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Proposals

Language categories

Hi,

I would like to add categories regarding the origin of the works, especially when they are not from English speaking countries, i.e. Category:French literature, Category:Indian literature, etc. What do you think? Yann 18:03, 29 March 2006 (UTC)

I think that this is a great idea. We are rather lacking in categories. What do think about focusing on language rather than natonality (Category:French translation, Category:Hindi translation, etc.)?--BirgitteSB 18:11, 29 March 2006 (UTC)
These have been implemented as Category:Works by original language and Category:Works originally in French. // Pathoschild (admin / talk) 20:58, 2 April 2006 (UTC)

Proposed new copyright policy

Following multiple discussions on related subjects (see "Free? ... or not?", "CC-NC license?", "Noncommercial licenses prohibited", and "Fair use & Speeches"), I've comprehensively rewritten Wikisource's copyright policy. The new version is written to conform to current Foundation policies, address questions and concerns raised about copyright and licenses on Wikisource, implement past community decisions, and generally be more user-friendly and understandable. The current copyright policy is located at Wikisource:Copyright, and the proposed overhaul at Wikisource:Copyright policy. (I also propose that the latter name be used, in keeping with the de facto standard of Wikisource:Deletion policy, Wikisource:Blocking policy, and Wikisource:Protection policy.)

This isn't a vote (yet); discussion, suggestions, and edits are welcome. // Pathoschild (admin / talk) 20:08, 22 March 2006 (UTC)

Whoa, I didn't even see this in the Scriptorium (although, I've been gone all last week, so I would have definitely missed it). That being said, I can't think of anything to say that could make it better or flush it out. It's very comprehensive for what it needs to be doing.—Zhaladshar (Talk) 20:13, 26 March 2006 (UTC)

Poll

There being no discussion, I'll move it to the poll phase. I support, of course. // Pathoschild (admin / talk) 19:19, 26 March 2006 (UTC)

Long SS's

I see in the recently added Elegy by Donne the original version makes use of the long S,(an F without a crossbar). I did not know we could do this. I suggest we add these old letter forms to our character bar at the bottom. The usual ones are F, FF, and various ligatures such as linking c and t. Does anyone know where these appear Apwoolrich 22:41, 27 March 2006 (UTC)

You know, I've been looking for ever to see whether or not they had the long S as a character the computer could use. I see that they do (how infuriating that I couldn't ever find it). But I heartily agree that we should add all those ligatures to the character insert bar. It will make editing (especially for older works) much easier.—Zhaladshar (Talk) 22:51, 27 March 2006 (UTC)
I was able copy and paste ſ from the w:long s article. Many of the ligatures are availble here, but I couldn't find the ct ligature. If anyone can figure out how to get it let me know.--BirgitteSB 04:51, 28 March 2006 (UTC)

See proposed solution "MediaWiki:Copyrightwarning (special characters)", archived. // Pathoschild (admin / talk) 23:12, 4 April 2006 (UTC)

Logos under consideration
Spirit/Pathoschild Kcyclopedist/Newbie
File:Wikisource News.png  

The Wikisource News logo, above left, was recently removed from the Wikisource News page by Yann. He stated the following on IRC:

10:47 yann_: i think that this is not a wikisource logo
10:49 yann_: and i feel it has little relevance to wikisource in general, and not more to news
11:00 yann_: but if the community wants to use it.. well...

On the contrary, I think that the logo is quite relevant to both Wikisource and to news. Spirit, who created the image, said "fire is representative of our quest for knowledge; water, a well-spring, a source from which all else is drawn. I believe both are powerful symbols of the project."1 Another user, Mxn, pointed out that "the fire imagery in this version reminded me of the candlelight that a scribe would use when putting some of these important source texts to paper."1

I'd like to seek a consensus on whether we should use this image for Wikisource News. // Pathoschild (admin / talk) 09:17, 20 March 2006 (UTC)

I don't think the selection of a news logo needs to be as rigorous as the actual Wikisource project logo. If it is attractive, has some sort of symbolic meaning, and people like actually like it, then why not? Personally I think this one is absolutely fine. If it turns out that a number of other people agree with Yann, then selecting a different alternative shouldn't be that hard either. We now have lots of options at our disposal... Dovi 14:18, 20 March 2006 (UTC)
I'm not too sure about creating a new logo if it turns out that we have to have a vote on a new wikisource logo, because we could get 2 quite mismatched logos or have to choose yet another logo to keep them similar. On a more specific point I don't see the relevance of this logo. The use of fire & water seems particularly poorly judged - speak to any archivist or librarian & they'll tell you that fire & water are the 2 greatest dangers (and most frequent destroyers) of any collection of archives or documents. You say "fire is representative of our quest for knowledge". Sorry but I don't see it, when I think of fire & knowledge I think of the burning of the library of Alexandria & the loss of knowledge. Also "water, a well-spring, a source from which all else is drawn." - Apart from the blue, which could easily just be sky, or just blue, I don't see any water. What is the big red dot at the top too? Is it a creator Japanese? because I don't see any other possible relevance or significance to it. AllanHainey 08:43, 21 March 2006 (UTC)
The dot and surrounding bar are derived from the Foundation logo  . The significance of fire and water to libraries in particular doesn't apply to Wikisource News, which isn't itself related to libraries. Fire as our quest for knowledge is backed by such myths as the story of Prometheus. // Pathoschild (admin / talk) 13:52, 21 March 2006 (UTC)
These things can always be changed, but I feel that my version is better for the time being. It's based on one of the proposed iceberg logos, so it comes across as a stylized representation of the current official logo. Conversely, the "fire and water" theme has not yet been adopted site-wide, so that version has no logical significance (at this time).
The Wikisource News logo is not, and should not, be the same as the Wikisource logo. Wikisource News is not Wikisource. Whether or not the fire and water theme is adopted site-wide matters as little as whether the CNN logo is on the United States flag. // Pathoschild (admin / talk) 16:03, 21 March 2006 (UTC)
I don't understand your analogy. Isn't Wikisource News a feature of Wikisource proper? And why did you reduce my image to slightly more than half the size of the one that you prefer? Newbie 17:01, 21 March 2006 (UTC)
Wikisource News is about Wikisource and it's run by the Wikisource community, but it's not a feature of Wikisource. I reduced the size because it overlapped halfway through the next discussion. // Pathoschild (admin / talk) 18:07, 21 March 2006 (UTC)
I still don't understand what distinction you're drawing. Isn't Wikisource News featured on this site? I'm looking at it right now, aren't I? Newbie 19:20, 21 March 2006 (UTC)
A logo is representative of something specific. The Wikisource logo is specifically representative of the Wikisource project, a public domain library. The Wikisource News logo is specifically representative of the community news project, a collection of news stories. The two logos should not be substantially similar for the same reason they should not be substantially similar to that of the WikiProject on infrastructual and guideance development. The logos represent different things, therefore should be different. // Pathoschild (admin / talk) 19:59, 21 March 2006 (UTC)

If we want something different, what about a dingbat of the god Mercury, the bringer of news? Historically many British newspapers have been called the *** Mercury Apwoolrich 16:31, 21 March 2006 (UTC)

I'd prefer we have a logo relevant to the project and to the Foundation, but different from the logos of either. // Pathoschild (admin / talk) 18:07, 21 March 2006 (UTC)
I'd prefer to have a logo for the news section that is related to the actual project logo. I think we should definitely have a filler logo until there is a new vote (if there is one), but if we get a new logo, I think the one we use for WSNEWS should be changed as well. That said, let's just keep the one we currently have; who knows, maybe we'll just end up keeping it anyway even after we get a new logo. I like its design, and in regards to what WSNEWS is doing, the symbolism sort of matches.—Zhaladshar (Talk) 19:02, 21 March 2006 (UTC)
Could you clarify which logo you're referring to? The current logo, as of Newbie's changes, is the Kcyclopedist/Newbie version. // Pathoschild (admin / talk) 19:59, 21 March 2006 (UTC)
Sorry. I meant the Spirit logo, as that was the one we used first.—Zhaladshar (Talk) 20:19, 21 March 2006 (UTC)
Doesn't the iceberg version better meet your criterion of being "related to the actual project logo" (as of now, at least)? Newbie 20:40, 21 March 2006 (UTC)

Poll

Spirit/Pathoschild
  1. I still prefer this version. // Pathoschild (admin / talk) 11:33, 31 March 2006 (UTC)
Kcyclopedist/Newbie
  1. Obviously, I prefer this version. Newbie 22:12, 31 March 2006 (UTC)
Neutral/discussion

Relative links

Recently relative links were enabled on Wikisource. This gives us a great amount of freedom in page naming and moving. However, if any sub-page is ever visited, there is a small link up at the top of the page that will go back to the "mother" page. Take Low-Life Deeps/Chapter 1, for example. There is a link along the lines of "<Low-Life Deeps" up at the top right of the page. This seems to be a bit ugly, especially with the header template involved. Does anyone have objections to hiding this link (it seems like we really don't need it as the header template already links back to the "mother" page)?—Zhaladshar (Talk) 21:33, 25 March 2006 (UTC)

Actually, how does one hide such links? Is there a special code, like for hiding the table of contents?Dovi 22:09, 25 March 2006 (UTC)
It's very easy to do, and should involve a minor addition to the stylesheet. We can hide the links in the article and associated talk namespaces, while leaving it in other namespaces (where they're more useful). If there's a general consensus to do so, I'll insert the code. // Pathoschild (admin / talk) 00:38, 26 March 2006 (UTC)

Rewrite Noarticletext message

I've sandboxed a rewritten version of the Noarticletext message (User:Pathoschild/Sandbox4). The new version is much smaller, more useable, and adds several relevant links such as a search of the deletion log, Help:Adding texts, and our inclusion guidelines.

  • Changes
    • Much less verbose. Explanation has been reduced on the assumption that most users don't care why purging works. Changed paragraph to short point form.
      • Removed links to search Wiktionary and Commons, added a link to Template:Sisterprojects.
      • Removed brief explanation of what's accepted on Wikisource, added a link to inclusion guidelines.
      • Removed instructions to update incoming links; a less experienced user might be confused by unrelated instructions, a more experienced user will do that anyway.
    • Added a link to search the deletion log.
    • Divided into two sections, "Searching" and "Before creating this page", to help users find what they're looking for.
    • Various other reorganisational and minor changes; see changes.

Feel free to edit the proposal in the sandbox; discussion is welcome. // Pathoschild (admin / talk) 15:58, 30 March 2006 (UTC)

Poll


Discussion

The new version looks much better. Just the fact that it's cut down on the verbosity is a plus. But getting rid of links to the other sister projects doesn't help (I'll bet most people would never even use htem anyway).—Zhaladshar (Talk) 16:14, 30 March 2006 (UTC)
Previously, it only linked to Wiktionary and Commons; the proposal links to the list of sister project with icons (Template:Sisterprojects). // Pathoschild (admin / talk) 16:49, 30 March 2006 (UTC)
Oh, I see where it is. What I meant, though, is that it doesn't have "Find this article on Wiktionary" or "Search Wikicommons for images, etc..." We just have one link to the sister projects, and aren't listing each one out.—Zhaladshar (Talk) 17:14, 30 March 2006 (UTC)
Given the number of sister projects, I think listing them in the template would be confusing. Perhaps we could add something along the lines of: "if the text is not a source text, try searching one of our sister projects: Wikibooks, Wikipedia, Wiktionary..." with each name leading to the search. // Pathoschild (admin / talk) 17:33, 30 March 2006 (UTC)
Actually, I like it the way it is. We just link to a place where they can go to any sister project. I don't think listing out all the various projects would really be any more helpful than just having them go to a portal. To me, it would just make the message a bit cluttered, which is the reason the system message is being rewritten anyway.—Zhaladshar (Talk) 19:59, 30 March 2006 (UTC)

Patrolled edits

Over the course of many months, numerous administrators have expressed the desire to enable patrolled edits on the Recent Changes. If there is community support, I would like to file a bug to get this feature enabled on this wiki. The question remaining, though, is who should be able to mark edits as patrolled or not. I suggest only administrators get to use this feature for the time being.—Zhaladshar (Talk) 16:11, 28 March 2006 (UTC)


Disable CSS hideifempty (accessibility problems)

I'd like to remove the hideifempty class from the common stylesheet. Serious accessibility problems have been discovered with this CSS trick since it was originally added.

