Wikisource:Proposed deletions

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Index:The trail of the golden horn.djvu

This specific index is one of many such indexes; I nominate it as an example, but should the rationale be found sound, I will endeavor to make a list of all such indexes.

This index (and many others) were created by now-absent User:Languageseeker. My main concern is that the pages of these indexes have been added via match-and-split from some source, likely Project Gutenberg, which does not have a defined original copy. Because of this absence of real source, and the similarity of the text to the actual text of any given scanned copy, proofreading efforts would likely have to either not check the text against the original source or scrap the existing text entirely to ensure accuracy to the original on Wikisource. In light of this, I think the easiest approach is to delete the indexes and all pages thereunder; if there is organic desire to scan them at some point in the future, the indexes may be re-created, but I do not see a reason to keep the indexes as they stand. TE(æ)A,ea. (talk) 19:12, 9 December 2023 (UTC)

•  Comment Hmm. I don't see the Index: pages as problematic. But the "Not Proofread" Page: pages that were, as you say, created by Match & Split from a secondary transcription (mostly Gutenberg, but also other sources), I do consider problematic. We don't permit secondary transcriptions added directly to mainspace, so to permit them in Page: makes no sense. And in addition to the problems these create for Proofreading that TE(æ)A,ea. outlines, it is also an issue that many contributors are reluctant to work on Index:es with a lot of extant-but-not-Proofread (i.e. "Red") pages.
  We have around a million (IIRC; it may be half a mill.) of these that were bot-created with essentially raw OCR (the contributor vehemently denies they are "raw OCR", so I assume some fixes were applied, but the quality is very definitely not Proofread). Languageseeker's imports are of much higher quality, but are still problematic. I think we should get rid of both these classes of Page: pages. In fact, I think we should prohibit Not Proofread pages from being transcluded to mainspace (except as a temporary measure, and possibly some other common sense exceptions). --Xover (talk) 20:24, 9 December 2023 (UTC)
  • Xover: Assuming the status of the works to be equal, I would actually consider Languageseeker’s page creations to be worse, because, while it would look better as transcluded, it reduces the overall quality of the transcription. My main problem with the other user’s not-proofread page creations was that he focused a lot on indexes of very technical works, but provided no proofread baseline on which other editors could continue work—that was my main objection at the time, as it is easier to come on and off of work where there is an established style (for a complicated work) as opposed to starting a project and creating those standards yourself. As to the Page:/Index: issue, I ask for index deletion as well because these indexes were created only as a basis for the faulty text import, and I don’t want that to overlook any future transcription of those works. Again, I have no problem to work (or re-creation), I just think that these indexes (which are clearly abandoned, and were faulty ab origine) should be deleted. As for transclusion of not-proofread pages, I don’t think that the practice is so widespread that a policy needs to implemented (from my experience, at least); the issue is best dealt with on a case-by-case basis, or rather an user-by-user basis (as users can have different ways of turning raw OCR into not-proofread text, then following transclusion and finally proofread status). But of course, that (and the other user’s works, the indexes for which I think should probably be deleted) are a discussion for another time. (I will probably have more spare time starting soon, so I might start a discussion about the other user’s works after this discussion concludes.) TE(æ)A,ea. (talk) 02:28, 10 December 2023 (UTC)

    I'm not understanding what fault there is in the Index page. If the Page: pages had not been created, what problem would exist in the Index: page? --EncycloPetey (talk) 02:53, 10 December 2023 (UTC)

    • EncycloPetey: This isn’t a case where the index page’s existence is inherently bad; but the pages poison the index, in terms of future (potential) proofreading efforts and in terms of abandonment. TE(æ)A,ea. (talk) 03:07, 10 December 2023 (UTC)

      @TE(æ)A,ea.: Just to be clear, if the outcome here is to delete all the "Not Proofread" Page: pages, would you still consider the Index: pages bad (should be deleted)? So far that seems to be the most controversial part of this discussion, and the part that is a clear departure from established practice. Xover (talk) 07:40, 20 December 2023 (UTC)

      • Xover: Yes, I think those are also bad. They were created en masse for the purpose of adding this poor match-and-split text, and there is no additional value in keeping around hundreds of unused indexes whose only purpose was to facilitate a project consensus (here) clearly indicates in unwise. The main objection on that ground is that indexes are difficult to make; but that is not really true, and in any case is not a real issue, as a new editor who wishes to edit (but not create an index) can simply ask for one to be created. Another problem with these indexes is that they are not connected with other information (like the Author:-pages) that would help new editors find them. Insofar as they exist like this, the only real connection these indexes have to the project at large is through Languageseeker, who is now no longer editing. I don’t think that every abandoned index is a nuisance, but I do believe that this (substantial) group of mass-created indexes is a problem. TE(æ)A,ea. (talk) 21:10, 20 December 2023 (UTC)

• I support deleting the individual pages of the index. As for the Index page itself, I am OK with both deleting it as abandoned or keeping it to wait for somebody to start the work anew. I also support getting rid of other similar secondary transcriptions. If a discussion on prohibiting transclusion of not-proofread pages into main NS is started somewhere, I will probably support it too. --Jan Kameníček (talk) 00:39, 10 December 2023 (UTC)

 Comment I've always felt uncomfortable with the tendency of some users to want to bulk-add a bunch of Index pages which have the pages correctly labelled, but are left indefinitely with no pages proofread in them. I feel like a "transcription project" (as Index pages are labelled in templates) implies an ongoing, or at least somewhat complete, ordeal, and adding index pages without proofreading anything is really just duplicating data from other places into Wikisource. Not to say there's absolutely no value in adding lots of index pages this way, but the value seems minimal. The fact that index pages mostly rely on duplicate data as it is is already an annoying redundancy on the site, and I think most of what happens on Index pages should just be dealt with in Wikidata, so I think the best place to bulk-add data about works is there, not by mass-creating empty Index pages. I know my comment here is kind of unrelated to the specific issue of the discussion (being, indexes with pages matched and splitted or something), but the same user (Languageseeker) has tended to do that as well. I am struggling to come up with any specific arguments or policies to support my position against those empty index pages... but it just seems unnecessary, seems like it will cause problems in the future, and on a positive note I do applaud Languageseeker's massive effort—it shows something great about their character as an editor—but unfortunately I think their effort should have been more focused on areas other than the creation of as many Index pages as possible. PseudoSkull (talk) 04:15, 10 December 2023 (UTC)

Bulk-adding anything is probably a bad idea on Wikisource, because so much of what we do here requires a human touch. That being said, so far as I know the Index: pages Languageseeker created were perfectly fine in themselves, including having correct pagelists etc. This step is often complicated for new contributors, so creating the Index: without Proofreading anything is not without merit. It's pointing at an already set up transcription project onsite vs. just (ext)linking to a scan at IA for some users. The latter is an insurmountable effort for quite a lot of contributors. We also have historically permitted things to sit indefinitely in our non-content namespaces if they are merely incomplete rather than actually wrong in some way.

That's not to say that all these Index: pages are necessarily golden, but imo those that are problematic (if any) should be dealt with individually. Xover (talk) 09:08, 10 December 2023 (UTC)

Oh, also, what we host on Wikidata vs. what's hosted locally in our Index: pages is a huge and complicated discussion (hmu if you want the outline). For the purposes of this discussion it, imo, makes the most sense to just view that as an entirely orthogonal issue. If and when (and how and why and...) we push some or all our Index: page contents somewhere other than our current solution, it'll deal with these Index:es as well as every other. Xover (talk) 07:33, 20 December 2023 (UTC)

 Comment I do not support creating them, but since they exist, I try to make good use of them. I usually proofread offline for convenience and when I add the text I check the diff. If anything differs, it is an extra check for me as I could be the one who made mistakes. So I would keep them.

BTW, nobody forbids to press the OCR button and restart. Mpaa (talk) 18:35, 10 December 2023 (UTC)

While that is true, my experience is that the kinds of errors introduced by a mystery text layer is insidious, and most editors are unaware of the issue, or fail to notice small problems such as UK/US spelling differences, changes to punctuation, minor word changed, etc. So, while a person could reset the text, what would alert them to the fact that they should, rather than working from the existing unproofed page?

H. G. Wells' First Men in the Moon is a prime example. A well-meaning editor matched-and-split the text into the scan. Two experienced editors crawled through making multiple corrections to validate the work, yet as recently as this past week we have had editors continue to find small mistakes throughout. Experience shows that match-and-split text is actually worse for Wikisource proofreading than the raw OCR because of these persistent text errors. --EncycloPetey (talk) 18:51, 10 December 2023 (UTC)

In my workflow, I start from OCR, then compare what I did with what is available. It is an independent reference which I use for quality check. The probability that I did the same error is low (and the error would be anyhow there). It is almost as if someone is validating my text (or vice-versa). For me it is definitely a help. I follow the same process when validating text. I do not look at what is there and then compare. Mpaa (talk) 19:21, 10 December 2023 (UTC)

Right. You do that, and I work similarly. But experience shows that the vast majority of contributors don't do that; they either don't touch the text due to the red pages, or they try to proofread off the extant text and leave behind subtle errors as EncycloPetey outlines. Xover (talk) 19:35, 10 December 2023 (UTC)

We could argue forever. I do not know what evidence you have to say that works started from match-and-split are worse than others. I doubt anyone has real numbers to say that. IMHO it all depends on the attitude of contributors. I have seen works reaching a Validated stage and being crappy all the same. If you want to be consistent, you should delete all pages in a NotProofread state and currently not worked on because I doubt a non-experienced user will look where the text is coming from when editing, from a match-and-split or whatever.

Also, then we should shutdown the match-and-split tool or letting only admins to run it, after being 100% sure that the version to split is the same as the version to scan.

I am not advocating it as a process, I am only saying that what is there is there and it could be useful to some. If the community will decide otherwise, fine, I can cope with that. Mpaa (talk) 20:32, 10 December 2023 (UTC)

I do not know what evidence you have to say that works started from match-and-split are worse than others. Anecdotal evidence only, certainly. But EncycloPetey gave a concrete example (H. G. Wells' First Men in the Moon), and both of us are asserting that we have seen this time and again: when the starting point is Match & Split text, the odds are high that the result will contain subtle errors in punctuation, US/UK spelling differences, words changed between editions, and so forth. All the things that do not jump out at you as "misspelled". Your experience may, obviously, differ, and it's certainly a valid point that we can end up with poor quality results for other reasons too.

Your argumentum ad absurdum arguments are also well taken, but nobody's arguing we go hog-wild and delete everything. Languageseeker, specifically, went on an import-spree from Gutenberg (and managed to piss off the Distributed Proofreaders in the process), snarfing in a whole bunch of texts in a short period of time. All of these are secondary transcriptions, and Languageseeker was never going to proofread these themselves (their idea was almost certainly to either transclude them as is, or to run them in the Monthly Challenge).

