User talk:Fenrix1958

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Welcome to Wikisource

Hello, Fenrix1958, and welcome to Wikisource! Thank you for joining the project. I hope you like the place and decide to stay. Here are a few good links for newcomers:

You may be interested in participating in

Add the code {{active projects}}, {{PotM}} or {{Collaboration/MC}} to your page for current Wikisource projects.

You can put a brief description of your interests on your user page and contributions to another Wikimedia project, such as Wikipedia and Commons.

Have questions? Then please ask them at either

I hope you enjoy contributing to Wikisource, the library that is free for everyone to use! In discussions, please "sign" your comments using four tildes (~~~~); this will automatically produce your username if you're logged in (or IP address if you are not) and the date. If you need help, ask me on my talk page, or ask your question here (click edit) and place {{helpme}} before your question.

Again, welcome!

Source and license[edit]

Whenever you add a new work to Wikisource, such as The Nightmare, please identify the source of your electronic text and add a suitable license template. --EncycloPetey (talk) 02:06, 6 September 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Works which do not have their source identified on the work's talk page, and have no license template may be subject to deletion. --EncycloPetey (talk) 12:26, 7 September 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Can you point to the location in the new user's guide where there are examples of required citations? Fenrix1958 (talk) 12:38, 7 September 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Scans[edit]

Is File:Unseen -- Unfeared.pdf in public domain? If so, then it should be uploaded to Commons, and not to Wikisource. Wikisource generaly does not store scans or images; that is the purpose of Commons. --EncycloPetey (talk) 12:28, 7 September 2019 (UTC)[reply]

@EncycloPetey - it was a 1919 magazine, so yes, in public domain in the US. There is a better quality scan at [1]. -- Beardo (talk) 02:26, 13 August 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Sources are required[edit]

As has been mentioned previously, we have an expectation of sources when works are being added. Wikipedia expects citations for information added, we expect to see sources. If you need further assistance to do this, and the help pages listed above are not sufficient, then please ask at wikisource:Scriptorium/Help. Thanks. — billinghurst sDrewth 03:42, 26 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]

As requested above, can you please point to the location in the new user's guide where there are examples of required citations? It would be very helpful to have examples to go by. Most of these texts are from compilations whose ancillary texts and new materials are not in the public domain, while some of the individual stories are. Therefore, I cannot upload the entire document for verification without violating the copyright on the compilation (bios, author/editor notes, etc.) I have located digital scans of some of the original printings, but open digital availability is limited for some magazines over a century old. Fenrix1958 (talk) 09:18, 26 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Note that most admins will have a lot of pages on their watchlists and may not notice responses unless specifically notified. You may therefore wish to use {{ping|Billinghurst}} (it will display as "@Billinghurst:") when you reply to their message.
I can't speak directly to what their concerns was, but in general terms we need to know the origins of a given text in order to verify its integrity and determine things like copyright status. If you cannot provide a link to a scan, then a typical citation that identifies the relevant edition would be needed. --Xover (talk) 08:43, 27 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Wikisource works on the basis of editions, and we can even host multiple copies of the same work when they are different editions. Imagine the works of Shakespeare the multiple editions available. If someone has a second copy of a work is it the same edition or not? Without that knowledge we cannot make that determination, and generally we will only keep one unsourced version of a work. Re klinks
— billinghurst sDrewth 11:12, 27 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Works without a scan[edit]

Hi Fenrix1958,

I notice you're adding several texts from Weird Tales but without scan-backing. Is there a particular reason for this? Scan-backed works are strongly preferred on English Wikisource. --Xover (talk) 09:40, 5 November 2019 (UTC)[reply]

