are about to be snowed in, salute you. It's great. Many thanks. — Ineuw talk 23:40, 20 December 2012 (UTC)

'Exotic Novels'

Latest comment: 11 years ago9 comments4 people in discussion

In scope:

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Cruel_Mrs._Tyrant%27s_Bondage_School

? Sfan00 IMG (talk) 01:54, 21 December 2012 (UTC)

It was published in 1962, so it's still copyright protected.— Ineuw talk 04:37, 21 December 2012 (UTC)

Rather it was registered in 1962 (A566123, 23 May 1962) and I can't find a renewal for it ~1990 so it might be Public Domain after all. -- George Orwell III (talk) 09:26, 21 December 2012 (UTC)

After posting my above comment, I wondered how it could be on the Commons. So they must have an OTRS ticket? (I am just learning the "ropes".) — Ineuw talk 10:04, 21 December 2012 (UTC)

Were 1962 Works automatically renewed if in first term? Sfan00 IMG (talk) 12:02, 21 December 2012 (UTC)

http://archive.org/details/copyrightrecords - Which volume should I be looking for? Sfan00 IMG (talk) 11:43, 21 December 2012 (UTC)

It won't be in there. For 1950 onwards, you need to check the online Copyright Office Catalog. A 1962 copyright could be renewed in 1989 or 1990 (and, to be clear, 1964 is when renewal became automatic). - AdamBMorgan (talk) 13:57, 21 December 2012 (UTC)

Well I can't FIND the item by title or publisher, or the artist. Sfan00 IMG (talk) 19:16, 21 December 2012 (UTC)

The images' copyright is {{US-Not renewed}}. I would think that the Commons' copyright check process is sufficient for Wikisource as well.— Ineuw talk 20:18, 21 December 2012 (UTC)

Newsletter relaunch

Latest comment: 11 years ago3 comments2 people in discussion

The Wikisource newsletter will be relaunched in January 2013. Its frequency, technical structure, content and format are discussed here. If you'd like to write for the newsletter, add your signature below. A link to the newsletter will be added to the {{Main Page header}} if no one disagrees.--Erasmo Barresi (talk) 16:40, 21 December 2012 (UTC)

Erasmo Barresi (talk) – I'd like to write about featured texts, community collaborations, monthly proofreads, "milestones" and notable statistical data.

Will this get "delivered" like the Signpost does over on enwiki? EVula // talk // ☯ // 18:43, 23 December 2012 (UTC)

I guess that copying it several times on wiki pages is unhelpful. But I may send a monthly PDF copy to the members of the Wikisource mailing list.--Erasmo Barresi (talk) 08:59, 24 December 2012 (UTC)

Structure of Dictionary_of_Greek_and_Roman_Biography_and_Mythology

Latest comment: 11 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion

Hi. As new pages concerning this text are being generated, I raised my concerns on the way entries are identified to deserve a dedicated page in main ns.

The discussion is posted here: Talk:Dictionary_of_Greek_and_Roman_Biography_and_Mythology#entries_and_sub-entries, but as it will probably go unnoticed there, I am raising the issue also here to make you aware of my concerns. Comments are welcome on the talk page.--Mpaa (talk) 23:41, 22 December 2012 (UTC)

Land Tenure in Palestine

Latest comment: 11 years ago20 comments6 people in discussion

Hi,

I would like to upload a paper from The Quarterly statement of the Palestine Exploration Fund, from 1894, pages 191-199, titled "Land Tenure in Palestine". The page says there is no copyright. Where should I put the text? --Erel Segal (talk) 05:01, 24 December 2012 (UTC)

The process is to upload the file in .djvu format to the Commons. Then, we link to the document with a page of the same name in the wikisource Index: namespace. If you need help at any stage of the process, please contact me. — Ineuw talk 16:29, 24 December 2012 (UTC)

The djvu file is 726 pages (2 issues), and I only want 8 pages (only a single article from one of the issues), so I think I prefer to just type them in. I just don't know what should be the name of the pge - should I just call it Land Tenure in Palestine, or maybe a more structured name? What is the convention here? --Erel Segal (talk) 17:22, 24 December 2012 (UTC)

If you only enter 8 pages of a 762 page document it is likely to get deleted as an excerpt. But if you load the 726 pages as a djvu and only proofread the 8 pages you care about. The likelihood is that someone (maybe you?) will take a stab at the rest. To my knowledge no partially completed work has been deleted, when the whole intact djvu file is available. Jeepday (talk) 22:17, 24 December 2012 (UTC)

Thanks Jeepday, I waited for someone like you, for I not having prior knowledge to give a valid reply. As for Erel Segal, my offer still stands if you have limited monthly data usage. — Ineuw talk 00:24, 25 December 2012 (UTC)

Worth noting - the details page at Internet Archive says the work is made up of Volumes 25 & 26 merged together and is 726 pages long but when I go to read the work online I get only ~309 pages with a good number of blank pages peppered throughout. It might be better to re-derive the original PDFs after its been split into each separate volume to make sure we aren't uploading more junk to en.WS. -- George Orwell III (talk) 00:50, 25 December 2012 (UTC)

What do you mean by "re-derive"? And how can I do this?--Erel Segal (talk) 05:56, 25 December 2012 (UTC)

As a disciple of George Orwell III (GO3) who works under his able supervision, premit me to explain. We download the current .pdf version, check and eliminate the empty pages, reassemble a new .pdf version, upload it to Internet Archive as a new book where they create (derive) multiple types of documents like .djvu, .txt, .JP2, etc., etc. We then transfer a new clean .djvu derivation to the commons. On how to disassemble and/or assemble a .pdf, you can look at my conversations on GO3's talk page, and practice a lot. Life is simple. :-) — Ineuw talk 10:29, 25 December 2012 (UTC)

I looked at the djvu, and there are not many blank pages - only 4 at the beginning, 4 at the end, and about 8 in the middle, out of more than 700 pages. Does it really worth the trouble, and the extra-diskspace in webarchive? Feels like buying a cow to get a cup of milk... --Erel Segal (talk) 17:26, 27 December 2012 (UTC)

Wikisource does not host the cup of milk, we host the whole cow. Everything above is about setting up a pasture for the cow to live in (at Commons), so you can come (to Wikisource) and get the cup of milk whenever you want, after the milking machine (index) is set up. We assume that others will be interested in getting a different cup of milk from the same cow, so all the set up is the expectation. JeepdaySock (AKA, Jeepday) 16:17, 28 December 2012 (UTC)

NOTE: I finally finished cleaning out the problematic source file category today so I can get around to fixing up this .DjVu in the coming week. -- George Orwell III (talk) 03:27, 29 December 2012 (UTC)

Done - Index:Palestine Exploration Fund - Quarterly Statement for 1894.djvu -- George Orwell III (talk) 04:58, 29 December 2012 (UTC)

Wow, thank you! I hope I will learn to do this myself someday. I started proofreading from here: Page:Palestine_Exploration_Fund_-_Quarterly_Statement_for_1894.djvu/231 Did I do this correctly? (this is all new to me). --Erel Segal (talk) 06:49, 30 December 2012 (UTC)

There is something wrong with this book and we should stop working on it until the issues are resolved. Essentially, the book may be triplicated and it's originates from three sources. For example, Page:Palestine Exploration Fund - Quarterly Statement for 1894.djvu/112 and Page:Palestine Exploration Fund - Quarterly Statement for 1894.djvu/145 are the same, and it appears one more time further on. I know this because I downloaded the .JP2 file and noticed this immediately. — Ineuw talk 05:25, 31 December 2012 (UTC)

It appears to me the journal simply reused the image. Fortunately there is a note on one image that it faces page 89, and that the other faces page 120. --Eliyak T·C 05:44, 31 December 2012 (UTC)

In the .JP2 derivation I noticed that it doesn't match the .djvu here on WS. The .JP2 file is a combination of the Palestine Exploration Fund - Quarterly Statement for 1893 AND 1894!. I split the file but I cannot yet discern a distinctly separate order for each. The images are duplicated, with the previously mentioned image appearing thrice. My image preparation work is only affected by the incorrect numbers of the images which follow the .djvu numbers, and correcting them is not a big deal as I had to do this hundreds of times in PSM. My concern is what happens to the proofread pages if they are also out of order? — Ineuw talk 14:40, 1 January 2013 (UTC)

Yes, the original DJVU contained two years (1893-4) and over 700 pages, but George Orwell III magically split it and created a DJVU of 1894 only, with only about 350 pages. --85.130.218.41 18:31, 1 January 2013 (UTC)

Thanks 218.41 (if I may may use this familiar term, as opposed to the formal 85.130.218.41), :-) I will continue to upload the images to the commons, as they are numbered on the .djvu page and deal with any discrepancies as they come up.— Ineuw talk 18:51, 1 January 2013 (UTC)

So, can I continue to proof-read pages? --Erel Segal (talk) 22:15, 2 January 2013 (UTC)

Yes Erel, I am also working on the image pages now. — Ineuw talk 22:25, 2 January 2013 (UTC)

Category:Users looking for help

Latest comment: 11 years ago6 comments5 people in discussion

There are four welcome templates directing users to use {{helpme}} if they need help. This adds them to Category:Users looking for help, when I just looked there where two user listed; User talk:Uyun question posted 13:39, 4 July 2012 (UTC) and User talk:Sergius g question posted 14 January 2012.

