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The Scriptorium is Wikisource's community discussion page. Feel free to ask questions or leave comments. You may join any current discussion or start a new one. Project members can often be found in the #wikisource IRC channel. For discussion related to the entire project (not just the English chapter), please discuss at the multilingual Wikisource.

[edit] Announcements

[edit] Welsh Wills prior to 1858

National Library of Wales announces that wills are now freely available, see announcement. -- billinghurst (talk) 10:57, 22 October 2009 (UTC)

[edit] November is Validation Month

At PotM we had a discussion and thought that it would be good to get some of our Proofread works up to the Validated. To add a bit of variety, we have eight texts that will loop through. If (as?) they progress to completed, we can add and subtract to the rotation. Hope that you will join us in getting a range of works completed. Cheers. -- billinghurst (talk) 22:31, 31 October 2009 (UTC)

Found a tool to generate a link to a random page in the Category:Proofread. Use it for your morning heart-starter.billinghurst (talk) 01:58, 21 November 2009 (UTC)

[edit] Validation Count Hits 10,000 Pages

At some point during this afternoon, we passed the 10,000 page mark in Category:Validated! Many thanks to all who have taken part in this month’s special project. Onwards to 20,000! :-) Tarmstro99 (talk) 01:46, 11 November 2009 (UTC)

[edit] WikiProjects replaces Song of the Day

To let the community know that in the {{Welcome}} banner we have replaced the quiescent {{Song of the day}} with {{Active projects}} (AP). We have identified five active WikiProjects, and each will feature (weekly rotation).

Background: Recently at {{Welcome}} talk page there was a discussion about revamping what was on offer to new visitors. Hopefully this will give a nice blend.

For discussion about {{welcome}} please use Template talk:Welcome
For information about Wikisource:WikiProjects, and if you believe that you have an active wikiproject that should join the rotation please start discussion at Template talk:Active projects

-- billinghurst (talk) 12:54, 7 November 2009 (UTC)

[edit] Match and Split tool

User:ThomasV has graced us with a new tool in the never-ending journey of migrating to Page: images and transcluded text in place of the main namespace text alone. The tool runs using his bot and it undertakes a Match and Split of pages where a user identifies the co-existing pages in the main and Page: namespaces. I am calling for some trial works on which we can do testing, so if anyone has candidates, please identify them. Some draft instructions are at Match and Split.

To utilise this tool, you will need to turn it on via your Gadgets. billinghurst (talk) 13:20, 14 November 2009 (UTC)

Found a work. See Special:Contributions/ThomasBot billinghurst (talk) 13:57, 14 November 2009 (UTC)

here is another example where I used it : Pensées/I ThomasV (talk) 18:14, 20 November 2009 (UTC)

[edit] Fix of Index page status issue

ThomasV has had the fix of the Index: page status reset problem implemented into production. Woohoo Thomasv!

There is a little work that editors will need to undertake. Where the status on an index page is out of kilter with the respective Page: page status of the works, then each individual Page: page status need to be renewed by performing a null edit such pages, then undertaking a purge on the Index: page to renew its status. At some point we will look to get a bot to run through the pages, however, we cannot guarantee that we will get all pages, nor can we guarantee that it will be done soon.

[Easy purge -> click the clock top right if you have that gadget functioning] billinghurst (talk) 23:22, 16 November 2009 (UTC)

[edit] Proposals

[edit] Proposals of texts

Searching for Lucy Clifford's short story "The New Mother", I found it is not yet in Wikisource. The text is in other places in the internet but it would be great to have it here checked against paper publications. I looked for a space to leave this proposal but I failed to find one by looking at the links in the main page. If there is such a place for asking for possible new additions to Wikisource, wouldn't it be a good idea to make it conspicuous. Thanks. --80.5.88.40 18:40, 13 October 2009 (UTC)

WS:RT. :) --Eliyak T·C 05:13, 19 October 2009 (UTC)

[edit] Move PD-manifesto works to Canadian Wikilivres?

After reading the Copyright Act of Canada more closely, I found that possibly copyrighted public speeches may have Canadian legal permission to post per Wikilivres:Template:Manifesto that I moved from Wikilivres:Template:PD-manifesto and rewrote, after discussing with Yann at Wikilivres:Wikilivres:Community_Portal/en#Canadian_copyright_protection_of_lectures. I would like to ask users here, especially my dear fellow administrators, if we should move {{PD-manifesto}} works to Canadian Wikilivres. I propose this as Wikisource:Possible copyright violations talks about 2009 Alaskan Governor Resignation Speech. Meanwhile, I also ask Chinese Wikisource users about a similar page move, as I consider allowing PD-manifesto on Wikisource possibly encouraging more abuses and endless arguments, therefore contrary to wmf:Resolution:Licensing policy about Free Content License.--Jusjih (talk) 04:05, 15 October 2009 (UTC)

Nice find, that would free up just about all speeches, wouldn't it? I can get cracking on recent Canadian works...Sherurcij ^{Collaboration of the Week: Author:David Livingstone.} 04:40, 15 October 2009 (UTC)

Great news! I'm very glad if these are indeed acceptable at Wikilivres under Canadian law; it frees up the concerns that we have here of PD-Manifesto simply being applied willy-nilly to texts that are (usually clearly) not intended to be freely licensed, simply because we would like the text. Indeed, if we do recommend these texts go to Wikilivres, I think we should go through the non-speeches and assign them a license per-text, and remove {{PD-Manifesto}} completely. Jude (talk) 07:39, 15 October 2009 (UTC)

Perhaps any Wikilivres administrator including myself can start importing PD-manifesto works to Canadian Wikilivres, then delete them here, possibly without further discussion, though courtesy messages to their contributors will be better, as IP edits on Wikilivres are severely restricted after excessive vandalism.--Jusjih (talk) 20:46, 15 October 2009 (UTC)

Nah, only dead fish ”go with the flow” ... Cygnis insignis (talk) with apologies to Sarah Palin, please don't sue me!

Does that mean you are against moving speeches hosted here, notably of dubious legality, to Wikilivres, where they would (apparently) be hosted without copyright issues? Jude (talk) 02:47, 16 October 2009 (UTC)

No. Who put that notice at the top of the page? I think we should argue each case individually on its merits, rather than prejudging them all. For example we would have to give up the Dalai Lama's manifesto for one thing. ResScholar (talk) 04:42, 16 October 2009 (UTC)

I believe it would specifically cover speeches such as 2009 Alaskan Governor Resignation Speech that have been tagged as PD-Manifesto without any noticeable evidence of their being intended to be released in such a manner. The other non-speech works would (and shouldn't) be removed en masse: they need to individually be judged. Jude (talk) 04:54, 16 October 2009 (UTC)

I posted on the top due to very serious copyright concern of the topic. I never intend to prejudge them all. Some speeches are not made so "publicly", so they do not even fit PD-manifesto right here. I agree Jude to individually judge relevant works. Only those clearly compatible with cc-by-sa-3.0 and GFDL should stay here, otherwise, Canadian Wikilivres if fitting Wikilivres:Template:Manifesto, or delete without exporting. These three choices are being applied on Chinese Wikisource as well. As the only administrator of both Chinese and English Wikisources, I now see PD-manifesto misleading too many contributors on both subdomains who could post clearly acceptable works.--Jusjih (talk) 22:45, 16 October 2009 (UTC)

I agree with the copyright concerns, and had only recently decided to start going through the category and highlight texts which don't seem to be free. There are a lot of speeches on Wikisource that are of dubious freedom, and they all need to be investigated sooner, rather than later. Jude (talk) 23:45, 16 October 2009 (UTC)

Comment. FWIW... The Palin Resignation Speech was published on the official Alaska state .GOV site at some point prior to or soon after the event taking place, so I can't understand why it would not be covered as any other publication is covered that can typically be found for public inspection on any of the 50 state's official sites. George Orwell III (talk) 00:22, 17 October 2009 (UTC)

There is currently a discussion regarding its copyright state at WS:COPYVIO, which would be a better place for your comments. Regardless, as pointed out by Prosfilaes, states can and frequently do claim copyright on works. Just because something is freely available on their website does not make it free and useable on Wikisource. Jude (talk) 00:34, 17 October 2009 (UTC)

Sure each state will look at things differently, and I believe that it was not that long ago that Oregon gave up enforcing protection of this sort.Eclecticology - the offended (talk) 07:59, 20 October 2009 (UTC)

Comment. Not be a lawyer I say lets Keep It Simple if a Copyright is automatically granted upon creation unless disclaimer by the Author or the law make it public domain then {{PD-manifesto}} is no good because copyright is assumed. If a work is under copyright it under copyright no matter how many people say it is in Public Domain. There are maters internal to wikisource like Notability then there are maters external to wikisource like copyright. I say let play safe and do not have {{PD-manifesto}} or better yet let a Lawyer do what Lawyers good for keep Wikisource out HOT WATER with to external world, By giving us good info and sometimes making the call.--Lookatthis (talk) 05:04, 19 October 2009 (UTC)
- I don't think there's any danger of you being mistaken for a lawyer. ResScholar (talk) 07:51, 19 October 2009 (UTC)
- While copyright is indeed a "Matter external", WMF sites have typically taken a more restrictive interpretation of copyright law than would be demanded by the law alone. If determining whether something is under copyright or in the public domain were so straightforward we would not be having this discussion. There is a very wide gap between what is clearly in one camp or the other. No lawyer can give a definitive answer that will safely apply in all circumstances. The effective ones are able to argue either side of a case, and win. "Playing safe" is too often a loser's strategy.Eclecticology - the offended (talk) 19:48, 19 October 2009 (UTC)
  - WMF can "have more restrictive interpretation of copyright law than would be demanded by the law alone" determining the copyright status is not straightforward That is why I now think we should let someone like an administrator who read lot more copyright law me make the call.--Lookatthis (talk) 23:55, 19 October 2009 (UTC)
    
    The connection between being an administrator and experience in reading copyright law is a non sequitur. Anyone who has been here for several years is familiar with these laws, and a multiplicity of opinions persist. The call should certainly not be in the hands of a single administrator who has his own strong POV about copyright law. That would be an abandonment of community responsibility. Eclecticology - the offended (talk) 07:59, 20 October 2009 (UTC)
  - The question is whether playing it safe is a good strategy depends on how important pushing the limits is. Furthermore, we're making this available as Free Content, for people who may be forced to fold when a serious copyright complaint comes up, which is a good reason to play it safe.--Prosfilaes (talk) 00:08, 20 October 2009 (UTC)
    
    There is nothing wrong with folding when a serious copyright complaint comes up, and the situation is re-valued on its own merits, but neither is there anything wrong with defending against that complaint if that same re-valuation shows that defence is warranted. To make playing safe depend on the importance of pushing limits makes no sense at all. Nobody is proposing pushing any limits on this site. Playing safe is a kind of negative limit. Between the safe negative limit and the foolhardy positive limit there is a very wide range of options. Rather than retreating behind a doctrinnaire interpretation of Free Content, we would be further ahead by not being so risk averse. Eclecticology - the offended (talk) 07:59, 20 October 2009 (UTC)
    - Anyone can "pushing the limits" on their own webpage I am not recommending that, Wikisource needs clear limits.--Lookatthis (talk) 00:53, 20 October 2009 (UTC)

I don't read Section 32.2 of the Canadian Copyright Act the way most seem to be doing. It protects "reports" ("comptes rendus" in the French version of the law). How does a report equate to a complete text? I still think that both projects should take a liberal view toward manifesti, but 32.2 alone is not a reliable authority for such action. Eclecticology - the offended (talk) 19:48, 19 October 2009 (UTC)

Wikilivres would be free to claim under Sections 29-29.2 which suggest that the purposes of "research or private study" allow full reproduction under Fair Dealing. Sherurcij ^{Collaboration of the Week: Author:Khwaja Kamal-ud-Din.} 20:03, 19 October 2009 (UTC)

Although there are some notable differences Canadian fair dealing and US fair use are remarkably convergent. If the lecture provision is not applicable, and we must depend on fair dealing, we are no further ahead than if we relied on fair use. I am concerned that this proposal may be nothing more than passing the buck to the Canadian legal system. Eclecticology - the offended (talk) 07:59, 20 October 2009 (UTC)

This is a misconception: fair dealing does not allow full reproduction, and is in fact explicitly prohibited on Wikisource. (Even if this were not a problem, fair dealing would not confer any of the other rights required by Wikisource.) --Piet Delport (talk) 09:35, 20 October 2009 (UTC)

Actual manifestos, perhaps. Tagging a speech as a manifesto "just because I want it on Wikisource" is the sort of thing that will cause legal issues for the foundation. We cannot take a liberal view towards manifestos, and we shouldn't take a liberal view to manifestos because the {{PD-Manifesto}} template, as far as I understand, has absolutely no legal backing whatsoever. Jude (talk) 22:32, 19 October 2009 (UTC)

I think that is right--Lookatthis (talk) 00:07, 20 October 2009 (UTC)

The view that "manifesti" will cause legal issues for the foundation is speculation and urban legend as credible as the belief that the sewers of New York City are full of alligators. I can't say that I like the term "manifesto", and I do have concerns about its imprecision and lack of clear legal backing. Maybe the place to start is with a clear definition of what we mean with that word. This is not a simple question of "wanting it on Wikisource." Copyright law does not exist in a vacuum, and needs to be balanced by other considerations, such as the public interest. Copyright in common law countries is historically an economic right; this is also reflected in the fair use factor about the effect on a work's market. Works that could receive the "manifesto" label are largely political in nature — a politician of the day speaking on a current issue. Is it in the public interest to have a politician's words so tied in copyright knots that the transparency required for accountability is thereby so severely hampered. There is an element of irony in the notion that Sarah Palin would need to depend on a freer Canadian law to have her words properly reported. Eclecticology - the offended (talk) 07:59, 20 October 2009 (UTC)

I don't appreciate my concerns being compared to urban legends. If we're going to go down the route of name calling and rude comments, then I think this discussion is a moot. Jude (talk) 10:04, 20 October 2009 (UTC)

I don't see how you can confuse a statement that something is an urban legend with a comparison. There was in fact neither name calling nor rude comments. Lighten up! Eclecticology - the offended (talk) 04:13, 22 October 2009 (UTC)

The loopholes for "public interest" in copyright law are called fair use. If Palin challenged the use of her speech as part of a manifesto from an extreme right-wing group on copyright grounds, she'd probably win; thus the speech isn't public domain.--Prosfilaes (talk) 23:14, 4 November 2009 (UTC)

This has nothing to do with "loopholes", nor is the discussion advanced by attempting to conflate public interest with fair use. Neither does the applicability of fair use or public interest imply public domain. Who's arguing that? A document whose publication is in the public interest may or may not pass the fair use tests. Public interest in the present context is about the right of the public to be correctly informed about the pronouncements of major political figures, free of political spin. This allows the public to make informed decisions. It is conceivable that this could apply to some other speakers, but I'm not yet ready to make a case for them. Eclecticology - the offended (talk) 08:28, 6 November 2009 (UTC)

In the US copyright law, public interest reuse falls under fair use. There's no right to quote in full the text of major political figures; if we want information about The Audacity of Hope, we have to provide a non-derivative summary and explanation, not the text of the book.--Prosfilaes (talk) 01:50, 7 November 2009 (UTC)

Where in the Copyright Act does it mention Public interest? But if people are going to fall for your conflation there's not much that can be done about it. And why bring up The Audacity of Hope as a straw man? We were talking about speeches; books were never a part of the discussion before this. If there is no right to accurately report political speeches how can anyone be sure that "a non-derivative summary and explanation" is accurate? Eclecticology - the offended (talk) 08:23, 7 November 2009 (UTC)

If it doesn't mention public interest in the copyright act, where are you getting your legal justification to do this? Why is reproducing polished bits of propaganda exactly more important than reproducing books and reports? There's a lot of things you have no right to exactly copy; we know that non-derivative summaries and explanations are accurate because of our trust in the source, and if we have concerns, we compare several sources. And again; Free content, not we can post it. There's lots of folding, spindling and mutilating that Free content demands that aren't in the public interest.--Prosfilaes (talk) 13:40, 7 November 2009 (UTC)

Definitely no go

Eclecticology is right: what 32.2 allows is to "make or publish, for the purposes of news reporting or news summary, a report of a lecture given in public, or an address of a political nature given at a public meeting", which

does not equate the complete text, and
does not permit the other rights also required by Wikisource's free content definition, beyond just publication (that is, modification and exploitation by anyone, in any form, and for any purpose)

It certainly does not make the work public domain, as the use of a PD-* template would suggest. --Piet Delport (talk) 09:15, 20 October 2009 (UTC)

In which case, we need to consider each and every work that is currently tagged PD-Manifesto. I have already said before that I believe each work with this tag should have a detailed rationale. Those for which a detailed rationale cannot be provided should be deleted. Jude (talk) 10:10, 20 October 2009 (UTC)

