Haendelfan

Welcome to Wikisource

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

• Help pages, especially for proofreading
• Help:Beginner's guide to Wikisource
• Style guide
• Inclusion policy
• Wikisource:For Wikipedians

You may be interested in participating in

• Proofread of the Month
• Monthly Challenge
• Requested texts

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

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

Have questions? Then please ask them at either

• Wikisource:Scriptorium; or
• Wikisource:Scriptorium/Help

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

Again, welcome! — billinghurst sDrewth 00:09, 9 November 2015 (UTC)

Suggestion regarding Singers in baroque opera

You may wish to consult more widely on this before acting further. Might incorporating the above article (as an entirely new section) within Portal:Operas be a worthwhile idea? AuFCL (talk) 22:20, 11 November 2015 (UTC)

Thank you for making me aware of this Portal. I was not aware, the music lovers in the English WikiSource are not more active. Of course I can also include it there!--Haendelfan (talk) 22:29, 11 November 2015 (UTC)

Change incorporated by opening a new sub-section "By singers" and inserting "F" as the first letter. I will not open the page on Senesino for the time being. Thanks again for your help and your constructive feedback.--Haendelfan (talk) 22:33, 11 November 2015 (UTC)

I just had a look and what you have done was exactly as I had in mind (I might have chosen "By performers" but please do not change on my account.) Thank you for letting me know. AuFCL (talk) 23:37, 11 November 2015 (UTC)

Hello again; as I hinted at earlier, I also found another essay on Senesino which I have no contributed also. Yet obviously something went wrong with the formatting. Is it possible that the wiki does not allow tables in footnotes? There is a longer footnote in the text about the female singer Margherita Durastanti which contains to songs that Alexander Pope wrote for her as a farewell. These are printed next to each other in the original. In order to maintain that, I have tried to put that in a table, but obviously that is difficult or not allowed for footnotes. I have also extracted that footnote to open up a new page Farewell songs Durastanti performed on stage, where the text with the same formatting shows well without any problem. The only problem in fact remaining in the latter is that the first line in each column is separated from the rest which is not the case in the original. Can you help me with that also?--Haendelfan (talk) 14:08, 12 November 2015 (UTC)

Second problem is with the header in the Senesino page. The text of the previous text is shown, but you cannot click on it. What did I do wrong?--Haendelfan (talk) 14:08, 12 November 2015 (UTC)

O.K. Issues (as I see them) in turn:

1. "Tables in footnotes". This is not the problem.. but it is the victim of the problem! The real issue is that mediawiki (the software behind wikisource) has a long-standing limitation with certain tags due to the way the software behaves. Regrettably <ref> is one of those cases; with the overall effect this structure ...<ref>...<ref>...</ref>....</ref>... is strictly verboten. The way the parser currently operates is that it tries to match the first <ref> with the first </ref> and then gets confused about the "left over" </ref>!

   Fortunately there is a solution—but one which is famously ugly—and that is to replace the above structure with this: ...{{#tag:ref|...<ref>...</ref>....}}.... The sequence {{#tag:XXXX|YYYY}} is an old-fashioned syntax and in the general case is internally equivalent to writing <XXXX>YYYY</XXXX> (this is not quite true but a good enough lie to live with!)

   Anyway once the substitution is made a second problem appears (this is what I meant about the table becoming a victim) and that problem is that the parser now gets confused about the |s in the table syntax which it now thinks are part of the newly introduced {{#tag:ref|...}}. The answer to this part of the problem is to substitute all of the table-specific occurrences of | with {{!}}. This "hides" them from #tag:ref just long enough before turning back into |s to be processed by the table construction phase.

   Now at last a table (containing a footnote) appears within a footnote. That's the first issue dealt with.

2. The link back from Senesino's article to Farinelli's article: this was easy. Just add surrounding [[...]]s.
3. (Vertical) spacing in poetry: First there was a bit of a diversion. You used </br> at the start of every line you wished to force a new line to appear in. I was not even aware that worked before, and have always used <br/> in this situation. So if it annoys you please change this part back. It won't make much difference.

   Now the real problem is that mediawiki wants to insert <p> tags around the stanzas of the poem but avoids doing that immediately after the table cell start. In fact it defers until the start of the second line (just after the first physical new-line.) The result is the rather ugly spacing you deserved. The answer is (1) to add an empty new-line directly after the cell-marking "|" (allows mediawiki to "get into synchronisation" with what you are about to do.) Then (2) add your own <p> tags around the actual poem stanzas to "group" them together. Step (3) is also optional: I added {{gap}} to lines which looked like they were intended to be indented; and {{dhr}} to emphasise the inter-stanza vertical spacing. Please amend as you prefer.