Any one have a good reason not to recommend {{helpme}} be deleted and the messages updated to point to Wikisource:Scriptorium/Help? Obviously I don’t check very often, does anyone? JeepdaySock (AKA, Jeepday) 15:35, 24 December 2012 (UTC)

I check it every now and then. One of the questions was in a foreign language, so I did not follow up. The other was answered by Billinghurst as Sergius g posted a message there, see User_talk:Billinghurst/Archives/2012#Custom CSS for a project. I did not bother to clean up his page if he did not bother himself :-)
But I do agree that it is better to point at Wikisource:Scriptorium/Help, as it is under the radar of many more.--Mpaa (talk) 16:04, 24 December 2012 (UTC)

What about replacing/adding the 'Protected edit requests' category with this one in the Utilities section of the Recent Changes page's dashboard? It could be set up to reflect any new additions to the category just like when there are new Speedy deletion requests. -- George Orwell III (talk) 01:00, 25 December 2012 (UTC)

We can do both/all. Add it to the list on RC, and point them to the place for help. — billinghurst sDrewth 14:36, 25 December 2012 (UTC)

added to RC intro text Special:PermanentLink/4201532 — billinghurst sDrewth 14:40, 25 December 2012 (UTC)

Index:Napoleon's Addresses.djvu

Latest comment: 11 years ago4 comments2 people in discussion

Hi. I am proofreading Index:Napoleon's Addresses.djvu and need some (many ….) advice:

1. Many of the pages are already existing as stand alone (even if pointing at the text I am proofreading), see Napoleon Bonaparte. What is the best option? Move them to be part of the text structure and redirect them?

2. Structure in Main ns. (this is related to the above). Shall each Address be a separate page and redirect the above pages singularly? The structure would be 3-levels and look like the TOC:

Cover + TOC
Introduction vii
Biographical Sketch xxiii
Part I. The Campaign in Italy 27
Address to the Army at the Beginning of the Campaign, March, 1796.
Proclamation to the Army, May, 1796.
…

Or make a 2-level structure and redirect the pages at point 1 to anchors, e.g. in Napoleon's Addresses/Part I page?

3. What would be the author and year of the work? Note: if the year of the edition (1897) is indicated in header and a separate page is selected for point 1 there will be a mismatch (look at Letter to the Pope, written in 1804, to see how a separate page for each address would look).

I understand it is a messy picture but to me it is like a big knot to be untied. Finally, if someone is a Napoleon expert, some advice on how to structure the Napoleon page to fit such addresses, is appreciated.--Mpaa (talk) 18:25, 28 December 2012 (UTC)

RE 1. Unless there is substantial evidence that the source of existing works is the index you are discussing, I would not move them into the text structure.

If existing works without clear sources overlap, verifiable content in the index you are working on then once the Index version is complete, delete old existing per G4. Redirect or relink as appropriate.
If existing works have verifiable sources other then your index, create versions with appropriate disambiguation pages.
JeepdaySock (AKA, Jeepday) 20:06, 28 December 2012 (UTC)

The note in the pages cites the source: As published in Joseph Knight’s 1896 Napoleon’s Addresses: Selections from the Proclamations, Speeches and Correspondence of Napoleon Bonaparte, edited by Ida M. Tarbell. From the few pages I check, the text is the same, so I would say the source is the index I am working on, onlt difference being 1986 vs 1897 edition.--Mpaa (talk) 20:34, 28 December 2012 (UTC)

I have completed Napoleon's Addresses proofreading. I move this discussion to proposed deletions.--Mpaa (talk) 00:23, 30 December 2012 (UTC)

promotion of en.wikiSource via youtube.com

Latest comment: 11 years ago6 comments2 people in discussion

This is the way to get en.Wikisource promoted -- the same way Wikipedia has already done this video but we would not have to ask for money. I had thought of various ways of doing this and placing it on Youtube.com but never followed through with it on my own. Still, there are ways to do this by one self including creating video clips since we are not all together physically. A few of us have tried doing this on Facebook, Tumblr, on our front page, &c., &c. but youtube is far better and always has been. It takes a bit of creativity but hey, my 9 year old grand daughter places videos on youtube of her and friends dancing to music and using special effects. —Maury (talk) 03:34, 29 December 2012 (UTC)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=3Knv6D6Thi0#!

I am adding this 2nd video link because it points to one of Wikisource's greatest strengths. This is, "Verifiability and Neutral point of view" from using, and in our case "showing", our sources -- books. —Maury (talk) 03:58, 29 December 2012 (UTC)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fa0Nmv9qsd8

The old "whatever"-apathy...shrug....... —Maury (talk) 07:45, 29 December 2012 (UTC)

Hey, you can't say we're apathetic after just four hours! I was sleeping at that time.

I can do video editing, but I'd not able to write very a engaging script.

Since Wikisource isn't as known as Wikipedia, the interviews should include explanations on how Wikisource works. In an Italian-language video about Wikisource (here's the script) there are five main sections: introduction, inclusion policy, how to proofread a work, site navigation (links, categories, portals, author pages), and community.

Maury, I hope you wasn't thinking to something completely different! Was you?--Erasmo Barresi (talk) 11:07, 29 December 2012 (UTC)

Erasmo, Alas! why were you sleeping when I posted? You have a wonderful imagination and that is something that is always needed. As Einstein himself stated, "Imagination is more important than knowledge" (I wonder if he was right..) As for the Italian language my Chaplain is 1/2 Italian 1/2 German and speaks the lingo. But the USA is a super power and many people of other nations learn "English" because of it. So, I think in terms of using English. However, we could do video clips in many languages! WikiPedia has more than those two videos. There are more (I think - it has been a while since I looked). Right, Wikisource would have to be explained. We could do what needs to be done in a series of videos. There are many ways to do things. Anyone here has the freedom to look into their video cam mounted on their computer and talk -- or take it outside with a laptop if a background is desired or several people are willing to work together and the video cam will record any movements just as a video camera. Personally I was thinking of the former because I believe that I can rely only on myself. Not everyone will be interested regardless of who does what and not everyone would be interested in a script for several people.... although as I think of that, it could be done as multiple statements from several of us, each at his/her home computer. We wouldn't have to use our real names but I would just as I do here.

I did not have anything specific in mind. I posted here to start a brainstorm if possible and with the hope that we all could contribute in some manner. I know I can do it alone but I do not think I know all that would be needed to tell and in what sequence. Still, I can get something done. WikiPedia did exceedingly well but then they always have people who are willing to "go the extra mile". I doubt that Wikisource has that when it comes to this idea of placing one or more videos on YouTube.com For one thing too many people use aliases here. Some day when aliases are old people and want to tell their grand children about what they did for humanity their real names will not be known -- not even to each other -- they will always be anonymous in history itself as well as to descendants. Ever want a photo of your ggg-grandparents, or read his/her thoughts, likes, including books, et cetera? It is a lot involved and a lot more that can evolve. Still, the point behind all of this is to promote WikiSource and that _can be done_. BTW, I can "say apathetic after just four hours" because I specifically posted a personal statement on three top excellent editor's talk page and got no statement here or there in reply, no ideas, no comments, and probably little or no _thoughts_ on the idea except for you, Erasmo. I thank you. —Maury (talk) 14:47, 2 January 2013 (UTC) "Ideas?" -- With them WikiPedia excels & WikiSource repels. Some care others don't.

Well, my wording is no longer staid (see Maury's talk page) because now I'm focused just to an explanatory video instead of a "meet some volunteers" one. Agreed for the series.

But not for the languages. Translating just the captions is easier and (almost) as good as re-making the video with another announcer.

