Wikisource:Featured text candidates/Archives/2023

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Featured

R. U. R. (Rossum's Universal Robots)

The following discussion is closed:

selected for April 2023. --Jan Kameníček (talk) 23:17, 24 March 2023 (UTC)

I am nominating this work as one of the crucial works that helped to form science fiction genre and introduced the word robot into English. We can celebrate the 100th anniversary of its first English performance, which took place in 1923. -- Jan Kameníček (talk) 15:22, 22 January 2023 (UTC)

 Support I have checked and corrected every page to the best of my ability. Some very slight formatting discrepancies may remain, but I don't see any that should prevent this work from being featured. There appear to be at least four errors (mostly of punctuation) in the original text, if that matters. I don't see any errors in transclusion, although I would suggest that page breaks be inserted around the images at the beginning of each act. In short, I believe this work has been transcribed to a very high standard. Shells-shells (talk) 01:13, 23 January 2023 (UTC)
Thanks for the check very much. Let's now wait for some time to see if some objections are raised or not. As for the typos in the original, imo they should not be an obstacle. If somebody thought they should be dealt with somehow, I could add there SIC templates like {{SIC| |.}} for a missing dot, but I personally do not think it is necessary. --Jan Kameníček (talk) 16:27, 23 January 2023 (UTC)
Unless opposed, I am going to feature the play for April 2023. --Jan Kameníček (talk) 21:57, 2 March 2023 (UTC)
 Support per nom. An appropriate pick for the year of the AI bots. BD2412 T 06:34, 3 March 2023 (UTC)

The First Part of King Henry the Fourth

The following discussion is closed:

selected for May 2023. --Jan Kameníček (talk) 19:25, 30 April 2023 (UTC)

Complete, validated and transcluded version of an important play by William Shakespeare. --Jan Kameníček (talk) 23:11, 1 October 2019 (UTC)

 Comment 2023 will mark the 400th anniversary of the publication of the First Folio. My inclination is to hold off featuring Shakespeare until that year, and then celebrate in a bigger way than we normally do, since Shakespeare's works are cornerstones of English literature. --EncycloPetey (talk) 21:41, 2 December 2019 (UTC)
@EncycloPetey: I see. Do you have any idea what the celebration may look like? Feature several works at the same time? Or several works in several months one after another? Or alternate featuring several Shakespeare’s works with non-Shakespeare’s works? --Jan Kameníček (talk) 21:49, 2 December 2019 (UTC)
I'm open to any suggested plans. Since we have never featured a work by or about Shakespeare, I could imagine featuring one of each main category of play, as well as a biography or other works, either in consecutive months or weeks, or at different times throughout the year. The final decision would also depend upon what other works might have accumulated for FT. Our track record for nominations over the past year has been spotty. --EncycloPetey (talk) 00:31, 3 December 2019 (UTC)
Nobody having pointed to any problematic points, I think the work can get featured. I have looked at it again, checking some 10+ pages, and found no typos or any real problems. So I think the work can get featured. Unless opposed, I will feature it for May.--Jan Kameníček (talk) 17:12, 27 April 2023 (UTC)

A History of Japanese Literature

The following discussion is closed:

selected for November 2023

Nominating to feature in July 2020 to coincide with the 2020 Summer Olympics in Japan. The author William George Aston was a leading British scholar of Japanese, the first translator of Nihongi into English, and a diplomat in Japan. His survey of Japanese Literature might even be the first such volume published in English, though I cannot find a definitive statement to that effect. --EncycloPetey (talk) 23:49, 15 February 2020 (UTC)

I have checked some random pages and found no problems. Featured for November 2023. --Jan Kameníček (talk) 14:32, 28 October 2023 (UTC)

---

I notice on the talk page, after getting a welcome link from an ad in another work, the proposal that this be an FT. An admittedly quick perusal sees no problem with that, so is there a reason not to? Cygnis insignis (talk) 14:40, 5 November 2021 (UTC)

Little Elephant's Christmas

The following discussion is closed:

selected for December 2023. --Jan Kameníček (talk) 10:18, 8 November 2023 (UTC)

A fully validated children's book, with a mixture of beautiful images and cute, family-friendly story.