Wikisource requires cc-by-sa-3.0 and GFDL, so reproducing the entire copyright-restricted work to claim "fair" use is impractical and thus forbidden, but Wikilivres just requires any permission to post in Canada, even if non-commercial and non-derivative. Most speeches and manifestos are unlikely getting Wikipedia articles, so perhaps making or publishing for the purposes of news reporting or news summary is possible with a short introduction in the Wikilivres header, maybe combined with Canadian fair dealing while the activities of Wikilivres are strictly non-commercial while not promising that downstream users may commercially copy everything. US fair use and Canadian fair dealing have no clear boundaries with copyright infringement regarding how much may be legally quoted. To clear this matter, we should review the Copyright Act of Canada carefully. Even if moving PD-manifesto works to Canadian Wikilivres is not feasible, many can be found on the web.--Jusjih (talk) 03:57, 22 October 2009 (UTC)

Yes, each and every work should be considered individually. "PD-Manifesto" is a problematic term. I would prefer a "w:Public interest" category, though I am aware of the vulnerability of that term to abuse. This would primarily refer to certain political speeches. Most people who make such speeches do so in the moment without any consideration of copyright, and they only receive it because of the broad automatic operation of the law. A detailed rationale would have the same effect, but if, for example, we considered replies to a State of the Union message it should not be necessary to go into detail for each of these. A single rationale for a class of speeches should suffice. Eclecticology - the offended (talk) 04:13, 22 October 2009 (UTC)

I think we should copy the speeches there, not move it. The latter would (presumably) mean deleting the speeches from Wikisource, which I don't think is necessary. --Ixfd64 (talk) 19:44, 11 November 2009 (UTC)

Wikisource doesn't discuss what Wikilivres does; if they or anyone else wants to copy the speeches, they are free to do so. But Wikilivres says "You are welcome to publish texts here if they cannot be accepted in Wikisource. Texts that can be accepted in Wikisource should be published there." So the discussion here is getting rid of a mess of content that's questionably Free content at best.--Prosfilaes (talk) 20:17, 11 November 2009 (UTC)

To respond to Ixfd64, Wikilivres never wants to duplicate anything acceptable here. As PD-manifesto is merely the presumed but not necessarily confirmed public domain, it is not really acceptable. M. L King, Jr's "I Have a Dream" is rejected here due to confirmed case law with no evidence of licensing compatible with GFDL and CC. Tagging {{PD-manifesto}} deprecated, I may want to start clearing the 100+ pages through WS:COPYVIO to discuss whether to keep them here (with compatible license), move to Wikilivres, or delete without move.--Jusjih (talk) 02:52, 14 November 2009 (UTC)

[edit] Mark as patrolled

I suggest that we make a change in the "Mark as patrolled" logic that will automatically "Mark as patrolled" when that edit has been reverted. I find a number of vandalism's that have been reverted but are still NOT "Mark as patrolled". Kind of a waste of patrolling when checking for un-patrolled edits if they have been reverted. Jeepday (talk) 01:00, 1 November 2009 (UTC)

If they are REVERTED by an admin using ROLLBACK, they are marked as patrolled. If someone uses UNDO, then they stay as are. Maybe this is the one reason why Rollbacker permission is useful. -- billinghurst (talk) 04:25, 1 November 2009 (UTC)

[edit] New bot proposal

Please see older thread at #Bot extraction of text already in DjVu file. I'd like to set up a pywikipedia bot to go through the nonexistent pages at Index:Dramatic_Moments_in_American_Diplomacy_(1918).djvu and fill them in using the djvutext.py script. This is the only task I plan for the bot for now. --LarryGilbert (talk) 19:48, 1 November 2009 (UTC)

I have now done a brief trial run of the bot and had it add four pages. I confess I overlooked the guideline to throttle the updates back to 1 per minute, but I hope the restricted length of the run excuses that. I will be more careful with that in the future. Please let me know here or on my talk page if there are any problems. --LarryGilbert (talk) 21:58, 4 November 2009 (UTC)

Looks fine. Can you test it to see what it does if it is faced with the same pages again and that it doesn't hang or get confusled.-- billinghurst (talk) 22:38, 4 November 2009 (UTC)

I did another run using the same range of pages plus one. As expected, the bot skipped over the pages where text already existed, adding only the single new page. On this run, I neglected to run login.py first to have the bot log in to its account. I was asked for a password when I started up the bot, so I expected that it would log in at that point, but apparently it didn't (see history for Page:Dramatic Moments in American Diplomacy (1918).djvu/121). I take this to be a bug in the pywikipedia code, so I will have to take care to run login.py before any run of the bot. --LarryGilbert (talk) 01:58, 5 November 2009 (UTC)

If the bot was posting identical text over the top, MediaWiki would have treated it as a null edit, and it would look like no edit was made. You should apply some fixes to one of those pages, then run the bot over it again, and see if the bot reverts those fixes. Hesperian 03:02, 5 November 2009 (UTC)

I proofed Page:Dramatic Moments in American Diplomacy (1918).djvu/117 and ran the bot again with the same range of pages as the last run (the page I edited was the first in that range). It recognized that all five pages had text and skipped over them. --LarryGilbert (talk) 05:23, 5 November 2009 (UTC)

I ran djvutext.py as Schlep once more. I just had it add 4 more pages. All looks well from here. --LarryGilbert (talk) 18:53, 9 November 2009 (UTC)

I still don't understand why it is desirable to post uncorrected OCR, when the OCR is preloaded when you edit the page for the first time. Posting OCR doesn't help, and arguably it slows us down by giving us an extra link to click in order to edit the page. Hesperian 23:27, 4 November 2009 (UTC)

In this case, there was uncorrected OCR text already existing for this book, no better than what is in the DjVu file; in fact, I suspect the original uploader just took the text straight out of the same DjVu file and uploaded it as one big long page (this at a time when the ProofreadPage extension didn't exist). Replacing the existing text with text divided across the Page namespace is effectively making an improvement. --LarryGilbert (talk) 00:25, 5 November 2009 (UTC)

"I still don't understand why it is desirable to post uncorrected OCR, when the OCR is preloaded when you edit the page for the first time.", because that way we can set up a text using the PAGEs; even if it's not corrected. A badly-parsed text is better than no text at all, for the next 18 months until it gets proofread. Sherurcij ^{Collaboration of the Week: Author:Khwaja Kamal-ud-Din.} 00:38, 5 November 2009 (UTC)

I agree with Sherurcij. A further benefit of having even the raw OCR text online is that it enables semi-automated proofing and correction of the OCR’ed text (as User:TarmstroBot is presently doing with the United States Statutes at Large), leaving less work for human editors when they do eventually turn their attention to the page. Tarmstro99 (talk) 01:34, 5 November 2009 (UTC)

After several runs of the bot, I'm feeling confident that it's doing what it's supposed to do. Could that account be given a bot flag, or is that still premature? --LarryGilbert (talk) 06:49, 12 November 2009 (UTC)

I've granted its flag. There was no opposition and after almost two weeks.—Zhaladshar ^(Talk) 14:28, 12 November 2009 (UTC)

Thank you! --LarryGilbert (talk) 01:22, 13 November 2009 (UTC)

[edit] {{Header}} and Scans

I would like to propose that we look to add (yet) another field to {{header}} that provides a direct link to the relevant image file Index: page. Tentatively call the field | scan = though I could be convinced to call it a number of things. read more ...

[edit] Remote nomination of English texts at Canadian Wikilivres

In addition to my initiative to discuss the moving of speeches tagged as "PD-manifesto" to Canadian Wikilivres since 15 October 2009, I would also like to propose allowing users right here to remotely nominate deletion of English texts at Canadian Wikilivres because Wikilivres pages, including Wikilivres:Wikilivres:Possible_copyright_violations and Wikilivres:Wikilivres:Delete corresponding to our WS:COPYVIO and WS:DEL, forbid IP edits without logging in with usernames after excessive vandalism. Unless exception can be allowed there, I consider allowing remote control possibly needed to discuss if any English texts at Canadian Wikilivres should be deleted. Even if exception is granted there, I see 1,506 registered users, of which 10 (or 0.66%) have Sysops rights, with unknown number of "active" users, so I doubt if sufficient community exists. In case a work tagged PD-manifesto here is moved there but found without any permission to reproduce, remote control can discuss. Please discuss if we should start my proposed remote control as I also plans to propose this at Chinese Wikisource due to extremely limited Chinese users at Wikilivres.--Jusjih (talk) 03:57, 14 November 2009 (UTC)

I'm uncomfortable with entangling the two, for legal reasons and because it makes things more complex. They run on different copyright laws and policy than we do and it would be confusing to handle both. Also, it would be help Wikilivres itself if they did this instead of depending on us; figure out how to get the sysops and get things done.--Prosfilaes (talk) 04:11, 14 November 2009 (UTC)

If no consensus to do this here, I am willing to close this discussion, but I am waiting for Wikilivres response. For English pages, If anything hosted there was unacceptable here but is now acceptable here with evidence, where should the request to move the page in be posted? Perhaps there, but until any change, only if logged in with username. After all, I would like to ask any users interested in Wikilivres, especially administrators, to consider registering usernames there, before yours are already taken by someone else. User:Yann is the webmaster, bureaucrat, and checkuser there. Even if you are not interested in editing there, all nine administrators including myself speak English with different skill levels, then whether something should be deleted there can be decided with limited comments.--Jusjih (talk) 02:07, 15 November 2009 (UTC)

Wikilivres:Wikilivres:Community_Portal/en#Allowing IPs to edit deletion requests? reports that exceptionally allowing IPs to edit its deletion request is not feasible, so once again, say you do not consider remote deletion nomination feasible here, please consider registering Wikilivres usernames before someone else takes yours.--Jusjih (talk) 04:32, 16 November 2009 (UTC)

[edit] Flagging obscure words, names, etc. for further research

I was working on the proofread of the month, and on a page from the Transactions of the Geological Society I found an interesting word: "contre." It's so interesting that I can't find a reference to it in the OED, even though it seems plainly to be in English usage here. It occurred to me that it might be nice to have a special template for flagging obscure words, phrases, names, or what have you; this would allow making them available in one spot for interested parties to see whether they can find more information on them, and if necessary add that information to one of the Wikimedia projects. Good idea or a waste of time? --LarryGilbert (talk) 19:17, 14 November 2009 (UTC)

I cheat. I wikilink to wikt:, and if it doesn't exist, I create the request there, and then add in the page reference so that they can find it and utilise it. Then I run away very quickly.

-- billinghurst (talk) 23:09, 14 November 2009 (UTC)

[edit] Other discussions

[edit] Nolo's Patent, Copyright, and Trademark Blog

Came across this while researching a copyright topic. --❨Ṩtruthious ℬandersnatch❩ 06:00, 16 October 2009 (UTC)

[edit] Video transcripts

Apparently, Commons is going to start doing transcripts on the audio of videos. It's a tech thing, so the feature is inevitable and who knows when anyone is going to start working out where to put the metadata and the rules on translations, much less working with us on it.--Prosfilaes (talk) 00:30, 10 November 2009 (UTC)

[edit] Questions

[edit] Dynamic Page List

Could we install the DynamicPageList extension? mw:Extension:DynamicPageList (Wikimedia) Arlen22 (talk) 19:13, 14 September 2009 (UTC)

Can you explain how you would see it used at WS, specific features, and the perceived benefits, what support may be needed on an ongoing basis, etc.-- billinghurst (talk) 09:45, 21 October 2009 (UTC)

I don't know about support, I know it is used on Wikibooks and Wikinews to provide a dynamic listing of pages in a certain category. Arlen22 (talk) 19:04, 21 October 2009 (UTC)

[edit] Question - Copyrights - The Way of a Man with a Maid

I was unable to find an answer on this site and through the internet. Since the author of The Way of a Man with a Maid http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Way_of_a_Man_with_a_Maid has remained anonymous for some time now, is this story copyright-free?

Also, is it not possible for all copyright status to stories and publications be disclosed on this site? Can't we make this mandatory prior to listing? This way we will all know if a story/publication is in the public domain or not? —unsigned comment by 76.64.97.184 (talk) .

Hah, told you people come for the erotica. Anyways, the story was published at least by 1908, so it is Public Domain, copyright-free, yours to do with as you will as though it were in your own snuggery. Sherurcij ^{Collaboration of the Week: Author:Carl Linnaeus.} 04:25, 25 September 2009 (UTC)

Our works should contain a copyright notice at the base of the page which relates to US copyright, as this does. We cannot cover every countries copyright at the end of each document, so for anonymous works you will need to check your countries laws. -- billinghurst (talk) 05:25, 25 September 2009 (UTC)

It would be nice if there were some basic source data, though; where was it published and when? Right now, all it says is pre-1923.--Prosfilaes (talk) 01:55, 26 September 2009 (UTC)

Can anything at all, regardless of its content, be put on Wikisource, if a copyright does not prevent it? Here we have a story where a man glorifies rape and torture, saying women might protest, but they'll be enjoying it and thank you for it once you have raped them. Can someone upload hate literature promoting the discrimination against a certain religion or race, and encourage violence against them? Or is it only the hatred and violence against women that is tolerable? Where are the rules listed at? I don't see it on the main page or anywhere. Dream Focus (talk) 17:19, 15 October 2009 (UTC)

Only hatred and violence against women is acceptable. No, no, I'm kidding of course. We do not censor what we host, you are free to upload hate literature that is free of copyright restrictions and notable. In fact, we have Wikisource:Ku Klux Klan, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion and similar works. The only times I have halted myself personally are with works advocating (rather than detailing) the sexual abuse of children, since they would put me in legal jeopardy for distributing them in my home country (But works like The Sexual Life of the Child do not advocate child sexuality, they merely discuss it in a scholastic context). If you or somebody else wanted to upload them, WS would almost certainly host them. (Free speech laws are a lot stronger in the country where the servers are located, than where I live). We are a library, we provide what history has provided us. And we probably hold close to the Wilde maxim "The books the world judges obscene, are the books that show the world its own shame". Sherurcij ^{Collaboration of the Week: Author:David Livingstone.} 18:15, 15 October 2009 (UTC)

There's no formal notability guidelines, and notability as a guideline at all is a bit controversial. Wikisource:What Wikisource includes is the inclusion guidelines; most notably the emphasis is on earlier works, and modern self-published works are excluded. I suspect most of us would be impatient with people wanting to upload their own racist rantings, but we have a number of historical ones. As for discrimination against a certain religion: are you not familiar with the fact that most branches of Christianity call for the annihilation of all non-Christian religions by conversion? That's a huge volume of popular text you're asking for us to exclude. [1] you argue that it's about how people use the text, to which I respond that the Bible, the works of the Popes, the writings of Martin Luther, Mohammed, etc., have a lot of non-historical readers and a lot of people who label part or all of those texts as encouraging hatred against women, and I suspect a lot more people taking action on their readings then the erotica we include. You also talk about most people who donate to the Wikimedia Foundation; I think most of them are familiar with w:WP:CENSORED and the frankness of Wikipedia's articles on sex, and would understand that Wikisource, as a library, would try to be similarly comprehensive. There's also a danger in that argument, in that you don't want to give every person who tosses a few bucks your way control over what you post, and worrying about hypothetical donaters can be paralyzing. The best is to set up clear policy and let people donate if they find that acceptable. Like about anything at Wikimedia, it's not set in stone, but most projects accept the basic concepts of w:WP:CENSORED, including this one.--Prosfilaes (talk) 00:57, 16 October 2009 (UTC)

The Alt Sex Stories Text Repository probably adds more erotic text to their archive every year than was published before 1923, if not all history, and a lot of it isn't very nice. Stopping Wikisource, an Internet library, from publishing historically published erotic works isn't going to change people's masturbation habits one bit; it's still going to exist out there, and they were never coming to Wikisource in the first place.--74.104.24.216 00:23, 16 October 2009 (UTC)

Well, I certainly read "coming to Wikisource" in a new light...Sherurcij ^{Collaboration of the Week: Author:David Livingstone.} 00:25, 16 October 2009 (UTC)

Those who would be influenced by religious text for violence, will be converted by the weekly brainwashing ceremonies their parents or others take them to. Thus the only people looking up such things here, are those who wish to learn more about it. Historical figures, and things of an educational value should be allowed. But for things that have no value whatsoever except fictional entertainment, there should be some simple rules, such as, whatever people like to read is fine, if published long enough ago so not in copyright, unless it glorifies kidnapping, torture, brainwashing, and rape of women, showing all the young perverts out there that it is alright to do so, she'll enjoy it and thank you later, and keep coming back for more. I'll take my suggestion to the proper policy discussing page though. Dream Focus (talk) 09:49, 16 October 2009 (UTC)

[2] here is where the discussion should be continued. Dream Focus (talk) 10:06, 16 October 2009 (UTC)

Shall we delete Titus Andronicus on those standards as well? Look, we cannot/doNot/willNot delete texts because somebody finds them unsavoury. We have works by Author:Adolf Hitler, Author:Osama bin Laden and Author:Marquis de Sade. If somebody wants to add the w:NAMBLA constitution, they're welcome to do so - we are a collection of primary sources, not a collection of bedtime stories for your 7-year old. Sherurcij ^{Collaboration of the Week: Author:David Livingstone.} 12:44, 16 October 2009 (UTC)

[edit] Problems with new update

The latest code update seems to have introduced a serious problem with respect to flowing paragraphs across pages. If I'm not much mistaken, the problem is that, on any page saved since the update, a carriage return is forced at the end of a page. Thus any transclusion page that uses a separate line for each {{page}} call (i.e. most of them) will produce blocks of transcluded text separated by two successive carriage returns, resulting in an unwanted paragraph break at each page break.