See you tomorrow—not before 07:00 UTC.--Erasmo Barresi (talk) 15:32, 2 January 2013 (UTC)

Running header

Latest comment: 11 years ago3 comments3 people in discussion

Regarding this edit: Is it actually necessary to include Running Header, Title, and page number into the page, in order to mark it as being proofread? At Help:Formatting conventions it is stated: A scanned page's header and footer often include page number and titles, each of which are not needed for the new page. Thanks. --D.H (talk) 10:54, 29 December 2012 (UTC)

There is no requirement to have header and footers in place for a page to marked as proofread. It is the transcludable body that is the reference point. Naturally, it is preferred. To note that one can add the template into the header field on the Index: page for the work and it will be added when the page is first created. — billinghurst sDrewth 11:38, 29 December 2012 (UTC)

Fwiw... The lack of header/page no. info severly hampers any maintenance that might arise during the proof reading process; the re-alignment of content to thumbnail images in particular. -- George Orwell III (talk) 19:42, 29 December 2012 (UTC)

Proposal to upload page scans for {{missing image}}

Latest comment: 11 years ago12 comments5 people in discussion

Folks,

Back in September I proposed a bulk upload of raw page scans for pages in Category:Texts with missing images. That discussion is now archived at Wikisource:Scriptorium/Archives/2012-11#Proposal to upload page scans for {{missing image}}. There was, I think, enough support for me to go ahead with it, but there were also some comments the led me to think I needed to put a little more preparation in. I am now ready to resubmit this to the community.

Rather than reiterate the archived discussion, can I simply invite you to have a look at Page:The Elements of Euclid for the Use of Schools and Colleges - 1872.djvu/38 and/or Page:A song of the English (1909).djvu/167 with fresh eyes. Note that the {{missing image}} template has automagically recognised that a full-res raw page scan exists, and has directed the reader to it. If you follow the links to the file pages, you'll find rough guidance on how to process these raw images. This guidance is captured in the {{raw page scan}} template, so you can go ahead and improve it.

I have 3830 images ready for upload. I think I'm ready to go now. It is just waiting for the Wikisource community to decide whether this is a good idea or not. If approved, I will use HesperianBot to upload the images.

Hesperian 12:34, 29 December 2012 (UTC)

Support: Just to repeat publicly my position expressed elsewhere. MODCHK (talk) 12:50, 29 December 2012 (UTC)

Support: As mentioned in the archived discussion, to fully exploit the benefit of this, there should be also an automated process in place to upload the image to Commons once the work is done here at WS (i.e. crop/clean-up done, re-upload on top of original file done, replace {{missing image}} with the image done). This second step in my opinion would definitely remove those barriers for users to deal with images. Though I cannot see right now what would be missing to implement also this second step.--Mpaa (talk) 14:31, 29 December 2012 (UTC)

Alas! Uploading over the top would be ideal, but these raw images will be in PNG format (the more appropriate format for images needing to be edited) but for photographs the final edit really should be uploaded as JPG. I don't think it is possible to upload over the top if the format is changing. Hesperian 01:35, 30 December 2012 (UTC)

If that is the case, why are you killing yourself with the stupid large JP2 zip file at archive.org? The equivalent of our thumbnails (~400px wide) can be found in flippy.zip (though older files admittedly didn't generate this zip automatically when first derived). I was under the impression that this proposal was more of a stop-gap solution to missing images rather than the first step in a series that may or may not ever reach fruition. Mpaa is right - its one thing to expect users to take a jpg (or jp2) "dump" here on en.Ws and properly move/categorize it to Commons' standards and a whole other ball of wax to expect users to make further edits to that image file or it's format in addition to the same move/cat. step needed for Commons hosting. -- George Orwell III (talk) 02:14, 30 December 2012 (UTC)

Can it be both? The original point of the proposal was to put the best possible raw material at readers' fingertips, to encourage them to provide these images. But we can make it work as a stop-gap too, by displaying the raw image more prominently in the text, and by promoting the option of uploading incremental improvements over the top. Have another look at the examples above and their corresponding file pages, and let know what you think. Hesperian 04:08, 30 December 2012 (UTC)

That is a loaded question. In-line figures, line-drawings & sketches aside, we've always had the option of pulling full-page images in the Page: namespace as well as transclude them to the main namespace articles but apparently we decided not to do that with the hope that a higher quality, stand-alone image would eventually be uploaded to Commons in short order instead. That "hope" was largely misplaced as evidenced by the large number of long outstanding "missing" [full-page] images to date.

If we eliminated those instances where a full-page image could be pulled (See The_Moonstone/First_Period/Chapter_III#28 transcluded from Page:The_Moonstone.djvu/28 after subst: Template:Use page image/sandbox for a rough example), we could focus on the "real" missing image problem - those in-line figures, line-drawings & sketches. Granted the quality is not the best but low quality never should have equated to missing [full-page] images in the first place (imho). I say satisfy the stop gap measure to some degree this way first and continue "seeding" the workable stand-alone image files at your leisure. My gut tells me that the sub-par, pulled images will do more to entice a caring contributor to replace them with high quality, Commons hosted stand alone image files than some annoying "Hi, I'm missing." message template by itself ever could. -- George Orwell III (talk) 10:37, 30 December 2012 (UTC)

I think you are both right. Hesperian's proposal is good: images promptly available, on a silver platter, for those who are not familiar with/do not want to dig/download Archive large zip files and whatever is needed to obtain the image (file conversion, etc. etc.). So it removes the first barrier. The second step to the final result has to be manually done: clean/crop the image, reupload it (somewhere …) and link it instead of {{missing image}}. What I was aiming at as third step is something which can avoid the user all the hassle of uploading to Commons, filling fields, etc. etc., which I think is another barrier for users not familiar with the process. What I thought is:

Take Hesperian image
process it (clean/crop, etc.)
reupload on WS (where people are familiar). It would be good if it could be done in place, I think we might solve the extension issue somehow.
replace template with image link in the page
declare the whole process completed -> what is the best way?
then an automatic process can detect completed images and take care of of the hassle of moving to Commons, deleting local images etc. etc.

This would leave the user only the manual local processing of the image and nothing else. Which hopefully would encourage more users to take care of images. What to present in the interim on the page is also relevant and GOIII has a point there, though not dependent on the above.--Mpaa (talk) 11:27, 30 December 2012 (UTC)

I think I see your point, George. Yes, for full page images, we could be throwing up the best scan we have (the PNG raw page scan if we have it, else the DjVu page) along with an unobtrusive (but not completely invisible) invitation to improve it. For inline images, we need to go much harder: not "here's an adequate image you could make much better"; rather, "we have no image, but here's a page scan you can crop it out of." Sure, we can start all these raw page scan images uploading in the background, but it's a higher priority to separate full page images from inline images so that we can stop-gap the former and turn the spotlight on the latter. Have I heard you aright this time? Hesperian 13:27, 30 December 2012 (UTC)

Right, the only time the viewer should see something like An image should appear at this position in the text in the main & Page: namespaces are in those instances where in-line figures, line-drawings & simple sketches are being floated amongst a body of surrounding text (or in the odd cases where a full-page image needs to be rotated). For full page images, we should be pulling the image as I exampled earlier; the added caveat being when one of your .PNGs is detected. You can then drop your recent template changes that tried to do everything in every possible instance at once for the more simple notification variant. Even better - that notification can reside in the header/footer fields so it doesn't transclude to the main (Either the quality is so low from a pulled image that a proactive editor visits the embedded link back to the Page: namespace where they'll see the notification to work the source for a stand-alone anyway or they'll get your superior .PNG if it exists). The point all along should have been to separate pulled full-page quality from the "really" missing inlines when it came to status Problematic.

The show-nothing, do-nothing, missing-image universal template approach IS A COMPLETE AND TOTAL FAILURE any way you measure it's effectiveness over time - it has done little in the way of actually resolving the issue - even at face value. In fact, all it does now is compound the problem(s). -- George Orwell III (talk) 14:17, 30 December 2012 (UTC)

Support: As before. The idea that anything or anybody else was ever going to properly address this issue was unrealistic to put it mildly. -- George Orwell III (talk) 19:52, 29 December 2012 (UTC)

Support as per GO3. Perfection is an unattainable goal, let's go with the practical and approach perfection later. As my contribution towards the unattainable, it seems it should be possible to use {{#ifexist:}} to determine if the jpg has been uploaded and automagically switch to it. Important Note: {{#ifexist:}} will not work on images being pulled from commons. --Eliyak T·C 05:26, 31 December 2012 (UTC)

Request to terminate account

Latest comment: 11 years ago4 comments4 people in discussion

To whomever has the authority I request a complete (as possible) termination of this account. I thank you beforehand. Brother Officer (talk) 20:24, 29 December 2012 (UTC)

There is no such thing as termination of an account. If you don't want to edit anymore, just stop. We can delete your user page if you like. An gr 20:46, 29 December 2012 (UTC)

or redirect it. — billinghurst sDrewth 23:50, 30 December 2012 (UTC)

Google books -> archive.org request

Latest comment: 11 years ago14 comments4 people in discussion

When someone has a moment (totally non-urgent), I am reliably told that Picture Posters is available in full view, so could someone please upload it to archive.org so we can have a derived copy. I am not sure what is in the book, however, it seems interestingly quirky. The author page is at Author:Charles Hiatt if you need detail. — billinghurst sDrewth 23:49, 30 December 2012 (UTC)