For these sorts of bulk actions that create an unmanageable workload to handle, I think deletion (return to the status quo ante) is a reasonable option. The same would go for the other user that bulk-imported something like 500k/1 mill. (I've got to go check that number) Page: pages of effectively uncorrected OCR. For anything else I'd be more hesitant, and certainly wouldn't want to take a position in aggregate. Those would be case-by-case stuff, but that really isn't an option for these bulk actions. Xover (talk) 07:17, 11 December 2023 (UTC)

 Comment I am agianst deleting the Index. Indexes are one of the most tedious work to do when starting a transcription. Having index pages prepared and checked against the scan will save a lot of work. Mpaa (talk) 21:46, 10 December 2023 (UTC)

•  Keep the Index, but  Delete the pages. None of the bot-created pages have the header, which is a pain to add after-the-fact unless you can run a bot. The fact that they were created by match-and-split, instead of proofreading the text layer is poor practice. --EncycloPetey (talk) 19:15, 20 December 2023 (UTC)

  There are many recently added "new texts" with no headers. Mpaa (talk) 22:00, 23 December 2023 (UTC)

  • What percent of editors want headers; and what percent do not care? Do you have data? --EncycloPetey (talk) 22:03, 23 December 2023 (UTC)

    No, I am only stating is not a good argument for deletion in my opinion, unless it is considered mandatory. Mpaa (talk) 22:22, 23 December 2023 (UTC)

    • It is a good argument if most potential editors want to include the headers, and are put off working on proofreading by the fact that pages were created without the headers in place. There are works I've chosen not to work on for this reason. --EncycloPetey (talk) 23:04, 23 December 2023 (UTC)

    I agree that on its own the lack of headers is not a good argument for deletion. But I read it here to be intended as one additional factor on the scales that added together favour deletion. Which I do think is a valid argument (one can disagree, of course). Xover (talk) 23:57, 23 December 2023 (UTC)

  • Mpaa: That is the result of the efforts of one user, who has declared headers superfluous. I was going to start another discussion on that topic after this one (only one big discussion at a time for me, please). I think that, for all editors who want headers (most of them), not having them (because of the match-and-split seen here) is bad. Also, in response to your other comments above about proofreading over existing text, I usually do that as well, but I prefer proofreading on my own, without needing to check against a base—that’s why I focus on proofreading, not validation. For that same reason, I avoid all-not-proofread indexes like those at issue here. TE(æ)A,ea. (talk) 23:22, 23 December 2023 (UTC)

    I was thinking the same about headers, it would be good to have a consistent approach about works, in all their parts/namespaces. Mpaa (talk) 09:47, 24 December 2023 (UTC)

 Comment in the future, if anyone feels blocked for the lack of headers, or wants to add headers, please make a bot request.Mpaa (talk) 09:47, 24 December 2023 (UTC)

 Comment I am proofreading this specific text. This discussion can be as reference for the other indexes, as TE(æ)A,ea. mentioned at the beginning of the discussion. BTW, a list would be useful, so I can fetch before a (possible) deletion. Mpaa (talk) 12:53, 2 January 2024 (UTC)

• I have removed your discussion-closure notice, EncycloPetey, because I created this discussion as a general issue, not tied to the specific index at hand. Mpaa, just to be clear, you would like a list of the indexes with match-and-split pages, or would you like a more general listing of that user’s indexes? TE(æ)A,ea. (talk) 01:09, 10 January 2024 (UTC)

  Per the description at the top of this page: "This page is for proposing deletion of specific articles on Wikisource in accordance with the deletion policy, and appealing previously-deleted works." This discussion was closed because the decision was to Keep Index:The trail of the golden horn.djvu now that it is proofread. Do you disagree with that decision? Because this page is not for discussing general issues. That needs to happen in the Scriptorium, not here. --EncycloPetey (talk) 02:47, 10 January 2024 (UTC)

  @TE(æ)A,ea. those with match-and-split pages that could be deleted. Mpaa (talk) 20:48, 10 January 2024 (UTC)

The Picture in the House (unknown)

Duplicative of Weird Tales/Volume 3/Issue 1/The Picture in the House, starting discussion to decide whether to remove or migrate the librivox recording. MarkLSteadman (talk) 06:43, 29 December 2023 (UTC)

Gah. Tough call.

The two texts are not the same. Both Weird Tales in 1924 and the 1937 reprint use … the antique and repellent wooden building which blinked with bleared windows from between two huge leafless oaks near the foot of a rocky hill, but the unsourced text uses … elms …. LibriVox for once actually gives a source, and in the case of File:LibriVox - picture in the house lovecraft sz.ogg that source is The Picture in the House (unknown) (modulo a page move after the fact here), and the audio narration does match (uses "elms"). The change to "elms" seems to be a later innovation, possibly applied by an editor as late as 1982 (Bloodcurdling Tales of Horror and the Macabre, the earliest use of "elms" there I could find right now), and the likely ultimate source of our text. The texts differ in other ways too, but up to this point the difference could be explained by transcription errors, lack of scan-backing and validation, etc.).

So… I don't think we can move the LibriVox file over to our new text (different edition). And because the nominated text is from an indeterminate edition and we have a scan-backed version of this work, we should  Delete The Picture in the House (unknown) too.

But it's really annoying that when LibriVox for once both gives the source text they have used for their reading and actually links back to us, we have to delete the page. I wish they'd coordinate more with us on issues like this so we could get the maximum benefit out of our respective volunteer efforts. Xover (talk) 08:38, 29 December 2023 (UTC)

I guess that the LibreVox versions dates to when this was the only version available. Can we put the LibreVox link on The Picture in the House ? -- Beardo (talk) 18:33, 29 December 2023 (UTC)

Hmm, no, I don't think so. We can't start amassing random multimedia versions of texts at the dab pages. Eventually we want spoken-word versions of our texts automatically linked from data on Wikidata, and that requires control over which specific edition the spoken-word version is from. Xover (talk) 10:49, 31 December 2023 (UTC)

•  Comment The earliest copy I found with "...elms..." is a Best Supernatural Stories of H.P. Lovecraft on Google books, p. 122, which the site dates to 1945. --EncycloPetey (talk) 20:29, 30 December 2023 (UTC)

weak  Delete - it would probably be better for us to just start from scratch, although I recognize its value as being linked to from LibriVox, so maybe it could just be redirected to the current scanned version instead of outright deleted. SnowyCinema (talk) 03:30, 8 March 2024 (UTC)

• But start from scratch using what? The issue is that our scan-backed copy has a different text from the LibriVox recording. The text of the nominated copy can be attested, but not (yet) from a volume dated before 1945. Ideally, we would find a PD volume with the current text. --EncycloPetey (talk) 04:35, 18 March 2024 (UTC)

Official Journal of the European Union, L 042I, 23 February 2022

Excerpt of just parts of the title page (a pseudo-toc) of an issue of the journal of record for the EU. Xover (talk) 11:29, 11 February 2024 (UTC)

Also Official Journal of the European Union, L 078, 17 March 2014 Xover (talk) 11:34, 11 February 2024 (UTC)

Also Official Journal of the European Union, L 087I, 15 March 2022 Xover (talk) 11:35, 11 February 2024 (UTC)

Also Official Journal of the European Union, L 110, 8 April 2022 Xover (talk) 11:36, 11 February 2024 (UTC)

Also Official Journal of the European Union, L 153, 3 June 2022 Xover (talk) 11:37, 11 February 2024 (UTC)

Also Official Journal of the European Union, L 066, 2 March 2022 Xover (talk) 11:39, 11 February 2024 (UTC)

Also Official Journal of the European Union, L 116, 13 April 2022 Xover (talk) 11:39, 11 February 2024 (UTC)

•  Keep This isn't an excerpt; it matches the Contents page of the on-line journal and links to the same items, which have also been transcribed. The format does not match as closely as it might, but it's not an excerpt. --EncycloPetey (talk) 04:52, 12 February 2024 (UTC)

  That's not the contents page of the online journal, it's the download page for the journal that happens to display the first page of the PDF (which is the title page, that also happens to list the contents). See here for the published form of this work. What we're hosting is a poorly-formatted de-coupled excerpt of the title page. It's also—regardless of sourcing—just a loose table of contents. Xover (talk) 07:09, 13 February 2024 (UTC)

  I don't understand. You're saying that it matches the contents of the journal, yet somehow it also doesn't? Yet, if I click on the individual items in the contents, I get the named items on a subpage. How is this different from what we do everywhere else on Wikisource? --EncycloPetey (talk) 16:35, 13 February 2024 (UTC)

  They are loose tables of contents extracted from the title pages of issues of a journal. They link horizontally (not to subpages) to extracted texts and function like navboxes, not tables of contents on the top level page of a work. That their formatting is arbitrary wikipedia-like just reinforces this.

  The linked texts should strictly speaking also be migrated to a scan of the actual journal, but since those are actual texts (and not a loose navigation aid) I'm more inclined to let them sit there until someone does the work to move them within the containing work and scan-backing them. Xover (talk) 08:35, 20 February 2024 (UTC)

  So, do I understand then that the articles should be consolidated as subpages, like a journal? In which case, these pages are necessary to have as the base page. Deleting them would disconnect all the component articles. It sounds more as though you're unhappy with the page formatting, rather than anything else. They are certainly not "excerpts", which was the basis for nominating them for deletion, and with that argument removed, there is no remaining basis for deletion. --EncycloPetey (talk) 19:41, 25 February 2024 (UTC)

Undelete Index:Commentariesofcj00caesuoft.djvu

Only one user (besides deleting administrator) supported deletion, and those comments were without justification and/or not true. There is a substantial amount of English text in this work, which makes it clearly in scope. TE(æ)A,ea. (talk) 22:38, 20 February 2024 (UTC)

•  Oppose In the 13 years this Index was up, the six pages of English introduction were never proofread. The pages that were created included: missing images pages in Latin with English titles; blank pages; and unproofread pages in Latin. Yes, there is substantial English, but only mixed with Latin in the endnotes. It is correct to say that only one person opposed the deletion prior to the deletion occurring. If the Index were proofread first at la.WS or the multi-language WS, we could host the six English pages here, but as a primarily Latin text, it is not in scope for en.WS. --EncycloPetey (talk) 22:42, 20 February 2024 (UTC)

  Considering the endnotes are about interpreting the latin text it really does feel like this is a good fit for multi-language WS. I could see a potential discussion if the endnotes were themselves meaningful independent texts but I don't understand how a 100 pages of "[Latin] See X. xx." can exist without the text. MarkLSteadman (talk) 00:27, 21 February 2024 (UTC)

   Abstain: Due to this relevant discussion related to this topic when it was put here a short while ago and I had voted in opposition to keep the work here at that time (since only about 235 scan pages out of the total of 418 scan pages were actually in Latin; the rest being in English). It should perhaps also be noted I made the Commons edit 853982373 (among several others) pointing the Wikisource link at WS.MUL. I agree this work had floundered here previously and that it probably should not be primarily here but I also believe there is substantial English content that can and should be here (provided someone actually proofreads it). —Uzume (talk) 14:18, 14 March 2024 (UTC)

: Undelete. My interpretation of what makes a text "an English text" or "not an English text" is intended audience. Clearly this book was intended to be read by English speakers, given that the front matter, introduction, etc., were in English. Yes, the bulk of the text is in Latin, but the reason it's in Latin is for English speakers to study it in its (presumably) original form, not because the text needed to be conveyed in Latin for a strictly Latin-speaking audience.