Older browsers, basic browsers (such as those on mobile devices), and special browsers (such as browsers for the blind) do not understand the CSS and display everything that should be hidden. This leads to clutter and confusion in such browsers, most serious in special browsers for the blind as there is no way for them to visually skip the mess. Additionally, users may be tempted to use it programmatically (see diff 118738 for a related attempt), which brings the aforementioned problem to an extreme level.

Additionally, it increases the complexity of exporting to mirrors, archives, or files by introducing an additional conditional syntax that is difficult for automatic converters to understand.

Although the export difficulties could be overcome, I believe that the accessibility problems are too severe for it's use. I would like to have Pathosbot scan Wikisource for uses of this trick for removal, and then remove it from the stylesheet. // Pathoschild (admin / talk) 04:12, 11 April 2006 (UTC)

I know the {{author}} template uses the HideIfEmpty template. Would removing this bit from the stylesheet affect the display of the template on the author pages (specifically the ones who do not have respective links to WQ or Commons)? If it won't affect that (or if we can easily overcome the setback) then I don't mind removing it, although I think it's a waste of effort to do just because people with older browsers/browsers on mobile phones might not be able to access the site.—Zhaladshar (Talk) 04:24, 11 April 2006 (UTC)
That seems to be using a style defined in the root stylesheet; I'm not sure how that happened. Assuming we change that too, it could be easily overcome. // Pathoschild (admin / talk) 04:44, 11 April 2006 (UTC)

MediaWiki:Copyrightwarning (special characters)

I'm proposing this based off of the French Wikisource's MediaWiki:Edittools. fr.wikisource uses menus to divide up their insertable characters. I think changing our character insert bar to match this method has many benefits (these are the only ones I can think of right now):

  1. It allows for a much easier expansion of the character set because everything is divided into different categories (not everything is displayed at once, so people have to do less searching for the character they need/want) and the amount of cluttering is greatly reduced.
  2. We can display the symbols at the regular size, so that the symbols aren't so difficult to see (letters with carons and breves are very difficult to tell apart currently).
  3. We can add numerous non-Latin alphabets without taking up anyspace.

I'm proposing to use this in our copyright warning message and not the edit tools message, because people (especially with smaller monitors) would have to scroll down and cut off visibility of much of the editting text box to insert the characters.

My proposal of organizing would be in groups like "Circumflex" (all letters with circumflexes), "Breve," "Macron," "Dots," "Rings," "Ligatures," "Math," etc, along with a number of non-Latin alphabets.—Zhaladshar (Talk) 20:02, 1 April 2006 (UTC)

  • Support, though we should try to keep the number of groups relatively small. It's quite easy to subgroup symbols inline. // Pathoschild (admin / talk) 00:49, 2 April 2006 (UTC)
    • Could you explain what this means (I'm just not understanding what you said from a technical aspect)?—Zhaladshar (Talk) 01:00, 2 April 2006 (UTC)
      • As an example of inline grouping:
        German: Ä ä Ö ö ß Ü ü | Greek: Č č Ć ć Dž dž Đ đ Š š Ž ž | Spanish: Á á É é Í í Ñ ñ Ó ó Ú ú Ü ü.
        Those were picked at random from the French Wikisource, where each has it's own menu item. As another example, we could have a single menu for accented characters, with subgroups divided by bolded captions and newlines. // Pathoschild (admin / talk) 01:58, 2 April 2006 (UTC)
    • I'd prefer not to organize it the way the French WS does. The reason being, many times letters with diacritics are required in texts, but the "language" that letter with that diacritic are in is not known. However, they will know that their letter requires an accent, so it would make more sense to group all the letters with accents together. If we grouped them by the language they appear in (what if they appear in more than one language?) it might be fairly confusing.—Zhaladshar (Talk) 15:58, 2 April 2006 (UTC)
  • Support, as the proposer.—Zhaladshar (Talk) 01:00, 2 April 2006 (UTC)
  • Support. Doin't forget the Long S please Apwoolrich 11:29, 2 April 2006 (UTC)
  • Support--BirgitteSB 22:18, 2 April 2006 (UTC)

While we are on this, is is possible to get an assortment of printers's flowers and some tasteful rules as well? In feel that many of our texts would look better is we could make them resemble the printed page more. As it is, we have a minimalist look. Apwoolrich 11:29, 2 April 2006 (UTC)

What's a printer flower? It doesn't really matter to me, but I've never heard of symbols like that.—Zhaladshar (Talk) 15:58, 2 April 2006 (UTC)


❁

I'd don't have much experience with these things but it seems "printer flowers" are a subset of the Unicode dingbats. There is a list of Unicode dingbats at Alan Wood’s Unicode Resources. You can just cut and paste from this page but most text editors don't handle them well. It seems better use something like &#10049;. Without some style attributes as they are rather small. I doubt older browsers render this kind of thing. There might be a way to create these kind of things using the <math> and TeX but its beyond me. --Inge 23:34, 2 April 2006 (UTC)

 

I just noticed this on the main page. --Inge 06:32, 3 April 2006 (UTC)

I looked up printer flowers (IE doesn't render them, I had to go to FireFox), and I was wondering how often we'd use them. I'm not opposed to adding a menu for some, but they just don't look like they'd ever see much action. Or maybe I was looking at the wrong dingbats (if the page Inge gave have printer flowers on them—instead of all non-printer flower dingbats, then my comment is valid).—Zhaladshar (Talk) 17:44, 3 April 2006 (UTC)
I think we would do better by using images for these. Otherwise some people will just see boxes or question marks. I am completely open to using them to imitate the printing. Although I wouldn't want to go so far as to copy the original pagination. As long as we can easily imitate the style of a printed work I see no reason not to do so.--BirgitteSB 18:12, 3 April 2006 (UTC)
I agree with your suggestions. Images would be more preferable to using it as an actual font because many browsers won't be able to see it.—Zhaladshar (Talk) 18:36, 3 April 2006 (UTC)
I agree with BirgitteSB. The Unicode character does not look good when scaled up. And I agree with Zhaladshar that the newer Unicode characters are not ready for prime time and it might be better if the flowers were not available on the menu. They could be listed and displayed on a help page or somewhere. I looked around for public domain images but was not successful. Maybe Corel has something. I understand that their clip are can be freely used. --Droll 22:57, 3 April 2006 (UTC)

I've implemented a version of this at MediaWiki:Edittools and Mediawiki:Monobook.js. You may need to refresh your browser cache before it works for you. Any thoughts? // Pathoschild (admin / talk) 22:27, 12 April 2006 (UTC)

Great work! this is a real improvement. The only thing I don't understand is why it ask you to select a catagory? It is working now--BirgitteSB 22:51, 12 April 2006 (UTC)
It's a great start! I've reworked a bit of it (mostly wording, but a few additions), and I've left a comment on its talk page, as I figured that was a more appropriate place for that kind of discussion.—Zhaladshar (Talk) 21:00, 13 April 2006 (UTC)
Great. Being unknowledgeable and inexperienced with special characters, this is probably as far as my participation goes in this. Feel free to ask if there's any coding aspect you need help with. // Pathoschild (admin / talk) 21:11, 13 April 2006 (UTC)

Author pagename guidelines (titles)

OK, I know this seems like a symptom of OCD but there are a number of Catholic Popes whose works appear here. Some of the author pages have the form Author:Pius X while others have the form Author:Pope Pius II. It would seem to me that NPOV would favor the first form and I prefer it but I don't feel strongly either way. Wikipedia does not seem to have a standard. If there is some consensus I'll do the work of changing the pages. We could also have Catagory:Popes. We can have a redirect from the other form. --Droll 23:06, 24 March 2006 (UTC)

Use the Wikipedia article title for the Author name, Pope Pius II. There isn't a NPOV issue, it is a fact that they were a Pope. --Pmsyyz 06:38, 25 March 2006 (UTC)
We shouldn't be using the title Pope in the name of an author page any more than we would use Dr, King (after all the Popes are technically monarchs) or any other occupational title. AllanHainey 11:14, 25 March 2006 (UTC)
Agree with Allan. "Pope" should be removed from any title page (I've corrected a few myself, but I didn't get all of them). When we list them on the Author pages, we can go ahead and put their title, but there's no need to display it on the actual author page itself.—Zhaladshar (Talk) 20:43, 25 March 2006 (UTC)
I am unsure about this. What exactly is considered a title? For example, do we take away "the Great" from Alfred. If we do what do we call him instead? I recently learned of problems with Wikipedia's naming convetion regarding royalty. Even though I have used their article titles as guide in the past, I feel we should be cautious when they regard nobles. I believe the best answer is to always use the most commonly used English name. This would mean prefering names such as Lord Byron, Alfred the Great, Mary Queen of Scots, and Pope Pius II. It can be argued that either to use titles or exclude them is biased. I realize this is not perfect solution. There will be people where it is diffcult to determine the most commonly used name in English. But I think it should be the ideal we are aiming for.--BirgitteSB 22:47, 25 March 2006 (UTC)
And Alfred, Lord Tennyson, not Alfred Tennyson as we have him. Apwoolrich 13:10, 27 March 2006 (UTC)
That's a good point. I think we should use the most common names as our page titles (and use uncommon ones as redirects). This brings up the question, though, of how people commonly think of popes. Usually, I just go by what their name is (John Paul II, Leo X, and so on), unless I need to put the name into context, then I'll use "pope." That's just how I do it. How common is it to refer to a pope with his title included? Popes aren't royalty, so I've always dropped the title (as opposed to using "king" or "queen" to talk about royalty).—Zhaladshar (Talk) 00:15, 26 March 2006 (UTC)
I did quick google search of news sites only.[1] It seems that they always say only John Paul II in the headline. But nearly always use Pope John Paul II in the text where there are no space constraints. I don't know what that means exactly and I don't talk enough about Popes to be sure which is most common myself.--BirgitteSB 00:44, 26 March 2006 (UTC)
There has been so much discussion on wikipedia on naming policy & what names to use I'm not going to repeat it here. Generally I agree that the most common name should be used, however on the Popes issue Pope isn't part of the name it's the title, the same as King John isn't the name of that king it is his title & first name (even if it is what he's most commonly known as). His name is John of England and wikipedia takes the view that kings should be noted in that format rather than King... even if that is the most common name. I see no reason not to do the same with Popes (though of course without the of...). Basically as long as we have the nominal after the name (& I don't think there've been any Popes who didn't have someone else copy their name) they won't get confused with anyone as Kings with the same name will have of.... We could add redirects at Pope ... anyway.
Incidentally Zhaladshar Popes technically are Royalty, they're sovereign heads of state & are considered as Royalty by other states, though this is a diplomatic & political technicality/nicety & not really relevant to anything other than precedence at State dinners/forms of address, etc.
Birgitte we should be wary of using the Google test at any times but here I wouldn't consider it relevant as most foreign (non-Vatican) news orgs are unlikely to be precise or consistent in their usage of his title, & whether they use the word Pope in the headline or not isn't really relevant. AllanHainey 12:15, 27 March 2006 (UTC)
That sounds good to me regarding the Popes. I will say this about some of Wikipedia's naming conventions. The ones I dislike are the ones that value internal consistancy over common sense. There is no reason all Kings or Barons or whatever should have their names formatted exactly the same if one is famous enough to be commonly known otherwise. (i.e. Lord Byron) Generally we will have it a bit easier here because many of the people we are concerned with have criticism written about them and it is in print how people refer to them. Does anyone object to the guideline of naming authors according to their most common English name and having redirects from variations? I would like to add it to the Style Guide.--BirgitteSB 14:31, 27 March 2006 (UTC)
I apologize, Birgitte—it's been a long day, and my brain is overall fried. What is it you would like to exactly add to the Style Guide? I'm not opposed to adding anything, but I'd just like to know what amendment we'd make.—Zhaladshar (Talk) 22:15, 27 March 2006 (UTC)