Its a book on posters from around the world and how they are used. Look back here for an update when its done. I'll have it derived as usual on IA but considering the amount of images that the book has, I'd prefer the upload of the text-layer rich PDF (not the same as the GoogleBooks PDF) to Commons over the .DjVu when its done. Of course the .DjVu will be there as well just in case the PDF is not acceptable for some reason. -- George Orwell III (talk) 00:53, 31 December 2012 (UTC)

I would have loved to do the transfer to IA, but for some reason I can't download from Google in Canada, even though I have an account (and tried). The options of access are not the same. Sorry billinghurst and GO3, :-( — Ineuw talk 02:12, 31 December 2012 (UTC)

Thanks to GO3, [I uploaded the document to IA. It's currently being derived and I will monitor its progress. When complete, I will upload it to the commons and install it here. — Ineuw talk 15:12, 31 December 2012 (UTC)

The Index is created here and the Commons category is Picture Posters (book) where I will store the images over the next few weeks. (my contribution). Enjoy — Ineuw talk 18:28, 31 December 2012 (UTC)

Wow, thanks, that has taken a life of its own, I was interested in having a look, not saying that it was my next work. I am told that the scan is black and white and it is thought that the images were originally in colour. If I check HathiTrust, the work is there, but I cannot tell more whether the scan is available, and if it is, whether they are in colour or not. — billinghurst sDrewth 07:59, 1 January 2013 (UTC)

For the umpteenth time - THEY ARE ALL IN COLOR!! (For works created in the "color" era and imaged using a color instrument that is. You'd have to go back to 2002 to find "color" works still being "digitized" in black & white - Microfiche is another story). Google hacks into the normal compilation of individual scans that will eventually make up one of their pdfs to force the most universal of settings they can get away with when it comes to their "free" online repository of works - its "good business" to dumb things down and automate as much as possible. IA has routines that undoes some of that forced dumbing down on the fly while files are being processed, but more often than not, a Google provided work will remain gray-scale at the end of the day there too. HathiTrust on the other hand gets the least manipulated of the Google digitized library to play with (i.e. they host things that somebody might actually get from Google if they paid for unlocking a limited-preview / no-preview PDF file). HathiTrust improves/replaces FUBAR'd Google library items in return for that specialized (& limited access). Hein Online, West Law, Lexis Nexus & Google Books - they are all in the same extortion racket the way I see it.

So you can always get the colorized version of most digital books if you manage to find the access to some 3rd party's repository that lets you in (and lets you leave with it) for free. Any student at the University of Michigan with access to the UoM library can easily pull this book up as it was first digitized because that is where this particular [scan of the] book was partnered from by Google in the first place. -- George Orwell III (talk) 11:30, 1 January 2013 (UTC)

Thanks. When one cannot see pretty well anything at HT, and often about the same for many Google Books, it just becomes one of those things in which one knows nothing. Would be worthwhile some of that information being added to Wikisource:Sources which is also missing information about HathiTrust. — billinghurst sDrewth 20:14, 1 January 2013 (UTC)

I checked the three copies I could find on Haithi Trust (from NYPL, Michigan, Minnesota) and the included images are grayscale. Two copies do have color front and back covers. MarkLSteadman (talk) 21:06, 1 January 2013 (UTC)

Give Ineuw some time to work on this. I'm sure he'll eventually find the right combination to "unlock" some of it. And remember, the whole point is to not to make a mountain out of a molehill when it comes to bulk digitalization for Google. You won't find them processing 300 pages of primarily black and white text for just 50 or so pages of images in color scattered throughout - I guess that is not cost effective or something. The Picture Posters book is an exception where the amount of images vs. the amount of text is high enough to warrant "processing" in color but unfortunately there is no person sitting in front of a screen montoring stuff like that. Its just a BOT setup to blindly run one batch of scans after another primarily tasked with the goal of make them into PDFs & little else. Its the same reason we get downloads with missing pages or the drop-out of even some of the grayscaled images. -- George Orwell III (talk) 00:32, 2 January 2013 (UTC)

Sadly, Google destroyed the color in the copy we are working on. All images are reduced to 256 colour channels in the .PDF file and any derivation like the .JP2 is also 256 colours, which means grayscale. Even the few images which retained a green/bluish hue are 256 colours. My current view is that we use what we have as best we can since the images can be replaced if and when we find the coloured versions.— Ineuw talk 16:01, 5 January 2013 (UTC)

The plot thickens

Many of the posters are already on the commons and in colour like this example. I created a redirect as File:PP D071 exposicion internacional madrid 1893 by grasset.jpg, and placed the categories in the redirect. It appears in the gallery as well as on this page. Furthermore, a Google web search found additional colour versions.

I propose the following four solutions which would cover all scenarios:

Search the commons and create redirects to identical color images, so that the image also appears in the book's category page.
Search the web for the posters, copy and upload the image to the commons.
I found posters which the images are identical, but display additional advertising info which is cropped from the book facsimile. These I would download, crop and re-upload to the gallery.
Use the grayscale where we have to, until a colour version shows up on the web. — Ineuw talk 00:05, 6 January 2013 (UTC)

FYI, in your /D0071 example, the scan page image is not exactly the same as the external color image. Personally, I don't believe it qualifies as a substitute because it is not exactly the same and I'm pretty sure that is the community's consensus as well. - George Orwell III (talk) 03:04, 6 January 2013 (UTC)

Thanks GO3. First, I am sorry for the belated reply. I just don't get an email notification of replies to my posts. You are absolutely right and will reset the page to the grayscale version. I missed this one. I noticed this with a couple of other colored versions which had minute variations as well and didn't upload them. I also gave up searching for colored replacement posters as a focused activity because finding and processing a colored image takes about 15 minutes and there are 150 posters. However, I know where to look for them and will do so occasionally. — Ineuw talk 03:00, 7 January 2013 (UTC)

The New Year

Latest comment: 11 years ago3 comments3 people in discussion

Wishing a very happy and successful New Year to everyone, especially my best wishes and a speedy recovery to Beeswaxcandle.— Ineuw talk 14:17, 31 December 2012 (UTC)

Hear hear. Hesperian 05:16, 1 January 2013 (UTC)

I wish he were here! Beeswaxcandle is very nice and very helpful. I have never seen him get angry, or annoyed, nor use profanities. He keeps Wikisource clean in many ways which is also good for public relations. I pray for him and I admire him. I get the strangest feeling he will never be able to come back. Perhaps it is just "feeling the blues" —Maury (talk) 07:15, 1 January 2013 (UTC)

Introducing colour

Latest comment: 11 years ago7 comments6 people in discussion

I just came across this: Page:François-Millet.djvu/117. I am wondering whether the community regards it as okay. Hesperian 05:16, 1 January 2013 (UTC)

So my choices are a publication made of print, reproducing a photographic picture taken of an oil painting vs. a direct photographic picture taken of the same oil painting?

Seems like a 'symptom of publication' issue to me - had the technology existed in the day to reproduce in photographic color & quality rather than the plain old printing press & its limitations, I'm sure they would have opted for the higher quality & color rich variant too. (Besides, what are we going to do about it?... make the current, rich color image as black & white, tainted and blurred as possible just to match a that phoney yellow-aged background rip of the real book?) -- George Orwell III (talk) 06:23, 1 January 2013 (UTC)

Hesperian, I think that image is beautiful. Too, anytime is a good time for prayer. It brings to mind the beginning of the Irish potato blight. Aren't they potatoes in the basket that they have dug from the ground? They do grow underground in clusters when the sliced "eye" of a potato is planted face up. One potato can yield many others by slicing the eyes from one and planting them. I prefer the image that is in color -- it's a color world. —Maury (talk) 07:27, 1 January 2013 (UTC)

Quality image anytime. I have no doubt that is our intent, to not get stuck with a typographical/publication limitation, if we wanted to do that we can just read the files at archive.org with errors and all. Reasonable, practicable, and mindful option. — billinghurst sDrewth 10:07, 1 January 2013 (UTC)

I think it's beautiful.— Ineuw talk 15:08, 1 January 2013 (UTC)

We should probably have some kind of note, if we replace published image with newer/better image. Otherwise it is implied that the color image is what was published. Jeepday (talk) 16:09, 1 January 2013 (UTC)

Whoa. Back up a bit. Hesperian's preliminary example was not the best one available to approach the question of replacing a derived/embedded image with one obtained from some other entity or file; color being just one of the many reasons to do something like that. In his example, both the embedded image and the higher quality image are of the same perspective so they can be considered "equal" in the eyes of faithfully reproducing the original work. Both are reproductions of the same oil painting (i.e. reproductions will always be based inline with the same width and height ratios as the framed oil painting has). In this instance, substituting the high quality image over the derived one is a no brainer.