Featured text activity has been so empty in recent years, that we reuse old ones most months. We need a plethora more works in there. Make things interesting, and give readers an extra reason to come check out the main page every month... PseudoSkull (talk) 02:43, 22 August 2023 (UTC)

 Support I'd love to see this process restarted. Maybe this process stalled because of (too?) high standards? A "Text of the month" or "Page/extract of the month" might be easier to keep up-to-date...
If I understand it correctly, French Wikisource, for example, seems to only have 0-100% works and validated works, the latter of which seem to correspond with our featured texts. As long as they are technically complete and follow the style guides, it might be easier to select interesting texts to "feature" on the main page, without involving too many value judgements on the actual content of the texts. Azertus (talk) 16:44, 3 September 2023 (UTC)
To decrease cognitive load on the admins closing, can we start work on a blurb already? I haven't read it, so the summary is a little bare... Azertus (talk) 17:05, 3 September 2023 (UTC)
 Support Seems well polished and no obvious errors. Nosferattus (talk) 15:21, 5 September 2023 (UTC)
 Support The only flaw I saw was the problematic cover with some parts covered with some library labels. I have reconstructed the missing parts, just check Page:Little Elephant's Christmas, story (IA littleelephantsc00wash).pdf/1, if it is OK like that. --Jan Kameníček (talk) 20:01, 29 October 2023 (UTC)

@PseudoSkull: May I ask you to suggest the blurb at Wikisource:Featured text candidates/Workspace? --Jan Kameníček (talk) 09:41, 4 November 2023 (UTC)

@Jan.Kamenicek: Submitted. How does it look? Does it look ready for December featuring? If so, I encourage that we set it up. PseudoSkull (talk) 01:58, 8 November 2023 (UTC)

Kept

De-featuring The Time Machine (Heinemann text)

The following discussion is closed:

Kept. --Jan Kameníček (talk) 14:27, 17 December 2023 (UTC)

The work was featured in 2011 as one of the first featured texts, without being scanbacked. Now the scanbacking process has started, but the work is still far from being fully proofread and validated. I believe that the work should be defeatured and after the proofreading and validation processes are finished it can be renominated. --Jan Kameníček (talk) 20:50, 19 December 2021 (UTC)

It was actually featured in 2006 before on-Wiki proofreading was available and was done to the high standards of the time (including two pairs of eyes). While it wouldn't achieve featured status today, it is still fine. Defeaturing it now would remove the historicity of what the Community did back then. By all means get it fully scan-backed, but let's not play with history. Beeswaxcandle (talk) 04:56, 21 December 2021 (UTC)
@Beeswaxcandle: In general terms I agree with that reasoning. But, what is the purpose of the Featured Text process? Is it to bestow an award on the contributors for their hard work, or is it to highlight to visitors and readers our very best texts? English Wikipedia has struggled with this question over the years, but has landed squarely on the "Featured Article" being a quality check designed to produce and highlight the very best articles on the project to their Main Page visitors. And in order for that to work, it means old Featured Articles have to be re-reviewed and de-featured when they no longer meet current standards (either because standards were raised, or because constant drive-by edits have deteriorated the article). The dynamics on Wikisource are slightly different, but for non-scan-backed works in particular the entropy issue remains; and the underlying "What is the purpose of the Featured process?" question is the same.
I've always considered it to be about the content and about our readers, rather than about our on-project contributors, primarily. The way I read Jan, that's their starting assumption too. Xover (talk) 08:12, 21 December 2021 (UTC)
That is exactly how I have meant it. The status of a featured article is meant to inform our readers about the quality of transcription of an important work. It should be kept only there where we can guarantee the quality, which is not possible without the finished validation process. --Jan Kameníček (talk) 11:22, 21 December 2021 (UTC)
Semi- Support Featured status implies it is the best Wikisource has to offer now, not had to offer in 2006. The archives of WS:FT will record the history, the current status should be the current status.
On an operational level, ideally, the work would be scan-backed and validated first and then the text replaced seamlessly in mainspace, and then re-reviewed to ensure it's still FT-quality. But I can see that's not what has actually happened, which I don't think is a very tidy way to do it. Inductiveload—talk/contribs 09:12, 21 December 2021 (UTC)
So, you support removing Featured status because of procedural quibbles? And not because of some actual problem in the text? --EncycloPetey (talk) 18:24, 7 May 2023 (UTC)