At Wikisource:Style guide#Title formats, I would to add 7. Author pages should be titled according to the most common English name, with alternate formats as redirects.--BirgitteSB 02:33, 28 March 2006 (UTC)

If the "most common English name" policy is accepted how is the most common English name determined. I don't think depending on Google would be acceptable either however I did two revealing searches. The first "pope john paul II" site:vatican.va returned 20,300 and the second john paul II" site:vatican.va returned 69,000 results. Of course the first search is a subset of the second. So it would seem that the Vatican favors the second form. Another more general solution would be to accept a reference such as some published encyclopedia as a standard reference. I just had brainstorm (Ou!). I'm going over to the library and ask if there is a standard practice in library science. Be back soon. --Droll 23:43, 28 March 2006 (UTC)
Ok I talked to the Reference Librarian an this is a summary of her answer. Authors are alphabetized without regard to a title. So titles like Dr., Sir, Pope, Queen and Princess are dropped. So "Princess Diana" is cataloged as "Diana, Princess of Wales" and Sir Walter Scott is cataloged as "Scott, Walter". She says that they have standard references that they use in case of a question. She suggested that we check any reliable online library catalog in case of doubt. This is all very useful except that we do not create author pages with names like Author:Donne, John but rather Author:John Donne. Maybe we should change since Wikisource is in a scene a library (another can of worms). I'd be willing to do the work. Still, in general, I think the librarians information gives useful guidance.
File this under musings. If Wikisource is to be considered as a library then the "search text box" might be considered a means of accessing the library's card catalog. It follows that a user should expect similar results. I see two options. First, have a single catalog in which the user can enter either an author's name or the title of some text in the library. Second, have two "search text boxes." One for authors and one for texts. In the second model we could maintain the "Author:Author Name" convention. This option would be confusing and require redesign. The first option would require changing the naming convention for author pages. I know this has been discussed before and that there is resistance to this change. I suggest that what is best for the user is what is best for Wikisource. It is almost too late to change but it is still possible if a bot is used. Author pages would have to be done by hand. Seems like this is one of those good standards early issues. This is meant as food for thought. I'm not in favor of change for change's sake. I know that careful consideration would be required before any such step. Let's come to a conclusion about author titles first. I propose that standard library practice be followed. Which for now means Author:Pious II and Author:Walter Scott. --Droll 01:18, 29 March 2006 (UTC)
Thanks for looking this up, Droll. Should we just drop all titles from the author page (have them act as redirects) then? And maybe add something along the lines of "7. Author pages should be titled according to the author's full name, minus all titles of honor or royalty"?—Zhaladshar (Talk) 01:55, 29 March 2006 (UTC)
I can agree about Author:Pious II, I was never really sure what was most common for popes. But what about Author:George Gordon I would much prefer to have him at Author:Lord Byron. I realize that there is a method to the way library catalogs are set-up but traditional card catalogs don't have redirects. I think we can be better, but if everyone else agrees with using full names I will conform--BirgitteSB 02:01, 29 March 2006 (UTC)
This good I think. I looked up "Gordon, George" at both the LOC and at the large regional library near where I live and found "Byron, George Gordon Byron, Baron, 1788-1824." That's the way he is listed in both catalogs. That's does not seem very intuitive. An author search for "Dickens, Charles" returns "Dickens, Charles, 1812-1870" among irrelevant results which is more like what I would expect. A search for "Pius II" returns "Pius II, Pope, 1405-1464." Looks like a good standard to me but I think we need to talk some more. Are dates necessary? They do guarantee uniqueness and seem to be part of the LOC standard. I like BirgitteSB's idea about redirects. I think we need input from someone who understands HTML design. We want to make sure Google can find our pages. Maybe it would be possible to imbed data from the {{Author:Template}} in the HTML page in such a way that it would not be visible to a human user but would be to a search engine. If I remember correctly there was a way to imbed data in a header that old time web crawlers looked at even when they didn't look at very much else in a page. If some one has a personal Wiki maybe they to do some experiments to see how the Wiki search engine would do. Maybe I worry to much. I would not expect the Go button to work very well with this kind of a standard but how many new users know to type Author:Lord Byron. I just tried a search for "Gordon, George" and the Wiki search engine found the correct page and returned it as the first result. This would be a big change so lets not jump to fast. --Droll 07:03, 29 March 2006 (UTC)
Byron's full name was George Gordon Byron, not just George Gordon. Though I agree that GGB isn't as well known a name for him as Lord Byron which is what he's usually referred to as. I can see us having a lot of problems if we go with 'proper' names without any titles as we have some (& expect to get more) works by British aristocrats (particularly speeches by 18th-19th centuary Prime Ministers) who are known solely by their titles & whose full names mean nothing to anyone, for example "Robert Arthur Talbot Gascoyne-Cecil" we have noted as Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, 3rd Marquess of Salisbury, which is what he's usually referred to as (Another issue is how full the full name is as aristocrats of that era tended to have lots of middle names). The fact is that most hereditary aristocrats are known by their titles, though most Royals are known simply by their first name, number & the state they were king/queen of. I think we should avoid titles except where someone is known only by that title or it is what he is best known as (in which case we should go with the generally accepted usage of first (or common) name; surname; number & title), Popes don't need the title Pope as they can be equally known as Pius I, etc (as without the of... it's obvious we're referring to a Pope & not a proper King) but aristocrats should follow John Hamilton, 2nd Lord Belhaven and Stenton or William Pitt, 1st Earl of Chatham. Kings or Queens should follow Elizabeth I of England. For people like Benjamin Disraeli who are also known by a title but better known under their (original) commoners name we should stick to the better known name rather than going with Benjamin Disraeli, 1st Earl of Beaconsfield. I'd also say that those best known as Lord something (where the Lord is a courtesy title like Lord John Russell) should retain that name on wikisource even if they subsequently get a proper title like Earl something. AllanHainey 07:38, 29 March 2006 (UTC)

I'm copying a discussion from w:Editing Talk:Robert W. Service because I think it is relevant to the current discussion and because it addresses the issue of standards. Things don't seem be as simple as I had hoped: (note I've changed the header type and make minor changes to my text for readability.)

This is becoming so extremely complicated, and all were talking about is how we should list someone's name!  :-) I'm not seeing any cut and paste way of listing authors by the name they are "commonly known as." For some, this will be easy; Byron is commonly known by George Gordon, Lord Byron or even simply Lord Byron. For many other aristocrats, this isn't the case.
What if we work with the following "draft," which of course can be easily changed, but I'm trying to give a particular direction to the discussion.
  1. Popes will go by the name they take upon becoming pope and its number (e.g., Leo X).
  2. Royalty will also go by the name they take upon becoming king/queen/etc., its number, and maybe the country they ruled (e.g., James I or James I of England).
  3. Aristocrats will go by their names, followed by their title (e.g., Alfred Tennyson, 1st Baron Tennyson or Charles de Secondat, baron de Montesquieu).
And there will be many redirects of derivative names pointing to the name we choose. Of course, there can be exceptions, such as maybe having "William the Conqueror" instead of "William I of England." I'm just throwing this out to try to help carve out a general set of rules for naming these kinds of authors.—Zhaladshar (Talk) 20:05, 30 March 2006 (UTC)
I agree with the list above (though I wish you hadn't used James I of England/James VI of Scotland as an example as his naming has its own long-running debate - that's one reason why we need to include the country in the name of Kings). I would try to avoid making exceptions such as William the Conqueror, if we're going to make a naming convention we should stick to it & have redirects for other names, as names like this are just basically nicknames or appelations applied by others & they may be contested (I'm sure there were a lot of folk who thought Ivan the Terrible was a really nice bloke). I think names like this should redirect to the standard William .. of.. page. AllanHainey 11:17, 31 March 2006 (UTC)
That's fine. I don't mind just having them all the same (i.e., not having an exception for "William the Conqueror" or "Katherine the Great" but instead having it with the monarch's number and the ruling country and using redirects for everything else. (Hehe, sorry about the James example; my knowledge of European monarchies isn't quite what it used to be.)—Zhaladshar (Talk) 20:57, 31 March 2006 (UTC)

Poll 

Since there has been no discussion lately, I am moving this into the polling phase. Please indicate whether you support the changes to the titling of author pages:

  1. Popes will go by the name they take upon becoming pope and its number (e.g., Leo X).
  2. Royalty will also go by the name they take upon becoming king/queen/etc., its number, and maybe the country they ruled (e.g., James I or James I of England).
  3. Aristocrats will go by their names, followed by their title (e.g., Alfred Tennyson, 1st Baron Tennyson or Charles de Secondat, baron de Montesquieu).

Support

  1. —Zhaladshar (Talk) 20:13, 4 April 2006 (UTC)
  2. - AllanHainey 07:35, 6 April 2006 (UTC)

Oppose

  1. I can agree with number one. However I believe we should always use the name that reflects common usage.

    • We want to maximize the likelihood of being listed in external search engines
    • We want to maximize the incidence that people who make a link guessing the article name, guess correctly
    • Using a full formal name requires people to know that name, and to type more
    • We want to avoid bias

    The problem proposed rules is they are never ending. We will next need to deal with Chinese emperors which will not work by using the European system. Then we come across the descendents of desposed Eastern European nobility, etc. The drawback with common usage is that in some cases it has to be determined. Which requires finding critical texts and how they describe the author, but I think that is a small hurdle.--BirgitteSB 02:09, 5 April 2006 (UTC)

    • (After Edit Conflict) Comment - In the majority of cases in 2 this will be common usage, for the few cases where it isn't & common usage is ... the great, etc a redirect should be created & this will ensure it shows up in external search engines, also I don't think Charles I of England, for example, is necessarily more formal a name or requires any greather knowledge than King Charles (& it avoids having to have a disambiguation page listing every King Charles I, there have been a few in different countries). On 3 I think the main problem in using common usage is deciding what is common usage, we've enough problems with this without using titles (see Robert Service Vs Robert W. Service below). I think we'll need to come up with a standard format otherwise we'll end up with author pages for Author:Pitt the Elder, Author:William Pitt, Author:William Pitt the Elder, Author:Earl of Chatham, Author:William Pitt, 1st Earl of Chatham, Author:1st Earl of Chatham, etc all of which are common usage. Basically I see the name & title as the easiest way, though of course for well known aristocrats commonly known under different names it's easy enough to set up a redirect (this wouldn't be needed for all of them though as, for example Palmerston in the search bar throws up Author:Henry John Temple, 3rd Viscount Palmerston at the top of the list anyway).

