User talk:Eclecticology

Catholic Encyclopedia header

Hi, Category:Pages with override author is full of articles from the Catholic Encyclopedia. This is an obvious candidate for having its own header like {{EB1911}}. I've seen you're doing a bit of work in this area; any suggestions on how the header should be done?

{{EBDheader}} is another template worth re-considering - I've just recently changed it from {{header}} to {{header2}}, but this means the footer is displayed and I am not sure how to turn it off (I havent looked properly,..) - there are enough of these dictionary entries to warrant a tailored page design. Rather than try and fiddle with making header2 work for these pages, I would rather fiddle with a prototype of a new header. John Vandenberg 17:53, 14 November 2007 (UTC)

Quickly answering,

I didnt change any EBD entries; I changed the header.[1] I am not 100% happy with my changes, but havent bothered looking for small fixes. I want to rewrite the header to be tailored specifically for that dictionary. That set of pages is rather unique in that they are all on the small side. Idea's on how to deal with them are all I need - i.e. your wish is my command...

I've cleared my cache, but Easton's Bible Dictionary (1897)/A (entry) still has a footer for me. I think that automatically placing a default footer based on the values of the default header is a reasonable idea, but I am not sold on it yet. I was too tired last night to be bothered working it out, and wanted more thoughts on it before getting my fingers dirty there. The simplest way forward is to reduce the number of pages that use the default header - the default footer will then also not appear.

I'm pretty sure that I can parse the CE entries sufficiently to find the author. Have you seen any with multiple authors, or no named author at all?

{{No translator info}} appears as a "used template" on the edit form because it is a conditional part of "header2". It shouldnt be doing anything unless the translator value = "?".

Your thoughts about organising encyclopedic/dictionary articles by topic is something I have been mulling over as well. My idea is to have a "Topic" namespace, where each page lists any pages of relevance - sort of like some of our "Wikisource:" pages which to me feel like they are in the wrong namespace. Evil berry (talk • contribs) is obviously thinking along the same lines as well, and came up with Wikisource:Encyclopedia articles. I think that Evil berry's approach is the sanest of us all, as one page is easier to maintain at present. A single page is also easier to promote. If we know that sending a reader to one URL is always going to take them one step away from the information they are looking for, that URL starts to be passed around and the meme grows wings. It beats having to navigate our complex structure.

John Vandenberg 00:49, 15 November 2007 (UTC)

If the footer isnt consistent across all skins, it's something I will to look into. I've not played much with the MediaWiki interface side of things, so it might take me a few days before I can take steps to correct any problems and consider suggestions on improvements.

Merging EBD pages doesnt sit well with me at present, primarily because it I cant immediately think of which ones should be merged together.

The {{header}} template already distinguishes between inapplicable unknown translators. see Template:Header#Translations. The {{No translator info}} template name that you see at the bottom of the edit screen is a nuance of the mediawiki template system, as far as I can tell. That said, I will look into it further to see if I can remove it.

Topical categorisation is underdeveloped here, but due to our small size I think we need to be wary about developing a category system that grows out of control and has a POV. Rather than develop a loose Wikipedia style topical system, I think it would be worth attempting to use one of the traditional library categorisation systems here. By doing that, we can have duplicate standardised categorisation systems in place all at the same time if/when contributors support that.

Maintaining Wikisource:Encyclopedia articles would be difficult if done by hand, and for some reason I didnt even think of automating it - it's easily automated; a weekly job would do the trick and as a side effect, the history of that page would help us gauge how many new articles we are receiving.

At least initially, the differences in page names can be resolved by recording in all entries the matching Wikipedia page name. Last night I was working on this "cross project" interwiki bot; see Wikisource:WikiProject 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/WikipediaCrossCheck. If CE articles had the same "wikipedia" parameter in the header, that would make things simpler. Note that the Wikipedia link doesnt need to be shown (as it is on EB1911) if we dont want to - it can simply be left hidden.

If/When having Wikisource:Encyclopedia articles on a single page becomes unmanageable, the bot can split it into one page per letter. John Vandenberg 03:15, 15 November 2007 (UTC)

fyi, Category:The_New_Student's_Reference_Work/Topics appears to be a per-work category system, probably closely matching an actual categorisation system that appear in the print copy. John Vandenberg 13:04, 15 November 2007 (UTC)

a diff to check

Hi, if you have a copy of the Catholic Encyclopedia, could you check this, and add your name as a proofreader on Talk:Catholic Encyclopedia (1913). John Vandenberg 23:18, 20 November 2007 (UTC)

Author pages

Hi there. I noticed that you have been creating many author pages. I wanted to let you know a few things that you might find helpfull:

1. The author page headers are usually formatted as such:
{{author
|firstname =
|lastname =
|last_initial =
|birthyear =
|deathyear =
|description =
|image =
|wikipedia_link =
|wikiquote_link =
|commons_link =
}}
I don't know if there is a rule that this must be the format but it seems to be the normal way of doing it.

2. There are many ways to group authors together in various categories, such as by nationality, genre, and occupation. (For a complete listing, see Category:Authors and its various subcategories.) Like categories for works, I think this helps browsers of this site find what they are looking for, in terms of authors of a specific country or genre, for example.

Keep up the good work. Wild Wolf 00:50, 21 November 2007 (UTC)

I have reverted your decategorisation of QEII; categorisation is useful to some readers, and very important to google, so if you find them useless, please divert your eyes from them. We do need better guidelines on categorisation, but until they are drafted, meaningless battles over them is a waste of everyones effort. p.s. placing the author template all on one line is different, but I dont think it matters much. John Vandenberg 12:53, 21 November 2007 (UTC)

sorry

Sorry about that, I must have hit the wrong button while patrolling pages. John Vandenberg 08:56, 25 November 2007 (UTC)

Act of Independence of Lithuania

Saw your note about this on WS:DEL. Should this be undeleted pending the results of your inquiry? Tarmstro99 20:58, 28 November 2007 (UTC)

Realize/Realise

I just checked the difference, and you're very right. I'm sorry about changing that spelling. --Uchohan 03:32, 8 January 2008 (UTC)

There are other changes, though, such as the one I quoted to John Vandenberg i.e. (Our Messenger.s Duty) that I think should be made. Other examples include:
"[the] Wrong- doers", as opposed to "wrong-doers"
"[God is] well- pleased", as opposed to "well-pleased"
Also, some sentences did not begin with a capital letter after a full-stop :/ when they should have.
Again I apologize about the realize/realise difference.--Uchohan 03:44, 8 January 2008 (UTC)

Lol, it's not a matter of being a hassle at all :) thanks for your reply. Fixing these errors is more of a religious duty to me :) and making unnecessary changes is certainly unwarranted. Indeed making a change that would affect the meaning of a verse amounts to outright blasphemy, something I would most diligently avoid. --Uchohan 20:50, 8 January 2008 (UTC)

Incomplete

Yes, I wouldn't normally tag it on a work that was under progress - except in this case it was a work that had a note pretty much saying the same thing "This work is not yet complete", so I simply replaced it with the template in case the original poster wasn't aware we had a template just that. Sherurcij 07:45, 9 January 2008 (UTC)

Sysop

You have been appointed :) --BirgitteSB 14:36, 17 January 2008 (UTC)

I am innocent!-

You've actually got the wrong guy, it was SkunkmasterIV who did the pages like "Napoleon's Addresses During the Russian Campaign", I much preferred putting each individual speech on its own page, no matter the length - and grouping them as per Author:Napoleon Bonaparte :) Sherurcij 02:16, 29 January 2008 (UTC)

Ida M. Tarbell

I've updated Author:Ida M. Tarbell as you created it as a cross namespace redirect. John Vandenberg ^(chat) 06:32, 29 January 2008 (UTC)