For an example, see A specimen of the botany of New Holland/Billardiera scandens. I have edited page 3, as a result of which there is an unwanted paragraph break at the start of page 4.

It is not possible to fix this by deleting the trailing carriage return; the carriage return will always be restored when the page is saved. I suppose it could be fixed by pulling all the {{page}} template calls onto the same line, but this is a hideous solution. I'm not sure if the <page> tag will fix this, but even if it does I think forcing a trailing carriage return is a problem.

Hesperian 05:41, 25 September 2009 (UTC)

thanks for pointing it; I'll try to fix it today. in the meantime the problem is not present with 'pages' ThomasV (talk) 06:45, 25 September 2009 (UTC)

I successfully have <pages> work its new nomenclature (from PotM), though see that the [RC] isn't showing the Page: ns edits from today. -- billinghurst (talk) 08:10, 25 September 2009 (UTC)

Do you or does anyone else know if it is possible to display page numbers like the {{page}} template does; and if so, does it automatically draw the numbering from the <pagelist> attributes on the index page, or must they be added independently? Hesperian 13:12, 25 September 2009 (UTC)

I see that this is supposed to be possible—each page transclusion is supposed to post a call to MediaWiki:Proofreadpage pagenum template—but this seems not to be working; or perhaps the template is being called but the code is wrong. Hesperian 13:12, 25 September 2009 (UTC)

Gosh, the page numbers can be see on the edit page of Notes on the churches in the counties of Kent, Sussex, and Surrey/Supplement/Kent but do not appear on the display page. Most bizarre, these are present on the preview page while the page is loading, but disappear once the page is loaded. This is spooky. Hesperian 13:12, 25 September 2009 (UTC)

page numbers are ok. you just need to click on 'links to scans' in the margin. (I guess this should be renamed to 'page numbers')

apparently the cookie that stores whether page numbers should be visible or hidden is not the same on edit preview and normal display; this probably explains the confusion.

concerning that extra carriage return, the fix is ready and I am just waiting for brion to show up and deploy it. all the pages edited in the meantime will have that unwanted CR; I am very sorry about it ThomasV (talk) 13:25, 25 September 2009 (UTC)

Ah, yes, I see. Thanks.

There's no need to apologize. We'll take our lumps. Hesperian 13:36, 25 September 2009 (UTC)

Has the fix been deployed yet? I'm still finding a CR inserted between the page body and the footer when I save. - Htonl (talk) 11:50, 27 September 2009 (UTC)

no, it has not. don't worry too much about it; I can catch it up later with a robot. ThomasV (talk) 11:58, 27 September 2009 (UTC)

We've noticed the new update also at the swedish wikisource.

There was a trouble with the last version in the page-namespace, since it was possible to edit by clicking on [redigera] (edit) in the the page, and the page became strange when saving. We solved that by adding a "NOEDITSECTION" in {{PageQuality}}. That does not help any longer, since the template no longer is in use. Therefor the trouble has been reintroduced.

Is there any other way to solve this in the new version? It's not a problem for us, who has been editing proofreading-pages some time. But it's a problem when newbies are introduced.

And Yes, I can edit MediaWiki-namnspace if that's required... -- Lavallen (talk) 16:28, 25 September 2009 (UTC)

~~I will fix the noeditsection thing; in the meantime it is possible to add it to Mediawiki:Proofreadpage_default_header ThomasV (talk) 17:34, 25 September 2009 (UTC)~~

modifying the css is actually better : .ns-104 .editsection { visibility:hidden; } ThomasV (talk) 18:21, 25 September 2009 (UTC)

".ns-104.editsection { visibility:hidden; }" will work even better... -- Lavallen (talk) 18:34, 26 September 2009 (UTC)

I sometimes get that when I BACK into an edit page, make changes and re-edit so had put it down to my editing. I either undo to the previous edit or manually just delete the additional page info. Or I am mistaking what you are saying

he means something slightly else, but with similar result; I think the problem you describe does not occur anymore with the new version. ThomasV (talk) 17:36, 25 September 2009 (UTC)

The carriage return creates large problems on no:WS, see for instance no:Jesus Messias/VIII , where the first paragraph of pages 109 and 118 are treated and presented as if they were code, and not text (and similarly in chapter IX, p. 123). As you can see, the result of this problem is highly unattractive. V85 (talk) 09:53, 2 October 2009 (UTC)

Yes, that problem is occurring because no:Mal:Sider has a space in between each call to no:Mal:Side. If you were to convert all those spaces to line breaks, you would have our problem instead of the problem you have. But the fact that your problem only occurs after the first {{Side}} call suggests that it could perhaps be fixed by tweaking {{Sider}}. Hesperian 12:21, 2 October 2009 (UTC)

ok the fix has been activated. pages that have been edited during the last 2 weeks have an unwanted \n and they will need a null-edit (I will write a robot for that). I also used this opportunity to add a search button to Special:IndexPages ThomasV (talk) 20:07, 7 October 2009 (UTC)

NEAT! Is there a means to be able to transclude a search result into a project page? My example is this result -- billinghurst (talk) 23:31, 7 October 2009 (UTC)

[edit] Rollback?

I am not sure if it has ever been proposed before, but has the community ever considered adding the rollback group? It would be very beneficial in fighting vandals. Thoughts? Maximillion Pegasus (talk) 00:03, 27 September 2009 (UTC)

As we are (still) a fairly tight-knit community, where each major contributor/admin knows each of the other major contributors/admins, we are quite liberal in simply appointing anybody who we'd trust with Rollback, to full Admin status :) Personally, I think this fact helps maintain our pleasant atmosphere, since it avoids creating "ranks" where drama and squabbling break out and people begin grabbing their webcam and a ruler to prove who has the largest ePenis. Sherurcij ^{Collaboration of the Week: Author:Carl Linnaeus.} 16:19, 27 September 2009 (UTC)

Ah, well, I see. Thanks :) Maximillion Pegasus (talk) 01:37, 28 September 2009 (UTC)

Classy words Sherurcij, and goes well with your eErotica. <laugh> So, in short I agree, less competition here, be clueful, be trusted, privileges granted. We do have a review process, see Wikisource:Adminship. That said, if there was a member of the community who just wanted to take the one step, and was passionate, I am sure that we would consider it. To this point it just hasn't been necessary, though am prepared to listen to ideas. -- billinghurst (talk) 08:12, 29 September 2009 (UTC)

I agree, for what it's worth. Vandalism isn't particularly prevalent here, and we've traditionally been quite liberal in giving out adminship. —Anonymous Dissident^Talk 14:08, 5 October 2009 (UTC)

[edit] refactored main page

Hi. I've done a refactor of the main page, including the header up top. This was mostly about getting all of the styling into a style sheet instead hard-coding it inline. This will centralize common stuff and allow future tweaks to be more easily managed. Because of the css caching, I've reverted my edits for a few days until people have the updated Common.css loaded. How long do folks think this needs to be? The changes to MediaWiki:Common.css are this scary diff and the changes to {{Main Page header}} and Main Page are the right sides of these: [3] [4]. I've also switched to proper wiki-text heading elements for semantic reasons. An extra I did restyles any embedded prettytables to use the same colors as the header; light blue, instead of grays.

Please stay off these pages so that I can bring the changes back easily, ok? Open to suggestions, of course. Cheers, Jack Merridew 09:20, 29 September 2009 (UTC)

Time? Something to suit your timetable. By the weekend should be enough. We can do an announcement here too. billinghurst (talk)

Sounds about right. I had three days in mind. This is a first step; I'd like to see the tables go, next. Cheers, Jack Merridew 13:36, 29 September 2009 (UTC)

Interesting as I wanted them to go first. However, that is probably just selfishness for the {{PotM}}. :-) billinghurst (talk) 14:54, 29 September 2009 (UTC)

I'm talking about the tables wrapped around the individual modules; they'll become divs in the next iteration ;) Cheers, Jack Merridew 08:47, 30 September 2009 (UTC) (who's back to hyper-busy)

I just took this set of changes live. Clear your cache, if you've not done so since earlier this week. Cheers, Jack Merridew 10:28, 4 October 2009 (UTC)

Comment: The Main Page from the outward appearance looks pretty much the same, though the coding is of course different. What is the advantage to the change? Cirt (talk) 23:47, 5 October 2009 (UTC)

[edit] Overriding Cover Image Properties on Index Pages

This edit to MediaWiki:Proofreadpage index template hard-codes several parameters into the cover image that is displayed on Index: pages, including size and border parameters. Doing so overrides the options that users may ordinarily specify when referencing images on the site, and causes a substantial number of existing Index: pages to display incorrectly. (Basically, any image reference that includes a size parameter larger than the now hard-coded value of 150px will display incorrectly; the image will be scaled to whatever size the size parameter indicates, but only the upper-left-most 150px-by-220px region of that scaled-down version will be displayed on the Index: page.)

Can this be fixed so that user-selected size and border parameters are still applied as written? I do not want to simply revert the edit to MediaWiki:Proofreadpage index template in case it is doing other things that are important to preserve (template syntax isn’t my forte), but it would be nice to have the old behavior back. Tarmstro99 (talk) 17:42, 30 September 2009 (UTC)

Could we delete the hardcoded table width ("width:150px;height:220px;") and change the "160px" to "frameless" so that default user thumb size preferences are honoured? Like this:[5]? Hesperian 00:02, 9 October 2009 (UTC)

Hearing no objection, I’ll give that a try. Tarmstro99 (talk) 16:44, 20 October 2009 (UTC)

Quirky at Index:Dictionary of National Biography volume 58.djvu at this point.-- billinghurst (talk) 20:40, 20 October 2009 (UTC)

Looks okay to me; what are you seeing? Hesperian 23:34, 20 October 2009 (UTC)

Spare image space to the right of the image (image left justified). Image space isn't conforming to the image frame, similar at Index:Notes on the churches in the counties of Kent, Sussex, and Surrey.djvu. -- billinghurst (talk) 09:12, 21 October 2009 (UTC)

[edit] Unified login question

I'd like to set up a unified login across Wikimedia projects. Wikisource is the one and only project in which my username is "Pete Forsyth" rather than "Peteforsyth". It's my understanding that changing that here is a good step to take before applying for UL; however, I'm unsure of the process for doing that.

Can anybody advise? Is there a bureaucrats' noticeboard or something I should be aware of? Thanks for any guidance. -Pete (talk) 23:41, 30 September 2009 (UTC)

No, this is pretty much the right place. Shall I rename you to "Peteforsyth"?—Zhaladshar ^(Talk) 23:49, 30 September 2009 (UTC)

Please do -- thanks for the quick response! -Pete (talk) 00:10, 1 October 2009 (UTC)

Done.—Zhaladshar ^(Talk) 02:54, 1 October 2009 (UTC)

Thx :) -Pete (talk) 09:06, 1 October 2009 (UTC)

Hmmm, UL seems to be working oddly. When I log in somewhere, it says it's logging me in to multiple projects; but then when I go to a different project, I'm not logged in. Any idea what that's about? -67.160.165.194 15:00, 1 October 2009 (UTC)

I don't know what causes that. That happened to me for a while, too. Now it's fixed for my account.—Zhaladshar ^(Talk) 15:24, 1 October 2009 (UTC)

Me too. I suspect you need to reconfirm your pre-existing accounts with a login, then it should be automatic. Cygnis insignis (talk) 07:16, 2 October 2009 (UTC)

I think it has to do with the cookies. Using Firefox I have UL in all wikimedia-projects, but with IE it only works within a single group of project. -- Lavallen (talk) 15:46, 8 October 2009 (UTC)

[edit] Volunteers still needed

Hi all,
Although we soon will remove the centralnotice that is up, the Wikimedia Foundation is still looking for volunteers to serve as subject area experts or to sit on task forces that will study particular areas and make recommendations to the Foundation about its strategic plan. You may apply to serve on a task force or register your name as an expert in a specific area at http://volunteer.wikimedia.org.

The Foundation's strategy project is a year-long collaborative process which is hosted on the strategy wiki, at http://strategy.wikimedia.org. Your input is welcome (and greatly desired) there. When the task forces begin to meet, they will do their work transparently and on that wiki, and any member of the community may join fully in their work. This process is specifically designed to involve as many community members as possible.

Any questions can be addressed to me either on my talk page here or on the strategy wiki or by email to philippe at wikimedia.org.

I hope you'll consider joining us!

Philippe (talk) 01:59, 1 October 2009 (UTC)

[edit] A survey of English literature, 1780-1880, Volume 2

A survey of English literature, 1780-1880, Volume 2

Oliver Elton

Was just wondering if this would be in public domain by now and if I could add it to the database or not? Thank You more info on Google Books. Kxw (talk) 23:37, 1 October 2009 (UTC)

Sure; it was published in 1920 and thus is fair game. (If it will come up under Public Domain Only on Google Books, it's almost certainly acceptable for us.)--Prosfilaes (talk) 23:45, 1 October 2009 (UTC)

How do I add it with all the information like your style guide? Kxw (talk) 23:52, 1 October 2009 (UTC)

Replied on talk page. Cygnis insignis (talk) 07:41, 2 October 2009 (UTC)

[edit] Opera libretto

I would like to upload an opera libretto that is in German, and then have a collaborative project to translate it into English. Ideally the original German and the English should be displayed side-by-side, like in a booklet that comes with a CD, so that one could follow the translation while listening to the opera in German. (The German text is in the public domain, but the currently available translations are not. A CD version that I have does not include the libretto because the publisher apparently could not afford to license the copyrighted text. They actually say this in the back of the booklet.) I have looked here but I have not been able to figure out how I should do this. I have not yet found any examples of something like this. Thanks for any suggestions and/or links! --Robert.Allen (talk) 02:07, 4 October 2009 (UTC)

I would suggest first uploading the original version to the German wikisource; then finding some German speakers here and seeing if you can collaboratively get the first section done - if so, start a Wikiproject for it to help further your collaboration :) Sherurcij ^{Collaboration of the Week: Author:Carl Linnaeus.} 03:57, 4 October 2009 (UTC)

Also have a look at Wikisource:Translations. There is a interwiki matching technology that one of our developers has that is available, however, as Sherurcij says, it relies on having something in the deWS first. -- billinghurst (talk) 07:14, 4 October 2009 (UTC)

Will the German WS accept the libretto without any scans to back it up? Something in the back of my head tells them they'll just delete it. I personally don't see why we couldn't accept the German as well (in the case that the German WS won't take it), since we already have foreign texts in many of our national anthems and in Romance of the Three Kingdoms.—Zhaladshar ^(Talk) 13:36, 4 October 2009 (UTC)

Thanks for the link to Romance of the Three Kingdoms. That should be very helpful! --Robert.Allen (talk) 22:35, 5 October 2009 (UTC)

Could I create a DjVu (sp?) file of the German text and then put it up on the English WS for translation? The text comes from a Swiss web site. I could organize it into pages first, I seem to remember it is one or two very long web pages. --Robert.Allen (talk) 02:23, 5 October 2009 (UTC)

If the images are out of copyright, yes, though we load images to Commons:. Look at Help:DjVu files -- billinghurst (talk) 04:43, 5 October 2009 (UTC)

[edit] Noli Me Tangere

Hello. I am a new user in WikiSource. User:Billinghurst referred me to speak out here in Scriptorium (sounds like the library used by monks in Middle Aged Europe, if I am not mistaken) since WikiSource is not that large community like Wikipedia.

When I am beginning to write the article in the space Noli Me Tangere, I saw the notice that it was deleted in 2008 because of copyvio. Well, I want to make the article with a new start, but my recent searches in different archives in WikiSource, especially this Scriptorium discussion proved that writing Noli was problematic in the past (2008). They are arguing that the version was León Ma. Guerrero's, which was initially published (according to them) in 1961, and not qualifies Philippine copyright laws.

