User talk:Prosody

Hello, Prosody, welcome to Wikisource! Thanks for your interest in the project; we hope you'll enjoy the community and your work here. If you need help, see our help pages (especially Adding texts and Wikisource's style guide). You can discuss or ask questions from the community in general at the Scriptorium. The Community Portal lists tasks you can help with if you wish. If you have any questions, feel free to contact me on my talk page.

John Vandenberg 05:20, 1 September 2007 (UTC)

Sanskrit Grammar by Whitney

Hello, Please see Index talk:Sanskrit Grammar by Whitney p1.djvu#Merge?. What do you think? Yann (talk) 11:14, 20 February 2009 (UTC)

Award

Hello Prosody, here an award for having contributed to and having finished the Project of the Month :)

--Zyephyrus (talk) 09:43, 1 July 2009 (UTC)

Award for participation
Proofread of the Month June 2009 Omnibuses and Cabs Proofread of the Month July 2009 A Dictionary of Music and Musicians vol 1

Thank you. I'm glad we were able to get the text to a state of correction within the month. Prosody (talk) 06:55, 2 July 2009 (UTC)

Index:Sanskrit Grammar by Whitney p1.djvu

I have purged this file at Commons, and this has now presented the text layer to the index file. This should make the transcription a lot easier for the remaining pages. billinghurst sDrewth 13:27, 23 January 2010 (UTC)

Thanks! I previously had relied on the extracted text layer stored at archive.org, which was one giant page. This is significantly more convenient. Prosody (talk) 10:07, 24 January 2010 (UTC)

One of the magnificent improvements brought to us by ThomasV in his luuuuuurvely Proofread Page extension. billinghurst sDrewth 16:04, 24 January 2010 (UTC)

Sanskrit Grammar

Prosody, my Sanskrit needs work. I don't have the financial amenity to purchase books so your work on Wikisource is most appreciated. I am working on my first real offering for Wikisource which is the Avadhuta Gita which is in production and I need more skills to be able to really engage the text to ensure that the translation and analysis is sound. This work that you are 'slowly' adding, may I help progress? And if you are familiar with Sanskrit, may I ask you questions about the text I am working on?
B9hummingbirdhoverin'^chittychat 14:05, 20 February 2010 (UTC)

To both questions, yes. I'm by no means an expert in Sanskrit, but I'd be happy to help where I can. I'll look over what you've done so far soon. Prosody (talk) 04:14, 21 February 2010 (UTC)

Federalist

Thanks for all your hard work on the Federalist! It's really exciting to see it advance so quickly.

Just as an FYI (you're certainly allowed to proof/validate what you want to!), pages 231–37 were proofed by me. I wasn't sure if you started validating with page 238 on purpose, or if you did so accidentally, thinking that you had proofed 231-237. —Spangineer^wp (háblame) 16:13, 20 August 2010 (UTC)

I accidentally skipped that one. Thank you for bringing it to my attention. Prosody (talk) 19:06, 20 August 2010 (UTC)

Template support.

Thank-you very much for the support. Your link is currently installed on 3 pages...Template:DNB link/doc, and author pages Benjamin Williamson and Alexander Charles O'Sullivan. I will replace these when {{DNB Link}} is working as envisioned. Thanks! JamAKiska (talk) 19:39, 10 October 2010 (UTC)

Follow-on... Have spent some time in discussion concerning DNB01. The provided link, DNB01 template, will take you to the current discussion which contains similar guidance to your previous template work...starting with the transcluded header image. Please let me know if your schedule permits you to unravel this one for us...Thank-you. JamAKiska (talk) 16:14, 14 October 2010 (UTC)

It's not really clear what you all are discussing on your talk page and that of DNB01 to someone who isn't involved. Is DNB00 the goal-line for what DNB01 should be, or does DNB01 have additional features/considerations? Why are they so divergent? Would it be satisfactory to create a generalized DNB header template and make the publication specific headers instances of it? Prosody (talk) 16:46, 14 October 2010 (UTC)

The goal is to get the DNB01 header on an article like, Clark, Andrew, to mirror that of a DNB00 article like, Baker, David. The feature of interest is a single wiki-link when a wiki article has also been written. Not clear to me why they diverged so much (May 2009), as I only just recently entered the discussion. If what you're proposing is to put together a template that generates the proper headers that will cover DNB00, 01, 03, and 12...that would be a positive set of steps in the forward direction. My inclination would be to keep it simple, but if it works as envisioned, this template would provide coverage for quite some time. The only constraint on a project like this would be a complete absence of interference on the existing templates DNB00 and DNB01 through the transition period. Does that sound reasonable? JamAKiska (talk) 20:24, 14 October 2010 (UTC)

