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Again, welcome! — billinghurst sDrewth 05:03, 10 February 2017 (UTC)Reply

Proofreading rules re archaic characters v. word search usefulness

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What is the theory behind a proofreading protocol that results in text not being wordsearchable? To me, that's like leaving in OCR errors. A human can figure out what is meant, but wordsearch can't. I bet this has been discussed but I couldn't find it after an admittedly short search. Thanks for any guidance.

Why I'm asking: Today I thought I'd try helping with the proofreading of the month. It's Wollstone's Vindication. I've proofread for Project Gutenberg and it looks like the Wiki rules are very similar, except, if memory serves, about handling archaic printer's characters. Wiki proofreaders apparently are supposed to leave unchanged things like (ſ), the 's' that looks like an 'f.' That prevents wordsearch from finding archaically spelled words. For example, on the validated Table of Contents page - https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Page:Vindication_Women%27s_Rights_(Wollstonecraft).djvu/21 - I wordsearched 'subject.' All I get is 1 hit, the Wikisource 'Subject index' link in the left column, because the proofread-version of the book has "ſubject." Maybe my beef should be with the browsers I tried: Firefox and Edge. Chrome might be better but based on past experience with GoogleBooks I'd guess that it is not.

Did you try searching the Introduction itself instead of Page 21 in the Page namespace? We transclude all the pages of a work into a finished document, and the template used to preserve the original text is dynamic, displaying the original long-s in the Page namespace, but converting it to modern script in the Main namespace. --EncycloPetey (talk) 18:45, 7 March 2018 (UTC)Reply
Thank you. Now I understand that the proofread version is not the final and have learned a new word, "transclude." I checked out https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/A_Vindication_of_the_Rights_of_Woman/Introduction and saw that the archaic typography is converted. Excellent! (But next question: Do I edit this discussion to add my thanks here or post it on your Talk page? I've done both.) Reedulot (talk) 19:01, 7 March 2018 (UTC)Reply