The problem is, Noli Me Tangere is originally in Spanish. WikiSource, I think accepts English right now. Charles Derbyshire had the first translation in English, and that was in 1912. Project Gutenberg has declared the English translation as public. If I shall re-write the article again, will I the same problem arise? Thanks for the help.--JL 09 (talk) 12:49, 4 October 2009 (UTC)

No. Both the original work and the translation you are doing were published before 1923, putting them out of copyright here in the U.S. There should be no problems if you added Derbyshire's translation.—Zhaladshar ^(Talk) 13:33, 4 October 2009 (UTC)

Thanks for the information. Maybe the previous addition in 2008, was copy-pasted from 1960s edition, which is before 1923.--JL 09 (talk) 14:01, 4 October 2009 (UTC)

[edit] SDrewthbot and author "fixes"

I've been looking at some of the changes the bot's making and I'm not entirely happy, but I don't know the details behind the headers. [6] delinks Federal Communications Commission which is unquestionably wrong, and I felt the effects of [7], changing the author name from the version used on the book and removing the illustrator from the authors field to the notes, was suboptimal. What's the goal here, and do others agree with my esthetic opinions?--Prosfilaes (talk) 15:36, 6 October 2009 (UTC)

For the first edit, I must say I'm relatively impartial. I've never liked the decision to have non-people author pages, but since the community has moved to that direction, I won't say the edit was a good one. For the second edit, though, I fully support. The author parameter should only be for authors; illustrators, translators, editors, etc., I feel have no place in that field. If we want to put that information in the actual header (which I do believe is a good idea) they should be given their own parameters (like | illustrator = ) so that we can process it as (pseudo) metadata and can add automatic categories (e.g. Category:Illustrated works) based on the existence of those fields.—Zhaladshar ^(Talk) 16:18, 6 October 2009 (UTC)

So what about expanding the author's name to its full form instead of what was on the book in the second edit? In the first case, I wouldn't be surprised if every word in the letter was written by some committee in the FCC and only signed by the person we list as author, so I'm uncomfortable just listing it under one person's name.--Prosfilaes (talk) 17:07, 6 October 2009 (UTC)

I weakly agree on the second point, I noticed a "Lev Tolstoi" changed to "Leo Tolstoy" earlier on a work I'd added with the "actual printed name" of the author - but didn't care enough to revert it back to "Lev Tolstoi". But when we can use the name as it appeared on the book - I support that. But not 100%. Sherurcij ^{Collaboration of the Week: Author:Carl Linnaeus.} 17:16, 6 October 2009 (UTC)

I don't believe it's the job of the header template to present the information that is specific to a particular work. If we want to use a variant of the author's name (such as "Lev Tolstoi" instead of "Leo Tolstoy") that should be done in the non-header portion. I think author names added into the header should be the name for which we have a (non-redirect) page created serving as an author page. (Note, I'm not married to this idea and won't strongly argue for it, as we can use redirects liberally to get things done. The thing I will argue for, is that attribution be in the right place--e.g., editors and illustrators not in the author parameter.)—Zhaladshar ^(Talk) 19:30, 6 October 2009 (UTC)

The idea of an |illustrator= parameter was floated In April without any disagreement - I think if anybody can take the time to insert it then we'll be glad to have it. Sherurcij ^{Collaboration of the Week: Author:David Livingstone.} 19:49, 6 October 2009 (UTC)

How should it be presented? We don't have a lot of real estate in the header, and with translators and authors, we chew it up quickly. Do we want it to say something like "by AUTHOR, illustrated by ILLUSTRATOR and translated by TRANSLATOR"? (Of course, assuming that both of those fields exist--otherwise "by AUTHOR, illustrated by ILLUSTRATOR" would work fine.) Or is there a better way of going about it?—Zhaladshar ^(Talk) 22:19, 9 October 2009 (UTC)

I would think that it would be possible to put the extra information so that it is reproduced as the first components of the Notes field. That is, create separate and distinct fields as required, and have them display distinctly formatted as the first components of Notes. It keeps the Header component more consistent; does not upset existing formatting, and gives scope for future expansion. -- billinghurst (talk) 01:24, 10 October 2009 (UTC)

First things first. A decision needs to be made here, to what extent {{header}} is intended to carry metadata, and to what extent it is intended to render an attractive header. Personally I think the main purpose is the latter, and therefore we should be somewhat free to pick and choose what we put in the header and what we omit. e.g. whether we mention the illustrator in the header should depends upon how important the illustrations are to the work: in some works the illustrations are more important than the text. I would be opposed to a header that refused to mention the illustrator alongside the author, no matter how important they are to the work; and I would also be opposed to a header that insists on mentioning the illustrator alongside the author, even when they are of no importance to the work. Hesperian 02:32, 10 October 2009 (UTC)

Background

I am currently working through a maintenance category that is set aside to find where we are using author hacks, and with ~14k pages listed, it was non-functional to be able to scan for maintenance tasks. Basic work is to churn through and do a simple workthrough, and push works to override author and then clean that up as required. In the author field, I have also seen that there are wikilinks to WP pages especially for organisations, and some of those I have left, WP-linked, though now with override author. To be followed-up when I get to override_author.

Comment

We have three basic pages that cover the matters raised which I have utilised when slowing churning through with the bot

Authors

Guidance is given that natural authors use the AUTHOR field and others should not be linked and have OVERRIDE_AUTHOR, example given is UK Parliament, and I have left all US Congress links. I would propose that such pages would be better collated under Wikisource: or similar. Worthy of a separate discussion, especially where various authors have produced books under the aegis of the British Museum, and UK Public Records Office for over a hundred years.
1. to the specific author question, I know not, and neither the bot nor its owner were wasn't about to start that argument, and if a concern then I would argue that either the work's or author's talk page is a more relevant place
There is a specific statement that authors are those who write books. If we want ILLUSTRATOR field, then I mind not either way. We should also consider COMPOSER as we have situations of music and lyrics. While we are at it a PUBLISHER field, etc. How long is this piece of string? The discussion is more than just the field per se, and also about how you want it listed, recorded, wikilinked or not
It is stated that fully expanded names are preferred, and where there is common usage for the author with initials to create a redirect. I can say that as we add authors, disambiguating these to full names is starting to raise its head, and I would prefer that if we are using initials, that they may be better specified in the body of the work as part of a reproduced title page.

Tolstoi

My fault, I missed that variation in those works between before and after pipe. Generally I leave fully expanded names as they are and create redirects as needed.

Anyway, I welcome the discussions and feedback on how to improve the work that I feed the bot. Though can I suggest that starting off as a criticism, or bringing in feelings of happiness, or values of unquestionable wrongness brings in a subjectivity. There is a lot of back of house maintenance and no-one really working on the tedious/curatorial, so if we can be positive and forward looking and thinking about fixes, rather than backward looking and critical, that would be fantastic. -- billinghurst (talk) 06:21, 7 October 2009 (UTC)

Several points bear commenting:
1. I have never felt that the "override author" parameter override was a good way of doing things. A simple and single symbol that could be used whenever and wherever an override was required, not just in headers, would be more efficient. "Override author" is awkward and counter-intuitive.
2. Corporate authors need a preferred place in the heading, and to be treated like any other author. In the opening example future users need to be aware that this is a government work and that copyrights are affected accordingly. While it is unlikely that the error will be made in the near term, there is a risk that letters of this sort will become detached from their encompassing work, and that the letter-writer will be treated as the copyright owner.
3. We need a publisher parameter. In the long term different editions will be identified by their publishers. Many works in the past have been separately published in London and New York with all the usual variations between British and American spelling. This has since become impractical in the general case, but most of these later works are still copyright protected anyway. A publisher parameter will also be useful when there is confusion between the corporate author and the publisher.
4. I support the notion that we should recognize supplementary authorship, but the various types of such people present an open-ended list. In All the Year Round Dickens (both father and son, and without distinguishing which) appeared with the phrase "conducted by". It would not make sense to have a separate parameter for each of these. Better a two part parameter where the first part shows the type of relation to the work (editor, illustrator, translator, etc.), and the second shows the name of the person. The parameter should be repeated freely as often as needed.
5. Full names should be preferred for author pages, thus "Lev Nikolayevitch Tolstoy" rather than simply "Lev Tolstoy" or "Leo Tolstoy". This is doubly important for authors who wrote in languages that must be transliterated. The header itself is not a part of the work; it is an artifact for linking that work with the rest of Wikisource. Author names as they appear on a title page vary considerably in time and place, and a preferred name form helps in linking things together. There will always be a place for showing the title-page form in the body of the page.
Eclecticology - the offended (talk) 17:51, 10 October 2009 (UTC)

[edit] Index page without and with Table of Contents

index without TOC and with TOC, can we remove the blank column when adding a TOC? Or should we use a layout similar to fr:Livre:Bulletin_de_la_société_géologique_de_France_-_Tome_1.djvu (layout provided by MediaWiki:Proofreadpage index template) Phe (talk) 10:20, 7 October 2009 (UTC)

I very much prefer the layout at fr:Livre:Bulletin de la société géologique de France - Tome 1.djvu, which wastes much less screen real estate. But I do not think it can be implemented here without further editing our own copy of MediaWiki:Proofreadpage index template, which I am personally nervous about doing. Tarmstro99 (talk) 14:15, 19 November 2009 (UTC)

[edit] New bugs

Hello, I find a new bug here: Special:Contributions/newbies (links to talk pages). I mentioned that on #wikimedia-tech Yann (talk) 20:55, 7 October 2009 (UTC)

I'm not understanding, from that page, the links to newbies talk pages work fine for me. -- billinghurst (talk) 23:32, 7 October 2009 (UTC)

[edit] Book Tool Issues and the Way to the Solution

Hi guys, we have had an open ticket on problems with our book tool for over 7 months. I have talked to the guys on #mediawiki and #pediapress about this issue and here is what they said we need to do to get this issue resolved. I could really use some help to get this bug going. This tool is so important to the project. With projects such as the WS:PotM we could start offering to print public domain text, but until this issue is resolved this is not possible. Anyways, the following is what we need:

Add a minimal example to the bug report. Tell what is happening and what you'd expect to happen.
If possible link a description which explains how this djvu stuff works. (They believe the way the templates and the transcluding work is causing the problem and it is also confusing)
Explain what templates might be involved and explain anything that helps to quickly understand the problem is helpful.

I got these questions from hejko from #pediapress. They are pretty much a direct quote. The bug can be found here at http://code.pediapress.com/wiki/ticket/508. Registration is required. Anyways, what do you guys think. Can you help with this? Thanks. --Mattwj2002 (talk) 18:03, 9 October 2009 (UTC)

I'd also like to point out that this bug also exists for pages using the <pages /> notation. It looks like there needs to be some kind of tie-in between ProofreadPage and the PDF book creator.—Zhaladshar ^(Talk) 22:16, 9 October 2009 (UTC)

[edit] Gutenberg and Wikisource

I format (.txt) files downloaded from Gutenberg, hyperlinking the chapter titles to recreate the table of contents, format and clean the text, paginate the documents for printing or onscreen reading. This, being one of my hobbies, I give copies to anyone for their reading enjoyment, in .txt .doc, .html or .pdf format.

I would like to contribute but, this being my start on this wiki, it would be best if I first join an ongoing project that requires additional work. This would help get the feel of the specific format requirements of this wiki, by analyzing previous contributions. Pointing me to the general direction would be greatly appreciated. Ineuw (talk) 19:41, 10 October 2009 (UTC)

Welcome welcome welcome. Now, I would happily steal you for the magnificent DNB and our project page is Wikisource:WikiProject_DNB, note though there are some other 'pretenders' who think that their projects are also worthwhile. [ducking shoes]. I would think that the best projects to be involved with are either Proofread of the Month or Contributor of the Week. We are an eclectic and (mostly) friendly bunch. Personal preference for PotM as there are always new things to try. Always feel welcome to also pop into the IRC channel #wikisource. -- billinghurst (talk) 00:26, 11 October 2009 (UTC)

If you're not familiar with DJVU texts WS:CotW is the better choice of the two; but if you do, POTM and Wikiproject:Popular Science are both great and could use your help. Glad to hear we have another "free access" advocate. Sherurcij ^{Collaboration of the Week: Author:David Livingstone.} 02:26, 11 October 2009 (UTC)

[edit] We need an award system on Wikisource

Hi guys, I noticed on Wikisource we have no form of awards. I propose that we add something like this Wikipedia:Awards. My personal favorite is WikiCookies. Anyways, what do you guys think? Is this a good idea, bad, otherwise? Please let me know. --Mattwj2002 (talk) 06:47, 11 October 2009 (UTC)

I'm typically opposed to the idea of "Barnstars" for example for the same reason as I'm opposed to Rollbackers and other things that lend themselves towards creating subconscious "cabals" and "factions" - things like adding a plate of cookies are great for our "Welcome" templates to show we don't take ourselves too seriously to newcomers...but after somebody's been here a month, I prefer the idea they're not rewarding people for doing things they like, or doing things to gain awards, etc. On WP for example, cookies, barnstars and similar templates lead to everyone displaying them on their userpage as a kind of "ePenis" as though it's a popularity contest...and while I can't say for certain that such "award systems" are the reason WP and WS are so different in atmosphere...I would be reticent to adopt WP policies on WS in most circumstances as I believe the less bureaucracy and infrastructure, the better. Sherurcij ^{Collaboration of the Week: Author:David Livingstone.} 17:52, 11 October 2009 (UTC)

I do have my little rubber stamp that I have been utilising for {{PotM}} contributors, though I see that it promotes the project, some of those works, and hopefully gives a smile to those who participated. -- billinghurst (talk) 23:14, 11 October 2009 (UTC)

That may be the solution. Let it happen, but don't create a "system" for it. Hesperian 23:52, 11 October 2009 (UTC)

My "solution" would be to adopt the wiki way (old-style) and allow spontaneous "awards" - why not? I don't think I've ever awarded a barnstar, since my style is a personal message of thanks when I feel so moved. The basic issue is not whether people's work should be recognised, but whether you need some kind of template to do that. This is an issue on which there should be legislation? Charles Matthews (talk) 10:18, 12 October 2009 (UTC)

I don't think we need a formalised system of awards, like most of the commentators have mentioned above; spontaneous thanks, or even a quick graphic put together and left on someone's talk page seems immensely more "rewarding" in a sense than a pre-compile barnstar applied cookie-cutter style whenever someone feels like it. So, in summary: Keep it as it is. If you want to give someone an award, do so; don't make it formalised or turn it into a policy, because I think that just removes any value whatsoever from an "award". Jude (talk) 10:46, 12 October 2009 (UTC)

The personal touch is always more meaningful than a templated picture that is as thrilling as one more toaster as a wedding gift. Linking your praise to a specific activity by the recipient shows him that you have actually looking favorably at his work, as in something like "I appreciate what you have been doing at [[ ... ]]. Keep up the good work." Eclecticology - the offended (talk) 17:47, 12 October 2009 (UTC)

[edit] Stale page link coloring on index page?

I recently finished proofreading Index:Scheme - An interpreter for extended lambda calculus.djvu, but a seemingly random selection of page links that used to be colored yellow have become red again. (Viewing the actual pages confirms that they are still proofread/yellow.)

I thought it might be a caching issue, but i have edited some of the pages in the mean time, and the problem seems to erratically persist. Does anyone know what's going on? --Piet Delport (talk) 00:24, 13 October 2009 (UTC)

This is a known issue; all we can tell you about it is at User talk:ThomasV#Another problem?. Hesperian 00:40, 13 October 2009 (UTC)

Ah, thank you for the pointer. I guess i'll wait for a fix; please let me know if i can assist in debugging in some way. --Piet Delport (talk) 01:43, 13 October 2009 (UTC)

I do know that a null edit of individual pages fixes the issue, and for me doing it with AWB was easiest, though somewhat manual. There is also the sporadic nature of Related changes that come and go, and again are fixed with a null edit of the Index: page.-- billinghurst (talk) 04:56, 13 October 2009 (UTC)

This problem got worse, not better, over this past weekend. Today a large number of pages in Index:United States Statutes at Large Volume 1.djvu that are in fact validated (such as this one), and which were showing up as green links last Friday, have reverted to the red “not-proofread” background on the index page (which, in the case of the above-cited example, means that the index is now more than a year behind the actual current page status). Problems of this sort really need to be ironed out before, not after, the site launches a special campaign to get users involved in validating pages; it makes us look foolish otherwise. The solution can’t just be “make null edits to the pages to update the status,” because even that fails to make the new status “stick” in the index (and certainly new users would have no reason to know that they must check back in at random intervals to “re-validate” a page they had previously marked as validated). Tarmstro99 (talk) 14:24, 9 November 2009 (UTC)

According to the Bug filed on Bugzilla, the problem is resolved. I would imagine in a couple days everything will go back to normal.—Zhaladshar ^(Talk) 15:07, 10 November 2009 (UTC)

It hasn't stopped, and it is ... a waste of time. Can we have the link to the report on bugzilla please. Cygnis insignis (talk) 18:22, 14 November 2009 (UTC)

Resolved in the coding, and now in SVN. Awaiting next code update to be implemented. As usual ThomasV has to wait for their window of opportunity for launch. billinghurst (talk) 23:03, 14 November 2009 (UTC)

As discussed on my talk page, ThomasV and Phe indicated that this is due to a deeper change, which in this case it was due to our modifying some underlying templates. I am talking to AWB programmers to help me out so I can null edit the affected pages. (Takes time as it is not a std implementation, and in fact railed against for WP implementation of AWB) billinghurst (talk)

[edit] Index page editing bug: double quote escaping

When the index page editing interface loads, the JavaScript (?) seems to truncate existing field values at double quotes.

