TheSkullOfRFBurton
linksand stuff
editWelcome to Wikisource
Hello, TheSkullOfRFBurton, 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
Add the code {{active projects}}, {{PotM}} or {{Collaboration/MC}} to your page for current Wikisource projects.
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Have questions? Then please ask them at either
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! Beeswaxcandle (talk) 02:57, 22 March 2011 (UTC)
djvu file now available
editHi, I've just created Index:The Romance of Isabel, Lady Burton.djvu for you to start working on. Enjoy! Beeswaxcandle (talk) 02:57, 22 March 2011 (UTC)
Welcome
editWelcome to Wikisource. I saw your work on your first book, and you seem to have the hang of most of the process! Here's a list of stuff you may find helpful (easier to be told it than pick it up over a few weeks):
- {{block center}} aligns a block in the centre of the page, but stuff inside is still left-aligned. Good for poems.
- {{x-larger}}, {{larger}}, {{smaller}} and friends for text sizing. It's best not to use HTML like <big>. This goes for things like <p> as well, though <br /> is fine for forcing a line break is you really have to (you can use a blank line in the wiki-text to make a <p> space)
- {{center}} is a useful template for centering text.
- {{runningheader}} gives you a running header at the top of the page. You need to put this in the header field of the Page: page, which can be opened by clicking [+], and there is a preference option to turn it on permanently.
- The page names are generally ordered like this: Title/Chapter 1, Title/Book 1/Chapter 1, Title/Part 1/Book1/Chapter 1. You can use any division name you please (book, chapter, part, act, volume, whatever), but try to stick to Arabic numbering (1, 2, 3...). If the subpage is named, you can also use the name: Title/Preface. This isn't a requirement, but Roman numbering is a royal pain to interpret using a program.
- Quick template reference at Help:Templates, quick reference to side-by-side proofreading at H:SIDE (though it looks like you've got the hang of that already)
If you ever have any questions, please ask me here, go to the Freenode IRC channel #wikisource, ask in the Scriptorium or on the relevant page (though it may not get read as quickly there). If you run into problems with our documentation, which is lacking, please correct it, or complain at me, and I'll try to fix it. Cheers, and good luck with your first work. Inductiveload—talk/contribs 22:17, 24 March 2011 (UTC)
Proofread
editPlease don't mark pages as "proofread" until they are proofread. CYGNIS INSIGNIS 23:11, 28 March 2011 (UTC)
- I am not marking any pages proofread unless/until I proofread them. That does not mean they are perfect, if I miss something, feel free to come along behind me and validate the page as having been proofread by two users. But I assure you the page is proofread once before I mark it so. TheSkullOfRFBurton (talk) 23:15, 28 March 2011 (UTC)
- User:TheSkullOfRFBurton/Arabia, Egypt, India: A Narrative of Travel has been moved. Perhaps burtonia.org or some other site has an acceptable version, you could copy that here fwiw. CYGNIS INSIGNIS 22:18, 2 April 2011 (UTC)
Why is quantity important and why should quality take a back seat?
editI am not certain why you believe that the scanned image and proofread system and the quality that it brings should take a back seat, and why would we want to import poor quality texts that sit there unedited? Further, as they sit in that manner, they are next to useless to get someone to come along and validate the text. The community started there, and has made the decision to move away from that place and into system that proofreads & validates scans. I am not particularly content with your disregard for that development or that quality of product. Quantity is not a reason to disregard. Also, it would be useful to look to utilise some of our more recent developments around nomenclature have a glance at the discussion at Wikisource talk:Naming conventions. Thanks. Billinghurst (talk) 05:34, 2 April 2011 (UTC)
- I am not certain why you believe that your way represents "the" way, and my way is an aberration. I assume people come here to read the works of Marx, or Goethe, or Burton. And it is best if they can find those works collected here - even if they are *gasp* with pagenumbers strewn about, missing a semi-colon present in the original or OCRed...I would rather find ten letters written by Darwin to his mistress that are improperly formatted, than none. And the entire point of a Wiki is that, over time, things improve. Let's take a work like A glossary of words used in the neighbourhood of Sheffield; somebody added it five years ago and never quite finished it, but he made an excellent start, and sooner or later somebody will come along and decide it's worth ten minutes to complete the work. But if JeremyA had never started it, nobody would ever finish it - and that work would be one step closer to being lost, and never being readily available. Or we can take Catholic Encyclopedia (1913)/Tepic, it is not "backed up" by a DJVU, so I could passive-aggressively slap a "unknown source" tag on it just like people seem to enjoy slapping a "unknown source" code on something titled "June 1896 letter to the London Times"...the source should be bloody obvious from the title, but they see a chance to nitpick, so they take it. And it's a pity that The Thoughts of the Emperor Marcus Aurelius Antoninus was added in a copy/paste format four years ago, but I notice a few months later somebody added a header to it, and after that, somebody fixed the capitalisation, after that somebody else still added the translator's name, last year somebody even started to clean up the formatting. And thankfully, anybody who searchs "The Thoughts of the Emperor Marcus Aurelius Antoninus" will find a copy of it, hosted here on Wikisource...all because many years ago, we welcomed drive-by copy/pastes as "better than nothing", and over time, they have slowly been improved - and maybe 2011 is the year that work will be split into separate chapters to ease page-loading. TheSkullOfRFBurton (talk) 21:04, 2 April 2011 (UTC)
- My way? I think that doesn't reflect the reality of the site, nor the history of the development of the site. We have progressed in our methodology and tools. It is easy to point to works that existed prior to our proofread system, and I could point to many works that existed afterwards that would refute those examples. Our Page namespace exists as a work space exactly for the reason that you identify where works can be cleaned up and progressed. I can also demonstrate to the works in the Page namespace have more progress and tidying than any work in the main namespace, and can end being demonstrably better quality works, they are supported by the evidence. I don't have a requirement for all scans, though for larger works there should be a reason why the demonstrated system shouldn't be used.With regard to {{no source}} it is about putting the exact source data for the work, date, page, ... so somebody who may have access can return to the work and validate the work. Billinghurst (talk) 03:40, 3 April 2011 (UTC)