Once I've finished the short story collection I'm working on, I can validate the remaining pages. Once that's done, others can have a look, and we can see if this copy meets standards to retain Featured status. --EncycloPetey (talk) 19:58, 25 April 2023 (UTC)

FT should use the proper punctuation, i.e. ‘ ’ and “ ”, not ' and ". I will have a look at this one. Yann (talk) 21:44, 25 April 2023 (UTC)

@Yann: Either form of quotes is acceptable by current Style Guide, as long as the choice is applied consistently throughout. The work has already had extensive proofreading. If the proofreading used straight quotes, then that's the style chosen for that work; if the proofreading used curly quotes, then that's the style chosen for the work. A quick check shows that the prior proofreaders used straight quotes, so that choice should be consistently applied throughout the work. --EncycloPetey (talk) 22:58, 25 April 2023 (UTC)
Well, I will oppose any FT using straight quotes. The punctuation should match the original print, and when the print uses curly quotes, proofreading should not use straight quotes. This is as important as respective the original spelling. Yann (talk) 11:30, 26 April 2023 (UTC)
That would be imposing a requirement that has never been required before, and isn't required by the Style Guide either. We've never required things like font style, typeface, or paragraph indentation to match, as they are artifices of the printing process, and not inherent to the work. You can suggest implementing your idea, but curly quotes is not now, and has never been, a requirement for Featured status. --EncycloPetey (talk) 16:51, 26 April 2023 (UTC)
Punctuation is not an “artifice of the printing process”. It is an essential part of a work, like spelling, language style, grammar, etc. For the same reason, if a text uses italic or small capitals, it should be faithfully transcribed. Yann (talk) 18:09, 26 April 2023 (UTC)
The presence of punctuation is part of the work, but the printing style of punctuation is not. The symbols all represent "A" and "a", but we do not bother to distinguish between the different font faces in transcription. We even make serifs on/off a user option. Likewise the print style of quotation marks is an artifice of the printing process. As I say, requiring curly quotes has never been a requirement of FT. If you wish to propose it as a requirement, that should probably happen as a discussion of its own in the Scriptorium. --EncycloPetey (talk) 19:15, 26 April 2023 (UTC)
While I personally strongly prefer curly quotes, current Wikisource guidelines admit both of them, and for works which are being proofread by many contributors with different preferences (e. g. Encyclopaedia Britannica), straight quotes are recommended to avoid endless disputes, see Wikisource:Style guide#Formatting. I also do not think that this issue is worth of fights and accept the right of the first or of the main contributor to decide. --Jan Kameníček (talk) 20:26, 26 April 2023 (UTC)
I don't understand that typographic mistakes are kept, but curly quotes are not. Yann (talk) 20:40, 26 April 2023 (UTC)
@Yann: This is partly historic, partly pragmatic. Historically straight quotes ("dumb quotes") were mandated for much the same reasons enWP mandates them: they were hard for many people to input, and computers were bad about any non-ASCII characters. It is only very recently, after a long discussion, that we opened up for allowing curly quotes. And because some of the historic issues still have relevance, and because some contributors have strong preferences for the status quo, the change came with the added provisio that curly quotes are only permitted and not mandated. And it is a requirement that for any given text this use should be consistent: either curly quotes or straight quotes, but no mixing both types. Which in turn leads to the guidance that for large texts, where many people are expected to collaborate, it is better to standardise on straight quotes to avoid inconsistency.
Personally I was iffy about permitting curly quotes because it takes quite a bit to use these correctly, but presuming their use is allowed at all I tend to agree with you that we should then reproduce the quotes that were used in the original work. But far from everyone agrees with this, and it's not an issue I consider important enough to try to change people's minds on. Do feel free to propose it at WS:S if you like, of course, but my gut feeling is that there won't be support for that.
In any case, that's the background for why it's not a criteria for Featured Texts, and hence why any objections on that basis to a FT nomination is likely to be accorded little weight. It's not an issue of someone's personal preference or a very (too) local consensus: it was a community-wide discussion and a policy change, so it's binding until a new policy is made. Xover (talk) 08:11, 27 April 2023 (UTC)