I think that is everything so far? AuFCL (talk) 21:52, 12 November 2015 (UTC)

My dear friend. You are a marvel. Thank you so much for bringing my text in order - and the more for explaining the background of the problem to me here in so great detail. I really appreciate this. By coincidence I now found that both texts, on Senesino and Farinelli - and including the footnote on Durastanti -, were originally published in Chapter 189 (CLXXXIX) or 191 (CXCI) of John Hawkins: A general history of the science and practice of music. Novello, Ever & Co., London 1875. Vol 2, pp. 872 (Hawkins's book was originally published in 1776). I have added an appropriate source comment in all three texts. --Haendelfan (talk) 03:11, 13 November 2015 (UTC)

Senesino picture: rechecking the amended portal page for Senesino, I doubt whether the painting uploaded and presumably showing Senesino really shows him, for me this seems to be George Frideric Handel most probably. I wanted to replace the current picture by another one, probably my newly found one or any other from the category. However, I could not find the picture file link when I chose the edit function. Sorry to trouble you again. Tell me if I am going on your nerves.--Haendelfan (talk) 04:23, 13 November 2015 (UTC)

You are, of course, quite correct. Well spotted! The previous image c:file:Fbernardi.jpg even lists as its source www.haendel.it which is a bit of a warning in of itself? Unfortunately up until quite recently the {{author}} template used to have a parameter |image= but in a recent fit of standardisation (can you tell that I am not entirely enthusiastic?) it has been removed and the linkage is via wikidata. I performed this edit over there to correct the image link. There is probably a better way to do this but for now I hope this will serve your purposes. (I noticed Beleg_Tâl was the last editor of this record at wikidata so perhaps would also be so kind as to review and comment?)

Even if you were getting on my nerves (and you are not!) the quickest way to dispose of the problem would be to educate yourself as fully as possible so that you did not need to ask so many questions… so where is the down-side? AuFCL (talk) 05:06, 13 November 2015 (UTC)

@AuFCL: I linked the Wikisource page to Wikidata, but didn't touch anything else. I am not hugely familiar with the way Wikidata does things. —Beleg Tâl (talk) 14:04, 13 November 2015 (UTC)

Hello and thank you for settling the problem with the picture. I would never have found it! So a great thank you. As for your assumption: indeed haendel.it has long been one of the few pages on the internet that offered a great deal of information on almost all of the well-known, not only the most well-known castrato singers and the file in question has obviously been misplaced by them on the Senesino page OR just been thought as an illustration to his on-going quarrels with Handel. The problem on the Italian page is that they do never give a legend to pictures nor sources to what they write... So as I said: thank you for rectifying this problem! --Haendelfan (talk) 13:17, 14 November 2015 (UTC)

Your message on my TalkPage

Hi, thanks for the message. At present I'm taken up with several RL projects, so don't have as much time as I would like to commit to enWS. I see that some of the others have been assisting you with your questions, so I won't go into detail on those. I have proofread the two DMM articles that you added, so those are now in conformity with the way the rest of the articles have been done. I noticed that on the Senesino article you had added several annotations. We have a policy here to simply present the text as it was published. There is WikiProject for DMM, which you are welcome to join Wikisource:WikiProject DMM to assist with proofreading and validating the articles. Beeswaxcandle (talk) 07:27, 13 November 2015 (UTC)

Hello and thank you for proofreading my entries to DMM and rectifying the technical issues in it. Too bad you do not provide links to make it reader for non-specialist readers who the writer is refering to or what image, but of course I will stick to these rules for future entries! Best of luck with your other projects.--Haendelfan (talk) 13:20, 14 November 2015 (UTC)

The Illustrated London News

Wikisource isn't a link farm. Our Mainspace page listings are intended to list items hosted on Wikisource. Any links offsite should be temporary, either pointing to a scan that can be uploaded to Commons from which we can add the work locally to Wikisource, or else a place where the text can be imported. Once the work is added locally, then the external link would be removed. --EncycloPetey (talk) 00:50, 13 April 2019 (UTC)

Hi, and thanks for the feedback. I did not know that. We have such links combining digitized versions of magazines and journals not available in full run at one place and I found that a good idea to collect such links at one place. However link repositories for non-German-speaking journals and magazines are not well-liked there either. So what shall we do? Shall I remove those links here also? Or may one open a discussion whether such an overview of links for oine particular journal like Über Land und Meer, which is then comprised into a topic-based collection of either links to all volumes or to separate sites like this example for medical journals would be something appreciated by the community? (PS: I am working on how to export the template for links to Hathitrust, which we have in the German wikisource, to the English one. Then the links now appearing in red should work also.) --Haendelfan (talk) 13:50, 13 April 2019 (UTC)

You could create a list in your own User space, or you could place the list on the work's Talk page. --EncycloPetey (talk) 14:45, 13 April 2019 (UTC)

OK, fine.