I had suspected you were adding a work about her. Is "Napoleon's Addresses: Selections from the Proclamations, Speeches and Correspondence of Napoleon Bonaparte" public domain? John Vandenberg ^(chat) 08:53, 29 January 2008 (UTC)

The Bell-Buoy

The edition I am using is "Rudyard Kipling: The Complete Verse" Kyle Cathie Ltd. (1990) ISBN 1 85626 009 7. I can confirm that everywhere you have changed it, including the title, I have followed my copy correctly. In particular, "blur" is obviously right - there is no such word as "blurr" - and "clearing light" dseems better than "nearing light". It is quite possible that there are typos in your copy.--Poetlister 22:35, 8 February 2008 (UTC)

At least for this poem, my 1990 edition faithfully reproduces the complete text of the posthumous Definitive Edition of Rudyard Kipling's Poetry. That in turn reproduces the 1929 Collected Poems of Rudyard Kipling. Thus I think that it is safe to say that any changes from the version you found had Kipling's approval. It is pretty inconceivable that they would have altered "pimping" to "godly" except on his instructions! I think that we should respect Kipling's final wishes and revert to what I posted, although you could footnote the earlier variants. In any case, why pick the first American printing without checking whether there was an earlier British one?--Poetlister 13:32, 9 February 2008 (UTC)

It's not a question of "my version" or "your version", but Kipling's version. What I uploaded represents the final version that Kipling approved for inclusion in his Collected Poems. I don't know whether the differences from the version you found are all revisions or some are just corrections of typos. However, any responsible collected edition of a poet's works will begin with his or her final approved text. Now will you please revert.--Poetlister 23:15, 9 February 2008 (UTC)

I look forward to your correcting the texts of all Shakespeare's plays to agree with the first printed editions.----Poetlister 10:58, 10 February 2008 (UTC)

Napoleon's Addresses

Sorry I took so long to respond. School has sort of been preventing me from really doing anything on Wikisource for quite a while now. It looks like that Ida Tarbell did have to do with them. Here is the link so you can check it out:

Napoleon's Speeches

-Skunkmaster IV 22:38, 9 February 2008 (UTC)

The Purple Wig

All twelve chapters were on a single page, and I just split them into the separate components. An IP address user, 68.73.164.102, originally added the story. - Politicaljunkie 19:25, 16 February 2008 (UTC)

A request

Can you welcome me? Thanks, Slade ^meta 21:13, 16 February 2008 (UTC)

Jayvdb just attended my request. Thanks anyway, Slade ^meta 13:27, 17 February 2008 (UTC)

Canadian Copyright Tags

I was going to revert your changes to {{PD-CAGov}} and {{Legislation-CAGov}}, but I thought I would discuss it here first. According to a legal counsellor at Justice Canada:

"The statutes and regulations are subject to Crown copyright by virtue of the Crown prerogative, with the result that they are subject to perpetual Crown copyright." (emphasis mine, full text here)

It is believed that US does not recognise crown perogative, and so these works can be hosted by Wikisource. However, crown perogative is (likely) recognized by the members of the commonwealth, which represent a sizeable chunk of the english speaking world. Hence the warnings.--T. Mazzei 01:27, 26 February 2008 (UTC)

First of, this is not "my view", but the view of the gov't lawyer and a reading of the Copyright act. Regarding your comment that By virtue of Section 12 of the Copyright Act statues are protected for 50 years, and no longer. Your claim that these rights are extended beyond that by virtue of Crown privileges is absurd. Crown privilege is based on common law, and common law is overridden by statutes. — Section 12 clearly states that the 50 year copyright does not "prejudice any rights or privileges of the Crown". The statute does not override Crown privilege, it upholds it: it specifically states that the Crown has privileges, and that these privileges are not affected by the Copyright Act.

Regarding Judicial decisions of federal courts are not copyrightable at all. The Supreme Court clearly stated this in CCH Canadian Ltd. vs. Law Society of Upper Canada. The courts are not government departments; treating them as such would compromise the judicial independence of the courts. — That case dealt with fair use ("fair dealing"), stating that a library can provide single photocopies of statues, decisions, etc. Wikisource does not provide "single photocopies" to its users, and does not allow hosting of documents based on fair use.

--T. Mazzei 04:06, 27 February 2008 (UTC)

If you are the one making the arguments for the views they are your views...As far as I am concerned he is dead wrong. We do not accept academics as absolute authorities for statements on Wikimedia projects. Lawyers should be no exception to this. No, my opinion (and yours) is irrelevent to the central question of whether or not these works are "free" from a Wikimedia proint of view, however a government lawyer's opinion, and the relevant legislation is. Whether or not the government (as represented by the lawyer) is correct in its conception of what crown privilege implies, it is their position, supported by the copyright act itself, that certain works are covered "indefinitely" by crown privilege. It is true that crown privilege is subject to legal precident, but unless you can find case law that rejects this claim, Wikisource should inform its users of the likely legal status of the documents.

Regarding case law, it does indeed appear that the case cited affirmed that legal decisions themselves are not subject to copyright. If this is the case, a template should be created (or modified) to reflect this fact. Do you know where it was originally established that legal decisions are not copyrightable? Obviously the creation of a legal decision involves "skill and judgement", and therefor should be copyrightable.

--T. Mazzei 21:14, 1 March 2008 (UTC)

Your reference to the definition of free cultural works is of little help here ... I am willing to allow the government lawyer's as much weight as yours, but to put his opinion on a par with legislation is completely unacceptable. Government lawyers do argue cases on behalf of their employers, and lose as often as they win. The reason for the importance of the lawyer's opinion is not that I believe he is right or wrong, or that he would win or lose a case. It is important because it reveals that the government believes it has legally enforcable (prerogative) rights. By hosting these works without a disclaimer Wikisource is representing these documents as being "free", while prerogative rights are incompatible with the Wikimedia definition of a "free" work; . Since the government asserts posession of these rights there is the possiblility, however remote, of legal action by the government against Wikisource or the downstream users should the government believe these rights are being violated. I think the Foundation has been pretty clear on wanting to avoid these situations, and not wanting their content to be ammunition for a test case.

The words "Without prejudice to any rights or privileges of the Crown" that begin Section 12 do not in themselves establish any copyrights. They only reference other provisions which may or may not exist ... My position is that there is no precedent that establishes a crown privilege over copyright. As far as I know there has not been a single case since 1867 on the matter, and it is not up to me to prove a negative. Crown perogative over legislation dates back to the 16th century. This document provides a brief history of some of the precedent ( British and Australian). I am unaware of any Canadian cases since 1867, but the Australian case in 1938 found that "the prerogative right in relation to copyright in statutes was vested in the Crown in right of the colonies before federation and had not fallen into desuetude".

As for the decisions themselves I have not traced back the origins of that idea, but the Supreme Court as owner of these decisions would certainly have the right to treat them as not copyrightable. The question is, though do they own the right, or, since they are representatives of the Crown does the crown have copy or prerogative rights?

If we are to make use of this for court decisions, I would suggest that the decisions be copied from the Court's own website rather than that of any law service company to avoid mixing in any copyright material added by those services. Thus far I am speaking with confidence only of federally established courts; I reserve opinion on quasi-judicial bodies or provincially established courts. Agreed.

Whether these court decisions should be copyright is a matter of POV, and doesn't advantage either side. I said they should be copyrightable, not that they should be copyrighted.

--T. Mazzei 01:12, 2 March 2008 (UTC)

No, it reveals the view of one anonymous government lawyer. The decision of whether or not the gov't persues legal action is based on the advice of "anonymous government lawyers". This particular legal counsellor at Justice Canada was asked by a member of The Crown Copyright and Licensing Office about the legal status of works wrt the Reproduction of Federal Law Order. If you think there are other gov't lawyers with more authority, who believe that crown copyright/prerogative rights don't apply, then feel free to search them out and quote them. Barring that, we have nothing but your assumptions.