In the case of the "Super Ugly Frontispiece" discussed elsewhere, substituting the colorized version for the pulled image is something I wouldn't do & hope nobody else has been either. The colorized file cropped the bottom fifth of the original derived file completely out - changing the perspective in the process - so I wouldn't consider that "faithfully" reproducing the original as "best" as we can. -- George Orwell III (talk) 18:01, 1 January 2013 (UTC)

Apparent validation glitch - is this a known issue?

Latest comment: 11 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion

Hello folks.

This single page recently permitted me to "validate" my own "proofread"ing without apparent intervention of any other user. As far as I am aware this only occurred in isolation, but certainly it is not normal. If it is not a known issue (and if judged worthy of report) who needs to be informed?

Regards, MODCHK (talk) 23:14, 1 January 2013 (UTC)

Index:Biographies of Scientific Men.djvu

Latest comment: 11 years ago8 comments4 people in discussion

Hi. This index has 2 missing pages (between D054 and D055). Can someone check if from where you are you can find another scan of the same book (maybe form Google books)? If you find it, can you please upload it locally? Then, I can take it from here and fix the djvu file. As a backup, if someone can at least find the text of the two missing pages, I could insert two blank placeholders for them in the djvu and at least copy the text there. Thanks--Mpaa (talk) 17:18, 3 January 2013 (UTC)

AI PDF is also missing pages 29 & 30 (corresponding to missing in djvu). Other formats also seem to be missing the same pages, text does not flow from page 28 to 31 so does not appear to be a page numbering issue. JeepdaySock (AKA, Jeepday) 17:26, 3 January 2013 (UTC)
- HathiTrust has a google scan with the missing pages (as pdfs). I'll upload them to commons in a sec. MarkLSteadman (talk) 18:14, 3 January 2013 (UTC)
  - Here they are: Pages 29 and 30 MarkLSteadman (talk) 18:19, 3 January 2013 (UTC)

Thanks. I will take care of the rest.--Mpaa (talk) 19:31, 3 January 2013 (UTC)

Check em' again. I removed the watermarks & timestamps. You all didn't give me enough time to ask if they needed to be cropped as well. Let me know. -- George Orwell III (talk) 20:06, 3 January 2013 (UTC)

I’ve already uploaded it. I already struggled once and I had enough. I was not able to get the text layer through my usual flow. Had to try two/three different ways before I managed it. Not one of my best patchworks … but good enough for me. If you feel like giving a try, OK for me. Just do not move the pages as I have already updated index and moved pages around in Page/Main ns. Thanks anyhow.--Mpaa (talk) 22:12, 3 January 2013 (UTC)

Well now you'd be at the end of the list & I've undertaken a 60Meg project to replace 26 source files missing text-layers in the interim. The patch works afaict; just not pretty. Its up to you - restatus it & I'll get to it eventually or leave it be. -- George Orwell III (talk) 22:42, 3 January 2013 (UTC)

The top 500 sites on the web

Latest comment: 11 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion

Perspective: The importance of promoting Wikisource on YouTube

"The top 500 sites on the web"

http://www.alexa.com/topsites

Global

1 Facebook - facebook.com

2 Google - google.com

3 Yahoo! - yahoo.com

4 YouTube - youtube.com

5 Baidu.com - baidu.com - leading Chinese language search engine,

6 Wikipedia - wikipedia.org

7 Windows Live - live.com

8 Amazon.com - amazon.com

—Maury (talk) 12:08, 5 January 2013 (UTC)

Purpose of author pages

Latest comment: 11 years ago18 comments7 people in discussion

It is suggested that "The purpose of author pages is not to provide biographical information:". This was brought to my attention here and here. I see that it is listed at Wikisource:Maintenance of the Month/Sister-project link standardization but not following the logic of why it is a good idea. There have been a couple of disjointed talk page conversations, but it seems like a topic community discussion at Scriptorium. Jeepday (talk) 14:28, 5 January 2013 (UTC)

Considering what a struggle it is sometimes to obtain any information about certain authors; is there a consensus regarding the minimal amount considered necessary?

Some of the parameters presented by default by the populating gadgets (e.g. image=) never convey information which is not also linkable via some kind of sister-project. Which one should take priority?

How should authors with existing descriptions in other languages, but not in English best be handled, e.g. if a translated work is encountered?

In all cases above, isn't it almost always easier to pare an excessive entry back, than it is to rebuild "holes" in an inadequate entry? MODCHK (talk) 21:53, 5 January 2013 (UTC)

Concerning the point on the minimal amount of info to add (manually) to an Author's page, my understanding is there are only two real reasons to do so (now that Plain-Sister parameters are standard that is): 1.) provide clarity &/or aid in the categorization of the Author; and 2.) help facilitate the possibility of any future DABs that may arise. So something like English poet and novelist. Cousin of Admiral Nelson. is more akin to what I've always thought was enough to add for our current &/or future needs. The "excerpt from Wikipedia" approach has always bothered me since it was a copy & paste rather than a real-time transclusion. This meant our WP-like blurb could eventually become outdated/refuted unless proactively revised along with any revisions made over on WP (rarely happened & mostly due to the over-information frequently added with respect to our actual needs to begin with). -- George Orwell III (talk) 00:15, 6 January 2013 (UTC)

O.K. Fair enough. Now (and I am cringing as I am writing this, because I know I am as guilty as anyone here) how should sources of such nuggets of information as "Admiral Nelson's cousin the poet etc." best be recorded (as there would be no point making such a note at all if the sister-link supplied it anyway. In fact why would you not be updating that as well?) Better research accountability = win! More tedium = not so much.

Just to be clear - my understanding may not be the understanding the community has agreed upon so let's not get too far ahead of ourselves based on only one response & only on one of the few points you raised.

The only reason I added the Admiral thing was to illustrate a possible scenario where the person in question is somehow named after a prominent family member - possibly leading to the need to disambiguate the names further if both happen to be part of our collection. Not the best example in hindsight; sorry if it introduced more confusion than it resolved.

The other part is pretty straight forward I hope; simply put, the info should aid or lead to Category:English authors, Category:English novelists, Category:English poets and so on if they don't already exist.

<And your right, there is no point for any of that IF the author page was created in full at it's start. As you must know by now, this is not typically how an author page is first setup nor how it evolves over time.

As for why not make a project out of updating that info - you can but I think you'd have to insure a proper citation is present for every tid-bit added and that starts to become less our mission & more like Wikipedia's.

Exactly my point (and yes, taking on board your warning this is only a concensus of two so far); thank you for expressing it so well. If we start going down this path we drain effort from what WikiSource is all about; and start doing what WikiPedia ought to be doing. Maybe in a strange way I am arguing myself into thinking Author: records should be a simple linking/caching apparatus, and the incorporation of information not available elsewhere should be minimised. However, back to your point about needing more opinions‥

Actually the incorporation of data should be centralized, if anything, and that is what WikiData (not up & running yet) is suppose to accomplish. Proven data should reside in some yet to be determined format and applied to an Author's Page Info so our contributions are stored along with everybody else's. I know - wishful thinking.

And as a further aside, I consider your Admiral example in fact quite a good talking point. Somewhere, somebody must have gained the information about the cousin relationship which is not already recorded elsewhere. There is absolutely no excuse for assuming the next person should (or even can) reproduce that piece of research. Which means: either discard it

as irrelevant; or record it (and cite source) in the appropriate place. MODCHK (talk) 04:38, 6 January 2013 (UTC)

Here's the rub - we are recording that data though in a roundabout way. When one hypothetically proofreads the Admiral Nelson Encyclopeadia Britanica pages and comes across the tid-bit about some cousin being named after him in his honor, we wikilink that name (again, in theory & if that person has an Author page). Wikilinking like that is part of our "mission". Not my fault if the reader doesn't think to click "what links here", is it? -- George Orwell III (talk) 05:11, 6 January 2013 (UTC)

And yet another thought. If {{authority control}} information is as valuable as frequency of addition to author records implies it appears to be; shouldn't some thought be made towards integrating it more closely into {{author}} and/or associated gadgetry? MODCHK (talk) 01:59, 6 January 2013 (UTC)

Can't argue with you there. I wish development was better coordinated too. -- George Orwell III (talk) 03:31, 6 January 2013 (UTC)

I fully concur that author pages should not contain large amounts of biographical information. I interpret "large" in this case as more than one sentence. George's fine example above is exactly the extent that's required. Said information should only appear in the notes field of the header. All other biographical information belongs on WP. The content of the author pages should be lists of works by and, occasionally, about the person. Beeswaxcandle (talk) 05:39, 6 January 2013 (UTC)

