Help talk:Contents

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This is going to need some more work, since Wikisource editing techniques are subtlely different from Wikipedia editing. Here this is a need to be more of a proof checker, with the additional need to have skills in the finer points of mark-up codes. Foreign scripts, such as Greek and accented Roman letters, typographical symbols such as the m and n dash, the section sign, the dagger and the pilcrow all can appear. Footnote numbers need to be inserted and hyperlinked. I suggest these skills are going to be more than the everage editor ever uses if writing and editing humanities pages on WP. Therefore we need to build in the tools here Apwoolrich 18:40, 23 September 2005 (UTC)

I agree. I personally think we just need to blank this page and start from scratch. You're right: editing here is very different from editing anywhere else. We have specific templates to be used in certain situations, and not many people (pretty much only the veteran editors) know what they are. And besides, our documentation is horrible and needs a revamp just for that reason, too.—Zhaladshar (Talk) 18:52, 23 September 2005 (UTC)

I suggest we think along the line of putting together a toolbox specifically for WS use. Would it be dangerous to assume we will only ever get skilled editors working here? My worry is that we might get enthusiatic newbies who will need a fair bit of training to get started, or at least not make horrible messes everywhere that are going to need salvaging.

Maybe we might have in the left hand toolbox column links direct to at least Wikimarkup (including Tex for maths, WS templates, Making tables, How to scan and OCR texts, Copyright, How to do footnotes (and anything else which comes to mind. There is an ad on the EB1911 page about to go out inviting people on WP etc to take part in the project, so we may get a sudden influx any day. I have also wondered if we might have on the discussion pages a template which lists the stages of the work, eg upload new scan, add appropriate markup for accents etc, prooofread, and finally freeze, so thay can be ticked off as they are done There is a gizmo on the new main page which does this, but I don't have a clue how it works in practice.

I feel is would be useful to have a section on the mechanics of using Mediawiki on a PC. This gets over the hassle of having to be on line, and gives an exact WYSIWYG result for checking. Long texts can be worked on over several days is necessary. There is something similar which works with some browsers, but it seems to need to be on line to be able to use it. I have not yet done anything about this, only having found out it is possible a few days ago. Then there is the use of the markup extension on Firefox.

As we are producing raw texts which will be frozen, I am not happy at the thought of having links to WP (and elsewhere) marked up in the texts. It is better to have one direct link at the top or bottom to a WP article. If there are in-text links they should be to places in the article, as in a qv link. As you know there is a fair bit of work in progress in the EB1911 project which could be milked for the rest of WS. Apwoolrich 19:31, 23 September 2005 (UTC)

Contents

[edit] Bug?

I apologize if I am posting in the wrong place, but I think this is important, and I can't find a wikisource specific bug threat. For some reason, my account got deleted - while I haven't logged into it for several month, it was gone now. I created an new account with the same username, and contribs have reatached themselves, but my userpage/talkpage/watchlists seem gone. Anyway to restore them? Also it may be wise to see how my account got deleted, since we don't want this happening to other users, right? --Piotrus 01:21, 17 October 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Updated Translation Appropriate?

I am thinking of editing an obsolete translation of a Tolstoy work that is in public domain. It's in really horrible shape, and the Gutenberg folks are releasing it -- of course, their concern is preserving the past, not so much creating something that is a pleasure for a modern reader to actually read. If this works out, it could be the predecessor for other updates of public domain translations. Is this something that would be appropriate for Wikisource?

Maybe this should be moved to the Scriptorium, since it will deal with some site-wide implications.—Zhaladshar (Talk) 21:06, 14 December 2005 (UTC)

[edit] formatting guide?

Is there a guideline anywhere on how to properly format an article? author backlinks, chapter navigation headers & footers, top-matter style, or other general formatting considerations? I wanted to put a link into the cleanup template, but wasn't sure what should go there. I'm directing to Help for the moment (it used to point to Wikipedia:Style_and_How-to_Directory) Wolf man 04:03, 18 December 2005 (UTC)

No, I don't think so. There is Guidelines for adding documents, but this does not cover what I think you have in mind. I will draft a suitable Help page about it. Kind regards. Apwoolrich 12:33, 18 December 2005 (UTC)
There used to be on the old Wikisource. Give me some time to hunt it down.—Zhaladshar (Talk) 00:48, 19 December 2005 (UTC)
Hm, on second thought, it seems that there isn't. Wikisource:Title formats (which needs to be finished) and Help:Author pages are the closest it comes to formatting an article. It seems we will have to write this ourselves.—Zhaladshar (Talk) 00:52, 19 December 2005 (UTC)