Example: Index:AIM-443.djvu (double quotes in Title)

It looks like field data is being inserted into the <input value="..."/> element without proper escaping, closing the value attribute prematurely and spilling the rest of the field data into HTML source.

(The problem can be worked around by restoring the field value (using "Show changes", for example), and saving without previewing again; this avoids the truncation during interface load.) --Piet Delport (talk) 04:17, 13 October 2009 (UTC)

Okay, i investigated further, and found the relevant code in proofread_index.js, in proofreadpage_index_init, which uses string building and innerHTML to construct the edit form.

Correctly escaping all those strings is non-trivial and tedious, so i changed the code to use DOM construction methods instead, which should cleanly avoid this class of error. The (unrun and untested!) patch is here: User talk:ThomasV#proofread_index.js edit form construction fix. --Piet Delport (talk) 02:00, 15 October 2009 (UTC)

[edit] Renewals

When a work written in, say 1928, is renewed in say, 1955, surely it's not an indefinite copyright. It must be set to expire at some point, no? Yet poking around WMF, Stanford, Rutgers and the rest haven't yielded any findings on when renewed works will expire. Sherurcij ^{Collaboration of the Week: Author:David Livingstone.} 21:26, 13 October 2009 (UTC)

95 years from first publication.--Prosfilaes (talk) 22:30, 13 October 2009 (UTC)

Yeah? Didn't see that anywhere. Assuming that's correct, 2018 is the date we start to see works enter then...Sherurcij ^{Collaboration of the Week: Author:David Livingstone.} 22:38, 13 October 2009 (UTC)

Cornell has a full chart.--Prosfilaes (talk) 23:12, 13 October 2009 (UTC)

And it's January 1st, 2019; they get a full 95 years of protection, and then it gets rounded up to January 1st.--Prosfilaes (talk) 14:33, 14 October 2009 (UTC)

The (U.S.) statute you’re looking for is Section 304. (No need to go all the way to Rutgers for that!) :-) For works published with formalities in the U.S. in 1923 (the earliest published works still under copyright at present) and validly renewed, copyright will remain in force through 12/31/2018 (assuming no further statutory extensions of the term, which is admittedly a shaky assumption). Tarmstro99 (talk) 10:56, 21 October 2009 (UTC)

[edit] Sister project links

Anyone for standardising our sister project link boxes? Have a look at Wikisource:Yagan. Hideous, ain't it? Hesperian 11:53, 14 October 2009 (UTC)

You get my support. I also vote for stealing something from somewhere that has standardised already. billinghurst (talk) 10:55, 15 October 2009 (UTC)

On French Wikisource we have suppressed the boxes, in order that the text can be alone in its own space; we put links in the left menu with this template:

You will see the result here.

--Zyephyrus (talk) 21:06, 15 October 2009 (UTC)

To me, those left links just disappear, though I like the idea of using the space. Would it be possible to put the link to the left hand side though utilise the images/text? -- billinghurst (talk) 23:52, 15 October 2009 (UTC)

There should be a common template; either one that uses a keyword to fill everything (i.e. template talk:sister) or make the individual templates call a common one with several parameters, which could have reasonable defaults. Then maybe see if that standard template should do something fancier. -Steve Sanbeg (talk) 04:59, 16 October 2009 (UTC)

[edit] DjVu text layers

Does anyone know how to add text layers to djvu files? I can create djvus pretty easily, but the products have no accompanying text. These documents are hundreds of pages long and the proofreading would go much more easily if the PR extension could just use the available layer rather than do a fresh OCR for each individual page.—Zhaladshar ^(Talk) 18:06, 15 October 2009 (UTC)

ThomasBot (talk • contribs) does some stuff like that, though it is usually aimed at where we have validated the text, and brought the djvu images along later. billinghurst (talk)

I looked into this earlies this year, because I liked the idea of replacing the crappy OCR with our validated text, once we have finished the transcription. DjVuLibre's djvused command gives you access; see http://djvu.sourceforge.net/doc/man/djvused.html. But DjVu text layers don't just contain text. Every word of a DjVu text layer is associated with a bounding box that defines its location on the page. And djvused does not help you define those rectangles and put it all in the required format. Hesperian 23:17, 15 October 2009 (UTC)

I stumbled across djvused as well. But I have no idea how to automate that process or know of anything that will do it for me.—Zhaladshar ^(Talk) 23:34, 15 October 2009 (UTC)

I just remembered: Any2DjVu has an option to upload a DjVu for verification or OCR. I used it once, and it seemed okay. Hesperian 23:58, 15 October 2009 (UTC)

The easiest way that I know (thanks to Yann) is to upload the files to archive.org in your available form, then wait for archive.org to do its magic, produce the text djvu format, and download that format later, and upload to Commons. [Now all I need is for their to be a way to push directly from archive.org to Commons without a download and upload process]. I find that Any2djvu can be problematic for larger files. -- billinghurst (talk) 00:07, 16 October 2009 (UTC)

This only works if the PDF file is uploaded to the Internet Archive. IA doesn't add the text layer to an existing DJVU. Yann (talk) 09:42, 16 October 2009 (UTC)

as I already explained to Billinghurst, I recently added a "match" command to ThomasBot. This command compares the text layer of an existing djvu (supposed to contain raw ocr text) to a page of the wiki (supposed to contain a proofread text), in order to find out the page positions. once the page positions have been found, the "split" command can be used to migrate the text to the page namespace. ThomasV (talk) 09:52, 16 October 2009 (UTC)

The issue isn't about taking an existing work on WS and migrating it to DJVU. It's about extracting a (non-existent) text layer from a DJVU to create a work on WS. Making DJVUs by hand does not add the text layer to the file, so when I start editing, the software does not immediately extract the text from it and I must push the OCR button. This isn't problematic, just inconvenient, but the file would be much improved if it had a text layer (for the benefit of anybody who might later download that file).—Zhaladshar ^(Talk) 14:16, 17 October 2009 (UTC)

[edit] New gadget added - edittop

MediaWiki:Gadget-edittop Add an [edit] link for the lead section of a page
MediaWiki:Gadget-edittop.js

You can turn it on at Special:Preferences --> Gadgets tab.

Quite helpful when you only want to edit something in the top of the page before the first subsection, like the header. :) Cheers, Cirt (talk) 19:10, 17 October 2009 (UTC)

Thank you! --Piet Delport (talk) 09:45, 20 October 2009 (UTC)

[edit] Internet Archive Scanning Services

Hey everyone, I just wanted to let everyone know about Internet Archive's official scanning services. Here is a link to it. We are planning on using these services for Popular Science Volume 75. What do you guys think about doing this on a regular basis? I know earlier there was some talk about wikimoney. If we have an easy way to scan, I think it would be a good idea to do it regularly. Please let me know what you think. Thanks. --Mattwj2002 (talk) 03:30, 18 October 2009 (UTC)

I wanted to add something else to this as well. If we want to do this on regular basis we should use Wikisource:Purchases to make a list and add to the fund to purchase the books. I think it would be great if we could scan them in on a regular basis. --Mattwj2002 (talk) 05:51, 18 October 2009 (UTC)

We're talking about amounts less than 20 bucks here. Is it really worth trying to administrate a fund instead of people buying and mailing them out of their own pocket?--Prosfilaes (talk) 13:18, 18 October 2009 (UTC)

[edit] Spelling rules for proofreading

I realize that even 136 years ago, contributions to journals crossed the oceans and thus there were numerous variations of spelling within a single edition, depending on the contributing authors' origins. Aside from obvious corrections, how strict, and how updated, should proofreading be for spelling?

Do I use the original as is? Or, do I change words like electro-magnetism to electromagnetism and, accept instalment as being correct? I would really like to hear what other proofreaders do? Thanks for any input. Ineuw (talk) 19:52, 18 October 2009 (UTC)

Unless it is a clear typo I leave it as the source puts it. I don't see a need to update the spelling to match today's current spelling, since who knows what current spellings will change in the next 150 years? It provides a bit of a snapshot of that area's spelling practices (for those who are interested in such things).—Zhaladshar ^(Talk) 20:34, 18 October 2009 (UTC)

Yup, when it is just a misspelling/archaic spelling, I leave it as in the source document. So "instalment" I would leave alone, while "instalmezt" I would like fix. I even try to use the ſ instead of s, when possible. Sherurcij ^{Collaboration of the Week: Author:David Livingstone.} 21:43, 18 October 2009 (UTC)

Thanks to you both. I came around to the same view, that the task is really about preservation of the original. I just needed the input of experience. Ineuw (talk) 21:53, 18 October 2009 (UTC)

You can also use {{sic}} after a word you're worried some casual reader will try to "fix" when they read the text in a year. It doesn't show up on the page at all, just when they click "Edit", they'll notice it and be warned that's an intentional mistake. Sherurcij ^{Collaboration of the Week: Author:David Livingstone.} 22:49, 18 October 2009 (UTC)

A number of aspects to this. Generally Type What You See (TWYS) Also with our greater use of the Page: environment and side by side, it is more evident if it is HOW IT WAS otherwise then a scan or transcriber error.

American spelling versus proper spelling ;-)
Archaic text is usually formatted differently, so it is what it is. We tend to automatically accept.
Use of wikilinks to wiktionary or wikipedia, where the meaning is commonly not known
There is also {{SIC}} which is good for tysop.

-- billinghurst (talk) 23:17, 18 October 2009 (UTC)

I agree with everything said and I am collecting everyone's comments and rules on my talk page. It's a simple, step by step rules I follow and revise as I go along. Please feel free to change and contribute. - Being Canadian, I am well versed in all spelling variations and terminologies, and use several sources to check when in doubt. Not all articles use US spelling, which tells me that the contributor was from somewhere in the British Dominion.

Having spent endless time as a kid, observing Linotype operators setting up daily newspaper pages (shows my age, eh?), am amazed by the pages I look at, because they were prepared prior to the implementation of the first Linotype machines (circa 1875). On one page, someone inked in a missing character. I hope this was done by a reader, and not an army of apprentices poring over every copy and correct it before publication. Some food for thought, eh. :-) Ineuw (talk) 15:44, 19 October 2009 (UTC)

Linotype? Have you forgotten when type used to be set by hand? :-) Respecting the errors and peculiarities of sources becomes a useful too for tracing the provenance of texts. I admit it was tempting to "fix" the spellings when I proofread Kipling's Kim from an American souce. Eclecticology - the offended (talk) 04:29, 22 October 2009 (UTC)

[edit] Who are the developers?

Who are the developers of the beta skin of Wikisource? I am tried using it but, the editor is missing features specific to Wikisource. I find the simplicity of the skin layout easy on my eyes. I use it in Wikipedia. Ineuw (talk) 17:29, 20 October 2009 (UTC)

The beta skin is the beta skin. I am presuming that you are meaning the Page: namespace, which hasn't been adapted for the Page: environment by the WMF developers, and I wouldn't have thought that we would look to make localisation changes until it comes out of beta and is adopted. I have quite an extended addition of icons to my toolbar, and rolled back to the standard as customising a beta wasn't worth my effort.-- billinghurst (talk) 20:46, 20 October 2009 (UTC)

I think Ineuw means the Useability Initiative re-skin that you can sign up for from the "Try Beta" link next to your username at the top of the page. The Useability Initiative has its own wiki, at http://usability.wikimedia.org/wiki/Main_Page. Hesperian 23:27, 20 October 2009 (UTC)

My comment was unclear with regard to the missing features specific to WS is presumably within the Page: namespace where ThomasV has a specific set of tools for our use, and they don't translate through. -- billinghurst (talk) 08:52, 21 October 2009 (UTC)

I recently commited a patch so that the Page ns will be correctly rendered with the vector skin. (attention: this is not about the usability edit mode, just about the vector skin) ThomasV (talk) 09:00, 21 October 2009 (UTC)

[edit] ye

Has anyone ever see the rendering of "ye" in the image caption of Page:Makers of British botany.djvu/83 before? The plate is a reproduction of a figure from a 1683 book. Presumably this is an archaic rendering? Does anyone know if it is possible to reproduce it in wikicode/html/css/whatever, or is my "y^e" the best I can hope for? Hesperian 07:41, 21 October 2009 (UTC)

Interested in the answer as I have seen similar overlay with the with the abbreviation for Number where the o was superscript and the period centred directly underneath.-- billinghurst (talk) 09:02, 21 October 2009 (UTC)

Like "N^ọ? Eclecticology - the offended (talk) 22:36, 21 October 2009 (UTC)

w:Thorn (letter) covers the ground of these variants, but uses an image to reproduce this one with the e on top. Charles Matthews (talk) 09:51, 21 October 2009 (UTC)

You might be able to find one in unicode. [8] —Dark ^talk 10:34, 21 October 2009 (UTC)

I just use a normal looking 'ye' because I haven't found a good alternative, and the positioning of the 'e' isn't really that important. But I wouldn't use an image for any portion of non-symbolic text because readers would not be able to copy and paste that portion of text. Special symbols could be images if needed. —Mike 02:25, 27 October 2009 (UTC)

[edit] Swedish bible-texts, Help wanted!

Hej!

I need some help uploading this book to Common. I need help since the first two pages, probably has to be removed first, since they are added by Google. I'm afraid my computer can't handle DjVu-files today. The book is from 19'th century and contains bible-texts translated to swedish in the 15'th century.

Best Regards! -- Lavallen (talk) 14:30, 21 October 2009 (UTC)

I'll upload it for you. Best regards! --Mattwj2002 (talk) 14:50, 21 October 2009 (UTC)

Swedish, well it's hard to separate the scandinavian languages at this era. It looks a lot like Danish when I read it. The languages was separated when the first official swedish bible was introduced by 1526/1541. In the 1541-bible, all words that look to much like danish were removed by political reasons. -- Lavallen (talk) 16:05, 21 October 2009 (UTC)

[edit] Is this of any use?

Taking a break from proofreading Popular Science Volume 1, I skipped all the way to the Index page of the 1918 edition and formatted it, just for change of scenery. My question is; is this of any help for the Index? Ineuw (talk)

Are you asking whether index pages are worth transcribing? If so, then my answer is yes, definitely. They are of particular use if you link the page numbers. Hesperian 02:58, 22 October 2009 (UTC)

Certainly yes! It would, however, be more useful to link to the article, and then the page on it. It's a lot of work! See The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night/Volume 1/Index. Eclecticology - the offended (talk) 04:21, 22 October 2009 (UTC)

Yes, pages references should definitely link to the actual page; the example I gave above also does so. If you want I can show you a trick for doing it very quickly and efficiently. Hesperian 06:19, 22 October 2009 (UTC)

Thanks Hesperian, I will take you up on your offer, the next break I take. I sort of committed myself to proofread all of Popular Science Vol 1, but in between, I must do something else for diversion. :-) Ineuw (talk) 14:37, 22 October 2009 (UTC)

[edit] Adding obituaries to wikisource..

New here...

I came looking for a place that I could add some obituaries for a couple of historical figures from newspapers that are way out of copyright. The idea is just to provide some light source reading linked from the WP article. After reading the documentation, I'm still try to come to terms with something that is probably quite simple...

I have four questions. Are these types of one off documents welcome at wikisource, or do they just clutter up the organisation and approach to adding newspaper content? Secondly, since the newspaper articles are already online and free, and since I'm just extracting a bit of them, any value I'm adding is in the extraction rather than in making them freely available. Is that something of value? Should I always add the source document, or is it sufficient to just provide the text and a link to the source? And finally, what is the best way to name the article? There are obituaries here that seem to have article names with a few different variations. --Inas66 (talk) 05:12, 22 October 2009 (UTC)

So far our collected obituaries are about person's who may be considered notable, or are in support of the authors of works who have Author: namespace listings. You can have a look at some via

Wikisource:Obituaries or Category:Obituaries

that said, there is also the opportunity to collect via publication, and you will see some of the same data presented via

The Times from Wikisource:Newspapers

My basic approach is if the person has an article at Wikipedia:, then we can host their obituary, as that becomes a source for the article, and directly wikilinkable. If there is defendable value against the scope of WS:IO, they are presumably in.