Looking more carefully, the biggest issue I see is that pages 66 and 67 are from another edition. And without a full set of pages from the correct edition, this can't be said to be the best Wikisource can offer. Can we find someone with access to the correct edition, who can supply images of the two pages? --EncycloPetey (talk) 21:49, 26 April 2023 (UTC)

 Keep It was featured and represents the works that we featured at the time. Please respect the choices of the community at that time. — billinghurst sDrewth 14:08, 1 May 2023 (UTC)

The badge shows readers what we all (not only previous contributors) are proud of. Defeaturing should not be understood as a sign of disrespect to previous contributors, it means that now our quality standards are higher and so we want to replace the items in our show window which are not representative enough. What is more, the works like this one can be brought to higher standards during the de-featuring process. Thus they would keep the badge and their quality would be improved at the same time. --Jan Kameníček (talk) 14:37, 1 May 2023 (UTC)

 Keep The full work has been double-checked, and all pages validated except two. Those two pages are marked as "problematic", but not through lack of proofreading. Those two pages are missing from the scan source, and were patched with pages of some other edition and proofread. If someone can patch those two pages into the scan, from the correct edition, the work will be complete. But I would not de-feature this work simply for a defect in the scan. In the 40 or so pages that I validated myself, I found one comma that should have been a period, some ellipses that were not set by template, and a few missing {{nop}} at the ends of chapters, but that's all. --EncycloPetey (talk) 18:22, 7 May 2023 (UTC)

While I do appreciate that the work has been proofread and validated, I am slightly hesitant about the two problematic pages: if the work were nominated now, it would quite probably not pass because of that. Most of the pages I have checked seemed well proofread (I just fixed italics in the Contents), with the exception of Page:The Time Machine (H. G. Wells, William Heinemann, 1895).djvu/6, which has some major formatting issues (centering, italics) and should not have been validated in this state. --Jan Kameníček (talk) 11:32, 9 May 2023 (UTC)
Note that scan page 6 is an advertisement, and not part of the work. --EncycloPetey (talk) 16:21, 9 May 2023 (UTC)
I have corrected the formatting and also some typos on the page, so I think we can close this as kept. --Jan Kameníček (talk) 14:24, 17 December 2023 (UTC)

Not passed

The Innocence of Father Brown

The following discussion is closed:

not selected; transcription errors and lack of support. Nosferattus (talk) 02:16, 27 June 2023 (UTC)

The first collection of mysteries featuring Father Brown by G. K. Chesterton. The character continues to be adapted for film, radio, and television. We haven't featured mystery fiction before, except A Study in Scarlet back in 2010. --EncycloPetey (talk)

 Support —Beleg Tâl (talk) 12:27, 1 November 2018 (UTC)
 Comment - There was a significant transcription error in the 2nd sentence of the book. Not a great sign, but I haven't looked further. Kaldari (talk) 00:28, 10 July 2019 (UTC)
 Comment The fpxxx page number in Index breaks the page number transclusion in Main ns. Mpaa (talk) 22:18, 29 January 2020 (UTC)
I do not experience any problem with the page number, but the flow of text is broken. Using {{img float}} could solve it. --Jan Kameníček (talk) 18:05, 25 April 2023 (UTC)
 Comment I have checked about 20 pages and found a few typos, which is not bad. However, I do not particularly like various annotations: I am not very happy about some external links to Wikipedia, like w:Eucharistic Congress, which should imo be avoided in fiction works. I have removed one external link to Wiktionary from quite a common expression ("skull and bones") to Wiktionary and one tooltip, but I suspect there are more of them. --Jan Kameníček (talk) 18:05, 25 April 2023 (UTC)
 Oppose - I picked one page completely at random and found a mistranscription. Given the concerns of others expressed above, I think this work needs another pass by a proofreader before being featured. Nosferattus (talk) 16:21, 7 June 2023 (UTC)

De-featured

Wikipedia is pushing the boundaries of scholarly practice but the gender gap must be addressed

The following discussion is closed:

de-featured

There has been practice that featured articles should be not only well proofread, but the original text also should have some undisputable qualitites. However, the quality of this article is very poor. It is an example of very bad journalism and bad work with sources, not offering any real evidence for its bombastic statements. As such it should not be promoted, because it does very bad service to the Wikigap movement. One example: My attention was caught by the statement that topics typically associated with femininity are actively deleted in Wikipedia. But instead of proofs, statistics etc., the readers are presented only with allegation that an article about Kate Middleton's wedding dress was deleted. Because the text (contrary to expectations) did not give the precise rationale behind this deletion, so I went to the linked source, where I found a link to the deletion discussion in WP, and found out that the result was speedy keep.

