Wikisource:WikiProject DNB/Style Manual

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Wikisource:WikiProject DNB Style Manual

Contents 1 Part A: Representing the DNB on this wiki 1.1 Style in biographical articles 1.2 Author templates 1.3 Hyperlinks 2 Part B: Wikisource concerns 2.1 Headers 2.2 Main page 2.3 Volume articles 2.4 Cross-referencing 2.5 Disambiguation 2.6 Titling issues in general 2.7 Author page listings 2.8 The "needs qv" category 3 Notes

One goal of this project is to capture (within reason) the look and feel of the original text, namely the 1885-1900 edition.^[1] To the extent possible, the idea is to convert it to wiki format. The use of transclusion from the Page: namespace means that constructing volumes out of pages and constructing free-standing articles can go hand-in-hand. Note that the original is a book having two columns per page; at present no effort is made to imitate that format.

This Style Manual applies to the various parts of the project:

• proof-read text of biographical articles in the Page: namespace;
• running heads and the initial text page of each volume;
• front matter in each volume;
• index in each volume.

These are part of the effort to mimic the DNB on this wiki. Also:

• individual Wikisource articles covering a single biography, where the main point is to define the header and the title to choose;
• Navigational pages (63 Index pages, the "main page" Dictionary of National Biography, 1885-1900, and the "volume pages" from Dictionary of National Biography, 1885-1900/Vol 1 Abbadie - Anne).

Here the format and other decisions are not concerned with imitating the old work, but with making the new work accessible to the reader of this website. The distinction means this Style Manual falls naturally into two parts.

[edit] Part A: Representing the DNB on this wiki

The bulk of the work is proof-reading the text of the biographical articles.

[edit] Style in biographical articles

A biographical article must preserve the content and should preserve the look of the original as much as possible. Fundamentally, it is not acceptable in any way to modify or otherwise "improve" the wording or spelling of the original. Paragraph lengths are retained, even if they seem long to the modern reader.

The following are acceptable alterations:

• Curved single quotes may be replaced by straight single quotes (apostrophes: <'>.) Many OCR conversions of the original text perform this change .
• When the original article crosses a page boundary, this is completely ignored in our version.
• When a hyphen is used to break a word across a line boundary, the hyphen is removed and the word is re-joined. Where that word is a compound word normally written with a hyphen, the hyphen should be retained. In cases of uncertainty about this it is safer to retain the hyphen.
• The last paragraph of most articles is a list of "authorities" and is in smaller font enclosed in brackets in the original. We retain the brackets, and the smaller font.
• When the original uses italics, an accented character, or a ligature, we use the identical italics, accented character, or ligature.
• Small capitals must be retained: you may use the {{sc}} template for this. Thus {{sc|John Smith}} will give John Smith.

[edit] Author templates

The final line of each article in the source is the right-justified initials of the author of the article. We retain this last line with the use of the appropriate author footer template. For example, if the source article is signed "G.C.B" then our article should end in {{DNB GCB}} which yields:

If you create an article for an author for which we do not yet have an author template, then please use your best guess at a template (such as {{DNB XYZ}}), and/or seek help at Talk:Dictionary of National Biography, 1885-1900/List of Contributors page.

There are a few technical issues to mention about these templates.

• Of the 600 or so distinct author footer initials, about 20 are ambiguous. If you create an article with an ambiguous footer template (e.g., {{DNB MB}}) the template will generate instructions on how to create the correct template. Please preview your edit to check for this prompt. The prompt messages take the form of the information that in certain volumes this author is meant by these initials, and in certain other volumes, another author is meant. This will always resolve the ambiguity.

• Please note that the author abbreviation depends often on the volume, anyway. Reference to the volume author listing in the front matter may reveal that an apparently missing author is there all the time, but that you need to create a fresh template according to the abbreviation used that time. (Don't redirect because that would give the wrong abbreviation on the page, but copy the other template as far as possible. Examples {{DNB SL}} and {{DNB SLL}}.)

• Hyphenation convention. Rather awkwardly, there are templates such as {{DNB RB-l}} for Richard Bagwell, where the DNB idea is to use the first and last letters of the surname to disambiguate the initials RB. It can be very hard to see these on the djvu because the typographic convention was "small caps", and l in R. B.-l. is not that different from L; you really have to be alert to this possibility. Our convention is to use the hyphen in the template and the lower-case final letter. Since there is possible confusion it seems to be the good practice to create a redirect from {{DNB RB-L}}, rather than assume everybody will always appreciate what is going on. (The current stock of templates may not follow this yet.) NB that independently of all this, there are also templates that are hyphenated because of double-barrelled names.