Our base preference is to have the source of the article uploaded to Commons:, however, we understand that it may not be possible. Many of the obits that I have uploaded do not have scans as they are not of reasonable copy IMHO.
Nomenclature is not set, and may depend more on the source of the article. For The Times you will see that I have done as [Publication/Year/Event/Person's Name], though that it partly due to the potential for the amount of information that is available. -- billinghurst (talk) 05:46, 22 October 2009 (UTC)

Yep, what Billinghurst said. These documents are welcome here. Preferably the title should be based on the title of the actual source document. You are free to post the text as a standalone page, for example to a title like "Robert Brown D.C.L.". Even better is to post it as if a component of a larger text, for example to a title like "Proceedings of the Royal Society of London/Volume 9/Robert Brown D.C.L." (creating, if necessary, skeleton pages at "Proceedings of the Royal Society of London" and "Proceedings of the Royal Society of London/Volume 9". Finally, best practice is to upload the document to commons as a DjVu (if multipage) or png/jpeg (if a single page), then proof against the image using the ProofReadPage extension; however, that is a lot to learn for someone just starting out here. Hesperian 06:13, 22 October 2009 (UTC)

1. Do we want obituaries? Absolutely! I'm sure that you will find strong agreement on that point. 2. Please, the whole thing, not just extracts. Having whole articles avoids the POV problems that can arise in the selection process. We still have lots to argue about here, but unlike Wikipedia a much smaller proportion is about NPOV. We cannot hope to compete with the large databases that include scans of the entire run of a long-lived publication. In the long term the real value of this wiki will be in the ability to provide extensive linking between articles, and the ability to provide translations and annotations. It is difficult to know in advance what links will be of value. 3. I'm not a big supporter of the necessity of having a copy of the scanned material, especially when it is otherwise easily accessible. That said, if no scans are provided it is essential that a bibliographical description of the precise source be provided to enable future Wikisourcerors to verify the material. 4. There are also differences of approach to the naming of these articles. Obituaries of persons are a subset of biographies. My own preference has always been to put the person's name as the first element in such articles. It's important to be flexible because one can find many situations requiring special attention. Eclecticology - the offended (talk) 08:35, 22 October 2009 (UTC)

And just a quick note in case there was confusion still surrounding the issue for you, WS does not really have "notability" guidelines - as long as it was legitimately published and is free of copyright. So a 1999 Obituary in the Times is no good, and your blog post about your mother dying is no good, but "Joe Smith" from Arkansas in 1913...go right ahead and add it in! :) Sherurcij ^{Collaboration of the Week: Author:Khwaja Kamal-ud-Din.} 14:43, 22 October 2009 (UTC)

[edit] Typographic or take an image

At Page:Notes on the churches in the counties of Kent, Sussex, and Surrey.djvu/168 there is a replication of a stonemason's work. Seeking opinion on whether think it better to try and replicate typographical, or just say stuff it, and create it as an image, and insert. -- billinghurst (talk) 04:22, 23 October 2009 (UTC)

I wouldn't even be able to tell if some of those dots are supposed to be there or not. They seem to be oddly placed (which might be hard to accurately type up). I vote for turning it into a picture.—Zhaladshar ^(Talk) 13:15, 23 October 2009 (UTC)

I'd say a picture too. That piece would be hard to represent accurately with text. For example, there's a high, horizontal line in the middle row, currently represented by a tilde; that's not really accurate and I can't think of an appropriate alternative character. - AdamBMorgan (talk) 16:30, 23 October 2009 (UTC)

I just figured out what it is in the picture. The inscription blended together a "T" and an "H" into one "letter" (the word should read "the"). There's also another one that mixes "T" and "E" in the second row. Of course, I highly doubt those letters are at all represented in any character set, so it's best to use a picture. —Zhaladshar ^(Talk) 16:38, 23 October 2009 (UTC)

Now that you've pointed it out, it's obvious. In that case, I think it's supposed to be the letter thorn (þ). I think the picture would still be best but the thorn could be helpful somehow. - AdamBMorgan (talk) 17:43, 23 October 2009 (UTC)

I uploaded, if it is still needed: File:Notes on the churches in the counties of Kent, Sussex, and Surrey (page 130 detail) 2.png Cygnis insignis (talk) 18:23, 23 October 2009 (UTC)

Thanks all, thanks Cyg. I have been using Fireshot for quick image grabs. -- billinghurst (talk) 20:59, 23 October 2009 (UTC)

[edit] Just Throwing this out there A Simple English Wikisource.

What is everyone's thoughts on contributing also to a simple english wikisource make things a little easier for esl people seniors younger children and disabled people also anyone can really contribute if they choose to. Putting this up for proposal for Opposing this idea or Supporting this idea i really hope it comes out to be a good new simple english project thank you for your time everyone.

Support I support this idea... Seabanks (talk) 23:50, 23 October 2009 (UTC)

A Wikisource hosts historical textual material. That makes a Simple English Wikisource a little pointless; there's absolutely no reason not to upload any works historically written in simple English to this Wikisource. Furthermore, any new Wikimedia Wikis need to be discussed at Meta, and new Simple wikis have been consistently declined; the current rules don't allow for the creation of any wiki in a language without an ISO 639-3 language code.--Prosfilaes (talk) 00:23, 24 October 2009 (UTC)

There may be the scope to collate works that you think are relevant and maybe create a page like Wikisource:Simple, and then link to it from simple: billinghurst (talk) 03:24, 24 October 2009 (UTC)

In what way would it be simple, then? In terms of the texts contained, or in terms of the means by which material was contributed? I don't think there's much more than we can do to simplify contribution, and as for texts, we can identify them within this project as Billinghurst suggests. BD2412 T 03:52, 24 October 2009 (UTC)

I support exploring this suggestion. Access could be improved for all new users. The users of simple wikis could have a selection of texts and guides to contributing here. Finding ways to improve access will be useful for all the documents. These groups already suggest and provide solutions at regular and simple wikipedias. Cygnis insignis (talk) 05:56, 24 October 2009 (UTC)

He made the identical suggestion on Wikinews as well, I'm guessing he's just copy/pasting the idea between projects without really thinking it through. Sherurcij ^{Collaboration of the Week: Author:Khwaja Kamal-ud-Din.} 17:55, 24 October 2009 (UTC)

Does this proposal mean collecting works that are already simple or "translating" more complicated works into Simple English? - AdamBMorgan (talk) 23:18, 25 October 2009 (UTC)

Per Sherucij. No thought has gone into this. Seabanks was also over a meta proposing a Simple English wikitravel, until he realised that there isn't even an English one; whereupon he proposed a English Wikitravel, until someone pointed out that Wikitravel is not a WikiMedia project; whereupon he proposed a WikiMovies. He seems then to have given up on Wikimedia and gone off to create his own personal Simple English Video Game Wiki on another site, then come back here to spam it. Hesperian 23:29, 25 October 2009 (UTC)

[edit] Just curious about a minor mystery

Hi everyone. Intermittently, as in Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 1.djvu/219, there is a sequential number below the last line of the page text. On this page, it's 14, and I paid attention to a previous page where a number appeared, and it was 13. Does anyone know what those numbers signified? A typographer's, or the printer's guide perhaps? Ineuw (talk) 16:38, 24 October 2009 (UTC)

They're binding signatures. They should be 8 or 12 or 16 pages apart, and label each physical sheet of paper that was folded to make those 8, 12 or 16 pages.--Prosfilaes (talk) 23:02, 24 October 2009 (UTC)

Many thanks Prosfilaes, the cat has revived. :-) Ineuw (talk) 02:54, 25 October 2009 (UTC)

[edit] Hidden headers

I am unclear about the text style for the hidden [+] page header. I noticed on a validated page, that the header line is in a template embedded within a template (Italics and other styles). Currently, I just clean and place the page heading in capitals, followed, or preceded by the page number. Does this template have anything to do with the TOC, or the index?

I would like to follow the consensus and, if such list doesn't exist, provide a quick guide to proofreaders, impatient to start with the basics. My current proofreading notes, are refer to my editing methods but I intend to re-write them for general use.—unsigned comment by Ineuw (talk) .

There is information at H:SIDE, we have been using {{Running header}} more recently. The idea is that the page elements that we do not want to transclude into the main namespace (headers and footers) are placed in that space. billinghurst (talk) 23:09, 24 October 2009 (UTC)

Thanks, Billinghurst. I tried it, but for reasons you mentioned above, I think that just moving the cleaned header and page number, without italics and template is sufficient. Ineuw (talk) 02:53, 25 October 2009 (UTC)

[edit] Indexes and TOC

I completed formatting the indexes of Popular Science Monthly Volume 1, and in the process, I also created a page number ordered Table of Contents, although I have to edit the description column for the proper wording order. I placed it in Ineuw/TOC. Could someone let me know if it's of any use? Ineuw (talk) 02:38, 26 October 2009 (UTC)

To note that

I would suggest that you make them subpages of the volume, so to do that with relative links, add a '/' like [[/...
one does not have to slavishly align page and document pagename with or header text, especially if it starts to make urls butt ugly. I try to maintain a balance between usability, reasonability and any future need to disambiguate within the nomenclature, e.g. I would not have linked the words (Illustrated); and instead of something like [["The To-morrow of Death" (by Louis Figuier), Notice of]] may simply be sufficient to label as "[[/The To-morrow of Death /]]" (by Louis Figuier), Notice of . No need for the " " in the wikilinks unless absolutely necessary. Also note the '/' used at the end of the relative link to pipe the output differently.
Titles like "Sociology, the Study of" would be better as "The Study of Sociology", and use {{DEFAULTSORT:Sociology, the Study of}}

billinghurst (talk) 05:17, 26 October 2009 (UTC)

Many of these suggestions are matters of opinion. Indexing a work under "The" or "A" makes no sense at all. Who would look for these works there? In the short term, as long as these pages only exist individually as part of the broader publication the suggested the suggested method is reasonable, but eventually, when the articles get split out as separate works they would do better linking to the works themselves. Eclecticology - the offended (talk) 19:06, 26 October 2009 (UTC)

Another view, stay flexible with 'naming rules' , but defer to the publisher's text; for example, abbreviating titles may be misleading. In billinghurst's example, someone searching for the "work" would find a single paragraph 'notice of'. I have to use exact match in searches when I'm looking for articles on the web, to sift out the similar titles, reviews, or citations.You may find a half title in the text, but otherwise put what you see and change it only if makes it more accessible. Users read pages, not urls, our title is insignificant unless it interferes with access. Get the full title as a redirect at least, there are millions of titles and it doesn't take long to find problems when you cutting corners. You don't need to put a 150 characters into the header template display, a subpage only needs to be distinguished from other parts of the work. As they say, redirects are cheap and default sorts can drop 'the' and 'A' for indexing (which are sometimes sensible titles).
What is meant by 'eventually split out'; some things may justify multiple transclusions of the same page: namespace, but this seems to imply the larger work would eventually be disassembled. Cygnis insignis (talk) 20:23, 26 October 2009 (UTC)
- Flexibility, by all means! - beginning with the meaning of "a work". The second article in the first volume of Popular Science is "The Recent Eclipse of the Sun" by R. A. Proctor, Author:Richard Anthony Proctor. It was not an original publication, but was copied from an unspecified issue of Cassell's Magazine where it may or may not have had the same title. Later in the same volume his "A Giant Planet" was taken from Cornhill Magazine. The articles here are what would be the works, and not the magazine. Splitting out would put emphasis on Proctor's work rather than on the magazine. On the other hand, the "Notes" page may be better treated as a sub-element of the magazine. Certain "Review" publications such as Quarterly Review don't really give titles to the articles, and one long article frequently reviews a number of other publications together. Many 17th and 18th century works have titles that amount to whole paragraphs; many of these should likely be reduced. Displacing a leading "a" or "the" is a matter of established bibliographic conventions. Yes, there are exceptional cases where it would be important to retain the article in place, but not all searching should be electronic; we need to allow for browsing by humans. In a library the experience of browsing the shelves is qualitatively different from the experience of finding something in the card catalogue. Eclecticology - the offended (talk) 19:52, 27 October 2009 (UTC)

- The same thing can be created with a redirect. The publication is the work we are dealing with, so as we don't necessarily know any exact earlier source, or if it is an exact copy, I would propose that we keep it in situ with the published work, and create a link from the root level in the main namespace to the article. This also assists disambiguation. billinghurst (talk) 21:03, 27 October 2009 (UTC)
- I think the best way to handle works that have seen publication in multiple meta-works is like this. Hesperian 23:33, 27 October 2009 (UTC)

Definitely agree with Hesperian on the matter. That {{versions}} should be used when we have more than one copy of an article, or where we know that more than one copy exists. And to do that, I do feel that we need to have the works as subpages to manage their locality and provenance. billinghurst (talk) 02:32, 28 October 2009 (UTC)

That seems excessive. For every British novel we host, I can find distinct editions in British and American spelling. Quite a few of our major novels have abridgments and variant editions in the PD. Preemptively creating versions pages when we have but one version is a lot of work for little to no gain.--Prosfilaes (talk) 13:52, 28 October 2009 (UTC)

Let me modify my statement to more reflect my brain thoughts {{versions}} should be used when we have more than one copy of an article, or where we know that more than one copy exists and need to disambiguate it.

To illustrate the extent of the problem, I've provisionally added Popular Science/Volume 1#Table of Contents for the first number. For now we need only concern ourselves with material where copyright is not an problem. A significant number of the articles in that number first appeared elsewhere. In the nineteenth century it was very common for American publications to copy from European ones (especially British) without any permission or payment whatsoever, and often without credit. In theory, using the Wiki-is-not-paper principle, we could host them all, but it may not be practical to document the small variations that distinguish two or more versions. The risk is that we can too easily oversimplify the problems. For a play like Macbeth, how important is it to have an expurgated school-boy version that omits the scene with the porter? Eclecticology - the offended (talk) 00:56, 29 October 2009 (UTC)

I don't see a problem. Posting of multiple versions will be mediated by user enthusiasm. We will have (if we don't already) users who see value in posting Thomas Bowdler's expurgated versions of Shakespeare alongside the originals. We will have (if we don't already) users who see value in posting different versions, with different provenances, of important manuscripts and speeches. We will have (if we don't already) users who see value in posting every single public domain version of the Bible. But I doubt we'll ever have users who are willing to waste their time posting and proofreading multiple versions of the same document, where the differences are trivial and entirely lacking in scholarly importance and interest. It is only in this last case that any problems arise. Why structure our work around the anticipation of a problem that has never happened and probably never will? Hesperian 02:34, 29 October 2009 (UTC)

True enough, but in that last case we can't know if there are any differences until the two are compared, and that's as much work as proofreading. The problem is not as unlikely as you believe. It has come up in the comparison of the original Dictionary of National Biography and its first reprint. A large number of changes were made in the reprint. This was primarily to correct errors, but that often necessitated other changes to avoid having the corrections spill over onto another page. An added sentence required removing material elsewhere on that page. Probably a majority of articles did not require changes at all; what benefit is there to duplicating these? Eclecticology - the offended (talk) 08:24, 29 October 2009 (UTC)

I use a text editor to compare documents, by proof-reading a few random pages or using the machine read text in the page scan to get an indication of whether it is worthwhile. If a user was interested in a particular entry in DNB, or an article in the above, they may get around to comparing the available editions. If another work gave special reference to these versions, for what they think is a notable reason, they can be linked in someway. This is perhaps less work than annotating the trivial to the substantial variants in the notes (or worse, the text), which may be subjective, unknown or incomplete. The versions can only increase the integrity of works projected for completion, it doesn't detract from them. Placing similar versions in their context is good for that browsing factor mentioned above, it is qualitatively different. That references given in works like DNB use these details surely indicates is not always trivial. This sort of thing is actually and potentially useful, or harmless. (On the subject of displacing or omitting the article in the title, I still reckon that is not always appropriate; the need to retain them is more than rare and it sometimes ungainly. It is good for bibliographies ... ) Cygnis insignis (talk) 21:09, 29 October 2009 (UTC)

The most practical way to show changes, which are most often short, is right in the text. Thus ~~old text~~ new text. Previously, I was putting the new text in square brackets, but that led to some ambiguous situations when square brackets were already used in the original. Another point to be made about magazine titles is that many with a long history such as Popular Science or National Geographic dropped the article somewhere along the way. Eclecticology - the offended (talk) 10:04, 2 November 2009 (UTC)

[edit] What is the go with {{Indent}}?