Think of it like this: This version of the work is not strictly "a Latin version of Commentaries" but a book for English readers containing a Latin version of Commentaries to interpret. The point isn't to read the Latin natively (like an ancient Roman text would be), but to read it secondarily to one's academic knowledge of the language. So the crux of the work, while only taking up a small amount of the text, is in the English language, making me believe that this should be hosted at English Wikisource, since this is part of the English-speaking world's compendium of literature. No, I don't think Multilingual or Latin Wikisources are appropriate for this, and including the Introduction alone here (since the Introduction is not a work, but a piece of a work, and not even the only part of it in English), defies our rules on including excerpts. SnowyCinema (talk) 01:02, 21 February 2024 (UTC)

From WWSI: "The English Wikisource only collects texts written in the English language." I would consider a Latin text aimed at English speakers as not written in the English language (e.g. the untranslated Principia). Re the crux issue, my view is the exact opposite, without the Latin text the introduction / notes have little value, but an edited Latin text could stand on its own. Re excerpts, that is what will happen once we blank out the Latin, that (and the title page) will be all that remain. MarkLSteadman (talk) 02:14, 21 February 2024 (UTC)

No, no, it's sort of like if you had a plate in a book, and the plate was a picture of a sign in French. But the caption was in English. So what language was the page in? English, not French, and the same logic applies to this book we're discussing... The book contains Latin to study (or whatnot), but the context of it was framed in English, so the book is descriptively an English work. And as I said below, splitting up content by language across interwikis gets complicated fast. SnowyCinema (talk) 16:21, 21 February 2024 (UTC)

To take the plates example a bit further. Let's say I have a 300 plate facsimile edition of a manuscript edition of this. I would expect that we agree that none of the following would make it a work for here as a preferred relative to Latin WS:

1. There is a title page that says something like "Volume 525 in the British Museum Manuscript Series", a dedication / acknowledgement or each page is captioned as "Page 25, Book 4" instead of "Page Liber 4"

2. Notes are added comparing against other manuscript editions and these say things like "foo in the Parker Library manuscript", again instead of having "in the Parker Library manuscript be English rather than Latin

3. Notes of a highly technical nature such as a discussion of the current thinking of the identification of a particular site, or military specifics.

The experience of a Chinese historian might be different. A classicist would engage archaeologists in English, write in English journals etc., the Chinese historian next door might be presenting a paper written in Chinese based on a similar facsimile from a Chinese publisher in a conference in China. I would expect that we wouldn't consider those differences really significant.

A long series of English essays on topics to accompany the text on the other hand would make sense as a standalone work. To what extent glosses become independent works in themselves is of course up for discussion. I can see an argument, we do have works like An Ainu–English–Japanese Dictionary which are similar to a work like [1] which is similar to the glosses in the endnotes here, but I would hope we agree that [2] or [3] are not English texts per WWSI. MarkLSteadman (talk) 15:08, 22 February 2024 (UTC)

That opens us to a whole lot of foreign-language texts. Pretty much every major enough work has an edition with English notes and vocabulary for pedagogical use. I've worried about how they fall through the cracks at Wikisource, but I'm not sure supporting huge chunks of Latin/German/Spanish/French/Russian text here is a good idea either.--Prosfilaes (talk) 02:31, 21 February 2024 (UTC)

Exactly right. If there's an edition (that's a key word) of a foreign-language work with English footnotes or commentary, this is at its core part of the English-language lexicon. So I see absolutely zero issues with including lots of these, since they're just individual editions out of probably hundreds across the globe that exist, and it doesn't corrupt anything at English Wikisource really to include them here. What does corrupt something is for us to automatically exclude certain bits of the English compendium of knowledge from our site. SnowyCinema (talk) 16:21, 21 February 2024 (UTC)

I'm curious how you came to your conclusion. The first 200 pages of the book are the text in Latin, followed by 150 pages of notes that are keyed to the text by page number. We don't host non-English texts, so we would not host the 200 pages of Caesar's text. Exactly what use are the 150 pages of notes that depend upon knowing the page numbers specific to a work we don't have? --EncycloPetey (talk) 04:00, 21 February 2024 (UTC)

Text is quite a vague word that can mean different things to different people. So it's unfortunate that we have a policy that doesn't elaborate on a specific definition of a word like text. For example, a poem in a larger poetry collection could be considered a "text" in some contexts. I would certainly consider that poem a work (or properly, a version of a work).

And as it turns out, if you want to use the loose definition of text that I suggested—and I'm assuming that's the one you all are using—we host quite a large number of poems in other languages than English. Why? Because these poems appear in printed works that are at the core English texts: in other words, even the one poem out of 120, that happened to be in French for some narrative or thematic reason, was broadly intended for English speakers to read. And I'm sure that most of you here would at least agree that it would be ludicrous to selectively pick and choose which bits of a poetry collection we want to include based on what language they happen to be written in.

So, I don't like the reverence to a word like "text" as if it's the be and end all, because it can't be. It doesn't capture the necessary nuance here. Let's use the word "scan" instead. That's more appropriate, yes, because that's what was brought up for an undeletion discussion, not the body of the work... And in the context of the broader scan, the intention is clearly for English speakers to read it. It was never for people in Ancient Rome because they were dead long before.

And a big part of the reason I'm making these arguments, by the way, is because of the structural importance of doing the simple thing, having this at enWS instead of making it into a discombobulated mess of interwoven interwikis. Like I said, being picky about which language is in which part of what scans is going to lead us into a kind of hellscape in terms of technical maintenance. Say you wanted to include the Introduction at enWS, but nothing else. How would you do that? How would you ensure no one proofreads the rest of it against your will? Would you use soft redirects to lead people to Latin Wikisource for the rest? Would you do the same at Latin Wikisource, to go back to the Introduction from the body? What if laWS already has 15 other versions of the same work? How would you make sure this one fits their version structure? What if laWS doesn't want this version, because they have some specific rule against some facet of your project? What if Latin Wikisource accepts your project, but doesn't want to let you soft redirect back to enWS, or doesn't have the technology/community consensus/whatever to do so? What if laWS wants the whole entire scan to be transcribed there just like we do, including the English introduction? So now, we have two places where the same transcription exists. Not good for my favorite rule to point to, the DRY rule.

Just one example of how this can get complex... I was gonna write a paragraph for both laWS and mulWS being exclusive keepers of this text, but I'm tired. Just let the platitude that it will also have major problems suffice for the penny I'm giving.

Maybe you'll shrug this off as a mere opinion on my part, that is absolutely nothing compared to the infallible word of Wikisource policy. But I do believe that texts should not be considered based solely on quantity of a certain language, but intent of using a certain language. Our policies are badly written in the first place, probably in need of decades of further reform, and shouldn't ever be someone's blindfold. (And, as far as I understand wiki culture, policies don't matter anyway if the community votes against them in a particular deletion discussion. So my vote, which is hypothetically more powerful than any policy, is still there.) SnowyCinema (talk) 05:08, 21 February 2024 (UTC)

Opinions and policy are not two different things; they are two forms of the same thing. Policy happens because many people held the same opinion and reached consensus on an issue. So to dismiss policy with a wave of personal opinion is to dismiss the collective opinions of many people. --EncycloPetey (talk) 03:07, 22 February 2024 (UTC)

I'm not necessarily even dismissing the policy outright. It certainly has merit: we've made it clear we don't want to keep "all works in all languages" (maybe so we don't have to be one letter off from Wiktionary's slogan). But the people who wrote the policy clearly made no consideration about a specific definition of "text", that could apply across the board. Either that, or "text" to the writers specifically meant "scan" or "entire piece of printed matter" (which I think is more useful to consider, and is also a valid definition of "text").

In other words, even with their intent in mind, I could be correct. On that note, this policy was written in the mid-2000s, so I wouldn't even call it "modern consensus", but just the opinions of people in the context of that time 95% of whom are probably long inactive now, so our views on their opinions are really only speculative in nature. But one thing we do know is how they worded it, and they clearly didn't word it with a whole lot of nuance. Literally only one sentence addresses this issue, and it defines what's not allowed with a word that could mean 5 different things to 10 different people. So I'd argue, the policy can't apply to this discussion, since people (not even just me) disagree widely on how to deal with a scan like this. So clearly, the rule can't address these nuances. (And by the way, this is the case with most of WS:WWI. I think lots of detail should be used there, or at least subpages of the policies should be made to address specific nuances. So, reform is needed badly.)

Even if I were to grant that my specific conclusion (that language of context should be considered and not which language is most prevalent) is wrong, it doesn't take away from the fact that a word like "text" is too vague for something like a sitewide policy. If the community is going to cite policy as an absolute arbiter of truth and authority, policy needs to be some of the most well-written and specific and all-encompassing content on the entire site. But it isn't, so I think it's fair to say it doesn't deserve that level of deference. SnowyCinema (talk) 04:11, 22 February 2024 (UTC)

I am inclined to agree that a work consisting of quite extensive comments in English on a non-English text which includes this non-English text that is being commented could be in our scope, mainly per argument by SnowyCinema above that it was intended for English speaking audience who want to study the Latin text. However, I am not voting to undelete the work, which had been abandoned long time before it was deleted, unless there is somebody who wishes to proofread it. BTW, maybe we should have a specific point about similar cases in our inclusion policy. --Jan Kameníček (talk) 16:55, 22 February 2024 (UTC)

I have three concerns around the idea of hosting non-English texts with with English glosses / notes.

1. The maintenance burden is increased. This extends from the difficulty of finding additional contributors (e.g. if someone proofreads 120 out of 300 pages of Thai and stops, what do we do?) to verifying copyright and fidelity concerns (are these 300 pages of Arabic what they claim to be? What is the copyright status if it is a modern scan? etc.)

2. Data model concerns. Per practice, we should turn Commentaries on the Gallic War into a {{translations}} page when this is proofread to link to the two different editions. But this isn't a translation. We could make De Bello Gallico a {{versions}} page and link The Commentaries of C. Julius Caesar from that but that breaks our wikidata model of single works with multiple editions, etc.

3. If we do start having large extracts of non-English text, we will eventually start to attract non-English speaking contributors. While that might produce collaborative work, it also brings along its own set of challenges. MarkLSteadman (talk) 22:52, 22 February 2024 (UTC)

Ad 1: Similarly as I did not agree with undeletion of this abandoned work, I think that we should be strict about completion of all such works, and abandoned works of this type should be deleted after some reasonable time, which can be discussed (e. g. 1 year after the work stopped?).