      I don't see the descendents of deposed Royalty or nobility as a problem, as they were deposed they're not entitled to any titles so we just list them by their names. On Chinese Emperors true I don't know enough to know whether we can use Author:Yu I of Ch'in, or Author:Chen X of Wu but presumably they all have regnal names they're generally known as & these can be used.AllanHainey 07:45, 6 April 2006 (UTC)

  2. Oppose. I appreciate the need and importance for standards and, indeed, have done my best to implement them across a wide range of aspects of Wikisource. But perhaps due to my background as a native Wikipedian, I'm very concerned by the creation of standards and guidelines that are overly specific, targetted, and difficult to document. I see this proposal as the first step on the way to the gigantic machine of guideline creation that has afflicted Wikipedia.

    I attempted to compile Wikipedia's entire Manual of Style as an example of this. Upon reaching 38 wiki pages containing 177 pages, 3,408 paragraphs, 60,296 words, and 415,147 characters of text, I gave up. That was perhaps 1% of Wikipedia's Style guide. You can see what I collected for yourself at w:User:Pathoschild/Sandbox4.

    We should strive to keep our standards as broad and simple as possible. Specific guidelines are not sustainable, as there are far too many specific things that can be individually treated. I suggest that if we cannot fit our entire present and future pagename guidelines on a single page, it is too large. Looking into the future, do you believe that this type of specific guideline will not lead to the prodigiously collossal phenomenon that has taken root at Wikipedia?

    A perhaps more sustainable guideline would be to name every author page by the person's real birthname, and redirect all alternatives to that. I'm quite willing to help draft a general page title guideline for community input and consideration. However, I think specific guidelines are unacceptable. // Pathoschild (admin / talk) 04:54, 5 April 2006 (UTC)

    • Comment As I understand it your objection is to creating any guidelines on naming, as I noted above I feel we really need to have sopmething to stop a proliferation of multiple namings, double redirects, etc which would need to be cleared up eventually. It's better to try to stop this before it starts by creating a sort, simple guide to our naming conventions, though I agree it should be simple & short & believe the 3 points above are. They're not meant to deal with every eventuality, that'd be impossible, though they do deal with the most common naming convention problems. I don't think we're ever going to get anywhere near the size of wikipedia's manual of style (thankfully), largely because we're never going to be as big or have enough folk writing them, and I don't see these simple naming guidelines growing significantly. I'm not convinced by the feasibility of naming "every author page by the person's real birthname, and redirect all alternatives to that". One obvious problem is finding out everyone's birthname, for example early Monarchs & Popes. This info isn't widely known & it would be a major job to find it out. Also it would necessitate a lot of disambiguation pages (eg 7 James Stuart's for the people who became James I- VII of Scotland (assuming they have no middle names(I don't know, it's hard to find out for sure) & they all wrote something - they didn't but it's a general example)). AllanHainey 07:35, 6 April 2006 (UTC)

      • I'm not at all opposed to naming conventions, but I am concerned by any step towards having naming convention for very specific titles or nationalities; the next logical step is to resolve every conflict by adding a new naming convention. Imagine that there's a big debate in two months over the naming convention of Japanese poetry authors, who often used pen names; one would be quite tempted, naturally, to add a naming convention for Japanese poetry authors once the debate was resolved, to prevent any future dispute. That leads to the problem Wikipedia experiences. We should not depend on staying a small project forever in the hopes of avoiding the problems of bigger projects altogether; if you look at the Scriptorium archives, you'll see that activity is increasing very rapidly.

        Where it is impossible to determine an author's birth name, they could exceptionally be under their common name. Disambiguating pages isn't a problem, as users won't be typing in their real name to find them. Let us say a user types in [[Author:Saki]]; they would be redirected to [[Author:Hector Hugh Munro]], which would mention "Saki" as a common pen name in the bio or name field. It's not at all necessary to include titles in author pagenames, except where needed to disambiguate. In many cases, the formal name is all we know of them, so that is an acceptable second choice. For example, [[Author:Elizabeth I]], not [[Author:Elizabeth I, Queen of Ireland and England]]. If necessary to disambiguate between multiple persons named [[Author:Elizabeth I]], we could have [[Author:Elizabeth I (England)]] or [[Author:Elizabeth I (1533)]].

        Concerning the example of the Robert Service debate, it would be easily solved by using his full birth name ([[Author:Robert William Service]]), and redirecting alternatives to that. It's not at all necessary for page names to be short or easy to type in; longer names will be easier to find in search engine results, in the MediaWiki search feature, and redirect pages can easily be created for common names that users will type in.

        As I've said above, I'm very willing to draft a global, one-page naming convention with community input that would cover all possibilities, not individual cases. I'd very much like to be able to explore that direction before we take steps towards Wikipedia's flawed method. // Pathoschild (admin / talk) 08:11, 6 April 2006 (UTC)

        • I kind of think a slippery slope argument is being made against adding these three naming conventions. Because we're making general guidelines (which do not have to be followed by any user but are just good suggestions for curbing confusion—they are just guidelines) for naming European aristocrats, I don't think this can in anyway be validly applied to saying this will create havoc in trying to name Asian authors/royalty/etc. or that it will increase our style guide to a bulky size. I say we reach the hurdle of Asian nobility when we come to it, but in the meanwhile don't worry about it—since Eastern authors are not nearly as common or well known in the West, I don't see this ever as becoming a problem.

          I think the reason that we're adding this to Europeans is because there are about 145 names an noble can go by (with all their titles), and we just want to pick one (and keep it standard) across the project. Redirects and listing alternative names on the author page will, I think, still allow the page to be indexed by Google (their algorithms are very good, that even with the addition of a few more words in the title page, this really won't hurt us in being listed).

          Remember that this issue was initially brought up because of a confusion in our naming conventions already (basically, do we allow—or which ones do we allow, if any—titles of honor in the person's name). So I do think that the issue really must be addressed and hammered out.

          I'm very willing to help in drafting a global naming convention—Zhaladshar (Talk) 16:40, 6 April 2006 (UTC)

          • I'd very much like to explore the feasability of global guidelines that can be applied to any author, regardless of social status or era. Such a system is vastly simpler and much easier to understand for both the reader and the users expected to implement it. I'll draft a proposal for community input in the next few days, to see if such a system can work. // Pathoschild (admin / talk) 18:46, 6 April 2006 (UTC)
  3. oppose : I think the best way to refer to an author is to use his most common name, because it is the most natural way to find him. Therefore Montesquieu should be referred to as Montesquieu, in the category "Authors-M". ThomasV 09:25, 11 April 2006 (UTC)

Discussion

  • Archived. This poll has extended for seven days, gathering two support votes and three oppose votes. Seven additional users would need to support without any further opposition. As this seems highly unlikely, I've closed the poll. // Pathoschild (admin / talk) 05:55, 14 April 2006 (UTC)

Reorder parameters in {{header}}

Droll has suggested that the de facto standard order of parameters used with the {{header}} template be changed:

And last, if there is a standard that requires the use of all parameters in the header template that is fine. I think they should be ordered though. For example title, section, author, previous, next and then notes. This is would avoid user errors and be more intuitive.

I agree with his suggestion, as that is a more logical order. The current order resulted from parameters being haphazardly added during development, copy and pasted to examples during discussion, and later copy and pasted into the documentation. I suggest the order title, author, section, previous, next, notes. This order is different from Droll's suggestion in that section and author are switched, since the author parameter almost never changes on subpages of a work whereas the section parameter is different on every page.

Current order Proposed order 
{{header
    | previous=
    | next=
    | title=
    | section=
    | author=
    | notes=
  }}
 
{{header
    | title=
    | author=
    | section=
    | previous=
    | next=
    | notes=
  }}

I don't think we should make this a guideline, but it should be changed in the documentation. If this seems like a good idea, I can have my bot standardise the order on all pages using the template. // Pathoschild (admin / talk) 22:47, 4 April 2006 (UTC)

I don't exactly care one way or another, as I have a script that automatically inserts the header parameter with all of its parameters, so I never have to worry about incompleteness. But it's not a big deal at all if you do reorder it. His suggestion is a bit more logical than the one that we currently use.—Zhaladshar (Talk) 01:24, 5 April 2006 (UTC)
  • I changed the documentation; at some point in the future, I may have my bot standardise the order as well. // Pathoschild (admin / talk) 06:10, 14 April 2006 (UTC)

Rewrite MediaWiki:Revertpage

I'd like to rewrite MediaWiki:Revertpage. The current version uses redundant wording, stating "changed back" in the same phrase as "Reverted". Linking the username and contributions list is also helpful, as it allows other users to view their contributions and have easy access to all relevant pages (including talk page, block log, block page, et cetera).

  • Current: Reverted edit of Pathoschild, changed back to last version by Pathoschild
  • Proposed: Reverted changes by Pathoschild (contribs) to last by Pathoschild

Any thoughts? // Pathoschild (admin / talk) 19:55, 7 April 2006 (UTC)

  • Did you purposefully leave out "version" in the proposed wording? I like the link to contribs alot. Great idea to rework this.--BirgitteSB 20:11, 7 April 2006 (UTC)
    • Yep, since that part of the sentence continues from the last. That is, "reverted changes to last by" is logically equivalent to the more redundant "reverted changes to last changes by". // Pathoschild (admin / talk) 21:25, 7 April 2006 (UTC)
  • I think it reads a bit funny without the "version" in there, but I like all the other changes.—Zhaladshar (Talk) 01:09, 8 April 2006 (UTC)

Convert templates to {{header}}

{{chapter_page}}

I'd like to convert {{chapter_page}} to {{header}} using Pathosbot, which will bring roughly 1,049 pages into line with the header standard, which is currently used on 2,940 pages. Does anyone object to this? // Pathoschild (admin / talk) 22:46, 5 April 2006 (UTC)

Go ahead Apwoolrich 06:48, 6 April 2006 (UTC)

Please do—Zhaladshar (Talk) 16:22, 6 April 2006 (UTC)

{{title}}

I'd also like to convert {{title}} to {{header}} using Pathosbot. It currently contains the {{header}} template, and is used on 78 pages. // Pathoschild (admin / talk) 09:43, 6 April 2006 (UTC)

Fine by me AllanHainey 11:51, 6 April 2006 (UTC)
Again, please do.—Zhaladshar (Talk) 16:23, 6 April 2006 (UTC)

Inclusion of reference data on Wikisource

Discussion

Inclusion?

I will start this discussion by saying I am completely open-minded about the inclusion of a variety of reference data on Wikisource. I truly do not know whether it has a place here. I realize this has been discussed several times in the past, to the agreement of accepting such material. However, the current state of reference data on Wikisource is unacceptable. The community members who are active on this site have little interest, and in some cases understanding, of the data we have been hosting. Although there have been editors that were adamant that this material should be included here, they have not remained active in the organization nor matainance of it. Much of this material is beyond the active administrators ability to even distinguish vandalism from corrections. Because of this current state of affairs there have been nominations for deletion for some of this data. However I feel we need discuss the larger questions of the place of reference material on Wikisource before we make any deletions. Some of this material may have more value than others. If we do decide to exclude certain things, there still may be a place for other material. I would like to approach this question differently from the past. Let us first try and figure out what kinds of material we want to include in Wikisource, and then work at separating out what doesn't belong here. I have kept this very general so if you work with anything besides verse, prose, or transciptions; I am talking about your material.