[edit] Hyperlinks

This is hyperlinking in the broad sense of adding internal links to other articles, WMF sister projects, or even truly external links to outside sites. Links may be made providing that the text seen remains unchanged from the original except for the changed colour. In practical terms this means a hyperlink will always be by via a piped link in text: the displayed text remains unchanged.

[edit] Part B: Wikisource concerns

[edit] Headers

The appropriate header is {{DNB00}} for all the single biography articles taken from the first edition (1885-1900); any articles from the 1901 Supplement need {{DNB01}}. Use of the template {{subst:DNBset}} (see {{DNBset}}) combines transclusion data with a rendered form of {{DNB00}} after substitution.

Note that links to author pages have in the past been placed in the "extra_notes" field of the header, as explicit wikilinks to Author pages. This is now deprecated, in that use of the "contributor" field, simply with the author name (e.g. Sidney Lee, no prefix) will render in the blue part of the header rather than below it.

The "wikipedia" field of the header is where to place the title of the corresponding enWP article. Its functionality has been upgraded. If there is no matching Wikipedia article this should now be left blank (in the past this caused format artefacts), and the article will automatically be placed in Category:DNB No WP. Where you find some entry in the field other than a WP article title, it was there to block the artefact, and should now simply be removed.

The generally accepted way to fill out the "previous" and "next" fields is to add the (disambiguated) titles of the previous or next biography in the DNB, skipping over any redirect-like piece of text. This convention matches the convention generally used in the volume ToCs. When creating the first or last article of a volume, replace the "previous" field (in the case of an initial article) or "next" field (in the case of a final article) by "overprev" or "overnext" respectively. Then fill in the field with a wikilink to the volume ToC of the volume before or after.

[edit] Main page

The "main page" article is in the main namespace at Dictionary of National Biography, 1885-1900, and includes a link to each of the 63 volume articles. It also should include links to any front matter or end matter articles that related to the DNB as a whole. The "table of contents" portion of this main article is a Wikisource navigational construct: it is not intended to exactly duplicate any actual content from the original source, but instead to help the reader find a way through this massive publication.

[edit] Volume articles

Each volume article includes a "table of contents" containing links to each biographical article from that volume. This table of content is a Wikisource navigational construct: it is not intended to exactly reproduce any actual content from the original source. It provides links to each Wikisource biographical article that was in the associated original DNB volume.

Note that so far we have not settled which parts of the DNB text will constitute articles. There being some that are frankly short redirects (of different types, though), the Wikiproject has not concluded what to do with those redirects (are they to be placed systematically in the main namespace in their own right? and are they to be put in the "previous" and "next" fields of article headers?)

The table of contents is in four columns (the division into four is not part of the organization of the original DNB volume), providing the Wikisource volume ToC. Eventually, the project should add exact reproductions of the indexes from the original sources, but the volume ToCs are not intended to fulfil this function. They are to provide access to the single biography articles, created or to be created.

The format of the volume ToCs has settled down as

• bulleted lists;
• piped links hiding the (DNB00) only.

Any required date disambiguator should be visible. (See #Disambiguation below.)

[edit] Cross-referencing

While the cross-referencing/redirecting function of the text in the Page: namespace is going to be implemented by some wikilinking, it has not been settled how, if at all, it will be implemented in the volume ToCs. Obviously it might help the readers just as much to create actual redirect pages.

Place the category Category:DNB needs qv on any article not having hyperlinks for the [q. v.] names it contains. Where in the text there is

Name [q. v.]

either Name or [q. v.] is turned into a piped wikilink, by current practice (logically, perhaps, it should be the latter). But there are other cross-references such as

[see Name]

and there is no accepted house style so far applying to hyperlinking.

[edit] Disambiguation

Often enough, two or more persons with articles in the Dictionary of National Biography have the same name. This requires a "disambiguation" process to distinguish the articles from each other (and from any other person that may appear in other works yet to be included in Wikisource).

We have chosen to use birth and death years for disambiguation.^[2] It is conceivable that two persons with the same name will also have the same birth and death years: a case has arisen where the death dates only are given and coincide.