Ad 2: In fact such a problem may arrise now as well. I can imagine that some English language work we already have includes e. g. some short poem, a letter etc. in a foreign language. Should the poem be added to the translation or version page? There is one specific example, here: Index:A grammar of the Bohemian or Cech language.djvu (currently also abandoned, but on my long list of works I hope to proofread one day). I think that such a kind of work does belong here. At the end of the book there are some works by Czech authors as "Reading lessons" in Czech, see e. g. Page:A grammar of the Bohemian or Cech language.djvu/162. I believe that such a reading lesson should not be omitted from the book, but at the same time it should not be added to any version or translation page.

Ad 3: It is quite possible, but at the same time it may also start attracting foreign contributors who speak English, and I may be considered to be an example of that :-) – after few coincidental attempts between 2011 and 2015 I started seriously contributing in 2016, after my attention was drawn to the above mentioned Grammar of the Bohemian language (although I soon moved to some different publications, as that one was too challenging because of complicated formatting). --Jan Kameníček (talk) 00:23, 23 February 2024 (UTC)

@Jan.Kamenicek: Your response to point #2 suggests you did not understand the concern. This issue is that, if we host a Latin edition of Caesar's Commentaries then we run into the conundrum of having to possess both a Translations page and a Versions page for certain works. Neither the set-up here nor at Wikidata can currently support this. --EncycloPetey (talk) 00:45, 23 February 2024 (UTC)

I did understand. And I wrote that we can run into the very same problem if we host an English work that includes just a short poem in a foreign language. And I suggested not to list non-English works either in translation page or a version page. That would eliminate the need to have both in such cases. --Jan Kameníček (talk) 00:53, 23 February 2024 (UTC)

But we have to list the main page title somewhere. For a work as an appendix and therefore as a subpage we don't necessarily need to build out the link but Commentaries of Caesar will point to what when we have both an English (e.g. [4] and [5]) and a Latin version under that title? Which gets back to the main text distinction (we wouldn't have this issue if it was entitled A Gallic Wars Lexicon. MarkLSteadman (talk) 01:13, 23 February 2024 (UTC)

The Latin version of the Commentaries will be only a part of Observations upon Caesars Commentaries. It should not be linked to from anywhere, only the whole work called Observations... should be linked from appropriate places, like from the author page of Clement Edmonds. Commentaries of Caesar can either be the translation page containing a list of English translations, or should be a redirect to such a translation page. In this way we can avoid the problem. Or somebody may later come with some other possible solution(s). Let's not forget that it is just a technical problem and thus it is a problem inferior to building up our content. Adding content useful to English language audience should be our main goal and technical means should be adapted to this goal, not vice versa. --Jan Kameníček (talk) 13:49, 23 February 2024 (UTC)

Except that it's not strictly a technical issue; it's a procedural one. An it's a problem that will be created for every instance we have of hosting a non-English text. Without a plan to deal with this issue, will we just leave it unsolved? The solution cannot be to say that we just won't link it from anywhere. This also goes against SnowyCinema's principle of DRY, since we would be duplicating non-English texts present at other WS projects and potentially duplicating them here as well. Why have just this author's footnotes on Caesar's Commentaries? Why not host all the editions of Caesar's Commentaries that have English footnotes or endnotes? --EncycloPetey (talk) 19:25, 24 February 2024 (UTC)

Well, playing with words aside, I think what I have written about technical problems applies to procedures too: they serve our goal (hosting proofread texts useful to English readers), we should not adapt our goal to fit the procedures.

Not linking from version/translation pages (containing links to English language works) to non-English text which are incorporated inside an English language publication, and linking only to this English language publication from other proper places, is imo a possible solution. If it is not a good solution for some reason, some other has to be found anyway, no matter whether we accept works like these Commentaries. How should linking e.g. to a fully quoted foreign language poem in an English language publication be solved? I suggest not linking to it.

We can host all editions of Caeasar's Commentaries that have extensive English comments to the original text if somebody were willing to proofread them here. What is extensive and what not can be decided case by case, as no massive adding of such works is likely to happen anytime soon. --Jan Kameníček (talk) 20:10, 24 February 2024 (UTC)

It is a straw man to compare a critical edition of the Commentaries of Caesar to a poem quoted inside another work. The latter is a work appearing inside another completely different work, but the topic at hand is an edition of Caesar's Commentaries with notes added. The two situations are not equivalent. --EncycloPetey (talk) 19:33, 25 February 2024 (UTC)

I did not say that the situation is the same, I said that the technical (procedural) problem is the same, because it is the procedure that was above used as an argument. --Jan Kameníček (talk) 19:37, 25 February 2024 (UTC)

And that is a straw man argument, as I said. The problem is not the same because of the reasons I stated. --EncycloPetey (talk) 19:47, 25 February 2024 (UTC)

The procedure is absolutely the same, so if you see any other problem, it is not procedural. I really do suggest focusing more on understanding the core of the message before you call somebody's arguments a "straw man". Reading (and thinking) twice may help to avoid some misunderstandings. Now I am going to stop beating the dead horse unless somebody comes with something worthy to think about. --Jan Kameníček (talk) 19:52, 25 February 2024 (UTC)

I agree. Please read what I wrote initially, because I do not think you've understood, or are instead dodging the issue. The solution will never be to ignore the issue or to prop up some other argument to be battled instead of the actual issue. If we do host this work, we can't connect it at Wikidata, and we have no means for listing it here, so how will anyone find it? It's not the same as a short foreign language work appearing inside another work because we've never included those procedurally in any listing. Not when a quotation appears at the start of a book chapter, not when a biography quotes a letter or poetry, and not when a literary survey of an author's body of works includes numerous quotations either. This is fundamentally different: it's a work not in English, with bits added, and we have no means in place here or at Wikidata to deal with that, in part because no Wikisource has ever done this. --EncycloPetey (talk) 21:46, 25 February 2024 (UTC)

Re the other points:

1. We can be stricter and enforce additional criteria, but that will need to be reflected in the policy language. And of course if we had a larger community, including more bilingual admins, they could help maintain such works. My point is that maintaining a large collection of works like this [6] is an increased burden relative to the same work in English, and that if concerns are raised (in this case we know it is safe, but e.g. someone uploads a 1980s collection of classical Persian poetry, and claims it is pubic domain it will be hard for me to search.

2. I will note that there is currently no sourced version of the work on la.wikisource. If people are interested proofreading latin shouldn't we concentrate on getting a complete version there? MarkLSteadman (talk) 23:29, 25 February 2024 (UTC)

@EncycloPetey: My example was a poem that is happenstance in another language, for some reason or another, included in a larger poetry collection of English poems. So I guess our infrastructure "doesn't support this" too you're saying (since poems themselves are works even if included in collections), yet we've been doing this for decades anyway with no contest. I've even seen entire Versions pages that only link to foreign-language poems hosted on English Wikisource, because they were included in collections multiple times. Well, anyway, if the poem in the poetry collection is in French, or in this case if the Caesar's Commentaries is given an introduction in English, in both cases the context is set in English which I've said multiple times, but that point was never addressed anywhere. The Latin body of the text is not holistically and wholesale what the work is as you seem to be suggesting... The body of the work is part of the work. Only part. I don't think of it as a Latin text with English commentary, but as an English work that has a Latin text in it. Sort of like a page in a novel that contains a photograph of a sign in French, but a caption in English. So the page is not a page in French, but a page in English using the French as a display for study by English speakers. Even though the photographed French sign might contain three paragraphs of French words, whereas the English caption is only one sentence long, the page is in English, just like this English work with a Latin text in it for the exact same kind of study. SnowyCinema (talk) 22:11, 25 February 2024 (UTC)

Please include examples of what you're saying you've seen, because I have only non-examples (quotes and poetry that were not indexed). But the example of a work inside a collection is still not directly analogous to this case. And I understand that you think of it differently, but this is far more like a critical edition of a Shakespeare play than a collection of literature. For a critical edition of any work, it is still an edition of that work, and not something else. All our annotated Shakespeare plays are listed as copies of his plays, because that's what they are. I cannot interpret a Latin-language work with English notes added as a fundamentally English-language work that happens to have Latin text in it. The Latin text is the core of what was published, and everything else in the publication is subservient to the Latin text. That's not an English work with Latin in it. --EncycloPetey (talk) 22:21, 25 February 2024 (UTC)

And let me pose a very practical question: Who gets credit as the Author for this work? --EncycloPetey (talk) 22:32, 25 February 2024 (UTC)

Example: Posthumous Poems/Chanson de Février. Should this be deleted too, or relegated to another project? SnowyCinema (talk) 22:34, 25 February 2024 (UTC)

My point is that such an instance as that is a non-example. It's not indexed here or on Wikidata because it's not the work; it's included inside another collective work that is indexed. We have countless such poems even in English that have not been indexed anywhere at all. With the item currently under discussion, we lack the means entirely for housing the edition both here and at Wikidata because it's a work in Latin written by Caesar with critical commentary added to it. That's how any major library would index it. --EncycloPetey (talk) 22:43, 25 February 2024 (UTC)

Changing vote to  Abstain—I'm not sure anymore, but EncycloPetey makes an intuitively good point in his rhetorical question about who would be credited as the author, and such like that. I can see there are both pros and cons to including this at English Wikisource, and I've gone into many of the pros. But, this is one of the only examples of a "kind-of-bilingual" gray-area work of this nature that I've even seen on the project, and the fact that it only has an introduction in English of 6 pages' length isn't doing it any favors. If it had much more substantive amounts of English content, I'd probably be more sympathetic.

I will say that I worry about the precedent this work may set for future discussion on far less gray-area bilingual material than this. I still maintain that WS:WWI should be immensely improved and made much more specific so that we're not left up to so much interpretation, and that a single sentence describing "texts" is not sufficient. We should probably investigate many different examples of foreign works with English text in them, to come to some more nuanced and universal conclusion.

I do disagree with EP's idea that poems in collections, i.e. "subworks", should lack indexing on Wikidata "because it's not the work"—see my efforts on any collections I've done like Illinois Verse, The High School Boy and His Problems, or The Way of the Wild, where I have gone above and beyond to connect all subworks to Wikidata and list each one at author and disambiguation pages, since I think they should be treated the same as any other work (and this is not inconsistent with past practices at Wikidata and Wikisource). So I think that the lack of indexing of Posthumous Poems is not a matter of "they shouldn't be indexed", but more that "they should ideally be indexed but aren't because it's hard and no one wants to take the time to do it". But this isn't that relevant to my overall change of perspective on Commentaries. SnowyCinema (talk) 23:22, 25 February 2024 (UTC)

Note: I am not arguing that "subworks" should lack indexing as a general principle. I was noting that (a) we historically have done a very poor job of indexing them, and that (b) some such works should not be indexed because of what they are and how they are included. If, for example, a novel places a poem at the start of a chapter, or (as noted above) a photograph of a sign in French appears in a book, such "subworks" are not indexed, as per standard library practice. --EncycloPetey (talk) 23:29, 25 February 2024 (UTC)

I am also much more comfortable being less strict with the metadata around subworks / appenda / etc.: they can rely on the stricter metadata "box" of the main work (putting aside the difference between subwork like an appendix as opposed to breaking up a chapter to wikidata a poem contained in it). MarkLSteadman (talk) 23:42, 25 February 2024 (UTC)

The Middle-Class Gentleman

The following discussion is closed and will soon be archived:

Kept; no consensus. The nomination was posed as a question, after which two people were in favor of keeping, 2 favoring deletion, and 2 commenting without taking a side.