You lads are having all of the fun. Every author page has a "Discussion" page connected to it. Any information deemed important and not on Wikipedia should be placed under "Discussion". Using bona fide manners, if an administrator comes along and deletes it, post it again and give a reason as to why you think it is important (or quit WS if it is really important to you and write elsewhere) -- or even better to keep from arguments as here -- ask the person on his or her talk page about it before destroying any information whether it be biographical or genealogical such as FDR being related to 11 other presidents and how. Many genealogical statements are found in family bibles -- "many" -- so citing it as a "source" may be a tad difficult. Still, many genealogists know several branches of their family tree and the many pieces of history not in published books. Matthew Fontaine Maury sued that stagecoach company for making him permanently lame. How many knew that and who among you even cares but there are people who care and it changed _International History._ If you want to know just ask. —Maury (talk) 06:16, 6 January 2013 (UTC)

(Whose red elephant is that above? Know this, never feed your pet elephant, red or pink or white, or gray elephants Christmas trees because the tree may be tainted with chemicals. Only feed them fresh cut pine trees. Bona fide source: CNN —Maury (talk) 06:16, 6 January 2013 (UTC)

red elephant edit

I have also always found a brief (one or two sentence) author bio helpful, particularly if the author is unknown. Additional rational are
1. There are many authors with similar names,
2. There may be multiple Authority control entries for similar names.
3. Wikipedia may not have a page for the author
4. When Wikipedia does have a page and we "borrow" a brief bit from them, attribution can be supported by the {{Wikipedia excerpt}}
5. Author information can be notoriously difficult to locate, particularly when the work is old and the author was not the subject of review(s) that has survived. (Maury’s suggestion for keeping on author talk page would apply here)
Jeepday (talk) 10:40, 6 January 2013 (UTC)

I agree that a brief (one or two sentence) author bio is helpful, in any case, whether there is a WP page or not.

My objection is about to add too much stuff here and not on WP. If one feels there are info (sourced) not mentioned on WP, just go there and fill in rather than start something parallel here on WS. No added value in having bits and pieces here and there. If a page for the Author is missing on WP, it should be created there and WS will refer to that. It is not us and them.--Mpaa (talk) 11:01, 6 January 2013 (UTC)

Concur; though in some limited and obscure cases (i.e. Author talk:David Marshall Brooks, Author talk:William Henry Williamson) there is no other place but the author talk page to collect information until such time as sufficient to create a Wikipedia page. Granted that these instances should be rare. Jeepday (talk) 11:21, 6 January 2013 (UTC)

I don't think anybody has objections to using the talk page as much as needed - nobody should expect the info appearing on a talk page to be authoritative so that possible pitfall is nicely avoided that way.

But I've always felt the the thing about excerpting stuff from WP was always beyond our scope, added a layer of responsibility to follow-up and verify that hardly ever took place and the info itself frequently was more paraphrased than excerpted anyway. I for one am not sorry to see it go as the standard has been the use of the plain-sister parameters for some time now as well. -- George Orwell III (talk) 11:30, 6 January 2013 (UTC)

I am with you. That’s why a sentence like English poet and novelist. Cousin of Admiral Nelson. is enough. Whatever they will add/rephrase in WP, he will always be English, a poet and the cousin of Nelson. And it will be enough to disambiguate from the brother … The rest is one click away.--Mpaa (talk) 11:52, 6 January 2013 (UTC)

Minor clarification to Mpaa's point about the issue not being us and them above. I did not intend this interpretation, and if what I wrote came across that way I am truly sorry. What I was trying to illustrate is the differing mind-sets represented by each sister project. The raison-d'être of WikiSource is to produce transcriptions loyal to their original material, without regard to whether the transcriber agrees with the content thereof. That of WikiPedia (and, presumably will also be of WikiData, come its day) is to provide researched statements (or facts, as the case may be.) It is perhaps not reasonable to expect WikiSource-hosted Author: records to get too bogged gown in the research audit trail; when this function more rightly belongs elsewhere (i.e. if a new fact of significance comes to hand, it is more reasonable to present it as an amendment to WP/WD, than to shyly keep a trail on WS ― simply because we lack the confidence that it will be permitted elsewhere... in the latter case we may as well not bother recording it at all, and that would be a shame?)

Not to mention the impossible task of anticipating beforehand what "fact" may prove to be valuable in a future disambiguation effort... MODCHK (talk) 01:32, 7 January 2013 (UTC)

Descriptions on author pages should be like Wikidata descriptions. If you agree, we can use them as soon as they become available. Adding extra text is allowed, but it should be "the exception, not the rule" (saying).--Erasmo Barresi (talk) 20:19, 7 January 2013 (UTC)

Agree―but only up to a point: the article indicates descriptions should differentiate existing possible ambiguities. However, the issue raised by George Orwell III near the top of this discussion was "2.) help facilitate the possibility of any future DABs that may arise." Surely this throws the floodgates open to capturing all sorts of trivia "in case" it may become useful some day in the future. MODCHK (talk)

Summary - Brief one or two sentence author bio’s are appropriate for the authors page. Accuracy and updates are concerns, which fall outside of Wikisource’s normal scope. Recommendation is to use WikiData through some automated process when it becomes available. As the content of the WikiData will be outside of Wikisource, any information potentially required for disambiguation that is not covered by WikiData or {{plain sister}} should be placed on the Author talk page with appropriate references. JeepdaySock (AKA, Jeepday) 12:04, 9 January 2013 (UTC)

Proofreading dates, numbers, etc.

Latest comment: 11 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion

Quick thought: OCR typos of the regular sort are one tliing, but it has recently occurred to me that it is especially important to make sure that we are extra careful about seeing to it that dates/years—numbers in general—are proofread/validated correctly. Not to say I haven't overlooked my share, but when readers/researchers come here looking for info (even casually), seems that numbers, more than anything (that I can think of), should be correct. Almost borders on a responsibility. Londonjackbooks (talk) 14:38, 7 January 2013 (UTC)

State of California Open Source Textbooks

Latest comment: 11 years ago12 comments6 people in discussion

I just noticed this b:Wikibooks:Reading_room/Projects#State_of_California_Open_Source_Textbooks, if anyone is looking for a future project it might be a good one. JeepdaySock (AKA, Jeepday) 19:27, 7 January 2013 (UTC)

A discussion at the Wikibooks link above, indicates a belief that these PD text books would be excluded by Wikisource Scope. WS:WWI include has expended over the years to limit new vanity works, if by doing so we have excluded new PD text books, I think we have done ourselves a disservice. So two conversations begin below. JeepdaySock (AKA, Jeepday) 14:12, 8 January 2013 (UTC)

According to QU's article, those books are CC, not PD... There's a PD licence under CC, but they didn't say they'd use that. Kayau (talk) 01:53, 9 January 2013 (UTC)

I am using PD as shorthand slang for all licensing compatible with Wikisource. JeepdaySock (AKA, Jeepday) 11:43, 9 January 2013 (UTC)

Are new PD Textbooks excluded from Wikisource?

The only problem would be if they are "living documents" with no stable, fixed wording. Assuming they are set documents, they should be eligible. I can see no other reason why they would not be. - AdamBMorgan (talk) 17:59, 8 January 2013 (UTC)

The guidance for so-expressed vanity books to me seems to be "published in a medium that includes peer review or editorial controls; this excludes self-publication" To me that seems to indicate that WB books can be published here if they have been through that process and are replicated as of a 'of a point in time'. I would expect rigour of community for the first, and the official calling of "finished edition" for the second. — billinghurst sDrewth 01:49, 10 January 2013 (UTC)

Is WS:WWI too restrictive?

I think not (i.e. policy seems O.K. as currently stated.) Whilst not being particularly highlighted, explicit "public domain" materials are allowed by the final sentence in WS:WWI#Defining_what_is_included by the rather weak statement: "it is still possible that a work created before that date remains protected, or that a work created after that date is in the public domain."
- Could be improved by giving hints as to how PD status is establishable for a given work; but this is not necessarily a requirement for changing the policy. MODCHK (talk) 17:00, 8 January 2013 (UTC)
- I think the wording could be better. The whole "Defining what is included" section is misleading. The 1923 transition is just due to copyright law and not any internal Wikisource policy (as far as I'm aware anyway). The "Analytical and artistic works" sub-section is a bit pointless and could probably be deleted. The other two sub-sections could be clearer that they are special clarifications of works that might seem to be excluded at first glance. - AdamBMorgan (talk) 17:59, 8 January 2013 (UTC)
  I would propose (informally at this stage) changing the wording of "Defining what is included" to remove references to the 1923 "transition date", which is possibly causing confusion because it is a copyright-based term despite the section starting with "Criteria on this page are in addition to copyright criteria". My suggested re-wording would be:

Informal proposal to amend "Defining what is included"
Current version	Amended version
Criteria on this page are in addition to copyright criteria, which are described at Wikisource:copyright policy Different rules apply depending on when the work was created. Although US copyright law provided the convenient transition date, it is still possible that a work created before that date remains protected, or that a work created after that date is in the public domain. Works created before 1923 Any written work (or transcript of original audio or visual content) published (or created but never published) prior to 1923 may be included in Wikisource, so long as it is verifiable. Valid sources include uploaded scans and printed paper sources. Works created after 1922: (meaning works created after December 31st, 1922) Documentary sources etc...	Criteria on this page are in addition to copyright criteria, which are described at Wikisource:copyright policy. Different rules apply depending on when the work was created. Any published, written work (or transcript of original audio or visual content) may be included in Wikisource, so long as it is verifiable. Valid sources include uploaded scans and printed paper sources. Special cases are as follows: Documentary sources etc...