The problem is not with a disclaimer, as long as the disclaimer makes it clear that it's only some people who believe that prerogative rights apply. Or, more accurately, that the lack of modern case law on the subject makes it unclear whether prerogative rights over statutes are still enforcable, or whether they have lapsed.

My argument is not based on that incompatibility, it is that prerogative rights do not apply at all to the material in question. Which is nothing more than an assumption ... the gov't assumes the opposite.

The remote likelihood of legal action by the government is always there, no matter what we do. This does not require us to put ourselves at an extreme disadvantage through paranoid interpretations of the law. And yet the same remote likelyhood of legal action is used to disallow orphaned works and other works of ambiguous copyright status from this site. I don't think they should be barred, merely that we should provide a disclaimer, and not misrepresent the works as free, when their status is in question.

The 1938 Australian case in the court of one state, has no bearing on Canada ... Perhaps prerogative rights had not fallen into desuetude in Australia by 1938, but for Canada the previously comment that the Copyright Act is "exhaustive" suggests the opposite here. What comment that the Copyright Act is "exhaustive"? It's definitely not wrt prerogative rights [edit - you refer to the CCH case comment "In Canada, copyright is a creature of statute and the rights and remedies provided by the Copyright Act are exhaustive". Crown prerogative is not copyright, and is specifically excepted from the Copyright Act.--T. Mazzei 18:56, 2 March 2008 (UTC)] Canada and Australia both being former colonies with the same exemption for Crown prerogative, the legal status of prerogative there is highly relevant. Its improbable to think that courts would not take the Australian decision (as well as the mouldy British decisions) into consideration, given the lack of Canadian law on the subject. That Canadian courts would rule that prerogagitve had "lapsed into disuetude" in Canada is nothing more than assumption on your part. The only modern Commonwealth legal decision (I am aware of) says the opposite.

I don't think that the Canadian courts would see themselves as "representatives of the Crown". To do so would compromise the independence of the judiciary and its precedence of the executive branch. They are hired and fired by the Crown. In a constitutional monarchy, all authority derives from the Crown. Tradition gives them independance.

The distinction between whether court decision should be "copyright" or "copyrightable" is of little consequence to this discussion. If legal decisions are "copyrightable" then the question becomes why do the courts consider them not "copyrighted", and do they have that authority.

--T. Mazzei 16:40, 2 March 2008 (UTC)

I don't see where the logical fallacy of arguing from authority would help my "assumptions" any more than it helps yours. Again, there is no "arguing from authority" since it does not matter whether the lawyer's opinion is correct or not. The pertinent point is that he (and by extension the gov't) believes he is correct. The importance of the lawyers viewpont is in its revelation of the governments stance on the matter, and the possible ramifications. Please review my comments above, and the definition of arguing from authority. I find the accusation insulting.

There is basis for finding common ground in a disclaimer ... The problem is not about prerogative rights over statutes; such rights do not exist ... Any disclaimer must mention prerogative rights. Until the statute is changed, or a court rules they have lapsed, the conservative view must be that it is likely that these rights do exist. The statute itself, what little precedent there is, and the view of the gov't indicate that it cannot be assumed, without any evidence, they these rights are not enforcable.

I propose the following on the {{PD-CAGov}} template:

This work is in the public domain worldwide because it was prepared or published by or under the direction or control of the Canadian Government or any government department prior to 1974

Section 12 of the Canadian Copyright Act provides an exception for Crown Prerogative. Lack of modern case law on the subject makes it unclear whether perpetual prerogative rights over these documents still apply, or whether these rights have lapsed.

I propose the following for {{Legislation-CAGov}}:

This legislation is reproduced under the terms of the Reproduction of Federal Law Order for enactments of the Government of Canada and for the decisions of federal courts and tribunals. This document is not an official version and is not endorsed by the Government of Canada in any way, shape, or form.

Canadian legislation is under Crown Copyright pursuant to Section 12 of the Copyright Act for 50 years after the first publication. The wording of the Copyright Act and the lack of modern case law make it unclear whether these documents remain covered by perpetual Crown Prerogative after their copyright term ends.

Saying that the Copyright Act is "exhaustive" suggests that it is self contained; one need not look outside of its text to determine what is copyright. Actually the jist of the comment was copyright was covered exhaustively by the Copyright Act. Prerogative rights are separate from copyright, are not "a creature of statute", and are excepted from the Act. They are included in the act only in the form of "what prerogative rights exist (outside the act), apply"

I don't recall presuming how the Canadian courts would rule about "desuetude" You continue to say that prerogative rights do not exist. The only way there non-existance is certain is if the courts rule they have lapsed, or if they are removed by statute. They haven't been removed by statute, and the courts (in Canada) haven't yet ruled on them. I see only one conclusion to draw.

The Governor General appoints Superior, District and County Court judges by virtue of section 96 of the Constitution Act; firing Superior Court judges may be done by the Governor General "on Address of the Senate and House of Commons" by section 99. In 140 years no judge has been removed by sectin 99. The Pervez Musharef technique would be frowned upon. I agree entirely, but the end result is that judges are still technically employees/representatives of the Crown. There is no legal separation, only tradition. This (in my opinion) gives the Crown a perfectly legitimate arguement that they own the copyright for legal decisions. CCH seems to indicate that we can post these decisions as uncopyrighted, but unless we can find why they thought so I would still want to cover my butt with a disclaimer.

--T. Mazzei 01:01, 5 March 2008 (UTC)

Have changed the templates as discussed (with a few minor modifications), and added {{Decisions-CAGov}} for court decisions. The language on all the templates is a little wishy-washy, but then again, so is their public domain status.

--T. Mazzei 20:48, 15 March 2008 (UTC)

Collaboration project

This weeks collaboration project is G. W. Bush. Please take the time this week to identify and/or transcribe one important work by, or involving, this very prominent person who is relevant to us all. John Vandenberg ^(chat) 02:35, 7 March 2008 (UTC)

Do NOT

Do NOT edit the userpage of my bot. -- Cat ^chi? 09:50, 18 March 2008 (UTC)

If you don't want others putting anything on the "bot's" user page, then please add something yourself to the effect that the proposed bot has not yet been approved. Eclecticology 20:33, 18 March 2008 (UTC)

What makes you think the template is only for approved bots? It exists to mark non human (automated) editors. -- Cat ^chi? 21:55, 18 March 2008 (UTC)

DNB00

See Wikisource:Scriptorium#DNB00_project.3F --John Vandenberg ^(chat) 08:19, 16 June 2008 (UTC)

Hi, Eclecticology. My creation of the DNB00 project is mostly a "drive-by edit" writ large. I simply needed a place to put the Friswell article. I hope you don't mind. Since I will probably be a fairly passive contributor, and since you have done some serious substantive work on DNB00, I hope you feel free to simply take over if you wish, and to at least become the major player. With regard to DNB01 and later supplements: Please make a suggestion on the project's talk page, or simply implement the suggestion on the project page. -Arch dude 10:21, 17 June 2008 (UTC)

Hi again. To be consistent with other multi-page works, do you think we should move the pages that end in (DNB00)? I think we should move them to become sub-pages of of Dictionary of National Biography, 1885-1900. I also think we should drop the (DNB00) suffix. -Arch dude 22:36, 18 June 2008 (UTC)

Self Realization v. Ananda Church

You say here that the renewal in this case was voided. But I cannot find where this is substantiated. The appeal given above simply remands the decision about the validity of the renewal to a jury trial. Do you have any information if the case did go to trial and the outcome?--BirgitteSB 20:08, 19 June 2008 (UTC)

• Nevermind I misread that case.--BirgitteSB 21:21, 19 June 2008 (UTC)

What formatting is essential?