  1. What sort of reference material on Wikisource do you currently use?
  2. What material is most heavily linked to by our sister projects?
  3. Why should someone looking for this material prefer to find it on Wikisource than any other web site?
  4. How can this material be organized so that it is an asset to the website, rather than a dumping ground?
  5. Who is willing to organize, verify, and patrol this material and which kind are you willing to take on?

--BirgitteSB 22:47, 3 April 2006 (UTC)

Although I appreciate your attempt to approach this from a different direction, the questions above depend on the fundamental assumption that we keep the reference materials. If we don't, they're not relevant; users will simply reference a different website, which will be linked to for that purpose, and the data will be organised as the maintainers of that website judge best.
I don't think they belong on Wikisource at all, unless they're part of a text which does (such as a verifiable, published crypographic textbook). Wikibooks may be interested, as the data would be a very strong asset to a textbook or reference book about cryptography. We should ask the Wikibooks community before making that decision, though.
I'm willing to store them on my personal server until we find an interested host. Regardless of Wikibooks' desire for the data, we should not accept to host works that are outside our scope. They're unpublished, unverifiable, original research, and not source texts at all. // Pathoschild (admin / talk) 23:06, 3 April 2006 (UTC)
I truly am not attached to any of the reference data, and I don't believe the questions assume the material will be kept. If the majority of those questions can't be answered to my satisfaction I am going join your crusade to delete this stuff. However after reading the past disscusions I would be surprised if we actually end up deleting all of it. Just as I will be surprised if we do not delete any of it. Much of this data is previously published, there truly are books on this stuff. We already regularly split out portions of published "books" into their own articles for verse, prose, and trancriptions, so it is hard to argue against doing so for data. To your last point, I am assuming we are limiting this disscusion to verifiable data that is not original research. Anything that doesn't meet that criteria needs to go in my opinion. I believe you do not quite realize the scope of the material I am trying to include in this discussion. There is more reference material on Wikisource than source code, crytograpy, and digits of Pi. --BirgitteSB 23:25, 3 April 2006 (UTC)
Well, to start off, I despise (most of) the reference material we have here, and I have from the very beginning. There is very little WS can add to reference material than what can be found at other pages already.
For starters, let's consider constants, like pi and phi. Great, these numbers are infinitely important in mathematics. However, who needs to know what the first million digits of either of them are? The verifiability alone is entirely defunct. No one's going to manually check to make sure each digit is how it should, and it's far too much of a hassle to check using some kind of program. Not to mention those pages could be vandalized and no one would really know. Constants are not reference material and serve no decent function here.
Tables. The tables we've been getting are such things as "powers of two" or "Pascal's pyramid." There really is nothing special about any of these tables. You can easily figure out the powers of two with just a calculator (or even a pencil and paper for smaller power values). No one will need to reference Pascal's pyramid unless they actually have to use it, and then those people will know how to generate the pyramid themselves; it will take as much time to look it up here as it will to manually discover the numbers. However, tables might serve a decent purpose, if they are done properly (that is, if they are tables of functions or numbers used in more advanced math courses). So far, this is not the case.
Scientific data. This seems to hold the best promise for staying on WS. Compiling collections of scientific information that is hard to scrape together elsewhere is greatly beneficial and will attract people to this project. However, a 300 kb page about the locations of eclipses still doesn't seem that relevant, does it?
I know I'm skipping over a lot of other categories (like source code—but I don't want to bring that discussion up; someone else can do it), but these are the most commonly seen here. Basically, even though there is some value to the data as a whole, they do not fit with our mission of collecting source texts. They should not be kept here—we simply just do not collect this kind of information. And with the relatively few active contributors here, the verification of such information and the desire to expand it is virtually nil. The people who fought tooth and nail to keep it have long since left this project (although I suspect they'll be back shortly) once they got their way.
Wikisource should keep itself at a high level of integrity and not automatically take what our sister projects reject. We've got our own mission statements, our own inclusion policies, and we are not dumping grounds for things that don't fit on Wikipedia. I say we cut out most of the reference material (and heavily restrict how we accept the rest, if we accept any). Whew, I feel a bit better now...—Zhaladshar (Talk) 23:55, 3 April 2006 (UTC)
I have no problem including source data as part of a text, say Chapter 6 of "The Student's handbook on cryptography". This is published, and can be verified simply by comparing with the source text. However, including data compiled by users or data tables alone is outside Wikisource's scope.
Since you still consider the questions relevant, I'll answer them to the best of my ability, although my responses are obviously biased by my position in the debate.
  1. What sort of reference material on Wikisource do you currently use?
    • I see no purpose to the reference data, on the whole. Many pages (such as Pi to 1,000,000 places) provide trivial information which aren't generally useful. Others, such as cryptography, are so sensitive as to make referencing a wiki (especially one without active experts in the subject) impractical. The exception to this is source code, which might be useful to a user who understands it and can troubleshoot obvious vandalism or mistakes. However, source code is very widely available on the Internet from more expert and dedicated websites.
  2. What material is most heavily linked to by our sister projects?
    • I'm aware of few incoming links. For the reasons I stated above, I would assume that we are most referenced for source code.
  3. Why should someone looking for this material prefer to find it on Wikisource than any other web site?
    • I do not believe this is the case, for the reasons I stated to #1.
  4. How can this material be organized so that it is an asset to the website, rather than a dumping ground?
    • This would require a comprehensive overhaul and updating of the indexes, the creation of multiple portals, dedicated communities of users knowledgeable about each of the data fields, comprehensive fact-checking to verify content modified since they were effectively abandoned, and regular maintenance to update according to evolving cryptographic technologies and language versions. However, I do not believe Wikisource should be hosting these in the first place, let alone embark on that monumental task better handled by the many dedicated websites.
  5. Who is willing to organize, verify, and patrol this material and which kind are you willing to take on?
    • Per my response to #4, this would require several dedicated communities.
I quote Zhaladshar, who says what I feel very well: "Wikisource should keep itself at a high level of integrity and not automatically take what our sister projects reject. We've got our own mission statements, our own inclusion policies, and we are not dumping grounds for things that don't fit on Wikipedia." // Pathoschild (admin / talk) 00:05, 4 April 2006 (UTC)
I think one of my comments on propsed deletions was misunderstood. I do not believe we should be a dumping ground to accept whatever our sister projects refuse. What I meant to say was that at one time the works of Shakespeare where dumped into the Source project from Wikipedia. Just because no other Sister Project wants something doesn't necessarily mean it does not fit our goals. That said I do not have any better answers to my own questions than you do. I am asking them because there were people who felt strongly that this data was important and I want to understand why. I do not see the purpose in it, especially in its current non-organized state. Even the election data is mostly redundant with information on Wikipedia. This is why I am asking what value anyone sees in any of it. And if no-one speaks up now, we have a good background discussion to point to when they do show up. And after they insist on the importance of their pet data, I want them to answer some questions about how their pet data fits into the larger goals and guidelines of this project. I think it is quite clear that the active participants of the project (myself included) do not understand where reference data fits in here. Honestly I would be happy to delete it, but I want to be sure we do so puposefully with full understanding and we might as well take the time to define ourselves while we are at it. As I said before most of this is previosly published, so what is the criteria we are using to say this is outside our scope? My gut says we can exclude it, but it would be nice if we could codify why. I do not want to be difficult, although I realize you must be find me to be so right now. I just want to be comprehensive.--BirgitteSB 00:46, 4 April 2006 (UTC)


Here are my answers to Birgitte's questions:
  1. What sort of reference material on Wikisource do you currently use?
    • I do not use Wikisource as a source of reference material. If I need to refer to data, I will either generate it myself (if it's possible) or I will look in textbooks or other peer-reviewed works where the work was written and reviewed by people very knowledgable in their field.
  2. What material is most heavily linked to by our sister projects?
    • I've got no idea. But my gut tells me our sister projects link to our source code (since they're the ones who added it here). I'm not even sure where we fall on having our literature linked; WP commonly provides links to every website that contains a given work but WS.
  3. Why should someone looking for this material prefer to find it on Wikisource than any other web site?
    • I have no idea.
  4. How can this material be organized so that it is an asset to the website, rather than a dumping ground?
    • As per Pathoschild's response, it would take a dedicated community of knowledgable people, which we currently lack.
  5. Who is willing to organize, verify, and patrol this material and which kind are you willing to take on?
    • A very dedicated group of people, which we currently lack.
I know the answers are biased a bit, but I answered them as honestly and as closely as I could.—Zhaladshar (Talk) 00:17, 4 April 2006 (UTC)
One thought I have is that if the data can be generated by a computer them maybe it does not belong here. For example there are astronomical programs that can generate information about just about anything we might host here. Many programs, like Mathematica, can generate Fibonacci numbers and a lot of other stuff. From my point of view the day when people looked up this kind of information in a table is long, long gone. It would be as useful to host logarithmic tables.
Just another note: What about the Unicode charts. I respect the work that went into this but Unicode is at version 4.1.0 and the last update was for version 3.0. If there is a user who will commit to keeping these up to date as time goes by that would be fine. I just think that there are more authoritative sources for this sort of thing.
I have mentioned before that I don't think hosting computer code is useful. It might be interesting to someone but as a former software engineer this is the last place I would look for this sort of thing. Professionals use reliable software libraries. All this said I don't feel any personal interest in one way or the other. Disk space is cheep I guess. I think User:BirgitteSB is right. The real question is what should Wikisource be. I get bent when someone disagrees with something I've done but after a short bit I realize that it is not about how I feel but what is best for Wikisource. I don't think Wikisource need to be everything to everyone. Wikisource can't make everyone happy. I'll get off my soapbox now. --Droll 03:01, 4 April 2006 (UTC)
WS would be terrible if it was everything to everyone. There would not be a point to any of the other sister projects if that were the case. We need to have a clear-cut description of what we are and what we take. Wikimedia need not have a project that stores everything a person can think of under the sun—it would no longer be able to focus on the best aspects and make them as good as it humanly can. The same holds true for WS. Hosting everything under the sun just because it has words or might be valuable to some person somewhere who must use mathematical tables is not a good reason to accept it. We would do best to focus on just certain things with text and do our utmost to make that effort as great as we possibly can. This will do much more to make us look like a respectable project than simply supplying as much information as we possibly can.—Zhaladshar (Talk) 03:47, 4 April 2006 (UTC)
I suggest posting a note about this discussion on the WP Librarians page (of which I am a non-librarian member), asking for help and inviting some librarians to join us. Clearly there is some reference material we should be hosting. I fear we are not seeing the wood for the trees. If there are any librarians active in WS and reading this I apologise:) Apwoolrich 18:15, 6 April 2006 (UTC)
Message posted today. Results, if any awaited with interest. Apwoolrich 07:16, 18 April 2006 (UTC)
Deadline and poll

Discussion seems to have stalled for nearly a week, so I'll open a poll on it. I added two boxes explaining the guidelines I think should be used; specifically, that the poll will end 27 April 2006 with voting weighted in favour of established editors. Does anyone disagree with the guidelines and poll? // Pathoschild (admin / talk) 04:39, 11 April 2006 (UTC)