This amendment eliminates unpublished works prior to 1923. These works may be in the public domain, like a diary describing a mountain-climbing expedition, but because they weren't published they would not belong at Wikisource. Is that what you want it to accomplish? ResScholar (talk) 09:23, 13 January 2013 (UTC)

Specific explanation: No, although a section under exclusions would probably be better. As an example, what about unpublished works after 1922? Why are we implying there is any difference in our inclusion policy? The issue here is copyright law, not site policy. (I believe unpublished work is pma+70 in the US, which would allow a small post-1922 window.) - AdamBMorgan (talk) 13:53, 23 January 2013 (UTC)

I don't see that is what has been proposed, as they would fall into the historical documents section which is next, not included here as no text change is proposed. To me it looks as this needs to have a Published works heading. My issue with the proposed change is that the existing WWI wording was to try and make it easier to know, ie. pre 1923 "IN" and post 1922 "harder, it depends ..." So what you are saying is not wrong, but I think that it misses the intent of the existing structure. I need more sleep before being able to be fully lucid. — billinghurst sDrewth 14:38, 13 January 2013 (UTC)

General explanation: The current wording seems to eliminate the vast majority of post-1923 works. The way it can be read at the moment appears to only allow (1) documentary sources, (2) analytical and artistic works, and (3) scientific research; nothing else. Technically the second group covers a lot but this is not immediately clear and the section text does not help. In particular, text books are not covered by any of these categories as currently defined (they do not analyse). I have no problem with these sections, I just don't think it helps to have them as subsections of "Works created after 1922". Regarding the split between pre-1923 and post-1922: this also seems to create confusion. As they are arranged, it implies there is a difference in the types of work we allow depending on the period. This is especially confusing coming directly after a statement that claims these rules are in addition to copyright law when it is really just a repetition of the law. A reminder about copyright periods might be helpful in a separate section of the same page. However, the mixture of conflicting claims and implied meanings has definitely created confusion in this case. If it has done so here, with an experienced Wikimedian, it has almost certainly caused problems for new users.

TL;DR: I know what the page means. We just don't seem to be explaining ourselves very well. Some changes (not necessarily those above) could fix that. - AdamBMorgan (talk) 13:53, 23 January 2013 (UTC)

Be a Wikimedia fundraising "User Experience" volunteer!

Thank you to everyone who volunteered last year on the Wikimedia fundraising 'User Experience' project. We have talked to many different people in different countries and their feedback has helped us immensely in restructuring our pages. If you haven't heard of it yet, the 'User Experience' project has the goal of understanding the donation experience in different countries (outside the USA) and enhancing the localization of our donation pages.

I am (still) searching for volunteers to spend some time on a Skype chat with me, reviewing their own country's donation pages. It will be done on a 'usability' format (I will ask you to read the text and go through the donation flow) and will be asking your feedback in the meanwhile.

The only pre-requisite is for the volunteer to actually live in the country and to have access to at least one donation method that we offer for that country (mainly credit/debit card, but also real time banking like IDEAL, E-wallets, etc...) so we can do a live test and see if the donation goes through. **All volunteers will be reimbursed of the donations that eventually succeed (and they will be very low amounts, like 1-2 dollars)**

By helping us you are actually helping thousands of people to support our mission of free knowledge across the world. If you are interested (or know of anyone who could be) please email ppena@wikimedia.org. All countries needed (excepting USA)!!

Thanks!

Pats Pena
Global Fundraising Operations Manager, Wikimedia Foundation

Sent using Global message delivery, 20:48, 8 January 2013 (UTC)

WikiData to Headers

Latest comment: 11 years ago16 comments6 people in discussion

In the discussion above the community desire appears to be for using Wikidata on at least some header template fields in a fully or semi (bot supported) method. This presents at least some community challenges. JeepdaySock (AKA, Jeepday) 16:00, 9 January 2013 (UTC)

How?

How can/will it be accomplished?

By adding our authors to Wikidata pages, for example Author:Ovid to d:Q7198.
By asking other Wikisources to do the same.
By requesting (maybe on Bugzilla) for Wikisource author pages to use Wikidata interlanguage links.

--Erasmo Barresi (talk) 23:13, 9 January 2013 (UTC)

The wikidata page d:Q7198 has multiple entries, if you go down to English it has a link to w:Ovid, how is this any different from just having a plain sisters link to the wikipedia page? How does this get a brief bio of the author? For cases like Author:Socrates and Author:Socrates it would seem invaluable to have; particularly as the later makes no mention of the former or of Author:Socrates. JeepdaySock (AKA, Jeepday) 11:42, 10 January 2013 (UTC)

The brief bio is the bit at the top that currently reads "Roman poet". Note that Wikidata is intended as a Wikipedia-focused project and (as far as I know) they have no intention of supporting non-Pedia projects. The current format does not allow for adding Wikisource authors (or other pages) to Wikidata. - AdamBMorgan (talk) 12:31, 10 January 2013 (UTC)

The current format is just for Wikipedia, but other projects will hopefully be added in the future. Socrates (c. 469 BC – 399 BC) is to be listed at d:Q913, while Socrates Scholasticus goes d:Q336198.--Erasmo Barresi (talk) 15:22, 10 January 2013 (UTC)

Many authors on WS will never have a Wikipedia page (fail WP:N, as noted in previous talks above), so how does Wikidata help with brief author bios? JeepdaySock (AKA, Jeepday) 18:06, 10 January 2013 (UTC)

“	It is for data what Wikimedia Commons is for media files: it centralizes access to and management of structured data, such as interwiki references and statistical information.	”
—Wikidata

From my reading and understanding of that is that while it is about structured data, not notability, not biographical detail. It will allow us to say this is PERSON: DJDHDH and identify them uniquely and exclusively, and the structured data that goes with it. Yes, it is currently focused on WPs, and it is in its infancy, but it has to start somewhere. The snippet is NOT a biographical detail, is just an identifying label. The more that you want it for WSs, then get in and contribute and be the squeaky wheel. — billinghurst sDrewth 00:14, 11 January 2013 (UTC)

So we can go and set up a dataset at WD, take all of the WS author data and move it there, then copy it back to WS on the author page? JeepdaySock (AKA, Jeepday) 15:52, 14 January 2013 (UTC)

Yes, with a main advantage: Wikidata works like a template, so no data is duplicated. For example, the information "William Shakespeare was born in 1564" will be host only on Wikidata and then included into all language editions of Wikipedia, Wikisource, Wikiquote...--Erasmo Barresi (talk) 22:13, 14 January 2013 (UTC)

Above you said "The current format is just for Wikipedia", so how do you get to entering once and sharing with everyone? Jeepday (talk) 22:45, 14 January 2013 (UTC)

We cannot yet, at this stage it is being rolled out for the WPs, and it is my understanding that it is the intention to get to sisters in time (note my qualifications). I am hoping that at that stage that someone will have written a bot that can crawl VIAF data, and can just inhale our data and we will have little manual work except for our oddities (and hopefully we can be notified which are those oddities). Either way, we have to be spectators and advocates for our cause at this stage. — billinghurst sDrewth 14:34, 15 January 2013 (UTC)

So for now, it is back to business as usual? Fill out the header template as appropriate and see what the future brings. JeepdaySock (AKA, Jeepday) 15:34, 15 January 2013 (UTC)

What?

What fields should be populated using this approach?

Currently, the only possible fields to populate this way are descriptions and sister-project links. After the enabling of infoboxes, we will be able to transclude names, family names, years of birth, years of death, and image names. We will even be able to categorize authors by nationality, type/occupation, and genre. Fantastic!--Erasmo Barresi (talk) 23:13, 9 January 2013 (UTC)

... and what is the Author header but an infobox in a sense already? If you do the categorization properly in addition to the header info then you have your short biographical data (with or without the existence of a WP article on that author). -- George Orwell III (talk) 00:38, 11 January 2013 (UTC)

Null

What do we do for null in the database? (i.e. The field is empty for the subject (author/book) or the dataset has not been created.)