Hi. Most of my query on ws:s about the proper formatting of pages such as

• Page:The works of Horace - Christopher Smart.djvu/9 — book's title page

was intended for you, so I thought I'd start a pocket thread here. What would you do differently here? One issue that I would like input on is is the proper case of text. On the above page, text such as 'American Book Company' is rendered in uppercase and the original scan captured all-uppercase from the book page. I converted most of the letters to lowercase and wrapped it with {{uc}}. I see this as 'good' in that all-caps is less than good, but I can see it being argued that I'm introducing something that's just not in the original. The choice of just what letters get smacked with a lowercase command in my text editor is not guided by anything more than my judgment and understanding of convention. If I've strayed here, the uc template is not going to see nearly as much use. Cheers, Jack Merridew 04:49, 27 August 2008 (UTC)

Thanks for the question. I think you mostly answered your own question. The number of bugs strikes me as directly proportional to the level of complexity in a system. There is probably a reasonable explanation somewhere about why the line "OF PEMBROKE COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE" on the Horace page went off-center, but who wants to take the time to track that down? While there may be some justification on that page for the font size templates, putting all-caps text into lower case so that you can turn around and use {{uc}} to present it back in upper case is not likely to get the support of those whom you most want to be productive. I suspect that the ranks of those well versed in both computer science and Horace are extremely limited. More likely, the Horace expert knows very little about computer science.

My general observation is that computer scientists have an unfortunate tendency to hopeless perfectionism. This is no wonder for a profession where a single misplaced comma can send a programme into oblivion. If we can have photoduplicate images of a page what do we accomplish when we use formatting tricks to produce a page that only simulates the photoduplicate? I think there are many more other ways to put added value into the raw texts that we add to Wikisource. Eclecticology 05:57, 27 August 2008 (UTC)

I'm certainly a software guy; my readings of Horace are limited to stray quotes here and there (not that I'm not reasonably well read!).

As far as the off-center bit, John and I have been talking about that and I have a solution in hand; see ws:s#Proofreading paragraph marker. This proposal works well and I'd like to get it deployed. We need a better paragraph-mark image; I'm thinking one very much like '¶' in a reasonable font; it has to be an image which means it has to come from somewhere and capturing a screen shot of '¶' gets into a licensing issue with whatever font.

re mixed case; if you select the book cover page on screen (the rendered text, not the edit box wiki-text) and then copy-paste it somewhere, you get mixed case text. Google will see the text as mixed case and this may affect search results a bit when people are entering queries in mixed case. I'm looking at it as drilling down to the 'true' text before it was originally formatted into uppercase in whatever year this book was published.

The other formatting — things like letter-spacing — are all about fidelity to the original source; for things such as a cover page, title and author should be more prominent and tags like big and small may be fine. Far worse than these templates, in my opinion, is hard-coded fancy markup in the wiki-source. Absent such templates, the alternative is raw html ad css in the wiki-text. People knowledgeable about the tech stuff can paste all sorts of geekery into an editbox; I've done it, and I see the need to minimize it.

I know too-well the trade-offs between hopeless perfectionism and other people; you can't set the bar too high and expect to collaborate with people see the issues differently (and I really mean to avoid a characterization of others setting the bar 'too low' — they're on a whole different vector). The techies will always reach for the bigger hammer for the tiny nail. I'd be interested in anyways you see that I can help with putting added value into texts other than with formatting tools. Cheers, Jack Merridew 07:58, 27 August 2008 (UTC)

Please don't underestimate the ignorance of us non-techies.:-)

I went to John's talk page where you gave a test of the paragraph marker's usage where I saw nothing until I switched skins, but that just leads into another of my pet peeves where developments are not made applicable to all skins. Page:German Instrument of Surrender (May 7, 1945) - page 1.jpg shows a funny symbol that seems like the top half of the ¶ symbol. Aesthetically, I don't mind having the ¶ symbol where you put it, but I would find myself scrambling trying to figure out how to turn it on or off as the situation required.

I did see the paragraph marker discussion in Scriptorium when it started, but I said nothing then because my immediate reaction was, "I don't understand what the fuck these guys are talking about!"

I think I see your point about searching through mixed-case text. I remember the long discussion a couple years ago at Wiktionary about whether we should turn off first letter capitalization in page names. A search should really be able to produce all instances of the specified letter combination, without regard to capitalization or even diacritics.

Fidelity to the original source has its limits, some of it may be very nice, but if the geeks are the only ones that understand how to do it it will be a long time coming on all the pages where it could be applied.

Setting the bar too high is a different concept for high jumpers than for pole-vaulters. I believe that value-added must be what sets us apart from the likes of Project Gutenberg and Google Books. It's easy for them to scan books and either present them as a pdf or an ocr text. They can handle far bigger volumes of material than we. Effective value-added depends on what humans can do, and not solely on automatable tasks. It can involve us in better search functions, better linkings, better translations and better annotations; all of these require a significant input of human judgement. Eclecticology 00:56, 28 August 2008 (UTC)

Ah, it's you non-techies that add the bulk of the true content, so I think you're referring to a lack of detailed knowledge of certain specialized fields.

You may have a point about the skins; I'll have to look. Ya, I run monobook, and always have. The few times I tried some of the others, I basically took one look and switched back. Part of what happened may have been a cache reloading issue. It can be sorted out. I had not given any thought to turning them off; you could kill it in your monobook.css (and I guess there are others?).

The clipped paragraph marker you saw at the top of The German Instrument page is gone now; many page have a sequence of two blank lines in the noinclude section at the top; these were a work-around for the off-center issue with the code that's now gone. The clipping is part of why I want to switch to a plain ¶ symbol instead of the larger image with a handwritten look. The other paragraphs on the Germain page don't have marks because they're not really paragraphs; that's an ordered list split across two pages; they're glued back together when transcluded.

I have another example of where it seems appropriate to take the case of characters in hand. See;

• Page:Equitation.djvu/17 and 18

Most of the text is in small-caps; the original text spat out of John's bot was all-caps and somewhere along the way it was converted to mixed case and wrapped in a {{sc}} template; wasn't me, but I'd have done the same. I did just work on those pages and helped them along; I see a need for a css class for such TOC to make the wiki-text cleaner. I'll need to see more of the sort that are about to better design a solution that's widely applicable. As to searches, an exact match can, and should, drift a bit higher in search results; this is a fine point, but not anything like a major concern.

I see more elaborate formatting as primarily for title pages and chapter heading; the thousands of paragraphs of a work should be rather plain text.

I don't know much about PG or Google's book project; big and automatic/rote scan sounds about right. The value added by wikis is the human labour; it's all about harnessing free worker bees. I expect that some of the kick-back I'm getting over these templates is based on a concern that I'm pushing fluff over content. In the cross-wiki picture, I'm pretty hard on fluff; I'm an Evil Deletionist^®. I've helped fluff find the door and balked at wasting effort implementing silly userboxes (a current discussion).

I'll take it easy on the templates for now; the absolute font-size ones really just didn't work out. Part of what's happened here is I wanted to cover a full 'set' of properties to try the ideas out. I'll let you know about supporting other skins. Cheers, Jack Merridew 06:23, 28 August 2008 (UTC)

Gee! Things can work themselves out with an exchange of views!

On the skins, when I joined WP in 2002 the Classic skin was the standard, and it's what I became used to. In some ways I find it easier to read. The big curl on the tails of the "6" and "9" in monobook sometimes makes it difficult to distinguish it from an "8". I confess to not having much understanding to how a css works, and I have certainly never felt that monobook.css changes would have any effect on other skins. To the best of my knowledge classic.css and the others have never been enabled. My lack of knowledge in such matters does not put me in the best position to argue for such an enabling.