@Xover: I've been adding more of them as I progress further and learn how this community functions. I learn a new snippet of code every week and add it to a note sheet for future use. It would be nice if there was a coding guide with examples and a FAQ instead of learning about rules by violating them. Are there any entries in particular that you'd like me to go back to fix? Fenrix1958 (talk) 02:18, 6 November 2019 (UTC)[reply]
None in particular; it was just a gentle nudge to do so in general. And we very much would prefer if you'd go back and add scans for the ones you've already done (let me know if you need help). We have a giant backlog of texts that are not scan-backed from before we had the proper facilities for that, and that we are slowly slowly chipping away at. Some of those older texts end up being wasted effort in various ways (either because some feature of them means we end up having to delete them, or because we end up having to redo them almost from scratch). Helping new contributors do things right from the start is a lot more efficient.
I agree we need better guidance and documentation, but it's hard to know where we need to change. Almost everything a new contributor needs to know is explained in pages linked from the welcome message, but it's a lot to take in and the process is fairly complicated. A lot of the improvement we might wish for would require changes to the Mediawiki software to actually make the process easier and more intuitive, and the Wikisources have so far not had sufficient priority in among the limited resources of the Wikimedia Foundation.
That all being said, if you have areas and concepts that you find particularly obtuse and difficult to figure out, I would appreciate feedback on that. There is no question or documentation both could and should be better, and such feedback would be great data to have to figure out how.
PS. don't worry about this revolving door of admins showing up on your talk page telling you what you're doing wrong. The primary task of admins on enWS when patrolling recent changes isn't "enforcing policy" but rather "helping and guiding new users". In other words, we're here trying to pick up some of the slack of what the guidance and documentation pages fail to communicate clearly. --Xover (talk) 09:33, 6 November 2019 (UTC)[reply]
@Xover: Thank you for illuminating the challenges you're facing, as that helps put a lot into context. I appreciate your patience and willingness to work to bring someone new into the community. After some reflection it appears that some of my challenges are philosophical. Maybe I’m approaching this wrong, but I approach the texts here as a massive digital library rather than an academic archive. Libraries are open and want people to come in and read. Archives seem fusty and focused on the preservation of the content. For me, sharing stories with people is more important than preserving 100% integrity of a text.
Some of my confusion comes from contradictions within the “beginners” guides. In favor of the librarian philosophy the final section of the guide to sources [2] says, “Ideally all works on Wikisource will eventually have scans, replacing the works already present that do not. However, it is still OK to add proofread texts from other sources.” This was included on the page in 2011 when it was created.
To highlight the other philosophy, the “beginners” guide [3] directs new users to find a scan, upload it, and transcribe it. This is an archiving task rather than librarian one. This sets the bar to entry very high, and I’m not sure I’d quantify that process as a “beginner” task. This barrier to entry requires access to scans and a substantial amount of time performing tedious transcription. This sets perfection as the enemy of getting texts out into the world that want to be free. Perfection has a lot of value, as I started poking away at these texts in response to coming over to fix an Everil Worrell story that Wikisource was hosting an abridged version of. That text has since been corrected and validated. But I did NOT transcribe it. I found another digital version of the text and proofed it against an original scan. I would think this method of adding text equally valid, but it violates the word of the archivist-focused guidelines.
One thought could be to create a flag for texts that is more along the lines of “This text has not been verified against an original scan, please help us locate and upload one” rather than “Texts without scans will be subject to deletion.” The first provides a warning to users that they may not be seeing a perfect text, and that more research may be warranted if that’s what they need. The first is community building and provides a specific requested task. The second feels much more exclusionary and unwelcoming and sets a bar for the texts close to perfection.
Here’s a couple examples. Both “A Cargo of Cat” and “The City of the Gone Away” are delightful satirical works by Ambrose Bierce, and some of his best work, but they are not on Wikisource. They were originally published in a newspaper in the late 1800’s and do not appear to be anthologized with his more serious works. I can put my hands on a half dozen copies of the text and validate them against each other and get a pretty darn good idea about version drift, but without an old source scan the archivist policy prefers they not be considered for inclusion here.
Also with that Beginners Guide, there’s nothing about the required (or available) tags to go at the front of texts, both the license tag and the header tags. Nor what tags go on the discussion page. As I discover more pieces, I add them to my personal coding quick reference guide. Again, I learned about these tags by ignorantly violating the rules. A full list of the available tags might be nice. Random aside: The document uploader doesn’t have a dropdown option for “published after 1923 but not renewed”
I know the preference is the archive, but if the librarian is ok, then the SUBJECT TO DELETION message should be reconsidered. Also, the SUBJECT TO DELETION is not backed up on either of the deletion policy pages, [4] [5] which are mainly focused on copyright violations.
If the librarian philosophy is no longer applicable, it should be deleted from the beginner’s guide and the deletion policies should be updated to reflect the archivist philosophy. —unsigned comment by Fenrix1958 (talk) 03:56, 10 November 2019‎ (UTC).[reply]
Thanks for elaborating; that is very useful!
You may be right on the library vs. archive philosophy. Wikisource started out as a pretty free-for-all anything-goes project (much as Wikipedia did), but over the years we've gained experience that illuminates where our particular set of tools and approach can bring unique value. For example, there are a million different sites where you can host texts if your only goal is to host texts (most basically, the Internet Archive as a pure dump of scans with automated OCR). Similarly, Project Gutenberg hosts a distributed mirror of transcribed texts. However, we've found that Gutenberg's sloppy approach to sourcing means you never know which edition of a work that text represents, that they routinely conflate multiple editions in a single text, or make random "improvements" to it. Wikisource takes the approach of starting with a scan, proofreading page by page against the scan, and hosting multiple editions of each work. This makes sure what we host is always a known edition, that we do not create our own new edition conflated from multiple sources, and that every step is possible to validate.
Our biggest value proposition is not simply hosting stuff or crowd-sourcing, but that we curate our collection. Through the works themselves, Author: pages, and Portal: pages we provide a curated collection of works. Think of it as one of the big academic libraries that blur the lines between archive and library.
The (admittedly complicated and hard for beginners) proofreading process also has advantages: it enables collaboration on a single work since you can easily proofread single pages from different places in the work (think giant projects like the 1911 Encyclopaedia Britannica), not least in terms of a second person validating the proofreading done by another. It gives flexibility in how the work is presented since the proofread pages can be transcluded in multiple ways, depending on need. The index and individual page status also makes it possible to work on a project off and on over years since you always get a nice overview of what's done and what remains.
And, while not easily visible to readers, we are also curating structured bibliographic data through integration with Wikidata. Without the "archivist" philosophy that sort of structured bibliographic database is impossible (cf. the crappy data in almost every library database anywhere, exemplified perfectly in Worldcat).
However, all of that being said, it is very rare for a text to be deleted here only for not being scan-backed. Strictly speaking they should be, but the community operates with a very high tolerance for that. It usually takes additional issues such as a copyright problem or being a conflated text, and even then many in the community bend over backwards to save it. There is no guarantee this will obtain in the future, and our standards have been gradually increasing as time goes by, but as of right now the community tends to go out of its way to retain texts even if they are not up to our current standards.
However, we do have those standards, and would encourage all new contributors to use those as a yardstick rather than the much lower ones we had ten years ago. Adding to the backlog of substandard texts is not really sustainable in the long run, because it just means other contributors will have to go back and fix them; and in many cases that job means basically redoing the work from scratch. I am working on one such right now and while I don't have to redo transcription or fix raw OCR errors, I do have to edit every single page, and there was quite a bit of detective work to figure out the edition the text actually represented. And, lo and behold, what had looked like a complete work when not scan-backed actually turned out to be missing its entire last chapter… --Xover (talk) 12:00, 10 November 2019 (UTC)[reply]