Regarding descriptions, we should not transclude them unless we are sure that they will not be missed. Regarding other things, I will think carefully later.--Erasmo Barresi (talk) 23:13, 9 January 2013 (UTC)

Grant application

Hi! I'm quite aware of all the problems you are talking about (specially after uploading more than 200 boooks...) and apart from what have you been commenting, there is the issue of integrating all the projects in a sensible way. In order to do this and to meet with the people involved, I have started a grant application. Please, check it and share your thoughts. Thanks!--Micru (talk) 06:32, 28 January 2013 (UTC)

PD in JSTOR

Latest comment: 11 years ago2 comments2 people in discussion

http://lj.libraryjournal.com/2013/01/academic-libraries/many-jstor-journal-archives-now-free-to-public/

Does anyone want to start finding pre 1922 US publications?

In disscussion with someone on IRC, it seems the issue of a mass 'upload' is licence sorting.. Sfan00 IMG (talk) 16:32, 12 January 2013 (UTC)

What? Nothing about insuring the completeness and the workability of a file? I know I wouldn't want the bulk uploads of partial works with no embedded text-layers to work from. As long those two criteria are met - license sorting for pre-1922 works doesn't seem like an issue. -- George Orwell III (talk) 17:45, 12 January 2013 (UTC)

Requested move

Latest comment: 11 years ago3 comments2 people in discussion

I'm not sure how to request a move of a protected page, but could someone please move United States Bill of Rights to United States Bill of Rights as proposed or something similar? The complaints on the talk page are correct - this is not the Bill of Rights (the first 10 Amendments to the U.S. Constitution), but the proposed Bill of Rights. The current title is just confusing. – Philosopher ^{Let us reason together.} 20:11, 12 January 2013 (UTC)

You are correct that it is what was proposed, it was what was put before Congress. That is the name of the document as of the identified year, and has come from NARA (check the image detail). The work does not propose itself as the living document of the US as of today, it is the "then" document. Please read the explanatory notes, they are quite specific. If you can find documentary record of what was passed and presented as a document of a date, we can host that too. — billinghurst sDrewth 14:54, 13 January 2013 (UTC)

That said, I note that there has been some drift in those documents as we have added documents around as components have been added. What I have done is standardised the related documents navigation (put it into Template:US charters of freedom and placed it inside the notes). I would think that we could amend the navigation text to clarify that they are documents of a time and place, not the living documents. — billinghurst sDrewth 15:18, 13 January 2013 (UTC)

Latest comment: 11 years ago3 comments2 people in discussion

Hi. Isn't this a duplicate of {{PD-US-no-notice}}?--Mpaa (talk) 18:01, 13 January 2013 (UTC)

Hello. It sure seems like an attempt to duplicate the premise to me (I'd replace and delete it). -- George Orwell III (talk) 18:34, 13 January 2013 (UTC)

I'll tag it for deletion and copy this thread at Proposed deletions.--Mpaa (talk) 21:56, 13 January 2013 (UTC)

Switch between layouts in a header template

Latest comment: 11 years ago4 comments3 people in discussion

En.Wikisource has these layouts that one can switch through but only on pages that transclude pages from the page namespace. Would it be possible through some javascript/CSS trickery to get a similar function to a header template that works with every text where that header template is used? So you could switch between a narrow, justified layout and a full width layout with a click (sort of like the navframe boxes used on Wikipedia that can show/hide the content of a footer template). If anyone could point me to an existing implementation of this or can make something like this if it isn't too much effort I would be very grateful. I don't intend to use it on the English Wikisource but I would like to see it on the Icelandic one. I am posting here for the greatest exposure. --Bjarki S (talk) 21:16, 13 January 2013 (UTC)

Check out {{default layout}}. I believe the Javascript which backs it is loaded from multilingual WS and therefore should work on any WS project that has the dynamic layout system set up. Prosody (talk)

The coding is within MediaWiki:Common.js (see Dynamic layouts within) and presumably layouts bits in MediaWiki:Common.css. It is set to only apply itself to pages transcluded through Page: ns. Common.js is the default applied to all pages, so you should be doable to have it for … • all pages • all pages in main ns • all transcluded pages in main ns • … — billinghurst sDrewth 00:46, 14 January 2013 (UTC)

I see where the layouts are defined in Common.js but I am not sure how it defines what pages to apply it on. --Bjarki S (talk) 18:00, 14 January 2013 (UTC)

Seems it's more complicated than that. The code is actually in Mediawiki:PageNumbers.js, which, uncharitably, is separate from the version in multilingual WS. It doesn't appear there's any options for where it applies, it's disabled on pages that don't use PP by the line

if( !self.proofreadpage_source_href && get_elements_by_classname("pagenum","span").length==0 ) return;

in the function add_page_container, which I think (just glancing at it) adds a wrapper div around the text body for the layout to be applied to. Prosody (talk) 19:11, 14 January 2013 (UTC)

* WikiSource Promoted via YouTube *

Latest comment: 11 years ago5 comments3 people in discussion

Please see 5.55 promotion of en.wikiSource via youtube.com above.

AdamBMorgan

Wikisource - Wiki Article

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=avdsUxeof0U

—Maury (talk) 05:48, 15 January 2013 (UTC)

I did not get very far into, but it seems like a computer voice is reading a Wikipedia article while a static image is displayed. JeepdaySock (AKA, Jeepday) 12:03, 15 January 2013 (UTC)

It's a text-to-speech engine reader the Wikisource article on Wikipedia. The channel's uploads seem to be all about turning articles into videos, which I vaguely recall was a suggestion on Wikipedia a few years ago.

Anyway, promoting Wikisource on YouTube has been done... in Italian. If we were to do something similar (and I have neither skills nor resources in this area) I would recommend doing something like this: YouTube: La WikiGuida di Wikisource. If you are curious, there are subtitles in English but they are a bit hard to read at times. NB: Wikimedia Italia have done one for a few of our sisters too (Wikipedia, Commons and Wikiquote). - AdamBMorgan (talk) 00:39, 27 January 2013 (UTC)

I watched the entire Italian "La WikiGuida di Wikisource", that is very well done! About the only word I understood was Wikisource, but it seemed to flow nicely and get the message across perfectly. Jeepday (talk) 13:33, 27 January 2013 (UTC)

I have used text to speech of many kinds for a long time. The computer voices I have are better than those Adam used. Those are obviously computer voices. My wife went blind some time ago and she has a screen reader with good voices built in. Too, one or two images shown to you (Jeepday) are "static" but they also don't show up well. Regardless, Adam has created what could be -- a beginning. I think it is too long and too technical -- over any new person's head. Shorter clips, with a voice, including anyone here can be done abut again, no voice is needed if images can carry the tune. I've seen promos of various kinds that have only typed in words, with and without a voice, and soft music in the background. Our Italian friend that comes here is presently in school and intends to create a script and make a video. He has asked me to use my own voice. He also heard a "test voice file" that I sent to him and he thought it was me. He said that it sounded very professional. That's the quality of one of my voice files. He thought it was a person talking. Voice files can read pages of a book, excerpts and the entire book. On YouTube the readings should be fairly short and not overly technical. What they should do for en.WS is *promote* en.WS and that can be done by "eye catchers" -- images. So, hopefully, there will be other clips for en.WS. soon. —Maury (talk) 14:32, 27 January 2013 (UTC)

How to use Portal instead of Author in header?

Latest comment: 11 years ago3 comments2 people in discussion

Hi. Author:Stratemeyer Syndicate has been moved to Portal:Stratemeyer Syndicate. What should be done in {{header}}? Use "| override_author = [[Portal:Stratemeyer Syndicate|Stratemeyer Syndicate]]" ? --Mpaa (talk) 21:29, 16 January 2013 (UTC)

The intention is to move the works over to the pseudonyms. Just haven't got around to sorting it out yet. Beeswaxcandle (talk) 00:25, 17 January 2013 (UTC)

I asked as Author:Stratemeyer Syndicate is a dated Soft Redirect. If you need a hand in replacing Stratemeyer Syndicate with pseudonyms according to Portal:Stratemeyer Syndicate, in works and relative chapters, just let me know. It should not be a big deal. Until it is done, it should otherwise be skipped in soft redirects clean-up. Bye--Mpaa (talk) 22:44, 21 January 2013 (UTC)

Two efforts to make things easier for newcomers

Latest comment: 11 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion

While discussing with Maury for a YouTube video about Wikisource, the difficulties in starting volunteering to Wikisource became evident. Please comment on the following two efforts:

display links to relevant help pages in the page-creation interface, above
develop a tool for creating Index pages, on the multilingual Wikisource

--Erasmo Barresi (talk) 18:42, 17 January 2013 (UTC)