I think that another advantage of backing the standard ¶ symbol over some hand-drawn representation is that you will avoid any of the possible licensing issues to which you previously alluded.

I'm glad that most of your formatting efforts will be limited to title pages and the like. I tend to spend very little time on these.

I think some of us non-techies need a little more guidance than even the average geek. I find "div" and "span" somewhat mystical and when "Class=something" is used I often wonder where do I look to find these classes defined. Searching for "something" does not always bear fruit.

I have an inclusionist reputation but I tend to view "silly userboxes" as being outside the inclusionist/deletionist spectrum since they are about what goes on user pages rather than article space. I've largely withdrawn from that argument. It's too exhausting to argue against someone's god-given right to be an idiot. Eclecticology 16:39, 28 August 2008 (UTC)

I'm running the Modern skin now. It's nice, but the shadow at the top of the content area doesn't fit with the rest of the look. When you select a skin, basically you're selecting a different style sheet and the different rules for formatting and laying out pages in it; alt imagery is invoked from the style sheet, too. One of the skins I previewed didn't put the stuff on the left, on the left and some css may assume there is a left column. Supporting the different skins is extra work.

I was never 'backing' the hand drawn paragraph mark; John offered that image on my talk page and I just used it. And my initial crop of it was too large. I'm quite pleased with the small and hyper-normal image Yann produced. Finding a class is fairly easy if you use some rather technical tools like HTML Validator Firebug. You probably don't want to go there.

My Deletionest tendencies tend to be in regard to subjects you would probably not find all that worthy. Does en:wp really need a thousand different articles on Dungeons & Dragons creatures and another thousand on specific game scenarios? 180 articles on the individual episodes of The Golden Girls (an 80s tv show). I wouldn't seek the deletion of the works Eugene O'Neill or Horace, however w:en:The influence of Horace on the background imagery used in Japanese Manga might be dispensable.

On Commons Rocket made the point that the issue is cleaning up the template namespace, not promoting silly boxes like this user prefers xbox. I've done some work on the template; needs more. Cheers, Jack Merridew 07:10, 29 August 2008 (UTC)

Look again

Try and make sure that you know what you're talking about before reverting and insulting people - it's bad form.Proabivouac (talk) 04:54, 14 September 2008 (UTC)

I don't know what kind of a game you are trying to play. My revert was perfectly acceptable. You, with no previous history in Wikisource, placed nothing more than a meaningless plus sign and a link to a non-existent user page on Wikipedia; it's the kind of thing one would expect from a vandal. Look to yourself before making up lies about being insulted. Eclecticology (talk) 05:16, 14 September 2008 (UTC)

I take it you don't have a policy against biting newcomers. Follow the link. Just as on Wikisource, the nonexistence of a userpage in no way implies the nonexistence of a user, only that they have not created a userpage. On the lower left there is, in a box labeled "toolbox", a link called "user contributions." This link will not exist unless there is a user with this name.Proabivouac (talk) 05:25, 14 September 2008 (UTC)

I looked at this diff before I welcomed Proabivouac, and there is good reason to believe that Proabivouac has correctly identified another sock. However, there is no need to inflame the situation here further, so Proabivouac should post this to the meta page for more eyes. John Vandenberg ^(chat) 06:39, 14 September 2008 (UTC)

Identifying two James Burnleys

Hi Eclecticology. I believe that I have identified two James Burnleys, one in DNB, one not. When I was capturing attributed works, I spotted some peculiarities. Would you care to look at my thoughts on this at Author talk:James Burnley. Disambiguation and differentiation. I am such a nag.<vbg> -- billinghurst (talk) 15:34, 23 September 2008 (UTC)

splitting up the author indexes

Hi, the redlinks on the author pages are annoying people a lot. I have initiated a discussion on this: Wikisource:Scriptorium#Two character Author initial. I would appreciate timely feedback on the interim solution I have proposed, so that we can quickly resolve the redlinks to keep the peace. Cheers, John Vandenberg ^(chat) 02:16, 28 September 2008 (UTC)

Once you have finished the B's, could you please wait for the communal discussion to complete before continuing. John Vandenberg ^(chat) 19:08, 29 September 2008 (UTC)

Pop

Hi...why are y ou removing so many Populate-tags? Sherurcij 19:43, 28 September 2008 (UTC)

The "populate" tags are utterly useless. If there are no links to existing pages on the author page, only a complete idiot would draw the conclusion that we have pages. If the people who put up these tags are so keen to have works by these authors why can't they just add the works instead of putting up annoying tags to tell other people what to do? Eclecticology (talk) 19:56, 28 September 2008 (UTC)

That's not really your decision to make; the tag is useful because it categorises authorpages, making it simple for editors to find "authors who need attention" on the project, or even "Canadian authors who need attention". To start just removing a template from dozens, if not hundreds, of pages simply because you personally disagree with it is a very poor example of editorship. If you believe the policy should be revisited, please start a discussion about it on the Scriptorium and await consensus. Sherurcij 20:04, 28 September 2008 (UTC)

This is a wiki. There is no more a policy to add them than there is a policy to remove them. Some people will add them, and others will remove them. What makes you think that anyone is seriously looking for "authors who need attention," Canadian or otherwise? If you really want people to add this stuff you would limit these templates to where they really matter, and not just indiscriminately hang wallpaper. Removing this clutter is an obvious example of good editorship. There is no need to revisit policy because there is no policy; I'm not so naïve as to fall for that rhetorical trick. Eclecticology (talk) 20:47, 28 September 2008 (UTC)

Hello, I think that this template is useful, and also that mass removing it should only be done after community discussion. Regards, Yann (talk) 21:06, 28 September 2008 (UTC)

I agree, this is useful for finding authors with no texts to work on. In particular, you have no right to overrule the main contributor of an author simply because you don't like the template. —{admin} Pathoschild 22:13:05, 28 September 2008 (UTC)

Would the same rule apply for pages where it is not included, and how are you going to know whether it is purposefully excluded? At what point should it be removed? If you read the description for the template, it should only be used when there is ZERO contributions, so any items then means POP removal. The whole premise of this wiki is that all Author pages are populate by default so only having the tag seems to be a circular argument. While I understand author needs attention; the concept, let alone the convention which is not documented. Not on MoS not on Author templates, etc. You have two discussions overlapping 1) mass removal 2) the template, running them together just muddies the water. --billinghurst (talk) 05:39, 29 September 2008 (UTC)

Here is one where we dont have any works and the tag was removed. John Vandenberg ^(chat) 06:26, 29 September 2008 (UTC)

The template has been around for two years, and I know of no evidence that is has been responsible for any improvements whatsoever in the site. It only serves those who want others to do the work. If having works by that author was so important why can't the person who adds the template add a work himself. Billinghurst has understood my point exactly. Every author page is "populate" by default, so adding the notice is a redundancy. Eclecticology (talk) 08:40, 29 September 2008 (UTC)

A perfect example of why you should first ask the community's opinion, whether they agree with you. You might have been told, for example, that it was used in the selection of authors for Wikisource:Collaboration of the Week to help us find authors who had no works hosted on WS yet. Sherurcij 09:45, 29 September 2008 (UTC)

So, it's about your pet project, not that I'm trying to suppress that at all! If it's a matter of pet projects I'm sure that I could come up with one or more. So of the two things that that template does is it the notice or the category that furthers your project? Eclecticology (talk) 16:33, 29 September 2008 (UTC)

Please don't be a dick, this isn't about a "pet project", I didn't even mention it until you claimed that the {{populate}} tag had never improved Wikisource, and I simply mentioned CotW as one obvious route through which the project is improved by use of the template you deemed idiotic. That doesn't mean "my project gets notice", or "my project is furthered", it means that additional texts are added to Wikisource that otherwise would not be - as a direct result of that template.. In closing, don't be a dick. Sherurcij 19:12, 29 September 2008 (UTC)