Poll

This poll will end 27 April 2006. Votes will be weighted in favour of established editors, although everyone is welcome to discuss or vote regardless. Please vote exclude, include, or neutral in regards to the following statement: "Reference data should not be included in Wikisource."
  • Exclude, per my lengthy comments in the discussion. They require a large community to maintain and update, are better cared for by dedicated websites such as Planet source code, and are not source texts. By their nature, they are either so simple that they are useless, or so complex that it is better to use code from a site with experienced programmers to verify it. Reference data is outside Wikisource's scope, does not contribute to our mission as a free library, and as Zhaladshar stated: "Wikisource should keep itself at a high level of integrity and not automatically take what our sister projects reject. We've got our own mission statements, our own inclusion policies, and we are not dumping grounds for things that don't fit on Wikipedia." // Pathoschild (admin / talk) 04:39, 11 April 2006 (UTC)
  • Exclude, except where the data is referenced specifically within a literary or scienfic text that has a purpose beyond merely serving source data. All texts should contain ideas, analysis or synthesis or something likewise human, which a pure reference work does not have. The same thing applies to source code. If we host source code we may as well host paintings, but a published work about either of these things is a different story and is appropriate for wikisource. -Antireconciler 06:01, 15 April 2006 (UTC)
  • Exclude with the same reservations as Antireconciler. There are circumstances where reference material is needed to reinforce a WP article, which does not appear anywhere else on the Web. As an example, a comprehensive article about the history of engineers' screw threads on WP need to include info about, for example, the Holtzapffel and the Roberts series of pitches which preceded the standards established by Whitworth. Likewise a piece about the evolution of wire and sheet guages needs to be able to record what the historical ones were, and WS is the place to have it. I am sure there will be other instances of a technological nature where the ability to record tables of data is important. Rather than have a blanket exclusion I would be happier if we had the machinery for deciding on a case-by-case or reference class-by-reference class basis. Apwoolrich 19:19, 15 April 2006 (UTC)
  • Exclude I believe we are better off with only the sort data within larger published works. To answer Apwoolrich's concern. I think everyone agrees if we put some work up on Wikisource the tables in the appendices are allowed. We are just excluding them without the larger work. --BirgitteSB 11:46, 18 April 2006 (UTC)

I think the discussion has resulted in a fairly obvious preference for exclusion. // [admin] Pathoschild (talk/map) 11:37, 27 April 2006 (UTC)

Standardised process header

I propose a standardised header template for pages in the Wikisource namespace. To that end, I've created {{process header}} and experimentally converted Wikisource:Possible copyright violations to the template. I had originally meant to suggest {{header}}, but the information that is useful is very different; See a comparative code difference between the latest revisions of {{process header}} and {{header}}, on the left and right respectively.

Following is an example of the current template, as it would appear on this scriptorium. It's subst'd for future relevance. 

{{process header
 | title    = Scriptorium
 | section  =
 | previous =
 | next     = [[Wikisource:Scriptorium/Archives|Archives]]→
 | shortcut = [[WS:S]]
 | notes    = This is the community discussion page...
}}
Scriptorium archives→
Shortcut:
WS:S
This is the community discussion page; feel free to ask questions or leave comments. You may join any current discussion or start a new one. Some users regularly populate #wikisource on Freenode, the official IRC channel. For discussion related to the entire project (not just the English chapter), please discuss at the multilingual Wikisource.


// [admin] Pathoschild (talk/map) 16:26, 20 April 2006 (UTC)

This looks very nice, Pathoschild. It's very appealing and does not require much technical knowledge to use (meaning looking at the source code is a tad simpler than looking at the code for a template that is using {{header}}). I support your proposal.—Zhaladshar (Talk) 18:37, 20 April 2006 (UTC)
Once again, outstanding work! Full Support--BirgitteSB 18:41, 20 April 2006 (UTC)
Not that you need it, but Support. Yay for standardization.--Shanel 00:22, 24 April 2006 (UTC)
Excellent, so Support. Apwoolrich 06:55, 24 April 2006 (UTC)

{{indent}}

I've used the new ParserFunctions to create {{indent}}, which takes a numerical value and inserts an equivalent number of indentations. It's currently using the {{#switch}} function, so it is limited to the values hardcoded into the template (up to 15 at the moment). I decided to create this after formatting On the Death of Smet-Smet, the Hippopotamus Goddess, which called for this somewhat messy wikimarkup: 

(''The People within'')<br>
&emsp;&emsp;&emsp;&emsp; ''She sent us pain,''<br />
&emsp;&emsp;&emsp;&emsp;&emsp; ''And we bowed before Her;''<br />
&emsp;&emsp;&emsp;&emsp; ''She smiled again''<br />
&emsp;&emsp;&emsp;&emsp;&emsp; ''And bade us adore Her.''<br />
&emsp;&emsp;&emsp;&emsp; ''She solaced our woe''<br />
&emsp;&emsp;&emsp;&emsp;&emsp; ''And soothed our sighing;''<br />
&emsp;&emsp;&emsp;&emsp; ''And what shall we do''<br />
&emsp;&emsp;&emsp;&emsp;&emsp; ''Now God is dying?''<br />

The code is much more readable using the indent template: 

(''The People within'')<br />
{{indent|4}}''She sent us pain,''<br />
{{indent|5}}''And we bowed before Her;''<br />
{{indent|4}}''She smiled again''<br />
{{indent|5}}''And bade us adore Her.''<br />
{{indent|4}}''She solaced our woe''<br />
{{indent|5}}''And soothed our sighing;''<br />
{{indent|4}}''And what shall we do''<br />
{{indent|5}}''Now God is dying?''<br />

Both result in the same visible output below:

(The People within)
     She sent us pain,
      And we bowed before Her;
     She smiled again
      And bade us adore Her.
     She solaced our woe
      And soothed our sighing;
     And what shall we do
      Now God is dying?

we could also expand it to automatically insert a line-break, so it would no longer be necessary to manually insert <br />: 

(''The People within'')<br />
{{indent|4}} ''She sent us pain,''
{{indent|5}} ''And we bowed before Her;''
{{indent|4}} ''She smiled again''
{{indent|5}} ''And bade us adore Her.''
{{indent|4}} ''She solaced our woe''
{{indent|5}} ''And soothed our sighing;''
{{indent|4}} ''And what shall we do''
{{indent|5}} ''Now God is dying?''

Does this seem like a useful template, or would it be preferable to indent manually? // [admin] Pathoschild (talk/map) 01:45, 26 April 2006 (UTC)

This is a great template. It keeps us from having to use "&emsp;", "&nbsp;", or ":" to indent, all three of which have their own drawbacks. This provides a much cleaner source for people to look at when they edit it. I say we implement.—Zhaladshar (Talk) 01:54, 26 April 2006 (UTC)
This is so awesome I can't even say. I don't even really know html so I am always doing this stuff by trial and error. Which is not fun. This is great. --BirgitteSB 02:12, 26 April 2006 (UTC)

Per comments on IRC, I've integrated the linebreak. Note that this template can also be used with lines without indentation, which is useful for consistancy. 

{{indent|0}} ''Come away, O human child!''
{{indent|0}} ''To the waters and the wild''
{{indent|0}} ''With a faery, hand in hand,''
{{indent|0}} ''For the world's more full of weeping''
{{indent|1}} ''than you can understand.''


Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world's more full of weeping
  than you can understand.
— The Stolen Child by W.B. Yeats

// [admin] Pathoschild (talk/map) 02:47, 26 April 2006 (UTC)

'Very useful for the proposed recategorisation of EB1911 Apwoolrich 07:41, 26 April 2006 (UTC)

Announcements

Template for small-caps

I've created {{small-caps}} to simplify formatting text in Small caps, where lowercase letters are replaced with smaller capital letters. Many works use this formatting, but replicating it requires some knowledge of CSS or incorrect use of dropcaps. This template should be substituted by using it as such: {{subst:small-caps|Text}}. // Pathoschild (admin / talk) 22:49, 1 April 2006 (UTC)

Converting deprecated templates

I'm converting deprecated templates to {{header}} per the Style guide and relevant proposed deletions using Pathosbot. The conversion is complex for a bot; it needs to interpret the result of the conditional template programming and correctly output or not output a value into the {{header}} parameters. The methods used (see below) cause the template to break until the conversion is complete; please don't revert either the pages or the template.

To simplify the task and reduce the margin of error, I'm performing the conversions in several steps, as outlined below. The bot performs one step at a time.

  1. Reprogram the deprecated template to convert automatically on substitution.
  2. Substitute all instances of the template.
  3. Fix any incompatibilities (for example, {{header}} uses the format "author_name", {{chap simple}} uses "[[Author:authorname|authorname]]" and remove artifact code from the conversion.

// Pathoschild (admin / talk) 20:08, 3 April 2006 (UTC)

I see Droll began before my bot did, which conflicted and stopped the bot. ;) No point duplicating efforts, then.
That said, what should we do with {{Chapter foot}} ? I propose we remove it entirely from pages, as it is redundant with {{header}} at the top of the page. It is currently used on 753 pages. // Pathoschild (admin / talk) 20:23, 3 April 2006 (UTC)
If you want, edit MediaWiki:Sitenotice so people know what your bot's doing and won't cause it to stop the bot. About {{chapter foot}}, I'm indifferent. I can understand the sentiment to having navigation at the bottom of the page, as well as at the top (saves a bit of scrolling), but I won't miss it if it's gone.—Zhaladshar (Talk) 20:29, 3 April 2006 (UTC)
Thanks, I added a note to the sitenotice. // Pathoschild (admin / talk) 20:45, 3 April 2006 (UTC)

Template:Footer

I created a template I called footer to use at the foot of a page with the template header at the top. It is just a navigational aid and follows the format used by Template:Header. I don't think it's useful for short poems but for long chapters I think a user would expect something like. May source pages if have used have this sort of thing. --Droll 21:18, 3 April 2006 (UTC)

I don't really see the purpose of a footer template, other than preventing extra scrolling. Adding a #top link (which jumps the view to the top of any page) would serve the same purpose without the extra maintenance and effort. Perhaps we could add this to the bottom of every page in a system message; it would be relatively easy to do. // Pathoschild (admin / talk) 21:25, 3 April 2006 (UTC)
This wouldn't be useful for poetry or short stories. Really, it'd only be useful for novels. However, I don't think it would be a bad idea to have a bottom navigation, either. Things like this are common for online works with long pages. It's just a slight courtesy for the reader.—Zhaladshar (Talk) 21:34, 3 April 2006 (UTC)
I would prefer the footer template to a change in the system messages. This is not needed on all pages, so I do not feel we need to make a change site-wide. I think the template is worth having as an option for those who want to use it. I would rather not add info about it to the help pages on Adding new texts, or people might start adding it to everything. I think we should keep things simple for new users to the site.--BirgitteSB 16:32, 4 April 2006 (UTC)
I don't see the point of this template, we've already got a previous/next chapter footer Template:Chapter foot
{{chapter_foot
|chap_title=
|prior_chap=
|next_chap=}}
Which can be used when you actually have to navigate between chapters so I don't see a need for Template:Footer. AllanHainey 07:06, 6 April 2006 (UTC)
Following my previous suggestion, and after valid observations that changing a system message would be pointless for smaller pages, I've created an example template at Template:Foot. This template is very easy to maintain, and doesn't require any duplication of effort. It consists of a {{header}}-like box containing a link that jumps the browser to the top of the page, where the user can use {{header}} to go forward, back, or return to the index. See (and try) the example below.
Any thoughts on this alternative proposal? // Pathoschild (admin / talk) 08:20, 6 April 2006 (UTC)
I think this looks pretty good. I don't think we exactly need to replicate a navigator at the bottom, but a "Return to the top" link would do it.—Zhaladshar (Talk) 16:21, 6 April 2006 (UTC)

Over at Wikiquote

We're revisiting the question of "What is Wikiquote for?" now the project is well established. Some of the discussions are about what belongs in WQ vs WS, so it would be great if folk from here added their twopennorth at q:Wikiquote talk:Aims. Many thanks, JackyR 22:07, 5 April 2006 (UTC)

Patrolled edits enabled

Per a recent discussion (see "Patrolled edits", Scriptorium archives, April 2006), the patrolled edits feature has been enabled on the English Wikisource. This allows an administrator to verify an edit, so that multiple administrators don't waste time rechecking the same edit. Unverified edits are flagged by placing a small marker beside them in the recent changes list; by default, the marker is a red exclamation mark. It has been configured such that only administrators can verify edits.

