Talk:The English and Scottish Popular Ballads

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Information about this edition
Edition:
Source: http://www.sacred-texts.com/neu/eng/child/index.htm
Contributor(s): User:Bookofjude, others
Level of progress: 50% - all text, partly proofread
Notes:
Proofreaders:

Could we rename the pages[edit]

Could we use the name of the ballad as the name of the page?

It would make it much easier to find the songs if the page name is the name of the song instead of the code here. Moving the pages will leave behind a redirect from the current name if anyone wanted to search on that name. Many of these songs have more than one name but redirects can be created for other names as required. OK? --Filceolaire (talk) 22:30, 5 September 2009 (UTC)[reply]

It is probably easier and more beneficial to create redirects that link to the respective works. Where the names collide with something of a similar name, then we should create a {{disambiguation}} page. Happy to help with the latter component. -- billinghurst (talk) 01:12, 6 September 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Ballad Titles[edit]

The following ballad titles have been corrected to bring them into agreement with the Wikipedia:List of the Child Ballads, and with The English and Scottish Popular Ballads, Edited by Francis James Child, Dover Publications, Minneola, New York, 2006. Listed below are the original and corrected names.

Stanza markings[edit]

Not sure if anyone is paying attention to this page, but the versions of the ballads here have the stanza numbers removed, which would be one thing, but also don't even honor spacings. This is a pretty catastrophic problem for people wanting to easily see the rhyme scheme, and not honoring what is in the source book. Is there any interest in fixing this? Or objections that adding in, at minimum, the paragraph breaks between stanzas would be a good thing? SnowFire (talk) 19:25, 29 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]

@SnowFire: It is an early work for us that has not been migrated to a scan-based text. there is a whole lot more that we can do to this work, including putting it properly under its published name for the work. I have added the scan to the root page for the work. — billinghurst sDrewth 12:36, 30 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]
I have renamed the work, and it would be my suggestion that when the works are updated to transcluded works, that we move each to their actual name, not simple numericals. That will also mean fixing any redirects that occur, and considering deleting the redirects at special:prefixindex/Child's Ballads/ — billinghurst sDrewth 12:46, 30 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]
@Billinghurst: Thanks for the speedy response.
On the title issue: I'm more of a Wikipedia person than a Wikisource person, but I'd strongly advise to keep the old redirects, not delete them. On Wikipedia, there's a "redirects are cheap" guideline, and further, "redirect from a move" is one of the base reasons to keep. There needs to be a really strong reason that a longstanding page title has its redirect deleted, like if it's old title is actively misleading. Who knows what other links are on the Internet to the old locations? Also, I'd been adding wikisource links to the various ballads to the relevant Wikipedia articles (e.g. [1]), so if the redirects were deleted, then those page revisions in the history would also be forever broken even if the pages were subsequently updated.
I will say that this work doesn't quite 100% correspond to the scanned books anyway, and that's not entirely bad - the existing "Child Ballads" page is kind of a mega-repository of all the volumes, so the Index:The English and Scottish Popular Ballads, Volume 01.djvu scan doesn't quite match. I think the idea of a merged super-work is fine, just means we'll need several scanned books backing it. (And an argument to possibly use later printings / editions, since they'd also be in the public domain? Unsure how much the work was revised in later printings.)
Since you're around - I've done a sample update to one of the existing works at Robyn and Gandeleyn (diff, see source text at Volume III on archive.org) . Does this look reasonable, or would it be better to abandon "fixing" the old versions and just wait for scans of Volume 3? Is using chapter & verse markings from the Bible too pretentious for stanza numbers? Some sort of sidebar style approach for marking stanza numbers would also work, but not sure what the template would be for that. (Also, keeping the decision of the original transcriber to replace thorns with "th", for all that Child didn't do that... no idea how to handle the fancy medieval character that looks like an ezh though.) SnowFire (talk) 16:34, 30 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]
@SnowFire: A quick note (as I am on the fly!). Redirects at top level are retained, whereas subpages can be problematic on moved works, especially when we have to disambiguate different editions of works. So we have a balance to maintain.

Our best weapon to help here is using Wikidata to help us manage literary work vs each edition (see d:wikidata:Books for some of that explanatory) that enable us to link to have an item for the literary work, then an item for each edition and interweave them. What we would typically try and do with such ballads that often each have their own notability is created a root page for the ballad (linked to the literary work item) that would redirect to the version wherever we have it situated (that target is wikilinked to the edition item at WD). Yes it is complex, and usually best shown with example. What is not helping in this case is the less than helpful /1 /2 /3 ... that we did years ago for this work when we didn't know better about how we would develop. The other issues you described about later volumes, and appendices hits us all the time in so many different ways, and for that we have a range of approaches, depending on the authors did things. DNB, EB1911, EB show some examples. WS:Versions will be some help. I don't know enough about the work (yet) to give vest guidance. Getting your head around how Wikidata sets us up for data collection will help. — billinghurst sDrewth 01:18, 1 May 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Also to note w:en:Template:Cite Q which link follows works. I will add more to above when I have some time. — billinghurst sDrewth 01:20, 1 May 2023 (UTC)[reply]
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