"Every edit on Wikipedia is political" is another apparent non-sense, given the large number of absolutely apolitical edits, not speaking about edits of purely technical nature, correcting typos etc.

I was also searching for the source of this text and failed to find it anywhere, so it has probably (rightly) disappeared from the Internet, with the exception of Wikisource.

While Wikigap movement is very important and needed, this text in fact undermines its efforts. For these reasons I nominate it to be de-featured. -- Jan Kameníček (talk) 00:09, 1 May 2023 (UTC)

  • agreed Languageseeker (talk) 00:27, 1 May 2023 (UTC)
  • This article is a joke. It looks little more than self-published, and thus out of scope, but that’s another discussion. This is not a discussion of Wikipedia but some dime-a-dozen “journalistic” hit piece by a no-name political hack. (The reference to the dress was through a Slate article, which correctly noted that it was nominated for deletion but ultimately kept. It seems the author is also illiterate.) The initial nomination seems to have been made primarily in response to an event which happened nearly a decade ago and which is no longer relevant. I agree that it should be de-featured. TE(æ)A,ea. (talk) 01:15, 1 May 2023 (UTC)
  •  Comment I expect one reason the article was nominated was the recent death of the author, just months before it was featured. --EncycloPetey (talk) 01:26, 1 May 2023 (UTC)
    • I am very sorry to hear that. No matter how much I dislike this particular text, below I was explained how good person she was. In Czech we have a proverb saying that the best ones leave first… --Jan Kameníček (talk) 12:44, 1 May 2023 (UTC)
  •  Support de-featuring, but only because for me the scale starts at Shakespeare and Tolstoy, and as literature this blog post is so far into the other end of the scale that it would need some truly massive significance to qualify. It's not intended to be more than a blog post.
    BUT! I knew Anne. I worked with her on several articles in my area of interest (Shakespeare), and reviewed several of the articles she wrote in her areas of interest (e.g. Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Shelley). She was an extremely competent editor and researcher, a wonderful collaborator, and I miss her dearly! If this particular piece by her provokes you to such a degree that its being featured here seems an actual outrage, then I think you need to go have a nice long look at your biases and triggers.
    The text is a blog post—that the blog is hosted by the London School of Economics is just fluff—in which Anne is speaking to other academics in the humanities, primarily, trying to convince them that they should not avoid and ignore Wikipedia; and in particular that female academics should not shun Wikipedia because it exacerbates the systemic bias that inevitably follows from a monoculture. She is also writing at a time when attention to and awareness about this problem was barely starting to happen. WikiProject Countering systemic bias had not yet started its Gender gap task force and Women in Red was still two years away.
    It is wrong, I think, for us to feature this text because it is a blog post, and because its social and cultural impact is not, currently, established to be sufficient to overcome that starting handicap. It was, perhaps, not so wrong for us to have featured it back then as a homage and because in the narrow blinders of the wikiverse it was a fairly significant piece of writing. It is a blog post, hastily written (between her IRL academic work and her massive contributions on-wiki, this blog post was a side project of a side project), and intended as a mild polemical aimed at other female academics.
    Awadewit was the most non-threatening and inoffensive kind of feminist Wikipedia editor, quietly chipping away at articles in the literature area of particular interest to gender equality and encouraging women and, in partcular, female academics, to participate rather than flee the then very locker-room-y boys' club that Wikipedia was (and still is, with some important changes). Her academic writing (on Wikipedia) was impeccable, and she thrived while their Featured Article criteria still demanded "brilliant prose" (they decided to do away with good prose on Wikipedia a decade or so ago, and nobody even seems to have noticed the absurdity).
    What we lost when she died is hard to quantify. I lost a treasured collaborator, a skilled writer and copy-editor, a knowledgable and careful scholar and fellow traveller, and a wonderful human being. I lost a big part of what made contributing to Wikipedia worthwhile. I miss her. --Xover (talk) 09:15, 1 May 2023 (UTC)
Thanks for explaining the background. I do believe that the author was a good person, and you may notice that I did not use any ad hominem arguments when criticising the article. It just happens that even the best authors from time to time produce poor texts, and had I been active on Wikisource in that time, I would oppose it the same way I do now. Strong statements need to be supported with strong evidence, while there is almost none here, and some of the arguments presented are simply false, because the author did not check the sources she was writing about. I take Wikigap movement seriously, some time ago I also had some lectures on Wikipedia during a Wikigap event in Czechia and I have always supported all activities fighting with various biases, but careless bombastic statements detached from reality make more harm to the movement than good. While I agree that Wikipedia is full of biases which need to be fought, I am always triggered when I see somebody is trying to reach good by presenting false arguments and distoring reality so that it looked even worse than it is, because in this way they do very bad service to the cause. And yes, I did expect that somebody will suggest that my criticism of this article is caused by my own biases, no matter how far from truth such accusation is. --Jan Kameníček (talk) 12:31, 1 May 2023 (UTC)
@Jan.Kamenicek: Criticism is fine, particularly constructive criticism; and as you can see I support the proposal to de-feature it (it shouldn't have been featured to begin with, except if we did so purely as a homage). I very specifically limited my comment there to those who are "[provoked] … to such a degree that its being featured here seems an actual outrage". Xover (talk) 13:25, 1 May 2023 (UTC)
  •  Keep I don't agree with the premise of the argument. Featured is featured, and one cannot unscramble the egg. Simply the community did make the collective decision via the appropriate process to feature this article. It was of its time, and of the people who made that choice and it got there for being of its time and of the author themself. BUT IT WAS THERE. You can have commentary about why future FT works should have a higher or different standard, you can make your commentary on the talk page about why you don't think that it should have been, but please do not change our history because you disagree with the decision of the time. — billinghurst sDrewth 14:06, 1 May 2023 (UTC)
    I understand the point but disagree. Scrambled eggs of insuficient quality can be thrown to the bin and featured articles can be defeatured. I understand the list of featured articles as a show window of our project, in which we present the best of our contents to the passers-by, and the contents of the show window can be not only added but also replaced any time. Readers who happen to go through the list know nothing about its history, they perceive only the presence, and may not understand why we consider some lower quality texts to be our best works. --Jan Kameníček (talk) 14:23, 1 May 2023 (UTC)
    Closed as not featured. --Jan Kameníček (talk) 15:57, 28 October 2023 (UTC)