If you look at the source on Gutenberg, you will see that "Philip Dwight Jones" is listed as both the translator and the ebook producer. I therefore believe that this is a rare instance of a work originally published by Project Gutenberg. Is such a work in scope, or is it doubly out of scope as self-published and second-hand? —Beleg Âlt ^BT (talk) 20:40, 21 February 2024 (UTC)

It's a translation of a public domain work. If it's public domain--which it claims to be--I would keep this along the lines of a Wikisource translation.--Prosfilaes (talk) 00:13, 22 February 2024 (UTC)

 Keep I don't see that counts as self-published, and we accept to keep second-hand works from that time, don't we, until we have a better replacement ? -- Beardo (talk) 03:01, 22 February 2024 (UTC)

There are many public domain translations of this work: from 1672 [7] to modern [8] [9] [10] [11] MarkLSteadman (talk) 19:21, 24 February 2024 (UTC)

In terms of copyright: This would be a rare case of an original Project Gutenberg transcription, and despite the work being from 2001 and being impossible to fall into the PD naturally, if I'm correctly reading the very complex legal notice at the bottom of every Gutenberg transcription, the terms comply with wiki standards on licensing, allowing free distribution, derivatives, etc. So it seems freely licensed.

However: Although this is a web transcription from a reputable source like Gutenberg, the transcription itself has no particular notoriety (even though the source work does). Most damningly, I believe Gutenberg works are constantly subject to further updates, which would not be in line with our purposes. The text is from 2001, and was last updated on February 7, 2013, giving it 12 years of potential strings of updates. I.e., it may be impossible to ascertain what the most pure version of this transcription is, so we probably shouldn't include it. So,  Delete. SnowyCinema (talk) 21:20, 22 February 2024 (UTC)

 Delete per SnowyCinema. --Jan Kameníček (talk) 22:30, 6 March 2024 (UTC)

 Comment There is no evidence that this work is "expected to constantly change over time". There is speculation that many years of changes might have happened, but no evidence of what has actually changed. No one has compared our copy to the 2013 revision in even a cursory fashion to investigate the actual degree of change. It could be a thorough revision different in many respects; it could be an update to formatting tags with no changes to the text; we don't know because no one has looked. Also, no one has mentioned is that our copy is a copydump without the formatting present in the original, such as centering, italics, font sizes, etc. --EncycloPetey (talk) 01:29, 8 March 2024 (UTC)

 This section is considered resolved, for the purposes of archiving. If you disagree, replace this template with your comment. --EncycloPetey (talk) 01:15, 20 April 2024 (UTC)

 Comment For the record, my point was that an Internet-based transcription, with multiple specific edit dates involved, should be assumed to be subject to constant substantial updates unless explicitly proven otherwise (if the page is somehow locked from editing, they make some official statement about no further updates, etc.), for the same reason we disallow pages of wikis as transcriptions. SnowyCinema (talk) 01:44, 20 April 2024 (UTC)

Interlinear Greek Translation:Bible

While I understand that there is value to interlinear texts, we generally only host one user translation of a given work, and we already have Translation:Bible. —Beleg Âlt ^BT (talk) 20:53, 21 February 2024 (UTC)

@Bobdole2021: I believe this is a project you are involved in —Beleg Âlt ^BT (talk) 20:54, 21 February 2024 (UTC)

•  Comment It depends on the source text, in this case, I would think. Translation:Bible is presumably using the Masoretic text (in Hebrew) for the Old Testament, which is different from the source text for Interlinear Greek Translation:Bible, which is from the Greek Septuagint. This is one reason we want our user-created translations to clearly identify what they are translating, so that we can determine what is happening in cases like this. If one is translating the Masoretic, and another the Septuagint, and another the Latin Vulgate, then that feels like legitimate separate translations. But without having a clearly identified starting point for the translation, we cannot determine that. And even for "the Septuagint", whose edition of the Septuagint is being used? There are whole volumes listing the differences between the various Greek copies of the Septuagint. --EncycloPetey (talk) 21:09, 21 February 2024 (UTC)

  Translation:Bible is a bit unique, in that every book has (or should have) its own source. So Hebrew works like Translation:Genesis would be translated from Hebrew, while Greek works like Translation:Esther (Greek) would be translated from Greek, Translation:1 Meqabyan from Ge'ez, etc. —Beleg Âlt ^BT (talk) 21:13, 21 February 2024 (UTC)

  There would be a good argument to be made, that Translation:Bible should actually be in Portal space, since it is a list of separate works rather than a cohesive work itself. —Beleg Âlt ^BT (talk) 21:15, 21 February 2024 (UTC)

  Yes, but also no. The Masoretic text is a cohesive collection, and there are published editions that can be used as a basis for translation. The Vulgate is a cohesive collection, and it has published editions too. But the Dead Sea Scrolls are not; they are a collection by virtue of being discovered in the same location together. And even if you consider Genesis a "book" in its own right, there is still no single source text. There is the Masoretic edition in Hebrew, and the Septuagint editions in Greek, and the Vulgate edition of Jerome in Latin. There is not even an editio princeps as often happens with classical texts. Considering Genesis (and the other "books" of the Bible) to be works in their own right does nothing to help the fundamental issues here. --EncycloPetey (talk) 21:39, 21 February 2024 (UTC)

  Unfortunately, Translation:Bible is nowhere near as sensible as all that :p

  I wonder if we could approach this by splitting Translation:Bible into component sources?

  • Hebrew OT books based on the Masoretic text, which is what I assume heWS has (he:ביבליה, not scan-backed)
  • Greek OT books based on the Septuagint, which is what I assume elWS has (el:Η Αγία Γραφή, also not scan-backed)
  • Greek NT books based on this scan at elWS
  • The others I'll need to research further but you get the gist.

  We already have separate translations for Esther (Hebrew and Greek) and Psalms (Hebrew, Greek, and Syriac) so we can just extend this to the rest of the works I guess.

  My main concern is the idea of having a separate "regular" translation and "interlinear" translation of the same work; otherwise, I'm open to whatever needs to be done to clean this mess up —Beleg Âlt ^BT (talk) 14:55, 26 February 2024 (UTC)

  Perhaps we consider an interlinear translation to be something like the Translation equivalent of an Annotated text, requiring a "clean" copy to exist first? --EncycloPetey (talk) 00:48, 27 February 2024 (UTC)

  Maybe. I seem to recall that at some point we explicitly disallowed interlinear translations, but I can't find it now.

  [update] I found it: WS:ANN disallows "Comparison pages: Pages from different versions of the same work, whether whole works or extracts, placed alongside each other (whether in series or in parallel) to provide a comparison between the different versions." I'm not sure whether that would apply here though. —Beleg Âlt ^BT (talk) 14:14, 27 February 2024 (UTC)

•  Comment I'm leaning toward saying we have "no consensus" on this particular item, because we really need a broader discussion where informed folks lay out the issues at stake, and because we probably need a decision on how we want to handle Wikisource translations of the Bible. A lot of things are in play here. --EncycloPetey (talk) 18:12, 13 April 2024 (UTC)
•  Delete A scan supported original language work must be present on the appropriate language wiki, where the original language version is complete at least as far as the English translation. Wikisource translations, like Annotations, are deliberately restrictive. But once the original text exists as a proofread and scan-backed work at grWS (or mulWS, or…) the discussion here on enWS is going to be vastly simplified. Also: The English Wikisource only collects texts written in the English language. Texts in other languages should be placed in the appropriate language subdomain, or at the general multi-language website [mulWS]. And that's in addition to the guidance for annotations that Beleg Âlt cited above. With strikes against it in three policies I don't see how this particular snowball is helped much by SPF 50. --Xover (talk) 18:55, 13 April 2024 (UTC)

  Are you advocating for deletion of all WS-original translations of the Bible? Are you advocating for deletion of all side-by-side original translations we have? Both of those positions would result in the deletion of a huge number of pages here. Hence, it is a much larger issue than just this particular translation. --EncycloPetey (talk) 19:07, 13 April 2024 (UTC)

  I'm not advocating mass-deletion of much of anything that was created before our current standards were in place (but do hold them to modern standards if they come up individually for other reasons). I'm saying this text, which is relatively speaking a new text, has so many strikes against it that it's not a difficult call. But I do think we should enforce current standards for all new texts (and this one should have been caught in patrolling when created), and most especially we should not turn a blind eye to Translation:-space as some kind of free-for-all.

  I haven't gone looking at what the other Wikisource translations of the bible look like, so I don't know what issues apply to them. But based on the above I suspect where we run into thorny issues is where someone wants to translate archeological artefacts rather than actually published works. In which case, lets apply or existing policies and standards to the ones that were actually published in any meaningful sense and save the big discussion for the archeological artefacts (which exception we may or may not want to accommodate). Xover (talk) 19:40, 13 April 2024 (UTC)

  We have a grandfather rule in WS:T which would exclude Translation:Bible from the requirement that the original be scan-backed on grWS, but I agree that this would be a strike against Interlinear Greek Translation:Bible if we chose to enforce it since it was added after the 2013 changes to WS:T. —Beleg Tâl (talk) 19:42, 13 April 2024 (UTC)

  (On the other hand, I don't see how Xover's second quote would apply, because the very next sentence in that policy is "However, English Wikisource does collect English translations of non-English texts, as well as bilingual editions in which the target language of the translation is English") —Beleg Tâl (talk) 19:43, 13 April 2024 (UTC)

  It's the English bits that are the essence (and for bilingual works we usually transcribe only the English pages). Granted that's watered down a bit by the very wide definition of "English" applied, but it doesn't extend to Greek (Ancient or Modern) beyond short quotes etc. Xover (talk) 19:55, 13 April 2024 (UTC)

  While what you say have been true here for transcriptions of published works, that principle has not been applied to original translations created here. We have a very large number of bitexts in the Translations namespace, so a decision here, using that principle, would affect a very large number of our Translations. So, if this were a transcription of a published work, yes, but in this situation, the waters are far muddier. --EncycloPetey (talk) 20:09, 13 April 2024 (UTC)

  But original translations are supposed to be "transcriptions of published works", just ones where the text is translated into English as it is transcribed. I'm not saying to go retroactively apply this to every old text we have. I'm just saying this text, which is comparatively very recent and came up for discussion here individually and for other reasons, should get the actual standards applied. Xover (talk) 06:47, 19 April 2024 (UTC)

  So you agree that what you are advocating would be a change to practice? What I am saying is that such a change in practice deserves a broader consideration for its impact, beyond the one work. --EncycloPetey (talk) 17:21, 19 April 2024 (UTC)

World Taekwando Federation & Anor v Tuan Wing Keong & Anor (Pendaftar Cap Dagangan, Malaysia, interested party)

A court document allegedly from Lexis Advance, but the source is not available to people who do not have an account of the Multimedia University (from Malaysia). With the source being inaccessible it is impossible to say whether it is a second-hand transcription or a transcription of an original document. The biggest problem is that the text is not available anywhere else either, and so it is absolutely impossible to check whether the transcription is correct and complete, whether it was originally in in English or it is a translation from Malay (which would raise questions about copyright), or even whether such a text really exists (I believe it does, but we have to be able to check it).