I see that Template:Indent is still on the books and used, though is noted as deprecated with people being pushed other ways. Not knowing the history of the deprecation, is anyone able to provide further information? Are we looking to better retire such templates? -- billinghurst (talk) 05:51, 26 October 2009 (UTC)

A chequered history. It was invented to handle line staggering in poems. This functionality became redundant when the <poem> tag was invented. Nonetheless the template was retained because it had found a new and unanticipated use: preservation of paragraph indentation. For that purpose it was implemented very badly indeed, and so it was updated to support indentation via css styling. This latter functionality was called in a slightly different way, so that it was not necessary to remove the old, crappy implementation in order to bring on board the new implementation. Keeping the old functionality meant that it would still be possible to view old versions of pages that use the old version of the template. Thus we ended up with a template that does two different things; or rather, the same thing in two different ways. Meanwhile, I became irritated that {{indent}} required the indentation size to be the second parameter rather than the first; i.e. {{indent|Blah blah blah|1em}}<nowiki> I felt that <nowiki>{{indent|1em|Blah blah blah}} was much more intuitive, especially when wrapping large blocks of text; plus the latter was in keeping with {{hanging indent}} which I had created to use the latter calling order. Therefore I forked {{indent}} to {{text-indent}}, with the latter using the better calling order, and which I recommend as a replacement. Hesperian 07:10, 26 October 2009 (UTC)

As there is no further comment, I propose that all the works using {{indent}} get converted to {{text-indent}} and
is sent to the great template retirement home in the sky. billinghurst (talk) 01:02, 4 November 2009 (UTC)

I support this, but (in case he doesn't turn up to say so himself) I think JV does not. He has a point: once you delete a template, old revisions that use that template don't render properly any more. That argument doesn't carry much weight with me, because that line of thinking tell us that every time we modify a template we are falsifying the history of every article that has ever used it; but that has never stopped us improving our templates. Nonetheless that point of view exists, so I thought I should report it. Hesperian 06:18, 21 November 2009 (UTC)

[edit] IRC channel?

Do we have a dedicated IRC channel? Ineuw (talk) 17:53, 27 October 2009 (UTC)

We have the one IRC channel for WS, and it is not too crowded and a reasonable place to be. There is a link at the top of this page, and also at Special:RecentChanges. billinghurst (talk) 20:57, 27 October 2009 (UTC)

[edit] Portals

I'm trying to formulate (as are others) a good way to handle reference material that is naturally divided into "topics" texts (e.g. discrete encyclopedia articles or biographies). One thing that has come up is that the Portal namespace is not so used here; and so maybe it should be, to organise such topic-related material by topic. Before speculating too much about that, I thought I should check out what exists. Three kinds of things: Portal:French literature looks like a traditional portal; Portal:Australia redirects to Wikisource:Australia; and Portal:Speeches is a kind of preamble to Wikisource:Speeches. Evidently this is all very top-down, while the problem needing a solution for "topics" is that where there are several texts relating to the same topic, there is a need to present to the reader a choice or menu. Considered as a disambiguation issue, you disambiguate the titles somehow: but this leaves the real issue, which is that everything is now nice and distinct, but not more findable than before. If there is a dab page, how are people going to find it?

Anyway, the theory of portals is that they are about user-friendly ways in. There seems to be some tension with the Wikisource: namespace and its function(s). I'm really angling for some discussion of a way in which Microportal:Napoleon (say) could exist and perform more like an Author page, collecting various internal and other links, without having to be a page about an author, and could coexist with Microportal:Duke of Wellington and other such material. All without prejudice to anything anybody else would wish to have in Portal space. Charles Matthews (talk) 09:41, 30 October 2009 (UTC)

I 100% agree with you that the Wikisource: namespace should be for project management and other meta- issues, and we are misusing it by putting topic indices (i.e. the contents of Category:Wikisource index pages in there. I also agree that these are not portals. Methinks we need a Topic: namespace. Hesperian 11:37, 30 October 2009 (UTC)

If we do. I would like to see whatever we do have a close link to other wikis so that there is an opportunity to x-wiki between Portals. That plays on the strength of wikis, and helps to align and drive traffic. billinghurst (talk) 11:48, 30 October 2009 (UTC)

After a brief look around, it doesn't look as if many Wikisources use portals a lot. French Wikisource seems to have more than most, and organised in a fairly clear way. Others are similar to English Wikisource, including Portuguese Wikisource or Italian Wikisource, in that they have few portals which don't seem that coherent at the moment. - AdamBMorgan (talk) 12:33, 30 October 2009 (UTC)

Portals are strange creatures, quite unlike our current Wikisource Index pages; they mash together templates of "Did you know...", "Recent additions..." and such. Not really something into which we should change our Wikisource:Mermaids, Wikisource:Wars, Wikisource:Islam or Wikisource:Education in my opinion. As ABM says, Portals aren't used a whole lot, especially in Wikisources - and the idea of having a Portal:Napoleon Bonaparte in addition to a Portal:Duke of Wellington seems to strain the limits of my vision for Wikisource. Works about a person go on that person's author page (even when, like some of our authors, they wrote no works themselves). To be honest, I'd be in favour of nixing "Portal" namespace altogether, and just adding "Index", and then we could have Index:Education and Index:Islam -- but that's probably a much larger decision than just en. can handle. Sherurcij ^{Collaboration of the Week: Author:Khwaja Kamal-ud-Din.} 13:02, 30 October 2009 (UTC)

In this regard, I was thinking Portals at Wikipedia:, more like those listed at w:Portal:Contents/Portals billinghurst (talk) 13:03, 30 October 2009 (UTC)

I too believe that 'Wikisource' should be used for project management. A 'Portal' namespace is a good way to separate source texts (content transcribed at wikisource) from pages covering a topic, which is content created by the project itself ThomasV (talk) 13:10, 30 October 2009 (UTC)

It looks as if there is a strong preference for namespaces with clear functional boundaries (kind of content both in terms of how generated and for what purpose). Which is to be expected. Perhaps the point to make next is that a portal implies a page looking for relevant content, while what I'm really talking about is a bunch of topic texts looking for relevant indexation.

One schematic would be to note that we already have a category system, so that the way a Topic namespace might fit in would be in a layer cake: Portal pages, over categories dedicated to topic pages, over pages in Topic space itself. This provides an odd definition, in that Topic pages would be potential orphans except that they should be clearly categorised in relevant ways by a special part of the category system, and would exist to index texts of factual and reference value. And so they are really there because you can't annotate entries on a category page?

Perhaps there is an idea here trying to get out, that Topic pages should be by intention "atoms" designed to transclude into bigger "molecular" pages. That at least expresses the notion that while Portal pages are naturally top-down, there is some missing notion of bottom-up indexation driven by the fact that we may have five texts on the same topic and currently just juggle them. Charles Matthews (talk) 14:21, 30 October 2009 (UTC)

There was some discussion of the problem with the Index: namespace at Wikisource:Scriptorium/Archives/2008-08#Standardize index linking. One underlying problem is that Wikisource undertook an idiosyncratic use of "Index" to organize the Page: namespaces. This is contrary to what most people would normally expect from indexes as a way of finding information within works. I would very much agree that some repurposing is in order here, and that much of the existing idiosyncrasies should be moved to the Page: namespace in the format "Page:Name of publication/Contents". This should not conflict with existing material in the Page: namespace since these are already distinguished by page numbers.

From my limited understanding of the coding, there are specific differences in how Index: and Page: work, and that is handled by different templates and javascript. I think that we have to accept that they retain their own namespaces. Trying to move from Index: at this point does not represent a value proposition IMNSHO. This discussion would be better targeted at what we can reasonably and practicably, and what alternate terms exist for what we want.

Perhaps so. If these must be separate namespaces, can the Index: namespace be renamed? But if traditional indexing needs to be in a new and different namespace this is not going to be the most important aspect of what we are addressing. Eclecticology - the offended (talk) 10:03, 3 November 2009 (UTC)

The broader question here is to the general purposing of all namespaces and how they might best be utilized. I agree that the Wikisource namespace should be limited to broad issues of project management, and anything there that guides the reader through works or helps a person to find content should be moved elsewhere. The non-contributing reader is not likely to have any interest in project management issues.

A word of definition about what we mean by "bottom-up" and "top-down". Categories are bottom-up because they start from individual articles and look to place those articles in a topical home. Portals or Wikipedia's "List of ..." pages are top-down because they begin from a topical home and look for content to live there. Both are valid approaches to organizing knowledge. Curently we have both author categories and author wikisource pages. The problem with the latter is its need for maintenance. Unless a person goes there to add a new author it doesn't happen. As a top-down scheme it could just as easily include red links to authors for whom we do not yet have pages.

The Portal: namespace is indeed underutilized. In the short term it's use would be better restricted to major topic areas, but that could be expanded at a later stage. Well done as it may be, Portal:French literature may still be too specific for a top level portal; Portal:Literature would certainly be a better top level portal that guides us to the literatures of various languages and/or countries. I reserve opinion on a possible Topic: namespace; it may be a good idea, but where it goes depends on how we see it as related to the other namespaces. Eclecticology - the offended (talk) 18:09, 2 November 2009 (UTC)

For me part of the discussion resides with searchability and findability. I think that many people never get out of the main namespace, and don't understand other aspects of namespaces and how they are used. We don't help. I am open for the discussion, it should be good. billinghurst (talk) 23:35, 2 November 2009 (UTC)

To sharpen one of the main points being made, navigation is good, but need it be through the part of the site devoted to project management? This would seem to take you immediately backstage. And the demarcation of projects is not the same as any natural division by subject area. The granularity appropriate to such a division is what really needs to be addressed. If the Portal namespace is to remain the main tool, then the thinking on granularity has to be more flexible; if not, then we need need another namespace and spec. Charles Matthews (talk) 08:08, 3 November 2009 (UTC)

First, let me make sure that we understand the word "granularity" in the same way. I read it as the ability to classify data into progressively more specific topics.

I agree that [wiki]projects are not the same as topical divisions, but again let's define our terms clearly. There is an ambiguity to the term "project management" My first inclination was to refer to that term as relating to the overall management of Wikisource as a project in itself. That approach would result in the Wikisource: namespace being used for such things as policy development and operational issues. I was concerned that you could be referring to the management of wikiprojects such as those for DNB and EB. The management of wikiprojects could merit a portal in its own right.

"Findability" and "flexibility" could be important features of a portal based systems. "Searchability" is primarily a machine function, and may be more related to software development than portals. I think that mediawiki search functions are seriously underdeveloped for such large databases as are found in Wikimedia. Solving that problem is well out of the scope if what we can do.

Rather than calling portals a "main tool" I would prefer to see them as top-level classifications. If one or more new namespaces need to be developed, that's fine, but I would avoid acting prematurely on this. For any top down classification system it is important to consider what might be the optimum number of divisions at any stage in the process. Too few, and we haven't divided things at all; too many and readers get tired before they can get through the whole list. When someone is Google searching how does he set the default for the number of hits on a page, and how many Google pages does he look through before giving up? What are the hazards of search terms that are either too broad or too specific? The problems that we need to address are not too different from those in Google searches. Eclecticology - the offended (talk) 10:03, 3 November 2009 (UTC)

Checking out Category:Categories, I think I see one end of the problem that needs discussion: none of the top-level categories within it addresses the idea that someone might come to Wikisource to research some given area of content. And being conscious that this all started from the idea that the same topic may be treated in the ED and DNB and other reference works, I feel that the comments before about indexation have merit: there are things needing to be indexed. Category:Portals is now a subcategory of Category:Wikisource, but it would be the work of a moment to change that. Would it be a good idea to place it as a subcategory of Category:Topical classification, as a psychological step in differentiating portals from project management, and suggesting that some work at least should be done within the category system on findability by topic? Charles Matthews (talk) 14:53, 3 November 2009 (UTC)

That could be a positive step, or even a name that suggests that this is a temporary category for only those things that we want moved out of the Wikisource namespace, and into something more meaningful. The more I look into some of this the more convoluted the problem appears. In part there seems to be a great unwillingness to clean out old ad hoc concepts that never got very far, and were effectively abandoned when their creators got bored with Wikisource. The detailed discussion required before these can be cleaned up discourages any serious efforts. Take Portal:Influential Books as an example. It may have been a good idea when it started but it doesn't contain a lot of material and hasn't had a substantive edit since January 2007. Could it be deleted without a lot of drama?

Of course, marking pages in the Wikisource namespace for moving, or efforts to delete abandoned ideas does not address the more positive question about what we want. I think we still need both an organized bottom-up category system, and a more or less parallel top-down system with portals at its top.

We can argue that some system of indexation should be available to link the appearances of the same person in various encyclopedic works, but the theory is more powerful than the practice. Looking to see if the individual DNB biography has a counterpart in EB or some other encyclopedic work is not an intuitive process for the editor who happens to be focused on DNB at the moment. How is he to know which other encyclopedic works also contain biographical material about the same person? Eclecticology - the offended (talk) 01:06, 4 November 2009 (UTC)

Concrete suggestion: a category like Category:Topical classification (don't mind the precise name) to be created, to house at least Category:Portals, to be an over-category of Category:Works by subject which obviously remains a subcategory of Category:Works too — and to have some other pages in it. Those other pages would be the pages in the notional Topic namespace, so defining what that namespace would be for ought to be the same debate as what further classification pages are required. It seems clear that there is a tendency for the Wikisource: namespace to act as a sort of Bermuda Triangle of projectspace, drawing in organisational material. So some work probably should go on, looking at which pages could be recategorised or moved around or split up in some way that would make their place clearer to those readers who are not active project members. Charles Matthews (talk) 11:26, 4 November 2009 (UTC)

Sounds like the beginning of a plan.

At this stage perhaps a more ephemeral sounding name like Category:WS pages to be moved would emphasize that this category will eventually no longer be needed. This will start rescuing material from the Bermuda Triangle.
Unless there is a reasonable chance that the Index namespace could be repurposed, I would propose a "Topic" namespace. It would be a top down parallel to categories. It would include red links for things to be done, and provide additional information about its separate elements that cannot be included in the Categories. In the short term this could be a pseudonamespace until we can be sure that people will use it.
I would also propose a "Project" namespace that could be used to marshal the various wikiprojects. Many of these are too easily forgotten once the initiator loses interest. By making these more visible we may be able to convince new people to work on completing these projects.
The "Portal" namespace needs further development. It should operate to bring together topics, categories and projects related to top level concepts. There may be some differences of opinion about which concepts are top level. I am willing to put some effort on developing these, beginning with the most obvious. Eclecticology - the offended (talk) 08:29, 5 November 2009 (UTC)

I rather like the idea of moving all "Index" (DJVU) pages to the PAGE namespace, then moving the WS:Works pages to the Index: namespace. But this shouldn't be attempted by a single user anxious to see this issue concluded, we have thousands of backlinks that will need changing, etc. Sherurcij ^{Collaboration of the Week: Author:Khwaja Kamal-ud-Din.} 12:52, 4 November 2009 (UTC)

While I support this in principle, I'm conscious of the possible technical difficulties raised by Billinghurst. If you think that this can work try moving the Index (DJVU) pages of one or two books to see what glitches arise. If they are too serious we may have to accept that it won't work. Eclecticology - the offended (talk) 08:29, 5 November 2009 (UTC)

Just to get the desired end result straight, do you intend to end up with a hierarchy the looks something like this?:

Portal:Religious texts
a) Topic:Baha'ism, Topic:Buddhism, Topic:Christianity, Topic:Hinduism, Topic:Islam, Topic:Judaism, Topic:Wicca, etc.;
b) Project:Wiki Bible, Project:Hinduism etc. (from Wikisource:WikiProject Wiki Bible and Wikisource:WikiProject Hinduism);
c) Category:Religion and sub-categories
The actual texts (ie. The Bible, Qur'an etc.)

(Using Religious texts from Wikisource:Works as an example because it is a convenient size.) - AdamBMorgan (talk) 12:37, 5 November 2009 (UTC)

Essentially, yes. Still I would prefer the simpler, Portal:Religion. "Texts" is somewhat of a redundancy, since the whole of Wikisource is about texts. When editors need to link to something they are probably happier when it can be expressed in one word. I'll see if I can start developing the idea at Wikisource:Portal. (Probably more intuitive to have this named "Portals" in the plural.) That's the sort of page that should stay in the Wikisource namespace because it's about portals ... unless somebody can make a convincing argument that it belongs in the Help namespace. Eclecticology - the offended (talk) 17:41, 5 November 2009 (UTC)

[edit] Bot extraction of text already in DjVu file

I am having trouble finding an answer to this. There is a DjVu file Index:Dramatic Moments in American Diplomacy (1918).djvu that already has OCR'd text in it, but it hasn't all been extracted and put into the "Pages" namespace yet. Is there a bot that can do this while leaving the already-placed pages intact? (billinghurst, is this what you were trying to do with it before?) --LarryGilbert (talk) 18:40, 30 October 2009 (UTC)

Yes, the djvutext.py script for the pywikipedia bot enables this sort of functionality, although I believe it would be necessary to supply the script with a list of pages to be uploaded manually to avoid clobbering those that are already there. At the moment my little bot is fully occupied autocorrecting the United States Statutes at Large scans, but I would be happy to queue this job up for it after it has completed its current run (unless somebody else does it for you first). Tarmstro99 (talk) 19:38, 30 October 2009 (UTC)

I think I'd heard of pywikipedia somewhere, but I'd forgotten about it. This may be a good opportunity for me to learn it and put it through some paces. Thanks for the suggestion! --LarryGilbert (talk) 20:29, 30 October 2009 (UTC)

There is no need for that now. The text layer is automatically imported if it exists when the page is created. This avoids creating 1000s of pages which won't be proofreaded before ages. See where I look? ;o) Yann (talk) 21:46, 30 October 2009 (UTC)

In this case, though, the text is already on the site, just not linked to any scanned pages. The easiest way to connect the two seems to be to replace the existing text with what's in the DjVu file. --LarryGilbert (talk) 00:27, 31 October 2009 (UTC)

When I looked at that work, it was not proofread, nor sorted to chapters, it was an flat long file of not proofread. Given that, it was preferable to do the work in the Page: namespace where we can work with the text to do side by side proofreading.