As an example, the original DNB included three persons named John Holt, and we distinguish them as follows:

1. Holt, John (d.1418) (DNB00)
2. Holt, John (1642-1710) (DNB00)
3. Holt, John (1743-1801) (DNB00)

Please note:

• The disambiguator which distinguishes persons of the same name precedes the disambiguator which distinguishes articles about the same person in different works. At this point we do not need to be too concerned about the latter since for our purposes the only other ones we need to define are (DNB01) for the first (1901) supplement and (DNB12) for the second (1912) supplement. Later supplements have unresolved copyright issues.
• There is a space between the two disambiguators. Such a detail may seem like a trivial point, but it is essential to insuring that links work.
• There is a space between the name and the disambiguator.
• The dates used should be exactly the ones used in parentheses after the name in the DNB, even if the further text suggests something different. The style with a query should be retained. In the light of current knowledge a date may be wrong, but this is a disclaimer matter.
• Where both birth and death dates are available they are separated by an ordinary hyphen and no spaces.
• If we only know one of the dates, or the general dates when the person was active the "d." or "fl." includes the period and is not followed by a space. If these terms are italicized in the source article text they should be italicized in our Wiksource article text, but they should not be italicized in the article title.
• Unfortunately, you will not be able to use the "short pipe" shortcut to hide the (DNB00) disambiguation when there is also a date disambiguation, because the "short pipe" creates the display text by trimming from the first parenthesis. Therefore, use the full pipe syntax if you create a link using a disambiguated article name.
  • desired result: Holt, John (d.1418)
  • (failed) short pipe: [[Holt, John (d.1418) (DNB00)|]] yields Holt, John
  • (successful) long pipe:[[Holt, John (d.1418) (DNB00)|Holt, John (d.1418)]] yields Holt, John (d.1418)

[edit] Titling issues in general

There are other points on titling, and these are not fully settled. In general for names that are forenames+surname, the title should be surname, forenames; all forenames should be included. It is better to make all strings unique rather than the initial part of another: the pair Smith, John and Smith, John Arthur share the initial string "Smith, John" and so dates should be added to the former, rather than the "tacit" disambiguation relying on the "Arthur" in the latter.^[3] For an article starting "Smyth or Smythe, John", make it Smyth, John; in general where there are name variants we should go with the first version only, and aliases should not mentioned in the article title.

Otherwise names that are forenames+surname should be kept minimal: remove titles of nobility, "Sir" or "Lady", post-nominal initials, and styles, even if the DNB includes them. (We will reproduce independently the DNB's index pages, but our volume listings are not meant to mimic those.)

There are numerous cases of names other than forenames+surname. Examples are:

• royals such as Henry VIII;
• In James Francis Edward Stuart (the Old Pretender), a prince, Stuart is not a surname and the title needs no comma;
• a pope Adrian IV;
• saints;
• medieval names in general, where in Roger de Mowbray you can't treat "Mowbray" or "de Mowbray" exactly like a surname (there are anyway various types of names with "de" or "of" as connective, and one should observe the DNB's handling of those). The connecting particles "de", "of" and "à" should be retained. Nicknames to disambiguate should be included, but without the connecting "called".

[edit] Author page listings

Except for about 1% unsigned articles, each single biography should be linked from an Author page; most such pages have been created by now (total number of authors is around 650, and a few remain to create, or to identify the author properly. These author pages carry {{DNB contributor}}, which fills with the abbreviation(s) used to sign articles.

Some 250 authors contributed just one article. At the other end of the scale, there are around 100 authors responsible for more than 50 articles. Therefore different treatment of listings is warranted. For more than 50 articles a subpage /DNB is being set up, that will give a systematic tabulated complete listing including page numbers for quick access. Reasons of efficiency suggest copying names into such tables from the volume ToCs, rather than re-typing; so the development of these listings will lag the ToCs. (Page numbers are in the reference book by Gillian Fenwick.)

At the other end of the scale, the template {{DNB contributor complete}} indicates that all DNB articles by the author (according to Fenwick's book) have been listed on the Author page. Such listings are often as piped links; this has the drawback that the suffix showing the edition (DNB00, DNB01) is then not visible. In time the edition should be shown explicitly as a subsection heading, for the Supplement articles or later versions.

[edit] The "needs qv" category

Any single biography that needs hyperlinks for the [q. v.] cross-references should carry Category:DNB needs qv, by a long-standing convention. This convention may need some further consideration, since the resulting maintenance category is large and not specially useful right now. It is also not so clear whether we should be privileging [q. v.] hyperlinks (and we apparently have no standard on whether you link the [q. v.] or the name); whether text like "[see Smith, John]" counts as a q.v. or something else; and so on, with no set of conventions having so far emerged. While it is still best practice to add Category:DNB needs qv where any [q. v.] cross-references have not been wikified, this area of the work is still being done freehand.

[edit] Notes