I have reviewed your last 1250 edits, and reverted or partially reverted around 120 of them, restoring {{populate}} and the categories you removed. This process took 4 hours of my time. I have been careful not to disrupt your interactive proposal to use two letter initials, as that is now being discussed by the community. In future, if you dont like a category, template, etc, please raise it at WS:PD or WS:S rather than trying to subversively remove them without discussion and without using edit summaries that reflect what you are doing. Just because you dont find something useful, and dont think it is useful at all, doesnt mean you are right. I know you have a long history of experience in wikis, but wikis evolve at a rapid rate, and approaches that were perfect can be invalidated overnight. Many of us disagree with your ideas about some structural issues, however you have begrudgingly been given the freedom to develop your own ideas. This wiki is a communal space, and author pages are one area where we all come together. I would appreciate if you would make more use of edit summaries in future, especially when you are doing anything that is even slightly controversial, as the rest of us depend on them to give us clues as to what is happening. I neglected to inspect your edits closely because I assumed that they were all uncontroversial "two letter initial" changes that didnt break anything. We should be able to make that assumption of any edit made by an admin, so it is very concerning that your recent edits are not in line with that assumption. John Vandenberg ^(chat) 19:04, 29 September 2008 (UTC)

Category

Wild Wolf, among many others, has spent literally years categorising our authors; why are you now removing those categories? This certainly doesn't seem like something with community consensus. You are encouraged to act autonomously to add to the project, not to remove things from it, whether templates, categories or pages you deem "idiotic". Sherurcij 03:32, 29 September 2008 (UTC)

The categories that I have been removing are only limited ones. Unless a person has actually written about religion or been involved in religious disputes posting his religion means nothing. And I can see absolutely no purpose or benefit to citing a Canadian persons investiture into a pompous English order. That makes sense on Wikipedia but not here. Eclecticology (talk) 08:55, 29 September 2008 (UTC)

I see no purpose to hosting War and Peace when it's already plenty of other places on the internet; however I would be remiss if I were to simply delete it because I happen to dislike it. Egalitarian collaboration is not the same thing as nihilism, and I'd ask that you pay a bit more attention to community consensus in the future; and checking with the community at large before you remove categories, templates or any other features of the project on a whim. Sherurcij 08:58, 29 September 2008 (UTC)

What has War and Peace to do with it? I'm not referring to articles or features, but to occasional categories that are nothing more than profligate fantasies. Eclecticology (talk) 16:03, 29 September 2008 (UTC)

I don't care if you dislike entire books, you dislike the author namespace, you dislike capital letters or you dislike talk pages. Don't delete them without first receiving consensus from the community. Sherurcij 19:13, 29 September 2008 (UTC)

So where is the community consensus for including all these categories exhibiting such a complete lack of judgement, or do you just make that up as you go along. Nobody is advocating a complete removal of meaningful categories; I've consistently limited myself to eliminating the stupid ones. Eclecticology (talk) 03:31, 30 September 2008 (UTC)

See: "You are encouraged to act autonomously to add to the project, not to remove things from it". Sherurcij 04:43, 30 September 2008 (UTC)

Mate, that is playing with words. Are you saying that you have never have and never will remove things? While I do not think I would have removed your categories, and my position may have been different in words in how I reflected upon others additions. That said, categories should add relevance and context, not just volume. Sometimes removing something can add value. None of us wants Category wikt:verbiage. I do not see how the religion of an author has relevance unless that is reflected in their writings. My personal opinion is that categories belong in the 80/20 rule. If it comes into the 80% relevant add it, if it doesn't leave it.-- billinghurst (talk) 09:09, 30 September 2008 (UTC)

We remove things, but not unilaterally. We have forums for general and deletion discussions. Note that these categories were not created, or added, by Sherurcij - they are mostly the work of Wild Wolf, who does an immense amount of maintenance of our Author pages. If Wild Wolf's approach isnt ideal, discussion is the way to give him feedback on his work. John Vandenberg ^(chat) 09:48, 30 September 2008 (UTC)

Ah, it seems that the context meant has not been the context portrayed/taken. In no way was I denigrating anybody's volunteer efforts, that is not my intent. If offence take, apologies given. I will return to my cave. :-) -- billinghurst (talk) 12:17, 30 September 2008 (UTC)

Obviously, editing someone's efforts is not a denigration unless its on a serious wholesale scale, something which does not apply here. Removing a category is about the specific category itself, not about the person who put it up. And Wild Wolf was not the one complaining. Eclecticology (talk) 17:45, 30 September 2008 (UTC)

Unsourced

What I was referring to was Battle Hymn of the Republic at Wikisource, which lacks source info and does not repost the Atlantic Monthly lyrics. If I happen to make a mistake or overlook something, please take it in good spirit. I'm fairly new to Wikisource and unfamiliar with some of the site conventions here. Better to ask questions then to make cleanup jobs for later. Durova (talk) 17:52, 16 October 2008 (UTC)

DNB main page

Hi!

Thanks for all your efforts on the DNB.

It's clear that we have differing goals, but it appears that we are making forward progress. I mostly see our differences when we make competing edits to the main pages of the DNB project. I hope that you do not take offence when we disagree. Please feel free to contact me on my talk page if you feel that we are in disagreement.

I just made a change to the main page that I feel is important. When I copied the EB1911 project, I preserved the distinction between "readers" and "editors" on the main page. You consolidated this. I have just re-established the distinction. If you do not agree with this, let's please discuss it, either here or on the project talk page at your descretion.

Thanks. -Arch dude (talk) 01:09, 21 October 2008 (UTC)

Scriptorium header levels

Hello Eclecticology. I've restored Xenophon's header level changes to the Scriptorium, because they match what is standard on the Scriptorium (and what the archives use). The scriptorium was only changed to level 1 sections as a hacky fix because people tend to add non-semantic level 2s (the correct hierarchy is page title header > section header > discussion header); if we now have a bot that can automatically correct the levels, there's no need to use non-semantic level 1s and 2s. —{admin} Pathoschild 17:03:59, 22 October 2008 (UTC)

Level three headers were apparently used in the archives until February. There was no March archive, and the April archive uses an inconsistent format (it doesn't have an index on the archive page because the bots can't parse it); the last 5 months, May-September, use level 2 headings. October was done in the midst of the unannounced change, so that has the level 3 headings, with some hacking to make things look reasonable. -Steve Sanbeg (talk) 18:50, 22 October 2008 (UTC)

pointless tag

I dont understand why you call it a pointless tag. It is used by other people, and it is useful to keep an eye on how many of our works are not yet complete. It is on all of the other pages, like EB1911, and it is helpful to indicate to new readers that we are wanting to be complete, even tho we currently are not. Perhaps you can convince me; if not, I'll take it to WS:S. --John Vandenberg ^(chat) 10:35, 14 November 2008 (UTC)

I just checked and there are at this moment 458 entries in Category:Incomplete texts without a source, and another 119 in Category:Incomplete texts. This leads me to believe that if the intent is to give new users something to work on, it is not a very successful strategy. As the list grows new users are more likely to be overwhelmed and disacouraged by this excess of choice. Making that choice even bigger won't help. DNB and 1911EB are represented by active projects for multi-volume pulications, and they are better accessed through their respective projects where the needs can be expressed in greater detail.

Some of the other incomplete texts with minimal content and no substantive additions for more than a year might just as well be deleted. Such deletion need not be permanent, and anyone wanting to put real work into the pages would not be prevented from restarting them.