BTW I did ask JV about whether he was going to update his script and he said he would put it into the queue for 2011. :-/ billinghurst (talk) 03:27, 31 October 2009 (UTC)

[edit] Indexes and TOC for The Popular Science Monthly

Created several variations for a proposed page hierarchy for TPSM. Please look look here at my proposals. Which naming style is best suited for Wikisource? Your input is much appreciated. Ineuw (talk) 19:10, 30 October 2009 (UTC)

Thanks for providing those mockups! Your proposal #4 (full name of publication (not abbreviated) / volume number / issues within volume / works listed within that issue) looks the most consistent with what I have seen done with other works here. Tarmstro99 (talk) 19:45, 30 October 2009 (UTC)

I vote for number four as well. It most confirms to our standards. -Mattwj2002 (talk) 03:58, 31 October 2009 (UTC)

Number 4 it is. I will complete the month of May first and let you know. Ineuw (talk) 19:31, 31 October 2009 (UTC)

I disagree to the actual proposition, I'm unsure if people liking this idea noticed the Page: prefix before a title or took it as a generic name for main:, Ineuw proposition consists of moving the hierarchy for the TPSM to the Page: namespace, which is really a bad idea imho. Ineuw proposition #4 is the best but must be done in main:, not in Page:*. Phe (talk) 15:20, 1 November 2009 (UTC)

[edit] Page structure for The Popular Science Monthly

Phe, thanks for your input. I had some problems trying to define a page (not a Page:), as you have suggested. I will test it again and will post here. In the meanwhile, the current structure I am using is here. Ineuw (talk) 02:10, 2 November 2009 (UTC)

I find the aim of this thread a little confusing. It's also important for the Table of Contents to show the article author, and the original source of the article when that is known. Eclecticology - the offended (talk) 10:09, 2 November 2009 (UTC)

[edit] Change of MediaWiki:Proofreadpage pagenum template

Hi, can an admin change this template to allow direct links to a page number ? It requires insertion of <span id="{{{num}}}"></span> between <span id="zzz" style="display:none;"></span> and the <nowiki>. This is used by <pages >, the old template:Page do this but not the new. Example of use : Transactions of the Geological Society, 1st_series, vol. 1/Index (to test it, change the template, do a dummy edit of the target page and try the link) Phe (talk) 17:54, 31 October 2009 (UTC)

Done billinghurst (talk) 22:58, 31 October 2009 (UTC)

Thanks, for people interested in linking from a TOC, I created an helper template, {{TOC link}}. The intent is to to provide a way to link from a djvu page to a page inside the same book but when transcluded to link to a subpage of the same book, in the shortest possible way. Phe (talk) 15:08, 1 November 2009 (UTC)

I have found that {{TOC link}} is for use when the main namespace TOC is used a subpage, so I have semi-forked the code for {{TOC mainlink}}. If there is someone clever who can work out how to amalgamate the two functions into the one template, then go for it. billinghurst (talk) 02:09, 22 November 2009 (UTC)

Both template can be merged using something ala (simplified code) {{#ifexist: ../{{{2}}} | [[../{{{2}}}]] | [[/{{{2}}}]]}} but it exists probably a better way to do it, I don't see exactly how but I suspect we can get the needed information by a clever comparison of {{PAGENAME}} {{SUBPAGENAME}} and {{#titleparts}} without adding any parameter. One case that must be handled is book structure as book_name/Val_1/Chapter 1 where the TOC can be transcluded either in book_name or in book_name/Vol1 Phe (talk) 10:55, 23 November 2009 (UTC)

I'd much prefer these templates were substituted. It is hard enough for newbs to make sense of this place without piling on esoterica like this. Hesperian 11:41, 23 November 2009 (UTC)

They can't, their expansion depend on the transclusion context, and {{TOC link|13|Account of Guernsey, and the other channel island|1}} is a lot of easier to read than the alternate way [[<noinclude>Page:Transactions of the Geological Society, 1st series, vol. 1.djvu/49</noinclude><includeonly>../Account of Guernsey, and the other channel island</includeonly>|1]]. Anyway only simple template should be substed. Phe (talk) 11:58, 23 November 2009 (UTC)

[edit] Template help is sought

I need a template to raise the caps of words like THE, and I created a copy of the dropcap named raisecap. Raising the first character works OK, but it inserts a line break immediately afterwards. Don't know enough about HTML to find the problem. Would someone please look at it? Thanks. Ineuw (talk) 19:47, 31 October 2009 (UTC)

Hi, see the edit comment [9] Phe (talk) 20:28, 31 October 2009 (UTC)

We do already have Template:Largeinitial. That doesn't do the job? billinghurst (talk) 22:54, 31 October 2009 (UTC)

Thanks to all. Template:Largeinitial is fine. Phe, thanks for the correction. — Ineuw (talk) 01:18, 1 November 2009 (UTC)

[edit] Proper placement of copyright tags/boxes

Is there a guideline or best practice for placing a copyright box? I'm afraid I've searched for an answer without any luck. Does it belong on the main page of a text or on its discussion page? Near the top or the bottom? Anything else? --LarryGilbert (talk) 02:52, 4 November 2009 (UTC)

I stick it on the front page of the work and at the bottom. That is what I saw done, and I want I now do. So there will be quite a few done that way. :-) billinghurst (talk) 03:06, 4 November 2009 (UTC)

Same as Billinghurst; it's an important part of the metadata we need to present, so it has to be on the main page, but the big box doesn't really need to be at the top of the page. I wouldn't mind putting it in normal size type in header; "This is a US work that wasn't renewed {tiny image to link to full text}", "This was published before 1923 {tiny link}", "and this was published by an author who died 57 years ago", etc. But the current big boxes should go to the bottom.--Prosfilaes (talk) 15:03, 4 November 2009 (UTC)

For once I generally agree with you. Whatever the notice says the boxes are butt-ugly. Many sites place their copyright notice discretely at the bottom without increasing or decreasing whatever rights they have. The important thing is that the information is available. Eclecticology - the offended (talk) 19:03, 6 November 2009 (UTC)

[edit] Problem with interface

In the Page namespace I am having trouble using the drop-down controls. I can navigate every symbol except ^ . When I move my cursor down the list, the whole list disappears at "image" when the pop-up image appears to the left. The list also disappear if I move my cursor off of the list and attempt to get at ^ sideways. Does any one else have this issues or know of a fix?--BirgitteSB 19:18, 6 November 2009 (UTC)

I am not quite sure to what you are referring. Are you referring to Mediawiki:Edittools that is appended to the bottom of all pages when in edit mode? Is it that you want the circumflex in symbols, or that you cannot navigate to the Circumflexes drop down mode? Or something different? billinghurst (talk) 13:23, 7 November 2009 (UTC)

No I am talking about the navigation for Page:Foo to Index:Foo. There is a tab witch is a drop-down list and and the last item is listed as ^ which signifies the navigation to the associated index page.--BirgitteSB 01:02, 9 November 2009 (UTC)

Which skin are you using? I don't have those options in my monobook version, I just have the tabs across the top and have a tab at the end with the ^. No dropdown boxes to be seen. billinghurst (talk) 02:04, 9 November 2009 (UTC)

[edit] Understanding <section> tags and their use with <pages> tags

I'm adding a book by Michael Faraday and I'm having trouble understanding the proper use of the <section> and <pages> tags.

Let's take the first "chapter" from the book. It starts on page 1 and finishes a short way down page 5. I thought it would be enough to put <section begin="chapter1"/> at the start (p. 1) and <section end="chapter1"/> at the end (p. 5), then use something like this to put the whole article on its own page:

 <pages index="Experimental_researches_in_chemistry_and.djvu" from=16 to=20
     fromsection="chapter1" tosection="chapter1"/>

But this does not work, so either I'm misunderstanding <pages> or I'm expecting too much from it, I fear. By experimenting with including or omitting the "tosection" parameter, the only thing I can change is whether all of page 5 is included or not. I can't get just the relevant portion to be included and leave the rest out.

I imagine I could work around this by using multiple {{Page}} templates, but I thought that was the sort of thing the <pages> tag was designed to avoid.

--LarryGilbert (talk) 00:11, 9 November 2009 (UTC)

Off the top of my head, I suggest you try it without the quotes aroudn the section titles. I have a vague memory of having the same problem myself a while back. Hesperian 00:27, 9 November 2009 (UTC)

On re-reading, I see the problem. Section tags are used to demarcate an individual page into sections; it doesn't work across pages. What you want to transclude is:

Just the chapter one part of page 1
all of page 2
all of page 3
all of page 4
just the chapter one part of page 5

In order to do the first of these, you need to define the chapter one part of page 1; to do that you wrap the chapter one part of page 1 in <section begin="chapter1"/> and <section end="chapter1"/>. Then you do the same thing on page 5. That should get you what you want. Hesperian 00:32, 9 November 2009 (UTC)

That's exactly what was needed. Thanks! --LarryGilbert (talk) 00:39, 9 November 2009 (UTC)

[edit] Fundraiser banner

At w: there's an option in My preferences|Gadgets to "Suppress display of the fundraiser banner". Can this be given here also? Moondyne (talk) 06:54, 11 November 2009 (UTC)

[edit] Odd problem with transclusion of footnote

ProofreadPage gurus, any hints on why the content of the footnote at the bottom of this page gets mangled when it gets transcluded to here? It looks like some boldfacing is added that isn’t present in the original, and one of the internal wikilinks vanishes entirely. Tarmstro99 (talk) 16:26, 12 November 2009 (UTC)

It's because the links in the Footnote point to the same page that it's being transcluded in. For example, I'm linking to the Scriptorium: Wikisource:Scriptorium (notice how it's in bold, but the source is typical wiki-markup). If you want to to be fixed, the only way I can think of is to remove the links altogether, because all you're doing is linking a page to itself.—Zhaladshar ^(Talk) 16:33, 12 November 2009 (UTC)

Aha! Thanks. Tarmstro99 (talk) 18:34, 12 November 2009 (UTC)

[edit] DJVU Viewer App Available for the iPod Touch/iPhone Now

I just wanted to let everyone that there is a DJVU viewer app available for the iPod touch/iPhone now. The app is called Heru. It cost $1.99 usd. You have to manually copy and paste the URL of the file to download. I just thought you guys would be interested since we use DJVU so much with Wikisource. This makes the iPod Touch and iPhone a nice eBook reader. :) Anyways, what do you guys think? I just thought I would spread the word. --Mattwj2002 (talk) 06:02, 13 November 2009 (UTC)

[edit] Batch-moving pages

I had Commons rename File:1960 FBI primer on Nation of Islam.djvu to File:1965 FBI monograph on Nation of Islam.djvu due to the incorrect year in the file name itself. Now I am in the middle of moving all of the pages formerly under Index:1960 FBI primer on Nation of Islam.djvu to Index:1965 FBI monograph on Nation of Islam.djvu--obviously a tedious task. It occurred to me that there must be an existing tool I can use to do a "batch" move like this without having to fire up a bot to do the task. Does anyone know of such a thing, or should I just dust off my own bot to do the work? --LarryGilbert (talk) 18:50, 14 November 2009 (UTC)

I will have a go and see how it works out. billinghurst (talk) 23:26, 14 November 2009 (UTC)

Done was manually with the bot application, but not horrific. billinghurst (talk) 23:50, 14 November 2009 (UTC)

[edit] Formating when proofreading

Hi, I would like to ask if it is necessary to take car of text format when proofreading? Look at this example: [10]. I was trying to figure out how to format the text to look simmilar to the text from scan, but I have found no way.--Juan de Vojníkov (talk) 08:48, 17 November 2009 (UTC)

You could either use {{indent}} or the <poem>...</poem> tags. I've edited the page using the latter (and validated the page). The text between the poem flags is formated as it is presented, leading spaces and all.- AdamBMorgan (talk) 17:34, 17 November 2009 (UTC)

[edit] Is there any easy way to upload external OCR?

I'm looking at Index:A grammar of the Bohemian or Cech language.djvu which has Tessaract OCR. But one of the most tedious things for some of us is entering all those Czech letters. I could take the images and dump them through my local copy of ABBYY Finereader, which will handle the Czech OCR just fine, but I have no way to quickly upload the OCRed pages.--Prosfilaes (talk) 23:17, 18 November 2009 (UTC)

If you e-mail the (good) OCR output to me as a set of zipped text files, I can have User:TarmstroBot replace the existing text with the amended versions en masse. (I assume you do not wish to replace any pages that have already progressed to Proofread or Validated status.) Tarmstro99 (talk) 02:25, 19 November 2009 (UTC)

complete. Tarmstro99 (talk) 19:53, 20 November 2009 (UTC)

[edit] Something weird happening

This morning when I click on the links to scans button I see this:

You are looking at the HTML representation of the XML format.
HTML is good for debugging, but probably is not suitable for your application.
See complete documentation, or API help for more information.
<?xml version="1.0"?>
<api />

Any ideas? Is it just me? Moondyne (talk) 01:16, 19 November 2009 (UTC)

The similar links to scanned pages gives can’t run the script “displayOptionText("links to scanned pages","display:none;"” blah blah, ... Cygnis insignis (talk) 02:19, 19 November 2009 (UTC)

{{Option}} is doing it too, so it is clearly a problem with handling of the "OptionText" class—the mechanism by which it is made possible to turn the page links on and off. No-one has edited Mediawiki:Common.js recently, nor even Mediawiki:Common.css, so it would seem to be a backend issue.

There has been talk at Template talk:Page#Missing page numbers? about how the disappearance of page numbers only causes confusion, and to no advantage, and therefore the "links to scanned pages" display option would be better off removed. Since there was no opposition there after quite a while, and since this functionality is broken at present anyhow, it seems like there is no better time than the present to implement it. Done.[11][12] Hesperian 03:26, 19 November 2009 (UTC)

See also Wikipedia:Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)#Scripts are down. Hesperian 03:31, 19 November 2009 (UTC)

[edit] Unvalidating a Page

Can someone please undo my edit to Page:Fair Circumvention.djvu/1? I read and validated the page but this blanked it for some reason. I can't undo my own edit because that would involve changing the proof reading status of the page. Thanks, AdamBMorgan (talk) 20:31, 19 November 2009 (UTC)

done Sherurcij ^{Collaboration of the Week: Author:Khwaja Kamal-ud-Din.} 20:52, 19 November 2009 (UTC)

[edit] Question about Corriegenda and Addenda

I have been working on proofreading A Dictionary of Music and Musicians, volume 1. Today I transcluded the Beethoven article to mainspace. However, in volume 4 of the dictionary there is an Appendix which contains Addenda and Corriegenda (for the Beethoven article this is on page 533 through to 542). Should the corrections be made to the original article? Should the addenda be transcluded to the end of the original article? Or should they be transcluded separately? Beeswaxcandle (talk) 09:06, 20 November 2009 (UTC)

I like to maintain the errors, but make a note of anything corrected in the Errata; e.g. see An introduction to physiological and systematical botany/Chapter 10. Hesperian 11:14, 20 November 2009 (UTC)

[edit] Ancient Greek?

Hi, I think I have completed A Highland Poem... which is part of the collaboration of the week. Its the first book Ive done, so I'm not sure if I can do anything more. Specific help is required with one of the poems as it has a non A-Z title ... I think it is ancient Greek (its rendered OK in the DjVU version). Anyone good at converting this to HTML? At present I have included it as "???" and its halfway down the table of contents. Thanks Victuallers (talk) 17:22, 21 November 2009 (UTC)

~~There are a lot of poems there; which one is it in? An gr 17:27, 21 November 2009 (UTC)~~

Never mind, I found it. I've moved the page to τέτλαθι δὴ κραδίη. An gr 17:34, 21 November 2009 (UTC)

I also corrected Miserrere to Miserere. An gr 17:40, 21 November 2009 (UTC)

Thanks, for both corrections, Angr Victuallers (talk) 20:03, 21 November 2009 (UTC)

Wikisource:Scriptorium