PD-1924[edit]

There is no template by this name, and likely there never will be. The template is called {{Pd/1923}} or {{PD-1923}} -- —unsigned comment by EncycloPetey (talk) 18:12, 1 January 2020.

Weird Tales[edit]

Why add external links, when we have a transcription project in progress? Adding the external link will imply that we don't have a scan uploaded yet, which leads to people duplicating scans. When a scan already exists, use {{|tlsmall scan link}} to link to the transcription project. --EncycloPetey (talk) 04:13, 23 February 2020 (UTC)[reply]

In fact, The Whistling Corpse has been fully transcribed. --EncycloPetey (talk) 04:15, 23 February 2020 (UTC)[reply]

@EncycloPetey: there was no transcription project link on the author page. Also, neither the author page nor the magazine page links to a successfully transcribed story. How would I find the finished product? Fenrix1958 (talk) 13:07, 23 February 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Sorry, I have been busy and somehow missed your question. The story has been fully transcribed, but not yet transcluded. I found it by using the citation information at Author:Gladys Gordon Trenery. I clicked the link for Weird Tales, then clicked 1937 from the table, then scrolled down to July to reach Vol. 30, Iss. 1. There you will see (transcription project) linked there, which will take you to the Index page for that Issue of Weird Tales. Because the person who did the transcription did not transclude their work, the links for the Issue and individual stories are red.
So, again, the external link you added implies that no local transciption has been started, and no file for the issue exists at Commons, and someone may end up doing duplicate work on the Issue. --EncycloPetey (talk) 03:11, 13 August 2022 (UTC)[reply]

What Was It? A Mystery[edit]

What was the source document for What Was It? A Mystery ? Is it available online ? -- Beardo (talk) 02:27, 13 August 2022 (UTC)[reply]

There is a copy of this story available here: https://archive.org/details/poemsstoriesoffi00obririch/page/390/mode/2up Fenrix1958 (talk) 17:13, 18 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks - Beardo (talk) 18:59, 18 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Garden of Evil[edit]

Do you recall what caused you to believe that this is PD ? -- Beardo (talk) 03:57, 5 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Planet Stories has no renewals, and I was unable to locate a specific renewal by author for this title. As a backup check, Gutenberg has a strong vetting protocol and this is available there: https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/63847 Fenrix1958 (talk) 17:10, 18 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks. Another user has already added the license.
I am wary about Gutenberg's protocol, as several of the other stories that they have by St. Clair are listed on our author page as having been renewed. -- Beardo (talk) 19:01, 18 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I'm not seeing the renewal of this story on the author page or in any of the talk threads. "The Gardener" and "Garden of Evil" are two different stories released in different magazines in the same year. If you give me the renewal number, I can look it up and disambiguate, as this author has been known to renew stories under different titles. Fenrix1958 (talk) 18:07, 20 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]
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