Administrators: there is an option to automatically mark your own edits as patrolled. From your preferences, you can go to the editing tab and check "Mark edits I make as patrolled". Please do so, as it will significantly reduce clutter on the recent changes list and make it easier to find unpatrolled edits.

I personally find the red exclamation mark to be much too visible and difficult to ignore. I've modified my personal stylesheet to make it less intrusive by making it black, similar to the N (new page) and m (minor edit) markers. Feel free to add it to your own stylesheet and modify as desired. 

   .unpatrolled {
      color:#000 !important;
   }

// Pathoschild (admin / talk) 03:47, 9 April 2006 (UTC)

I just noticed this right now, if we want to mark an edit as patrolled do we now have to go in & edit it ourselves so it shows up as patrolled? or can we tick a wee box or something to mark it as checked? AllanHainey 14:34, 10 April 2006 (UTC)
You can mark an edit as patrolled by clicking the 'diff' or 'last' link from the recent changes list, and clicking "[Mark as patrolled]". If it's a new page, you can click "[Mark as patrolled]" from the read view at the bottom-right corner. However, there seems to be a glitch which makes it difficult to mark a new page as patrolled if it's been subsequently edited and you have "enhanced recent changes" activated in your preferences. // Pathoschild (admin / talk) 16:06, 10 April 2006 (UTC)

{{sisterprojects}} protected

I've protected {{sisterprojects}}, since it appears prominently on the main page. // Pathoschild (admin / talk) 02:32, 15 April 2006 (UTC)

Community coordination

There has been much discussion in the past concerning the divide between each community and the others of the Foundation. Although some attempts to coordinate have been made in the past, they all failed for lack of participation. I've drafted a new proposal I think may be more successful at Meta:Community coordination. This may be of particular interest to users who are participating in the discussion about CheckUsers on the Foundation mailing list. // [admin] Pathoschild (talk/map) 20:11, 16 April 2006 (UTC)

This is a very interesting project. It seems very similar to the long-ago Ambassador project that Meta once tried. I'm very interested in helping any way I can.—Zhaladshar (Talk) 05:11, 17 April 2006 (UTC)

Questions

Applause

It's a minor matter, but should phrases like "applause" and "laughter" be included in speeches? For example, this speech has (applause) scattered throughout the transcript.--Politicaljunkie 21:56, 29 March 2006 (UTC)

I think we should only be concerned with the actual text, not its delivery. If this speech were published in some anthology, odds are great that the crowd's reactions won't be in it.—Zhaladshar (Talk) 22:27, 29 March 2006 (UTC)
I agree, generally I leave out applause/laughter/etc & only keep it in (in square brackets & itallics) when the speaker responds to it, such as 'you may well laugh, but...'. I leave in interjections by other speakers where relevant (& by hecklers when the speaker responds) but with the other speakers name in bold for interjections or where he is invited by the speaker to comment/defend himself. When the main speaker goes back to speaking again I put his name in bold. AllanHainey 07:20, 30 March 2006 (UTC)

Robert Service or Robert W Service

Shouldn't this page be moved to Robert Service (poet) or just Robert Service with a line at the top disambiguating him from the historian. I've never seen him referred to as RWS on any of his books or in any references to him, RS is the name always used. AllanHainey 11:09, 25 March 2006 (UTC)

Please see my note on the discussion page for Author:Robert W. Service --Droll 09:49, 29 March 2006 (UTC)
The Library of Congress catatlogs the historian as Robert Service and the poet as Service, Robert W. (Robert William), 1874-1958. --Droll 10:05, 29 March 2006 (UTC) (note: These search links have expired)
I don't know how the Library of Congress categorises its works, frankly I don't consider it too relevant. The British Library, at least as authoratative a source, lists the poet as Service, Robert, 1874-1958 and the historian as Service, Robert, 1947- so I'd say that how different catalogues classify them isn't really relevant. We should find the best way for wikipedia/wikisource without necessarily following any other usage (save the most common usage). I would suggest moving RWS to Robert Service (poet) & making the Robert Service page a disambiguation page or just redirecting to RS (Poet), which I think is likely to be the most searched for, & having adisambig line at the top of the article. AllanHainey 10:48, 29 March 2006 (UTC)
I disagree. I understand that there can be a difference of opinion about which name to use. I have always seen him referred to as RWS in the U.S. just as you have seen him referred to as RS. I didn't move the page on Wikisoruce to RWS just out of the blue but because it was my firm belief at the time that it was the best thing to do. I consulted user:Zhaladshar before hand. I also updated well over 150 poems to reflect the change while I was changing them to {{header}} format and doing other minor corrections. It seems to me that our difference in opinion arises because of our personal points of view. In the long run what we think should not be the deciding factor. The issue is not isolated to this one author as you imply. I appears to me that it would be best in the long run to have an external standard such as either the LOC or The British Library or some other source such as the Encyclopædia Britannica.
. . . --Droll 21:16, 29 March 2006 (UTC)
I want to clairify now that I did not mean to say that AllanHainey was implying that this issue is isolated to this one author but that he seemed to imply that it was a broader issue because of his reference to the LOC and the British Library. The point is should we leave the naming of author pages up to personal opinion (either mine or someone else's) or do we try to find some external standard. I think this needs to be resolved before anything else. As always all this is just my opinion and I'm hoping for someone with a better idea. --Droll 21:54, 29 March 2006 (UTC)
Who on earth re-organised this page, I much preferred it as it was before. Nevertheless, I agree that the problem is that we both have different views on the most accurate/widely used name RS or RWS (& of course this could be a problem with other authors eg Author:Laozi or Author:Lao Tzu) however I don't see that copying a naming convention/specific namings from an exterior source solves this problem it just means that we transfer it out of our hands & accept whatever they decide,& they'll have the same naming issues we have (& not necessarily any better way or procedure for resolving them), without having a share in the decision making. I think the best way to solve any naming dispute is through discussion & opening it up to as wide a group as possible in the hope that consensus is reached. On the specific RS or RWS I believe we're better going with RS as we don't and won't (for 70+ years) have a page for Robert Service the historian and most people searching for anyone are more likely than not to use only the first & last names (what I would consider as the most common usage). AllanHainey 11:32, 31 March 2006 (UTC)
I re-organized the page. I did a considerable amount of research at the LOC and the British Library as well as many other sites and I am convinced that Robert W. Service is the most common rendering of this author's name. If you would like to have a constructive discussion I am more than open to that. I have tried to avoid relying on my personal point of view and have tried to find a NPOV. --Droll 18:39, 31 March 2006 (UTC)

What can go on?

This is a speech by a Canadian Member of Parliament to a public university. It essentially sets up his bid for leadership of the opposition party. Does it qualify? -- Zanimum 23:08, 4 April 2006 (UTC)

I don't see why not, if you want to add it to Portal:Speeches go ahead, you'll need to create an author page too though. Check any of the 2006 speeches for the general format to put it in & let me know if you have any questions. AllanHainey 07:02, 6 April 2006 (UTC)
Okay, so they aren't "copyright infringements". Just wondered if only speeches by mayors, premiers, prime ministers, Queens, and people who've been dead for 75 years were allowed. I remember the King Foundation was getting all ansy about our copy of "I Have a Dream" at one point. -- Zanimum 20:27, 7 April 2006 (UTC)

Our Common Future

Hi,

Can we publish here the Brundtland report, "Our Common Future"? It is a very important document from the UNO, and the only copy available online on the Swiss government web site is very poor: [2] Yann 18:59, 7 April 2006 (UTC)

What is its license status? According to Amazon, the work is copyrighted and commercially distributed by the World Commission On Environment and Development: at the top of pages in the extract view, it states "Copyrighted material". Otherwise, there's little information about its license that I can find. // Pathoschild (admin / talk) 19:25, 7 April 2006 (UTC)
Who does own the copyright? The relevant page is [3] which says the copyright is owned by the UNO Commission. So the status is similar to other UNO documents we already publish. And Amazon says "copyrighted material" for every works it sells, including Shkespeare and Poe, as examples. Yann 10:55, 8 April 2006 (UTC)

The license it's released under doesn't seem to be compatible with the GFDL. See the following copyright statement:

© World Commission on Environment and Development 1987

[...]

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,
stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means,
electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without
the prior permission of Oxford University Press

// Pathoschild (admin / talk) 11:22, 8 April 2006 (UTC)

I believe that Oxford University Press owns the copyright about the formatting and the cover picture if any, but I don't understand how it could own the copyright about a UNO document. Yann 11:32, 8 April 2006 (UTC)
The copyright itself belongs to the World Commission on Environment and Development, which doesn't release it with the UN website Terms of Use (unless it's hosted there under those terms). // Pathoschild (admin / talk) 11:56, 8 April 2006 (UTC)

Missing Scriptorium button

Where has the Scriptorium button gone from the Navigation box to the left of the page? Apwoolrich 06:54, 10 April 2006 (UTC)

This seems to be caused by a caching problem; I fixed it by purging MediaWiki:Sidebar. // Pathoschild (admin / talk) 13:35, 10 April 2006 (UTC)

Problem with url on infobox

Last month Birgitte reported a problem with the infobox displaying urls, Pathoschild fixed it but it's come back here Talk:On Global Warming. Anyone know how to sort it? AllanHainey 15:53, 10 April 2006 (UTC)

The problem was caused by the same incompatibility in unnamed parameters ("{{{1}}}"), which don't accept some characters because they conflict with various syntaxes. In this case, the equal symbol (=) broke the template.
Named parameters ("{{{name}}}") are much more flexible because their limits are much more clearly defined for the parser. I've converted the template to use named parameters by priority, and updated the documentation to encourage the new usage. Named parameters are more user-friendly (since it is obvious to experienced and new editors alike what each parameter is for) and flexible, as this example demonstrates.
There should be no further problems if we use the newly documented usage. I'd like to have Pathosbot standardise this, if nobody objects.
Previous usage 
{{textinfo
  |First edition, published 1913
  |link to source
  |[[User:YourUsername|YourUsername]]
  |Proofread and corrected [[Image:75%.png]]
  |Still a few typos to be corrected.
  |[[User:YourUsername|YourUsername]]
}}
New usage 
{{textinfo
  |edition      =First edition, published 1913
  |source       =link to source
  |progress     =Proofread and corrected [[Image:75%.png]]
  |notes        =Still a few typos to be corrected.
  |contributors =
  |proofreaders =[[User:YourUsername|YourUsername]]
}}
// Pathoschild (admin / talk) 18:56, 10 April 2006 (UTC)
I don't entirely understand most of that but as long as its fixed. I'm happy enough for you to have your bot make these changes, though Politicaljunkie has already changed a lot of them. By the way on the edition line the template is throwing in an extra } at the end of the line, can you get it to remove that when you send the bot round. AllanHainey 12:27, 11 April 2006 (UTC)
Can you show me an example of this happening? The examples I've looked at aren't doing it. Ah, I see Pengo fixed it. // Pathoschild (admin / talk) 12:43, 11 April 2006 (UTC)

Just thought of something else, Pathoschild is it possible for your bot to:

  1. move the Template:Edition template tag to after the = on the notes line, where it appears elsewhere on the page, that way it appears next to the notes & doesn't take up any extra space (like A Drink Problem).
  2. Change it to make the text in notes appear in itallics without need ing to put in the ''. I don't think the bot needs to do this but it could be done by tinkering with the code. Could the bot make sure that, if this is done, the '' is removed from those notes lines it's been manually added to?