Other

Fixing the links of previous FTs

The following discussion is closed:

One link fixed and one left as it is. --Jan Kameníček (talk) 09:55, 4 November 2023 (UTC)

Would the stewards of this process please look at finding the original versions of the above two works, and changing the links to those original FTs, they both seem to be versions pages. Thanks. — billinghurst sDrewth 14:15, 1 May 2023 (UTC)

@Billinghurst: Based the comments of BirgitteSB at https://en.wikisource.org/w/index.php?title=Wikisource:Featured_text_candidates&oldid=258742#Elegie_II and their edits in the history of https://en.wikisource.org/w/index.php?title=Poems_(Donne)/Elegie_II&action=history, I think we can assume it's Poems (Donne)/Elegie II.
As for the Gettysburg Address, it looks like all 6 versions were featured, since they were all on 1 page back then. Azertus (talk) 22:15, 31 August 2023 (UTC)
I am sorry for the very late answer, I have missed this discussion somehow. Thanks Azertus very much for searching through the history of both featured texts. Given the facts that the Gettysburg Address versions were gathered in one page in that time, and now they are separate (and all validated), I think we can leave the version page (i. e. the page of the work, not of a specific edition) marked as featured.
I have fixed the links to Poems_(Donne)/Elegie II. --Jan Kameníček (talk) 18:16, 28 October 2023 (UTC)
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