It looks like Billinghurst is on the right track and the remaining problems involve decisions about how DNB is organized. I'll keep a tab on it in case you all get bogged down. Prosody (talk) 17:15, 15 October 2010 (UTC)

Thank-you...JamAKiska (talk) 17:26, 15 October 2010 (UTC)

div needs to go on a separate line

Hi,

I reverted your edit to {{Left margin}} because of the issue raised at Wikisource:Scriptorium/Archives/2008-12#div needs to go on a separate line. Hesperian 23:35, 17 October 2010 (UTC)

Mediawiki is a lot more finicky than I thought it was. Sorry for the trouble, and thanks for the quick catch. Prosody (talk) 16:10, 18 October 2010 (UTC)

Yeah, you never see issues like this at Wikipedia, but here we really push the limits of what wiki code can do in terms of representing unusual layouts, and so sometimes encounter these bizarre little issues. Hesperian 00:01, 19 October 2010 (UTC)

Portal:Disney

Thank you! Do you have any suggestions for the next CotW project ? John Vandenberg ^(chat) 23:56, 20 October 2010 (UTC)

Scattershooting ideas here: Pacific Ocean, feminism, Avicenna, salons, deism, reptiles. Whatever y'all choose I'll try to pitch in if I have the time. Prosody (talk) 01:00, 21 October 2010 (UTC)

Hmm, reptiles! A meta:Wikimedia Australia/Zootober 2010 related theme would be good. John Vandenberg ^(chat) 01:42, 21 October 2010 (UTC)

An edit of template:Number

I saw from {{number}} history that you fixed its code last time, and I presume that you know it deeply. I just edit it, since I found that it doesn't run properly into NsPage; perhaps it's not useful in proofread works, but I felt more comfortable saving, and fixing, it. I found it when testing Match and Split here: Critique of Pure Reason/Introduction. Feel free to rollback my edit if needed! --Alex brollo (talk) 17:16, 29 December 2010 (UTC)

Looks good. The previous solution to that problem was the use of {{Sidenotes begin}} and {{Sidenotes end}} in the header and footer of every Page: which contained a {{number}}. IMO yours is a better tradeoff of complexity for reproduction of formatting in the Page namespace. Prosody (talk) 19:41, 29 December 2010 (UTC)

… it was an excellent point

We do occasionally need someone to remind us that when we have our face stuck wikignoming to still consider the big picture. A penny for your thoughts about what we can/should talk about. What we should show to people, where to show it, etc. are all useful information. Where we can we give you better value? Better opportunity? Better anything. As I said, I would love to hear your thoughts. — billinghurst sDrewth 07:35, 2 January 2011 (UTC)

This is a little tricky, because I've either changed or maybe refined my original concerns to a weirder position. I think broadly that administrators should be able to act without specific community backing/notification in proportion with the degree to which that action is an established mandate, where other considerations (privacy, timeliness, ease of negotiations, etc.) do not intervene. To recur to the Ottava Rima thing for an example, without knowledge of the character of the emails at the center of the argument, which are rightfully a private matter between Ottava and the 'crats they shared them with, it's impossible to determine if or to what degree the 'crats were remiss in not acting on them, and whether Ottava's outrage was justified though uncivil, or an overreaction: therefore public discussion is pointless or worse. As another example, the most recent episode, which initially took a turn towards community deliberation but was ultimately handled ably behind the scenes. Therefore most of the things I cited specifically weren't really transparency problems so much as problems of mischaracterization of the situation. Which I do think is potentially dangerous, as on the one hand liable to incite the other party to continue appealing something to the very end, and on the other to check the administrator's inclination to settle the affair privately.

I guess as a better formulated request I'd ask that y'all try to be mindful of where whatever you're doing falls on the scale of well-established admin action with little oversight necessary vs. novel action with the support of the community in some degree necessary, and whatever mitigating circumstances might be in play.

Having said that, I appreciate the efforts you and others are making to invite discussion on these subjects. Prosody (talk) 21:24, 3 January 2011 (UTC)

Oh dear, I wasn't clear. I was thinking on the big broad scale, not worrying about the incident. I am meaning for you as a member of our community what do you want to hear and see in a wholistic sense. While it is not up to admins to always do the speaking, we do control the access to do it more easily. What would make WS a better place to be? And how can we think about doing that for you? — billinghurst sDrewth 07:11, 4 January 2011 (UTC)

I haven't forgotten about this or am ignoring it or anything, just still mulling it over. Prosody (talk) 07:39, 6 January 2011 (UTC)

I actually did end up forgetting about this. Sorry. Anyway, if it's general kvetching you want...