Thanks AllanHainey 07:28, 12 April 2006 (UTC)

The first could be done with relative ease, given some preparation.
Why do you want standard italics in the notes parameter of {{header}}? Italics are widely used to distinguish a Wikipedia excerpt from Wikisource editorial notes, but our editorial notes are typically roman. // Pathoschild (admin / talk) 08:13, 12 April 2006 (UTC)
Generally on the notes I see, and add myself, them in itallics. I think this is a holdover from before we had the shiny new header box & the intro/notes had to be distinguished from the actual text. AllanHainey 11:29, 12 April 2006 (UTC)

Template:Title page

I was thinking of doing some clean up and I came across the template {{title page}}. It's a fairly bulky template and doesn't seem to fit in our new style. I was wondering if we should remove the template or find a way to integrate it into our presentation (maybe remove some parameters, change the colors, etc.). There are many pages that use this template, so whatever we decide, we must keep in mind it will affect a number of pages.—Zhaladshar (Talk) 17:46, 11 April 2006 (UTC)

It could be converted to {{header}} by Pathosbot, with some minor difficulty. // 207.162.58.3 (Pathoschild) 17:54, 11 April 2006 (UTC)
Are you talking about similar to what you did for the EB1911 templates? Would all that information be contained in the "notes" parameter then? Depending on what/how much we kept, presentation might be hard to pull off, but I can't really picture this in my head. If you can, have at it; I'd rather not lose all that information about the work by simply deleting the template entirely and using {{header}} instead. Your way sounds a bit better.—Zhaladshar (Talk) 18:01, 11 April 2006 (UTC)
I've drafted an initial conversion mockup at User:Pathoschild/Sandbox6. Most of the parameters are ported to {{header}}, excluding the Library of Congress classification ({{{loc}}}) and alternate sources ({{{other}}}). The title ({{{orig_title}}}) and author ({{{author}}}) are placed in the corresponding parameters in {{header}}, while the rest are described in prosaic form. The conversion will require heavy use of conditional programming to correctly translate the parameters into prose, since the sentence structure varies depending on which information is provided.
Before I begin that task, I'd like some community input on what the conversion will look like. Following is what the {{title page}} on Crime and Punishment will look like if converted now. More detailed comparisons can be found at User:Pathoschild/Sandbox6.
Crime and Punishment
by Fyodor Dostoevsky
Crime and Punishment was originally written in Russian and translated by Constance Garnett. This edition is taken from Project Gutenberg. See also the Wikipedia entry Crime and Punishment and Fyodor Dostoevsky, and the Wikiquote page Crime and Punishment.

// Pathoschild (admin / talk) 08:41, 12 April 2006 (UTC)
Congratulations. This as a VAST improvment over what we have been using. Apwoolrich 20:08, 12 April 2006 (UTC)
Thank you. // Pathoschild (admin / talk) 21:31, 12 April 2006 (UTC)
It looks very good, Pathoschild. This might be a bit too late (I don't want to ruin any of your hard work), but is this a template that we really need? I mean, we've got the {{header}} template which gives us a number of freedoms in its use. We should ask ourselves if we really want to have another template based off the header template which seems to do nothing that we couldn't already do with the header template right now. If it's decided that we want to use it, that's fine (I know it will look good), but this almost seems like it would be a lot of effort to reproduce something we can already do.—Zhaladshar (Talk) 20:32, 13 April 2006 (UTC)
You seem to have misunderstood my proposal. ;) I'm suggesting that my bot convert all instances of {{title page}} to {{header}}. We could then delete {{title page}}, since no page would use it anymore. I was waiting to make sure that there was general consensus to do so before proceeding; I'll begin writing the logic for the conversion later today. // Pathoschild (admin / talk) 21:25, 13 April 2006 (UTC)
Whoops. I did misunderstand the proposal. Sorry. Yes, this would be very good if we could do.—Zhaladshar (Talk) 22:40, 15 April 2006 (UTC)

Runtime Error

Hello, everyone. Whenever I use Wikisource I get a notice telling me that a runtime error has occured, "Line: 221," "Error: 'InstaView' is undefined." Is this just me or is it happening to everyone? --Think Fast 23:36, 17 April 2006 (UTC)

Try refreshing to clear the javascript from your cache; an extension was briefly inserted into the common javascript file by accident a few days ago. If that doesn't work, check your user javascript. Are you using the default Monobook skin? // [admin] Pathoschild (talk/map) 03:40, 18 April 2006 (UTC)
I tried clearing my cache, and it worked. Thanks for your help:). --Think Fast 00:23, 23 April 2006 (UTC)
You're welcome. :) // [admin] Pathoschild (talk/map) 02:31, 23 April 2006 (UTC)

Other discussions

Permissions

I have just noted the following message from Angela on WP Village Pump in relation to a query about obtaining permission to use an image.

See Wikipedia:Boilerplate request for permission. You need to make sure they give permission to use it under a free license, not just permission for it to be used on Wikipedia. You can forward emails granting permission to permissions@wikimedia.org where they will be archived in case proof is needed in future. Angela. 14:25, 25 March 2006 (UTC)

I did not know about this WP boilerplate page, never having had to use it, nor about the procedure for archiving permissions received. Since the info relates to the texts we might wish to add, and I think somebody raised the question a while back I suggest we devise a Help page about it, or incorporate it into our existing copyright page. Apwoolrich 14:44, 25 March 2006 (UTC)

I'm not seeing what this means or how it relates to this project. We don't exactly host images here (unless they're PD). What do we need to obtain permission for?—Zhaladshar (Talk) 20:49, 25 March 2006 (UTC)
I don't think we should make a Wikisource help page on this, since it may be of use on all Wikimedia projects. Such information should be on Meta. // Pathoschild (admin / talk) 19:16, 26 March 2006 (UTC)

What I meant was that WS editors should be aware of the procedures for obtaining permissions for us to have PD texts (not images) and for notifying the Foundation when we have the OK. These boilerplate messages are a useful foundation for contacting people who have texts, but would need revising for WS use. There must be occasions when we might wish to have a modern text on a website on WS and need to get permission to do so. OK, having a Help: page might be extreme, but I feel a sentence about this should be included in the 'adding a text' and 'copyright' page somewhere. Apwoolrich 20:47, 26 March 2006 (UTC)

I think I'm still slightly confused. If the work's PD, then we don't need anyone's permission to publish it. Do you mean instead to get permission to publish non-PD works, instead?—Zhaladshar (Talk) 01:58, 29 March 2006 (UTC)
Yes. It won't happen very often, but there might be a research paper, for example that an editor wishes to add. Apwoolrich 18:20, 29 March 2006 (UTC)

National Anthems

I'd really like to start a project dedicated to organizing the national anthems, but I don't have the time or patience. I'd hate to see it started and then fade away into disuse. Is there anyone who'd be willing to start it? I'd definitely help a bit, but as I said, I don't have a whole lot of time. Foxjwill 16:08, 31 March 2006 (UTC)

How would you go about organizing it. I'm not opposed to getting involved (there are many things I think that need to be fixed with the anthems); I would like to know what you had in mind for it, though.—Zhaladshar (Talk) 20:53, 31 March 2006 (UTC)
It would be arranged geographically by continent then region. A system would need to be developed for naming national anthem pages; it's kind of malproductive to have to find the name of a country's national anthem before searching for it. Foxjwill 01:50, 2 April 2006 (UTC)
The problem with arranging the anthems geographically is that many people have poor geographic skills (I know mine isn't really up to snuff). People might know what continent a country is on, but the region seems a bit more iffy. What regions were you thinking of using, just out of curiosity? I think alphabetically by country makes more sense, although I might be wrong about that.
I was thinking on the lines of organization by continent and then split into regions like Eastern and Western Europe and Middle East and East Asia--well-known regions like those. However, it would probably work alphabetically also. Foxjwill 20:04, 2 April 2006 (UTC)
I'm not sure what you mean by it being malproductive to have to find the name of a country's national anthem before searching for it. The way the national anthems are set up, all you need to know is the name of the country.—Zhaladshar (Talk) 16:05, 2 April 2006 (UTC)
While sifting through the national anthem articles, I noticed that all of them were titled with the names of the songs and without any mention [within the title] referencing their countries. Foxjwill 20:04, 2 April 2006 (UTC)
If it's on the actual page (e.g., The Star-Spangled Banner), then the country which uses this as a national anthem should be noted in the "notes" parameter of {{header}}, definitely. However, the country's name should not appear in the actual title, as that should only contain the title of the work. Besides, The Star-Spangled Banner just looks like a better title than United States National Anthem or The Star-Spangled Banner (United States nation anthem), etc. I hope I've addressed what you said, if not, please tell me and I'll try to understand the comments differentl.—Zhaladshar (Talk) 21:50, 2 April 2006 (UTC)
I really don't think ordering the national anthems by region is the way to go. Frankly its too subjective. As an examply you gave Eastern & Western Europe - where is the dividing line, where the Iron Curtain used to lie? I'm a child of the 80s & I grew up thinking Europe stopped at Germany full stop, other people in different countries will have different ideas of where the borders of regions lie, I'm sure many Eastern Europeans will consider themselves Western Europeans now they're in the EU & not the Soviet Empire. You may think everyone knows what thei region encompasses but I doubt everyone would agree, especially with such vast areas as East Asia, Oceania, etc.
I also agree with Zhaladshar, I think we're best assuming no geographical knowledge at all in ordering/listing the anthems. Alphebetically listing them by country, as we do now at Wikisource:National anthems seems the best way. Though just looking through it it needs a lot of work verifying which songs actually are national anthems (I removed Jerusalem from England) & in making sure they're all English language versions. I think where there is more than 1 anthem/song listed it should state next to the link the years it was used as a national anthem or whether it is an unoffical anthem, etc. Unfortunately I don't have time now to get involved in sorting this page out but it should be interesting for anyone who does. AllanHainey 11:44, 3 April 2006 (UTC)

Signing the welcome template

As more than one new user has pointed out, it is confusing to suggest that they ask any questions on the placer's talk page if their is no signature link for them to follow. This is the only place where there's a tendency not to sign, so I would assume that this is a problem with the bot used to place the templates (Wolfbot). Could someone knowledgeable about it please explain what the bot does and how it is operated? We may be able to fix this immediately, or we may need to contact Wolfman, who doesn't seem to be active on Wikisource lately. // Pathoschild (admin / talk) 19:57, 12 April 2006 (UTC)

I think this is a problem with backwards compatibility. The old version of the welcome template never mentioned anything about "asking question on my talkpage." So when we changed it all the templates put up by Wolfbot suddenly no longer made sense. I do not belive the bot as been active at all for months. --BirgitteSB 22:58, 12 April 2006 (UTC)
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