Wugo

Hello, Wugo, welcome to Wikisource! Thanks for your interest in the project; we hope you'll enjoy the community and your work here.

Please take a glance at our help pages (especially Adding texts and Wikisource's style guide). Most questions and discussions about the community are in the Scriptorium.

The Community Portal lists tasks you can help with if you wish. If you have any questions, feel free to contact me on my talk page. John Vandenberg ^(chat) 22:27, 3 February 2008 (UTC)

Author:George Bernard Shaw

Go for it. Be bold! Our author pages are intended to be a complete catalogue of all works, and any works about the author.

Let me know if you need a hand. John Vandenberg ^(chat) 23:56, 3 February 2008 (UTC)

I have updated the page. We use <ref> to record online sources, and we keep red links for any work that is free of copyright. To "fix" the red links, you can create new pages using the texts from online-literature.com. With a bit of effort, our collection of his works can be extensive. Ideally, we dont want people to be going to online-literature.com to read the works of Shaw; we want our readers to be able to enjoy reading them here on Wikisource, so that they can comment on the works on the talk page, and annotate the text to help other readers. John Vandenberg ^(chat) 02:38, 4 February 2008 (UTC)

Yes, please create "Dark Lady of the Sonnets". I will review it and offer advice on how it might be improved. John Vandenberg ^(chat) 05:09, 4 February 2008 (UTC)

Hi, the page Dark Lady of the Sonnets still needs to be created with the contents of this. You may format it however you want. John Vandenberg ^(chat) 22:33, 4 February 2008 (UTC)

There are no tools to make it easier, but with a bit of practise your progress will speed up. We are working on creating some tools, but they are not ready yet.

Dark Lady of the Sonnets looks good. I have added a license to the bottom, which helps readers know the copyright status of the work. John Vandenberg ^(chat) 23:41, 5 February 2008 (UTC)

I have moved the preface to Dark Lady of the Sonnets/Preface as it is a part of that work. As such, it does not need it's own copyright tag.

As an example, if there was a later 1900 edition which had an introduction, we would place it on a page named "Dark Lady of the Sonnets/Introduction (1900)". If it doesnt have the same copyright status as the main work, we would then add a copyright tag to inform the reader of the difference.

At 68 kilobytes in size, the preface does not need to be split. We only split works when there is a logical break that can be used to split the work. John Vandenberg ^(chat) 02:01, 7 February 2008 (UTC)

Your discussion with Quadell is here: User talk:Quadell#Casting Shaw before Perl. John Vandenberg ^(chat) 02:03, 7 February 2008 (UTC)

I left you a message on my talk page. —Quadell (talk / swapmeet) 21:06, 7 February 2008 (UTC)

Progress on Shaw

Okay, I have now imported The Philanderer, You Never Can Tell, Androcles and the Lion, Preface to Androcles and the Lion, The Devil's Disciple, Mrs. Warren's Profession, The Man of Destiny, Captain Brassbound's Conversion, Misalliance, and Caesar and Cleopatra. Whew! I'm not taking a break to do other things. Let me know when you're done proofreading these (if you're willing), and I'll import more then.

By the way, your proofreading work is really helpful. It's something a bot just can't do (obviously), and it raises Wikisource's accuracy and profile. All the best, —Quadell (talk / swapmeet) 13:55, 8 February 2008 (UTC)

I listed the preface as a separate work (since it's longer than the actual play). It's at Preface to Androcles and the Lion, linked to in the Notes. :-) —Quadell (talk / swapmeet) 19:48, 8 February 2008 (UTC)

Wow! That preface is very long; it is certainly large enough to be considered a separate work. Can we pin down when the preface was first published?? John Vandenberg ^(chat) 04:28, 9 February 2008 (UTC)

Yes, it was published in 1915, three years after the play. —Quadell (talk / swapmeet) 05:26, 9 February 2008 (UTC)

apostrophes

Just so you know, Shaw didn't like to use apostrophes in contractions, and hed usually leave them out (as in this sentence). Sometimes an editor would add them in to conform to standard usage, but other times the work would be published without them. I personally dont think we should add the apostrophes if they werent there originally -- but even he wasn't consistent in this. In some published versions of his plays, the preface would have apostrophes, but not the play itself.

He also usually wrote Mr and Mrs without periods, so Mrs. Warren's Profession was sometimes published as Mrs Warren's Profession, etc. He had lots of intentional eccentricities. (Androcles and the Lion was originally published in the Shavian Alphabet, but we can't really reproduce that, much as I'd like to.)

Mark Twain, on the other hand, used more apostrophes than we do, writing had'n't and ca'n't with an extra apostrophe where the words would connect. Editors sometimes "fixed" that as well. And of course Shakespeare's "ben" and "dream'd" are routinely changed to "been" and "dreamed" in modern editions. It eventually becomes a philosophic choice about what to keep and what to standardize. —Quadell (talk / swapmeet) 04:51, 20 February 2008 (UTC)

Shaw developed his system of punctuation over the years and never became consistent in it's usage. For apostrophes, I favor the use predominating in the actual writing I am proofing. Fortunately, it makes little difference if my guess is wrong or right, as far as understanding is concerned. What troubles me the most is his erratic use of colons; at times it is impossible to stay my hand! I also routinely replace his double hyphens (--} with an —; I feel sure he would approve of that. (The poor guy only had a typewriter, and those didn't recognize HTML!} Wugo 05:47, 20 February 2008 (UTC)

Why can't we reproduce Androcles in the Shavian alphabet? Page 4 of my edition says, "Any non-copyright work may be transliterated into the Shaw Alphabet without permission. In the case of a work still in copyright, however, permission must, of course, be obtained from the owner of the copyright." Androcles is out of copyright, so under its own terms the transliteration must also be. Marnanel (talk) 23:53, 12 May 2010 (UTC)