We also need to make better use of portals and projects, and find ways to channel the salvageable material through these. A new editor looking for something to do is more likely to be responsive if he can find tasks that are consistent with his own interests. This cannot be accomplished by going through a diverse list of 458 items. Eclecticology (talk) 20:08, 14 November 2008 (UTC)

The ability to see that there are ~580 incomplete works is one of the benefits of this tag. The category isnt likely to help new users; we could make those categories hidden if that would help. New users are more likely to see the tag on a page, read it, and think "I can help". Sadly we dont know how effective these tags are - both of us are making assumptions on their utility.

Would it help if we made the tag more useful? We could add a "wikiproject" parameter, which if provided would have a different approach, encouraging the reader to visit the wikiproject, or something like that. Or we could add a "hide=yes" param, so it doesnt display, but does put the page in the category. It would be nice if we can find a way that we are both happy with the end result.

John Vandenberg ^(chat) 14:10, 15 November 2008 (UTC)

True enough that we are both making assumptions. Is there any way to track the size of a category page over time? If all it gets is additions, with nothing ever taken out as done, it is not very productive. I'm perhaps more pessimistic about the new user than you. I see him as a person who is looking to read whatever material interests him, and who is most likely to go away disappointed when he realizes that the chosen work is incomplete. A common complaint from Wikipedians is that many users never even notice "Edit this page".

I think your proposal is constructive. Rather than a "wikiproject" parameter, why not a whole new "wikiproject" tag instead? I don't think that a "hide" parameter will accomplish anything for either of us. It doesn't help you if you believe that it invites contribution, and it doesn't help me if I believe that that doesn't work.

I also think that completion should be de-linked from sourcing issues. This doesn't make sourcing any less important; it just recognizes it as a different issue. If we look at a clearly PD work that is well over half complete already, but which is from an uncertain source, completing that work, even from an unverified source will be more useful to the public than a part work. We still have other means for marking an improperly sourced work.

As I said before, we should also feel free to delete, without prejudice, anything that is not progressing to completion once it has haqd sufficient opportunity to do so. Take The Price of Love as an example: all it has is a header and an "incomplete" tag. We would be better without it until someone is ready to put in the work. Democracy in America/Volume 2 has the tag but no meaningful content at all; Volume 1 doesn't have the tag, but the only blue link there is to the introduction. This was an historically important work which we should host, but what does it say about us when a person wanting to read our contents gets only the introduction and a lot of red links.

At the other end of the scale we have Uncle Bernac. This Arthur Conan Doyle work should never have been tagged, because it is not incomplete. The only thing wrong with it is a misspelled link to chapter XV. This one is a very easy fix, but it does make me wonder how many others there are like it. It ends up as a maintenance backlog issue, but as long as the number of people actually performing maintenance is small we owe it to ourselves to keep things as simple as possible. Eclecticology (talk) 23:32, 16 November 2008 (UTC)

I just looked at All of Grace. It still has the "incomplete" tag, but at first appearance it seems that the original contributor has, since the tag was applied, gone ahead to complete the text without removing the tag. No source information is provided. I'm not familiar with the work or the subject area, so I can only guess that it's complete. This is only one more problem associated with the tag. Eclecticology (talk) 01:22, 17 November 2008 (UTC)

Re: WikiMedia Canada

The steering committee fell apart after a couple of us went away for the summer, but I'd still like to see WMC get off the ground, and I'm sure other committee members would be too. While the committee was active, we got pretty close to a workable set of bylaws, as well as discussed some potential policy items, like how meetings would be run, whether to charge for membership, and how regional meet ups would work within a national organization. We could try to set up an IRC or voice chat and invite a bunch of people to see where WMC is at, or we could just try to get people talking on a talk page in Meta. --Arctic.gnome (talk) 05:03, 23 November 2008 (UTC)

I absolutely agree with you on the regional diversity thing. Having WMC be an all-Toronto club would be a sure-fire way to break it up into regional groups. At least with you in Richmond and me in St. John's we currently have the country well covered :). Maybe a rule saying that you can't have 50% of the executive from the same province would work. We might also want to legislate at least one francophone on the executive. As for getting everything else started, I guess the steps to take are:

1. finalize the by-laws on meta,
2. decide on how to choose the first executive (who organizes the vote and whether one needs an official membership for the first vote),
3. announce the final draft to the various WikiProject Canadas to look over,
4. propose it to WMF for aproval, and finally
5. go through with our plan to choose the first executive.

Does that sound about right? --Arctic.gnome (talk) 17:39, 26 November 2008 (UTC)

I've added regional and linguistic guarantees to the bylaws. I think that the best way to decide a point where everyone is happy with them is to just choose a completion date, tell past contributors about it, and thus force ourselves to reach a consensus by then. As far as I understand it, we have to get our bylaws approved by WMF and become an official chapter before we legally incorporate in Canada (as per here, for example). Among other things, this ensures that we aren't breaking copyright by using their name and logo when we incorporate. I think we should pick a finalization date, and on that day we submit our bylaws to WMF along with the names of the people who will thereafter work on incorporation. --Arctic.gnome (talk) 03:14, 29 November 2008 (UTC)

I'll fix up the parts about projects and language during my next read-through. Feburary should be plenty of time, so let's take the middle ground and submit the bylaws on w:National Flag of Canada Day. I agree that we can take out references to the Steering Committee, but we should still include some mention of who will incorporate the organization and act an the interim board of directors until we can organize an election. --Arctic.gnome (talk) 02:33, 3 December 2008 (UTC)

Sorry for the late reply. Those changes look good, and as for the sub-chapters, I don't think anyone ever wanted to force a language on them. I don't think that we need a formal division of powers between the levels, except where it would be legally necessary to do so. The way I see it, WMC would organize initiatives that it will work on, and if any provincial wing has something they want to do on their own, they are free to do so. Fundraising might be a bit tricky: do provincial wings have to go through the WMC to issue tax recites, and will both levels have to do their own fundraising if each level refuses to fund the other's projects? Hopefully we'll be able to deal with those issues civilly given that we're all working toward the same goals. --Arctic.gnome (talk) 15:44, 14 December 2008 (UTC)

Is there any part of the bylaws that you think still need major work before being submitted? I haven't read them in full for a while, so I'm going to run through it again in the next couple days. Also, you said we need three people to attach their names to it, do you know of someone willing to be the third? Hopefully we should be able to at least get the Chapters Committee's approval within the next few weeks. --Arctic.gnome (talk) 20:04, 13 January 2009 (UTC)

I think we should all have a meeting among interested wikimedians to see if there is enough drive to get Wikimedia Canada up and running. I've therefore been bold and tentatively scheduled a meeting, with the date and forum type still open to change. Check out meta:Wikimedia_Canada/Meetings/2009-02-04 and it's talk page to discuss how we should organize a chat and what date is best. --Arctic.gnome (talk) 20:53, 27 January 2009 (UTC)

Shift

We often host excerpts of works where they have been republished across other works, and quoted in other works as stand-alone pieces, etc. ZIn this instance, the "poem" is found in The Way of a Virgin, as well as 1001 Nights, etc. Sherurcij ^{Collaboration of the Week: Author:Nostradamus‎.} 01:39, 13 December 2008 (UTC)

The Quatrain is a standalone poem that Burton "quotes", whether truly an existing poem or his own imagination I cannot say. But it is not part of any longer work. The context in AK is;

Then she pulled up the shift above her breasts, and when I saw her in this pose, I could not withhold myself from thrusting it into her, after I had sucked her lips, whilst she whimpered and shammed shame and wept when no tears came, and then said she, "O my beloved, do it, and do thy best!" Indeed the case reminded me of his saying, who said...

"When I drew up her shift from the roof of her coynte, * I found it as strait* as my mind and my money: So I drove it half-way, and she sighed a loud sigh * Quoth I, 'Why this sigh?': 'For the rest of it, honey!'"