Pinging also Ong Kai Jin, who I have already asked to add a proper licence tag but without any reaction. -- Jan Kameníček (talk) 18:09, 7 March 2024 (UTC)

If indeed this is a document that originated (from legislators) in English it would be in the public domain as an edict of a government, but like you said it is also impossible to tell if that's the case without access to the original source. So,  Delete until evidence of source is provided. SnowyCinema (talk) 00:49, 8 March 2024 (UTC)

I have trimmed the source link to become not dependent to the institution's account, but subscription is still required for access, I am sorry if this is also not accepted. I would say this is the only authentic and original source, since this is a 'unreported' case law which it was not included into the journal for print, and LexisNexis is the publisher of this journal. The issue is no direct way for other user to validate the text, but I could not help.

In regarding the copyright, literary work, which is a copyrightable work, does not include judicial decisions. This is stated in Section 3 of Copyright Act 1987. The license tag Template:PD-Malaysia have been prepared. I assume there is no copyright issue here. Ong Kai Jin (talk) 16:34, 8 March 2024 (UTC)

@Ong Kai Jin - to be hosted here, a work needs to be in public domain under US copyright law. I am still unclear - was the actual judgement in English ? -- Beardo (talk) 17:46, 8 March 2024 (UTC)

I think it is reasonable to be under the public domain in both countries? Yes, the actual judgement was written in English. Why is it suspected to be in Malay language? Ong Kai Jin (talk) 19:52, 8 March 2024 (UTC)

 Keep a court judgement issued in English is solidly in scope as {{PD-EdictGov}}. That said, @Ong Kai Jin: is there any way this work can be exported from LexisNexus in PDF format so that it can be properly proofread? —Beleg Tâl (talk) 23:14, 8 March 2024 (UTC)

The website provides two versions of PDF download, the user-customizable and the court-ready, but the court-ready version is not available for 'unreported' cases such as this work. I feel that it serves no authentic value for using that custom PDF. Ong Kai Jin (talk) 20:23, 9 March 2024 (UTC)

Poems by Emily Dickinson - Second Series

The following discussion is closed and will soon be archived:

deleted, and replaced with versions pages —Beleg Tâl (talk) 17:42, 19 April 2024 (UTC)

The following unsourced poems by Emily Dickinson, which now have scan-backed versions in Poems: Second Series (Dickinson) and another in progress in The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson, should be deleted to make way for {{versions}} pages:

• "Arcturus" is his other name—
• "Faith" is a fine invention
• "Hope" is the thing with feathers—
• A Bird came down the Walk—
• A Charm invests a face
• A Death blow is a Life blow to Some
• A Deed knocks first at Thought
• A narrow fellow in the grass
• A poor—torn heart—a tattered heart—
• A Route of Evanescence
• A shady friend—for Torrid days—
• A Spider sewed at Night
• A Thought went up my mind today—
• A throe upon the features—
• After a hundred years
• Ample make this Bed—
• An altered look about the hills—
• An awful Tempest mashed the air—
• An Everywhere of Silver
• As by the dead we love to sit
• As imperceptibly as Grief
• At Half past Three, a single Bird
• At least—to pray—is left—is left—
• Before I got my eye put out
• Before you thought of Spring
• Besides the Autumn poets sing
• Blazing in Gold and quenching in Purple
• Bring me the sunset in a cup
• Dare you see a Soul at the White Heat?
• Death sets a Thing significant
• Delight—becomes pictorial—
• Did the Harebell loose her girdle
• Each Life Converges to some Centre—
• Essential Oils—are wrung—
• Except the Heaven had come so near—
• Experiment to me
• For each ecstatic instant
• Frequently the woods are pink—
• From Cocoon forth a Butterfly
• Further in Summer than the Birds
• God gave a Loaf to every Bird—
• God made a little Gentian—
• Going to Heaven!
• Going to Him! Happy letter!
• Good Night! Which put the Candle out?
• Great Streets of silence led away
• He preached upon "Breadth" till it argued him narrow—
• He put the Belt around my life
• Heart, not so heavy as mine
• Her final Summer was it—
• How happy is the little Stone
• I bring an unaccustomed wine
• I can wade Grief—
• I dreaded that first Robin, so
• I found the words to every thought
• I gained it so—
• I gave myself to Him—
• I had been hungry, all the Years—
• I had no Cause to be awake—
• I have no Life but this—
• I haven't told my garden yet—
• I held a Jewel in my fingers—
• I know a place where Summer strives
• I know that He exists
• I like to see it lap the Miles—
• I lived on Dread—
• I many times thought Peace had come
• I meant to have but modest needs—
• I never hear the word "escape"
• I noticed People disappeared
• I read my sentence—steadily—
• I robbed the Woods—
• I should have been too glad, I see—
• I should not dare to leave my friend
• I started Early—Took my Dog—
• I think just how my shape will rise—
• I took my Power in my Hand—
• I went to Heaven—
• I Years had been from Home
• If anybody's friend be dead
• If I should die
• I'm Nobody! Who are you?
• In lands I never saw—they say
• Is Heaven a Physician?
• It can't be "Summer"!
• It sifts from Leaden Sieves—
• It sounded as if the Streets were running
• It tossed—and tossed—
• It was not Death, for I stood up
• Just lost, when I was saved!
• Lay this Laurel on the One
• Let down the Bars, Oh Death—
• Like Mighty Foot Lights—burned the Red
• Mine Enemy is growing old—
• Morns like these—we parted—
• Musicians wrestle everywhere—
• My country need not change her gown
• My nosegays are for Captives—
• Nature rarer uses Yellow
• Nature—the Gentlest Mother is
• No Brigadier throughout the Year
• No Life can pompless pass away—
• Of all the Souls that stand create—
• Of Tribulation, these are They
• On such a night, or such a night
• One need not be a Chamber—to be Haunted—
• One of the ones that Midas touched
• Our journey had advanced—
• Pigmy seraphs—gone astray—
• Portraits are to daily faces
• Prayer is the little implement
• Remorse—is Memory—awake—
• She died—this was the way she died
• She sweeps with many-colored Brooms—
• Some, too fragile for winter winds
• South Winds jostle them—
• Step lightly on this narrow spot—
• Surgeons must be very careful
• Taken from men—this morning—
• Talk with prudence to a Beggar
• The Body grows without—
• The Day came slow—till Five o'clock—
• The Gentian weaves her fringes—
• The Leaves like Women interchange
• The Moon is distant from the Sea—
• The Mushroom is the Elf of Plants—
• The nearest Dream recedes—unrealized—
• The Night was wide, and furnished scant
• The One who could repeat the Summer day—
• The only Ghost I ever saw
• The Rat is the concisest Tenant
• The Robin is the One
• The Rose did caper on her cheek—
• The Show is not the Show
• The Skies can't keep their secret!
• The Soul unto itself
• The Sun—just touched the Morning—
• The thought beneath so slight a film—
• The Way I read a Letter's—this—
• The Wind begun to knead the Grass—
• The Wind—tapped like a tired Man—
• Their Height in Heaven comforts not—
• There came a Wind like a Bugle—
• There is a Shame of Nobleness—
• They dropped like Flakes—
• This Merit hath the worst—
• Tho' I get home how late—how late—
• Through the strait pass of suffering—
• To hear an Oriole sing
• To learn the Transport by the Pain
• Triumph—may be of several kinds—
• Two butterflies went out at Noon—
• Undue Significance a starving man attaches
• Unto my Books—so good to turn—
• Victory comes late—
• Wait till the Majesty of Death
• We play at Paste—
• Went up a year this evening!
• What if I say I shall not wait!
• What Inn is this
• When I hoped I feared—
• Where Ships of Purple—gently toss—
• Who never lost, are unprepared
• Whose are the little beds, I asked
• Wild Nights—Wild Nights!
• Will there really be a "Morning"?
• Your Riches—taught me—Poverty

—Beleg Âlt ^BT (talk) 15:36, 13 March 2024 (UTC)

•  Comment @Beleg Âlt: If really needed, they can be deleted, but imo it is not necessary, they can be just overwritten. --Jan Kameníček (talk) 23:10, 16 March 2024 (UTC)

  Deleting, overwriting, they are equivalent, still needs a discussion though —Beleg Tâl (talk) 00:29, 19 March 2024 (UTC)

  Pages like this always have to be deleted and recreated in order to break the Wikidata binding. In this case it's a edition-level item that we're proposing to turn into a work-level page. Xover (talk) 19:46, 13 April 2024 (UTC)

•  Comment As a matter of technical process I agree with Jan.Kamenicek, but I do think it's worthwhile to bring up such an extensive list of poems for wider discussion prior to executing an extensive overwriting project. That said, I support either overwriting or deleting; these unsourced versions certainly need not be preserved if properly sourced versions exist. -Pete (talk) 17:53, 18 March 2024 (UTC)

  This is a continuation of the process previously discussed here and here, and is mostly a formality since they are borderline WS:CSD as redundant anyway. —Beleg Tâl (talk) 00:26, 19 March 2024 (UTC)

  Thanks for the context. I think we're all more or less in agreement, I recognize and appreciate the due diligence. -Pete (talk) 03:32, 19 March 2024 (UTC)

•  Delete per nom (no-brainer; but I agree with Pete that it's good to have the discussion even so). --Xover (talk) 19:48, 13 April 2024 (UTC)

 Delete per nom, i.e. overwrite. SnowyCinema (talk) 18:56, 14 April 2024 (UTC)

 This section is considered resolved, for the purposes of archiving. If you disagree, replace this template with your comment. —Beleg Tâl (talk) 17:42, 19 April 2024 (UTC)

Sonnet 140

The following discussion is closed and will soon be archived:

Deleted. Not redirected because there are other works known as "Sonnet 140".

