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PSM work

Hi. Thanks for your proofreading work on Popular Science Monthly. If you are interested in working on this project and you have any question, feel free to contact me or User:Ineuw. We will be glad to help you. I do not know how familiar you might be with WS but there are a lot of tip and tricks that speed up proofreading a lot.

Just two few minor comments to your proofreading: 1. pls move the header from body of the page to the header section, otherwise it will be transcluded in the article as part of text (use {{rh}}). 2. curly quotes: actually there is no real rule, but for consistency with the rest of the project, I would use straight quotes, which is what I have always seen/used.

Again, welcome and good job! BTW, consider to create an account, it is much nicer to talk to a nickname rather than with an IP address :-) --Mpaa (talk) 22:19, 4 February 2012 (UTC)

I couldn't figure out how to get access to the header, or I would have put the info in there. I know before I found a button that did this, but I couldn't find it this time. Perhaps it isn't available for IP edits? Straight quotes look so tacky. It is hard imagining a preference for them, except of course as far as ease of editing is concerned, and there it is understandable as a temporary expedient. Please use them if you like them, but let me use curly ones for the articles I proof. Bob

Have now figured out how to access the header. Glad there's no real rule on the quote marks. Consider using curly ones as the next step. Bob

Correcting of original errors in PSM

In the beginning, I was not against some of the corrections of errors made in the originals, but this raised the issue of how far are we going to make changes and stray from faulty originals to satisfy our sense of the aesthetic. This has been a major issue with my work when I first began to contribute to WS, until I accepted the view that we adhere to the original, if, for no other reason than changes to the original would have to be ruled (written down somewhere), and the last thing we need is more rules.

• For spelling errors I use {{SIC}} or {{sic}}.
• Missing pairs of quotations "" are left as they were in the original. My rationale is that 19th century writing was inundated with double quotes for emphasis, a topic on which I can write a multi-page commentary. In addition, one irritating style is the beginning of a series related of paragraphs with an opening double quote without a matching closure, until the last related paragraph.
• Moving text that surround images is purely an aesthetic issue AS WAS DONE HERE, and I would refrain, because then there are thousands of PSM images that would have to be moved to meet this new change, and then, who in the community would know about this?
• In the same vein, I regretted joining hyphenated words surrounding images, but since it's my habit to re-check my previous work, I reverse these alterations, and even find work arounds to changes I made to avoid causing technical errors, like links to incorrect or non existent page numbers in the PSM Indexes.

If you think that I am going overboard, please read on . . .

The single most difficult aspect of Wikisource is the dual nature of the work. If one aims for general readership, then the focus is directed towards the appearance in main namespace, a stance which generates numerous discussions on changes made to the underlying original. I increasingly prefer to avoid this and stick to the "golden rule" of keeping to the originals as faithfully as I can and this works well. — Ineuw talk 22:49, 13 September 2012 (UTC)

I think you have to realize a work is being adapted to an electronic medium. In the print medium, pictures can be embedded, and the paragraphs worked around them without awkwardness. But in the electronic medium, you have to allow for flexibility of reformatting. I think the problem with the illustration placements I found in "The Badger and the Fox" was that in some circumstances they looked sort of like the original, though even then the text was broken up in an odd way which one would not see in print. A little alteration of position gave a result where the paragraphs could be clearly indicated and there were no odd breaks in the text, even with different sizings. A lot of this is perhaps due to the fact that there is currently no graceful way to insert illustrations in the middle of a paragraph in Wikisource, or if there is "The Badger and the Fox" was certainly not using it. Keeping to the original faithfully I think means no weird breaks in the text, meaning graceful text wrapping. I imagine this is mostly a technical issue, and defining a float in the right way would allow a mid-paragraph insertion without text-wrapping issues, but I didn't have the solution of the top of my head. In the interim, I think my solutions were reasonable, and better than what I found. I didn't know about {{sic}} and {{SIC}} and I will consider them. I don't always correct mistakes in the original, but I think it's best to if in the original a proofreader back then would have flagged it. Missing quote marks make the work more difficult that necessary to comprehend. I always do any correction in a way that makes the correction as obvious as possible with HTML "ins" and/or "del" markup, and the original format is easily reconstructed for any museum maven.

I don't think everyone needs to follow the exact same editing standards. Certainly if I see a better way of doing it I am going to use that. It is unreasonable to expect any editor dropping in to follow a detailed list of items for consistency. Getting the OCR errors corrected, the fonting right, and the paragraphs right is job one. I have gone to the detail of indicating hyphenations between pages and columns, but I draw the line at pictures. If you want to great, go ahead. And I could certainly understand anyone who didn't want to deal with hyphenation issues at all. - Bob (71.174.236.5 17:25, 22 September 2012 (UTC))