And she repeated, "O my beloved, let the finish be made for I am thine handmaid. My life on thee, up with it! give it me, all of it! that I may take it in my hand and thrust it into my very vitals!" And she ceased not to excite me with sobs and sighs and amorous cries in the intervals of kissing and clasping until amid our murmurs of pleasure we attained the supreme delight and the term we had in sight. We slept together till the morning, when I would have gone out; but lo! she came up to me, laughing, and said, "So! So! thinkest thou that going into the Hammam is the same as going out? [FN#534] Dost thou deem me to be the like of the daughter of Dalilah the Wily One? Beware of such a thought, for thou art my husband by contract and according to law. If thou be drunken return to thy right mind, and know that the house wherein thou art openeth but one day in every year

Sherurcij ^{Collaboration of the Week: Author:Nostradamus‎.} 04:20, 14 December 2008 (UTC)

Sic

Do not remove this template from works without consensus as you did here, it indicates to potential editors that the misspelling is in the original. Sherurcij ^{Collaboration of the Week: Author:Nostradamus‎.} 23:39, 25 December 2008 (UTC)

WikiMoney

Hey, following your (and everybody's) contributions to the discussion on the Scriptorium about buying books online specifically for Wikisource, I've created Wikisource:Purchases and request you all check it out; add books you see for sale anywhere online (not just eBay) that you'd like to see some collaborative interest on, and sign up to help on existing listings. Sherurcij ^{Collaboration of the Week: Author:Bahá'u'lláh.} 15:05, 29 January 2009 (UTC)

Me again?!?

Nobody uses talk pages on this damned project it seems...anyways, I did some work template-wise and cleaning up The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night today, saw you were the other major contributor, hoped we might make a collaboration of it, bring one or two others on-board and gangbang it until we've got it all up and beautiful. Sherurcij ^{Collaboration of the Week: Author:Romain Rolland.} 05:18, 28 February 2009 (UTC)

How committed are you to using DJVU files for the project? I'm never a huge fan of them, and I'd be as happy to just set up using Gutenberg's texts for the main ten (They don't have the supplementals, as I recall) and getting the headers/subpages/tablesOfContents and everything set up first...and then possibly replacing them with DJVU scans in the far future. But realistically, I don't see anybody ever proofreading 5,000 pages for this. Sherurcij ^{Collaboration of the Week: Author:Romain Rolland.} 05:07, 1 March 2009 (UTC)

Thank you

Thanks for your help on author pages. Cirt (talk) 06:12, 9 March 2009 (UTC)

Foundation-l

That is the wrong forum, but what exactly are the issues that you want to work on through mediation? I am sorry that I didn't understand that you were asking for this during the conformation.--BirgitteSB 16:59, 11 March 2009 (UTC)

The issues with Thomas V are ancient and it is unfortunate that he brought them up. I don't think you can put Pathoschild's concerns in the same category. Pathoschild does hold people to a higher standard than others, but he does so in a regular fashion. Sherurcij passed adminship despite his opposition. And maybe you should reconsider Sherurcij's point as being that you did not have enough time to be exposed the community standards of behavior before becoming an admin. Because they aren't written down anywhere and you still seem to have trouble understanding that they are not mere accidents of inertia but actual standards that we have chosen to encourage here. Frankly I didn't expect to see you desysoped when this began, but your responses are really what brought the majority against you. You would have been better off to acknowledge the issues, outside of Thomas V's, and say that you did not realize these issues were so important here and that you will act differently in the future. I am not sure what could be mediated that you mentioned on my talkpage. Normally on Wikipedia only article content is accepted for mediation, so I thought at first you might be talking about one of the specific issues someone disagreed with you about that was brought up. Or maybe your general problems with one person. But you seem to be want the confirmation result appealed. The only appeal can be a new RFA, which I think you could pass after some time and demonstration that you understand the standards of behavior here. I realize this is not what you want to hear, but I don't see any possibility for becoming an admin without demonstrating the support of the community.--BirgitteSB 21:01, 14 March 2009 (UTC)

Liber Pennae Praenumbra

See User_talk:Sherurcij#Liber_Pennae_Praenumbra. I'm guessing from the deletion debate that the colophon was not included with the document. The full document explicitly releases itself into the public domain, although it does so in (probably poor) Latin. Since you seemed to be in favor of keeping the document if its copyright status were known, I thought you might be interested in this...

More on margins

How does A Dialect of Donegal/The Vowel System look now on your monitor? It should be 2/3 of text width at any size. Angr 18:35, 31 March 2009 (UTC)

Britannica Vol. 19

Would it be possible to list your EB1911 work on the Volume 19 page? You've done a lot of work for this volume, and it would save duplicated effort if they were listed there for everyone to see. Many look ready to go. Even links to the ones that are pasted together with similar entries for other works would probably be useful for editors who want to copy out the EB1911 component and make it available. Bob Burkhardt (talk) 19:13, 17 April 2009 (UTC)

OK, I listed them. I understand the need for subject pages, but I think the solution is pages with links to individual articles as is done in the "Works about ..." sections on author pages. Globbing articles and headers for multiple projects on a single page doesn't look like the solution to me. And I think you should create project pages for things like Encyclopaedia Americana if you are going to do articles out of it. Just a list of orphans would be good to start with. Nothing complicated. Thanks for your contributions. Bob Burkhardt (talk) 01:35, 28 April 2009 (UTC)

Billinghurst - the offended

I am a little disappointed that my opinion counts for nought versus your opinion, and subsequent action. I would think that implementing an idea would take more than your vote in favour. Regards. -- billinghurst (talk) 12:02, 23 April 2009 (UTC)

I have deleted Publisher:Marcus Witmark & Sons as a dup; please dont create pages in faux namespaces; namespaces must be registered in the wiki configuration before they are used.

I recall this being discussed before, and my recollection is that the community was opposed to it (sadly). The development of Portal:Marcus Witmark & Sons should stay on the one page until we have a "Publisher" namespace approved by the community and implemented by the devs. John Vandenberg ^(chat) 23:04, 23 April 2009 (UTC)

Request for help

You mentioned on wikien-l that you had a version of the DNB. If that allowed you to fill the lacunae caused by the thumb in the lower left at Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 53.djvu/140, I'd really be very grateful. I don't feel like creating the article with the places I have left as "gap here" intruding. Charles Matthews (talk) 13:45, 24 April 2009 (UTC)

Author:Shirley Jackson

Since the deletion discussion is closed, I've copied your discussion of deleting the author page to Author talk:Shirley Jackson and responded.--Prosfilaes (talk) 19:52, 18 September 2009 (UTC)

A Greek English Lexicon of the New Testament

Hi Eclecticology, I was told that you might be able to help with the text A Greek English Lexicon of the New Testament. From what I understand you know how to work with Greek text. Also, if you could drop a note by the Greek Wikisource, I would really appreciate it. --Mattwj2002 (talk) 07:25, 11 October 2009 (UTC)

RFC: Author field DNB

Gday Ec. Care to have a comment about Wikisource_talk:WikiProject_DNB#Author field . Regards billinghurst (talk) 19:02, 13 October 2009 (UTC)

Deletion discussion

Please see Wikisource:Proposed_deletions#Category:Eccentric_denominations_and_Category:Smaller_religious_movements. Cirt (talk) 21:53, 5 November 2009 (UTC)

As a general note, it's bad form to modify somebody else's text with your own - especially without identifying it with a little (added by Eclect) or something. I assume it's a good faith mistake, since deletion discussions are just collaborative brainstorming - but just something to keep in mind to keep the peace. :) Sherurcij ^{Collaboration of the Week: Author:Khwaja Kamal-ud-Din.} 02:57, 9 November 2009 (UTC)