I believe this is a translation performed either by an anonymous/IP Wikisource editor in 2009, or else a translation of unknown provenance with no reason to believe it complies with Wikisource's copyright policy. I believe this is a different translation of the Petrarch poem Wyatt translated, here: "The long love that in my thought doth harbor"

It should be deleted as being either out of scope or else a copyright violation; I don't think it's worth the effort to do further research to determine which is the case, if either would likely result in deletion. Please note, there are several such "prose translations" of Petrarch poems; while I have not found as much information about these others, I believe this logic would apply to all of them. See some prior discussion at Author talk:Thomas Wyatt. These full list of such sonnets:

• Sonnet 134 Prose Translation
• Sonnet 140
  • Ideally this one would be recreated as a verisons page, pointing to The long love that in my thought doth harbor and Love, that doth reign and live within my thought
  • Also, a versions page should have a note or a "see also" to Sonnet 140 (Shakespeare).
• Sonnet 189
• Sonnet 190

(All are labeled "modern prose translation" on their respective pages.) -Pete (talk) 17:50, 18 March 2024 (UTC)

Update: With the help of some fellow Wikisourcers (see Author talk:Thomas Wyatt), I have gathered some info about this poem (Petrarch's 140) and its various translations. See this versions page I created: Sonnet 109 (Petrarch) Along with the issues I mentioned above, I believe the title of Sonnet 140 is misleading; according to Petrarch's numbering scheme it is Poem 140, and it is also known as Sonnet 109. Further reason, in my view, to replace the translation of unknown origin with a redirect (to the versions page, which seems the best place to gather the info about the various titles the poem and its traslations have had). -Pete (talk) 17:20, 23 March 2024 (UTC)

Good close, but three of the four sonnets included were missed. I believe all should be deleted under the same justification. (I'll note that Beardo had marked the first of them PD-old, but I believe that was a simple error.) -Pete (talk) 17:11, 12 April 2024 (UTC)

None of those other items were nominated for deletion: they were listed in the discussion, but they were not nominated, nor were they tagged with the template for the deletion discussion. Since they were neither nominated nor tagged, no action was taken. I am not going to presume nomination. Lots of things get mentioned in discussions, but a mention is not a nomination. --EncycloPetey (talk) 01:27, 20 April 2024 (UTC)

Translation:La Serva Padrona

There is no scan supported original language work present on the appropriate Italian Wikisource, as required by Wikisource:Translations. -- Jan Kameníček (talk) 09:50, 28 March 2024 (UTC)

•  Comment There is an 1862 Italian copy of the libretto on IA, with just 26 pages and no music score to transcribe, if any is willing to transcribe it on it.WS. --EncycloPetey (talk) 17:28, 28 March 2024 (UTC)

  I've started the Italian transcription at it:Indice:La serva padrona - intermezzi due (IA laservapadronain00fede).pdf --EncycloPetey (talk) 20:20, 19 April 2024 (UTC)

  I've set up the English translation match at Index:La serva padrona - intermezzi due (IA laservapadronain00fede).pdf --EncycloPetey (talk) 21:26, 19 April 2024 (UTC)

Contracts Awarded by the CPA

Out of scope per WS:WWI as it's a mere listing of data devoid of any published context. Xover (talk) 12:53, 31 March 2024 (UTC)

 Keep if scan-backed to this PDF document. Since the PDF document is from 2004, a time when the WWW existed but wasn't nearly as universal to society as today, I find the thought that this wasn't printed and distributed absurdly unlikely. And the copyright license would be PD-text, since none of the text is complex enough for copyright, being a list of general facts. Also, this document is historically significant, since it involves the relationships between two federal governments during a quite turbulent war in that region. SnowyCinema (talk) 14:25, 31 March 2024 (UTC)

(And it should be renamed to "CPA-CA Register of Awards" to accurately reflect the document.) SnowyCinema (talk) 14:32, 31 March 2024 (UTC)

It's still just a list of data devoid of any context that might justify its inclusion (like if it were, e.g., the appendix to a report on something or other). Xover (talk) 19:51, 13 April 2024 (UTC)

Maybe I should write a user essay on this, since this is something I've had to justify in other discussions, so I can just link to that in the future.

I don't take the policy to mean we don't want compilations of data on principle, or else we'd be deleting works like the US copyright catalogs (which despite containing introductions, etc., the body is fundamentally just a list of data). The policy says the justification on the very page. What we're trying to avoid is, rather, "user-compiled and unverified" data, like Wikisource editors (not external publications) listing resources for a certain project. And if you personally disagree, that's fine, but that's how I read the sentiment of the policy. I think that whether something was published, or at least printed or collected by a reputable-enough source, should be considered fair game. I'm more interested in weeding out research that was compiled on the fly by individual newbie editors, than federal government official compilations.

But to be fair, even in my line of logic, this is sort of an iffy case, since the version of the document I gave gives absolutely no context besides "CPA-CA REGISTER OF AWARDS (1 JAN 04- 10 APRIL 04)" so it is difficult to verify the actual validity of the document's publication in 2004, but I would lean to keep this just because I think the likelihood is in the favor of the document being valid, and the data is on a notable subject. And if evidence comes to light that proves its validity beyond a shadow of a doubt, then certainly. SnowyCinema (talk) 00:03, 20 April 2024 (UTC)

Evidence of validity: The search metadata gives a date of April 11, 2004, and the parent URL is clearly an early 2000s web page just by the looks of it. My keep vote is sustained. SnowyCinema (talk) 00:16, 20 April 2024 (UTC)

Henry William Williamson

The following discussion is closed and will soon be archived:

Speedied; accidental creation.

Hello I accidentally published a page for author "Henry William Williamson", I meant to create an author page, but create a normal page instead, please delete. HendrikWBK (talk) 13:01, 5 April 2024 (UTC)

Done, see Author:Henry William Williamson SnowyCinema (talk) 13:32, 5 April 2024 (UTC)

 This section is considered resolved, for the purposes of archiving. If you disagree, replace this template with your comment. --EncycloPetey (talk) 01:17, 20 April 2024 (UTC)

Tale of the Doomed Prince

excerpt translation —Beleg Âlt ^BT (talk) 16:55, 10 April 2024 (UTC)

 Delete. I find a version of this here, but it appears to be a fairly recent translation, perhaps self-published, linking to a (publisher?) website that is no longer online (blackmask.com), with no indication of a free license. (The TOC page is explicitly copyrighted, but I see no general statement about copyright or licensing.) -Pete (talk) 23:41, 12 April 2024 (UTC)

I spoke too soon. There is a scan of the 1913 book it is excerpted from here. Seems to me it could be kept, matched, and treated as an in-progress transcription of the full work. -Pete (talk) 23:44, 12 April 2024 (UTC)

Portal:Pre-1945 State Roads in Florida

The following discussion is closed and will soon be archived:

Kept; sources located for the listed documents.

I suggest deleting the laws linked at this portal page. I do believe they are all in the public domain; however, there are many of these pages, they appear to be of minimal significance individually, and it would be a significant project to find and connect them with scanned source materials. I brought this up here in March but there was no discussion. I notified the two users who seemed to have worked on the pages here.

At minimum, if the pages are not deleted, I suggest the pages should all have their titles changed to something more descriptive. -Pete (talk) 06:07, 12 April 2024 (UTC)

•  Comment It's not clear to me on what basis these are being nominated for deletion. --EncycloPetey (talk) 02:00, 13 April 2024 (UTC)
  • @EncycloPetey For more background see the above-linked Scriptorium comment. I don't feel strongly that deletion needs to be the outcome (note that I didn't !vote on this one), but it does seem something should be done to bring this content into closer compliance with Wikisource's standards. Came across it while processing a backlog; I'll pose a more specific question on your user talk, as it may be better understood as me trying to learn best Wikisource practices, than as a strong recommendation. -Pete (talk) 18:22, 13 April 2024 (UTC)
  • EncycloPetey points out that it would be helpful for me to have outlined my efforts to find the source text. On several occasions, I have searched on several randomly selected page titles, as well as chunks of text from the contents of the pages, on archive.org, DuckDuckGo, and Google. I also looked at the Florida Secretary of State website, but it seems that unlike some other states, there is little or no effort there to present historical legislation. (I imagine somebody more familiar with Florida government or history might have better luck, though.) While I did ping @NE2 in my initial comment, I believe they are more active on English Wikipedia; I will reach out to them directly there, in case they have further insights to share. -Pete (talk) 16:43, 14 April 2024 (UTC)
• I'm very conflicted on this one. I generally think we should delete things like this (old dumps of mostly data, with no source, no probability of ever finding anyone with a similar obsession willing to work on it, probably does not correspond cleanly to any actually published work and definitely does not appear here in the context in which it was originally published, etc.). BUT… from the text there it is clear that in this case there actually was a source, and whoever transcribed it at least tried to be fairly faithful to the original. And the very fact that its content is so obscure, in this case, speaks in its favour: where else online is this going to be available, and who other than the original contributor would ever put in the effort to put this online? Xover (talk) 19:05, 13 April 2024 (UTC)

   Keep. With TE(æ)A,ea.'s awesome job finding scans for these I land solidly on keep. They still need cleanup, migrating to scans, etc.; but for a transcription with no other obvious problems that's not sufficient reason to delete. --Xover (talk) 07:24, 19 April 2024 (UTC)

• Keep. Each individual law is a complete work, which is based off of sources (the session laws) which can easily be found (especially if you live in Florida). The laws, as laws, are in the public domain in the United States. Pete: The session laws can be found here. The first law, c. 9311, 1923 Sess., starts on p. 367 of the first volume of 1923 Session Laws. TE(æ)A,ea. (talk) 17:04, 14 April 2024 (UTC)

 Keep per Xover and TEA's comments. These are obscure but interesting from a perspective, and were done as a larger project originally intended to be faithful to the originals. Scan-backing them (and cleaning them up a bit) eventually will be great, though. SnowyCinema (talk) 18:52, 14 April 2024 (UTC)

Great find @TE(æ)A,ea.. As a test case I've run AWB on the first few items. These should address the {{no source}} and {{no license}} issues; unless somebody sees a problem with these edits, I'd be happy to withdraw the nomination, and apply these changes to the full list. Here are example edits: special:diff/14057562, special:diff/14057640, and special:PermaLink/14057548. (IMO the page title issue is not so important if the content is otherwise pretty much aligned with Wikisource standards. I don't think that needs to be pursued given that source material has been located.) -Pete (talk) 22:59, 14 April 2024 (UTC)

I've made the changes. I'd be happy to withdraw this nomination if there are no further concerns. (I applied the wrong edit summaries of one of my AWB tasks, so that adding the PD tag is labeled as adding a source -- sorry for the confusion.) I do think there's probably a better naming scheme that would be more informative, but that's not really a discussion for Proposed Deletions, nor do I have a clear proposal for that, so I'm happy to let that part go; the pages all have links, and PD banners. -Pete (talk) 02:00, 19 April 2024 (UTC) (pinging @Xover as the only person so far in the discussion who might be leaning "delete")

@Peteforsyth: No reason to withdraw the proposal: the issue has been brought to the community and the community is collectively deciding what to do with it. So long as your current stance is clear somewhere in the thread that's all that's needed. (Actually withdrawing a proposed deletion really only makes sense when the proposal in retrospect turns out to have been really dumb and everyone participating is throwing popcorn at you. In those circumstances withdrawing would let an admin snowball-close the discussion. For anything else the community should get its say once it's been brought up here.)