I very broadly like the decentralized quality of Wikisource--most people have their pet projects and if they happen to overlap then they work out themselves how they'll do that particular item. What policies and guidelines exist are either common-sense or have a happy ratio of utility produced to burdensomeness. And this seems to work okay, mash the random page button and you'll see a parade of uniformly passable e-texts. :::Still though, given the role of WS as producing what essentially ends up being the authoritative electronic edition of many texts, I feel a little uncertain as to whether passable is good enough. Lack of provenance, lack of multiple proofreadings, poor formatting, unidentified translators, unstated copyright statuses all fester. It's a little galling in comparison to DP's regimented system.

I'm pretty optimistic though. I've been really pleased to watch over the last three years as proofread page usage has increased massively. The work on portals being done by AdamBMorgan et al. is hugely impressive. And, while I know that talking up formatting is considered passe here, I have to say that if Aldus could see what DP was doing with basic things like sidenotes he'd have given up, while here, I think, we have a good handle on what's worth trying to reproduce and what isn't. New templates which take the heavy lifting out of things pop up with surprising regularity. I think the intersection of Mediawiki's open-ended nature and the kind of everyone experimenting in their own corner ethos results in good texts being very good. This was why I came here instead of DP: I wanted to make an e-text of Sanskrit Grammar which would serve as a model of what a good e-text could be, how it's a great medium distinct from the printed word, and it didn't seem possible at DP (incidentally, I haven't gotten around to it here either, got caught up in other things).

I guess generally I'm worried about a sort of quality disparity among texts here. And judging by an unscientific sample of random pages and my observations of RC, it seems like bad texts are mostly old, a lot even from before the partition of multilingual WS. I half remember someone from Norwegian (?) WSer mentioning on our Scriptorium as an aside that they did an organized inventory of some sort, I guess going through every text they hosted and tagging it for problems and thereby making their maintenance backlog comprehensive. They might be blessed with a better regular editor to text ratio though.

You'll pardon me, I hope, if I rambled a little. Prosody (talk) 05:10, 13 January 2011 (UTC)

Re:Page number mislocated in Chrome

Maybe you should be using Mozilla Firefox, which is fine with the above page numbers. If you're not using Windows it's also cross platform. --kathleen wright5 (talk) 21:17, 2 February 2011 (UTC)

I actually do use Firefox normally. Prosody (talk) 21:31, 2 February 2011 (UTC)

Artefacts, not typos

For something like https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikisource/en/w/index.php?title=Page:Language_and_the_Study_of_Language.djvu/272&diff=prev&oldid=2352093 if you look at http://www.archive.org/stream/cu31924026442156#page/n271/mode/2up you will see that the djvu file is just a weird artefact of the scan rather than mispellings. I think that it is reasonable to ignore them when they happen. — billinghurst sDrewth 07:34, 3 February 2011 (UTC)

And here I was thinking the printer had n-u letterblindness or something. Thanks for catching that. Prosody (talk) 20:27, 3 February 2011 (UTC)

Human Immortality: Two Supposed Objections to the Doctrine

You're doing a great job with cleaning up the text and linking to the authors and works. I just want to say thank you. - Theornamentalist 02:23, 6 April 2011 (UTC)

Thanks. I'm quite pleased that we were able to see it to completion so quickly. Prosody 03:16, 6 April 2011 (UTC)

Oops

/ That was awefully hasty of me; I restored it. - Theornamentalist (talk) 03:31, 29 April 2011 (UTC)

Afrikaans Bible

Hi Prosody, thanks for your advice on the Afrikaans Bible. I've imported it at Bybel on the international Wikisource. It'd be great if you could take a quick look and make sure I did everything right. I'm also wondering if you could suggest good places to recruit contributors (maybe af Wikipedia?) Thanks! Dcoetzee (talk) 05:37, 20 June 2011 (UTC)

Looks great. I see you've run up against the oldwikisource language link problems. I've gone ahead and filed a bug regarding language links from oldwikisource to language subdomains, which from a survey of the mediawiki code might just be a matter of changing a variable in a config file. I'll file another for language subdomains to oldwikisource later. As for finding other contributors, Wikimedia projects are a good place to solicit help; I'd also recommend other Afrikaans language internet communities. Prosody (talk) 19:26, 22 June 2011 (UTC)

Thanks! Dcoetzee (talk) 12:28, 28 June 2011 (UTC)

Perseverance

Wikimania, in the organization of which i participated, is over, and i'm back here, complaining about dynamic layouts.

When you have some time, take a look at Wikisource:Scriptorium#Making one of the layouts the default, again. --Amir E. Aharoni (talk) 22:51, 20 August 2011 (UTC)