[edit] 5000 digital texts

Comment moved to the Scriptorium. // Pathoschild (admin / talk) 21:07, 8 February 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Categories

I would add a link to categories.--Mac 12:36, 14 February 2008 (UTC)

The "Help:Contents" page is to list the contents of the Help, and it mentions "Help:Categorization".
I think you are suggesting that users will click on "Help" when looking for advice on how to find a work, and this page doesnt do a good job of nudging them towards "Help:Reading". John Vandenberg (chat) 23:19, 14 February 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Where are instructions on how to link to PDFs uploaded here

I've looked all over and can't figure out how to format a link to a PDF I've uploaded to wikipedia. There are a couple pages I've left messages that the page should explain how to do it (like "adding new texts"). If there is a page explaining how to do it it needs to be more explictly linked. Thanks. Carolmooredc (talk) 15:14, 28 June 2009 (UTC)

In the interim I finally discovered that at the upload page there is a link to the document so I'm just linking to that from the Document links page. If that's all it is, it may seem intuitive to geeks, but it takes quasi-geeks much longer to figure it out so it needs to be explained and I'll do it if necessary - if that's they way it's done.... 15:21, 28 June 2009 (UTC)
Someone just explained else where that PDFs should be turned into DjVu files (which I'd never heard of before) and put on wikipedia commons. It sure would be nice if this help page said so. I'll put in something to that effect and someone else can feel free to tweak it. Carolmooredc (talk) 01:59, 29 June 2009 (UTC)

[edit] added value in the footnotes

I contribute to the persian wikisource. Until now I have translated lots of English wikilisource's policies and help documents into Persian. So we have accepted these policies. I have a question about inclusion of the novels in the wikisource: Is it possible to add extra information to the text of a novel or any other piece of literature which was not mentioned in the main source? For example is it possible to explain the meanings of some words in the footnote? Could we consider these information as the added value? --80.71.123.75 07:37, 26 August 2009 (UTC)

This is possible. You might want to consider how you can use hypertext instead of relying on footnotes which are a bit of a holdover from non-digital works. It really is more of a matter of what your community wants. I can't say the boundaries have been set absolutely over how far to go with added value here. But even if they had been; you need not copy us so exactly.--BirgitteSB 20:29, 29 August 2009 (UTC)

[edit] Suggestion for new "How to get started - proofreading" page

I'd like to suggest a new help page dedicated solely to starting out proofreading. I'm looking for what other people think should be in the table of contents (with not-so-good section titles in ""s: please improve them).

So far, I have:

  • It should contain NOTHING about putting new documents up: that only convinces newbie proofreader-wannabes they've found the wrong help page.
  • It should be linked directly from proofread of the month
  • It should describe that proofreaders should be comfortable editting wiki pages, before they start proofreading.
  • "Looking at documents": It should describe the difference between Page Namespace, and main namespace, in particular the differences between the view portion of Page namespace & main.
  • "Mechanics": It should indicate that you want to do your proofreading starting out in edit mode right away.
  • That the new-lines in edit mode, should match the newlines in the image, for ease of proofreading.
  • "How to find pages that need work": It should explain what indexes are, where to find them, & what all the colours mean.
  • "Proofreading vs Proofreading(sic)": It should explain that some pages have only been OCR'd, and will need a lot of copy-editing to become useable documents. That this task is also called proofreading in wikisource-land, as opposed to more traditional proofreading which is focussed only on identifying defects.
  • That significant edits and markups to get the view page to approximate the image, should still leave the page red, so that two independant eyes can be looking just for mistakes, as opposed to major data-entry/fixup/markup. (Important with automated entries.)
  • The set of most useful templates should be linked, eg.
    • sc
    • hw
    • What else belongs here?
  • It should explain the various statuses (in a wikisource specific way), & that they're changed by selecting the radio button in the edit session. (No review board, just the individual editor's fingers, so be careful that what you're doing is right.)
  • If they run into a problem with a page, they should:
  1. check to see if it's a common problem in that project, by checking the discussion page for the index
  2. make a note of the problem in the discussion section of that page (pointing to the index page, if they need to)
  3. mark the page as problematic (purple)

Or if it's a problem that they don't know something, where to start looking for help (and that they should upgrade the help pages, to what they would have wanted to see when they started :) ) And what discussion boards to visit to post questions/ask for help etc.

What else should be covered?

User_talk:Ineuw#Checklist_for_proofreading - another list -- SoftlySaid (talk) 15:00, 14 November 2009 (UTC)

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