On the issue itself I'm going to go slap a {{vk}} up below my original comment. I was already on the fence, and with TE(æ)A,ea.'s awesome job finding scans for these I land solidly on the keep side. We still need to upload the scans, migrate the text (matching it to the scan and modern standards), and retransclude in the context in which they were published; but that's just the general maintenance backlog and nothing that needs be discussed on WS:PD.

Regarding your AWB edits… The textinfo template on Talk: is the old way to indicate the source pre-Proofread Page. For situations like this please indicate it using {{scans available|1=[link]}} at the top of the page itself so the availability of scans is made visible and the relevant tracking category gets added. Xover (talk) 07:21, 19 April 2024 (UTC)

Thank you, I'll just add my  Keep (^as nominator) !vote then! -Pete (talk) 16:25, 19 April 2024 (UTC)

 This section is considered resolved, for the purposes of archiving. If you disagree, replace this template with your comment. --EncycloPetey (talk) 20:06, 19 April 2024 (UTC)

John McCain Concession Speech

The following discussion is closed and will soon be archived:

Deleted. These speeches are not the result of work in capacity of the US Gov't and are not hostable on Wikisource.

Also:

• John McCain speech in Kenner, Louisiana
• John McCain speech on Foreign Policy to the Hudson Institute
• John McCain speech to American Israel Public Affairs Committee

These are speeches given by a senator and a presidential nominee, but in his capacity as a candidate not as an agent of the U.S. government, in some cases as a guest of private organizations. So {{PD-USgov}} seems to clearly not apply, and copyright has not expired on these 2008 speeches, and there is no indication that a Wikisource-compatible license was granted. Delete as copyright violations. -Pete (talk) 16:36, 12 April 2024 (UTC)

Note: see prior discussions at Wikisource:Copyright_discussions/Archives/2024#Content_related_to_2008_U.S._presidential_election and Wikisource:Proposed_deletions/Archives/2024#John_McCain_Concession_Speech_and_works_of_president-elect_Obama

•  Delete as nominator. - Pete (talk) 16:36, 12 April 2024 (UTC)
•  Delete per nom. Cremastra (talk) 23:28, 12 April 2024 (UTC)
•  Delete per nom.  Comment @Peteforsyth: This discussion should probably be moved to WS:CV. SnowyCinema (talk) 18:53, 14 April 2024 (UTC)

 This section is considered resolved, for the purposes of archiving. If you disagree, replace this template with your comment. --EncycloPetey (talk) 17:03, 19 April 2024 (UTC)

2008 U.S. Democratic party presidential debates

The following discussion is closed and will soon be archived:

Deleted. These debates are not the product of someone fulfilling their elected duties, and so are not placed in the public domain, and cannot be hosted on Wikisource.

• 2008 Democratic Debate - 13 April
• 2008 Democratic Debate - 16 April

Previously nominated at Copyright discussions by @Beardo, discussion expired with little engagement. Note that @Beleg Âlt, and @MarkLSteadman had ~voted and/or discussed this item and related ones. -Pete (talk) 16:50, 12 April 2024 (UTC)

Reasoning: No reason these items would been exempt from copyright, and no indication that they were released under a free/Wikisource-compatible license. Delete as copyright violations.

•  Delete as (re-)nominator -Pete (talk) 16:52, 12 April 2024 (UTC)

 Delete and ditto the last discussion, this should be moved to WS:CV. SnowyCinema (talk) 18:55, 14 April 2024 (UTC)

•  Comment It looks as though one section was closed, which resulted in the archiving of the parent section. --EncycloPetey (talk) 17:13, 19 April 2024 (UTC)

 This section is considered resolved, for the purposes of archiving. If you disagree, replace this template with your comment. --EncycloPetey (talk) 20:04, 19 April 2024 (UTC)

Wikisource:Welcome

In my reviewing of a completely different policy page, WS:What is Wikisource?, I came across this one, thinking it might redirect to it. Here we have a Project page with no header template, created in 2008 and not updated since 2013, and not at all connected to other main Project pages.

In fact, Special:WhatLinksHere/Wikisource:Welcome indicates almost no usage across the project, aside from linking on some newbie talk pages in lieu of Template:Welcome. This appears to have been the entire purpose of the page. It got 47 page views this month, but compare this to the just over 1,000 that WS:What is Wikisource? got during that same time.

This slipped under the radar for over a decade and is no longer useful for its intended purpose. I propose to redirect this to WS:What is Wikisource? or WS:About, or something similar. SnowyCinema (talk) 18:01, 15 April 2024 (UTC)

•  Comment If it's gotten 47 views in a month, then we should redirect it to something rather than simply delete it. --EncycloPetey (talk) 20:00, 15 April 2024 (UTC)

@EncycloPetey: Agreed, and it's what I'm proposing. All it comes down to is which page. SnowyCinema (talk) 20:08, 15 April 2024 (UTC)

Redirect to Help:Introduction, possibly? That seems most aligned with "welcome". Cremastra (talk) 14:29, 20 April 2024 (UTC)

• I have no objection in principle to redirecting somewhere, but I do think that a "welcome" redirect should redirect somewhere that actually welcomes the reader. I don't know if Help:Introduction is the place to add such a message. BD2412 T 04:03, 21 April 2024 (UTC)

I wasn't immediately aware of that page, so okay by me. SnowyCinema (talk) 04:30, 21 April 2024 (UTC)

Extracts from an Opera

The following discussion is closed and will soon be archived:

speedied, converted to redirect —Beleg Âlt ^BT (talk) 15:13, 23 April 2024 (UTC)

List of links to poems in The complete poetical works and letters of John Keats —Beleg Âlt ^BT (talk) 17:04, 22 April 2024 (UTC)

• Speedied, as a duplicate to a published item with scan-backing. There is a page at The complete poetical works and letters of John Keats/Extracts from an Opera, in a published work, after which follow the items linked from this page. Hence, converted to a redirect to the scan-backed page. --EncycloPetey (talk) 18:38, 22 April 2024 (UTC)

 This section is considered resolved, for the purposes of archiving. If you disagree, replace this template with your comment. —Beleg Âlt ^BT (talk) 15:13, 23 April 2024 (UTC)

Captain Sharkey

The following discussion is closed and will soon be archived:

speedied, converted to Portal —Beleg Âlt ^BT (talk) 15:13, 23 April 2024 (UTC)

List of works by Arthur Conan Doyle, not itself a work —Beleg Âlt ^BT (talk) 17:57, 22 April 2024 (UTC)

Moved (speedily) to Portal:Captain Sharkey. For one, I don't think this deletion will be controversial. Two, I have found it to be important to keep series of works in individual portals so that the data about them can be easier tracked. It's better than just a listing on the Author page, because then the Wikidata items can have proper connections, etc. and it aids in searchability. SnowyCinema (talk) 18:16, 22 April 2024 (UTC)

 This section is considered resolved, for the purposes of archiving. If you disagree, replace this template with your comment. —Beleg Âlt ^BT (talk) 15:13, 23 April 2024 (UTC)

Festival (Lovecraft, unsourced)

Which version exactly is this of the existing Weird Tales/Volume 8/Issue 6/Yule-Horror? SnowyCinema (talk) 01:54, 23 April 2024 (UTC)

 Delete as unsourced edition of a work of which we have a scan-backed edition —Beleg Âlt ^BT (talk) 15:12, 23 April 2024 (UTC)

Descartes (Mahaffy)

Empty TOC page —Beleg Âlt ^BT (talk) 15:11, 23 April 2024 (UTC)

O My Lord, Your Dwelling Places Are Lovely

This and three other poems attributed to Judah Halevi and translator Solomon Solis-Cohen (d. 1948):

• The Seventh Day
• Hymn for Atonement Day
• Sabbath, My Love

These poems were added to Wikisource in 2008 by Josette, who has not edited here in a decade. The discussion page for the first identifies this web page as the source, and I have confirmed the text matches. However, the web page makes no mention of Solis-Cohen, nor does it attribute any translator or make any assertions about original publication date. I have searched extensively for pieces of the text and metadata at google.com, archive.org, and hathitrust.org, but I've come up with nothing. Difficult to ascertain the provenance of these translations, seems unlikely they are is in the public domain, or that we could definitively establish where they came from. -Pete (talk) 20:15, 23 April 2024 (UTC)

Some of the poems have a little note at the bottom, saying they are from A Treasury of Jewish Poetry (1957), which does identify Solis-Cohen as the translator. However, I'm inclined to suspect these translations are copyvio. —Beleg Âlt ^BT (talk) 21:06, 23 April 2024 (UTC)

•  Comment Based on his Wikipedia article, the translations might have been published in When love passed by, and other verses: including translations from Hebrew poets of the Middle Ages (1929) but I cannot find this volume in IA nor Hathi, and it would not be in the public domain in the US unless the date is an error or a reprint. --EncycloPetey (talk) 21:15, 23 April 2024 (UTC)
  • EncycloPetey: When Love Passed By was published in the United States and was not renewed, so it is in the public domain. I will try to access a copy of it. TE(æ)A,ea. (talk) 21:18, 23 April 2024 (UTC)

Template:Spider Boy/TOC

The following discussion is closed and will soon be archived:

Speedied; converted to more streamlined approach requiring only one template, rather than a new template for each work. SnowyCinema (talk) 13:40, 24 April 2024 (UTC)

Only used on one page and one index. subst: and delete as a separate template. —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 09:09, 24 April 2024 (UTC)

@Koavf:  Keep, there's an entire category of these: Category:Auxiliary_table_of_contents_templates, please read the docs to read why it exists. SnowyCinema (talk) 11:55, 24 April 2024 (UTC)

It's used for the Index TOC, and the front matter page, so as to avoid code repetition. Yes, you can use Subst, but all this will do is just put a manual code entry there. The idea is that if the TOC needs to be changed, it can just be done in one place rather than having to be at risk of being wrong in one place, and right in the other. SnowyCinema (talk) 11:57, 24 April 2024 (UTC)

As it turns out, I have invented a better method in {{AuxTOC detect}}. This will make it so that making a separate template for each one of these isn't required for the same clean outcome. It's proven to work on Index:Keeping the Peace.pdf. I'll go through and change all the templates accordingly and delete them later today. SnowyCinema (talk) 12:47, 24 April 2024 (UTC)

 This section is considered resolved, for the purposes of archiving. If you disagree, replace this template with your comment. SnowyCinema (talk) 13:40, 24 April 2024 (UTC) (UTC)