Wikisource:Scriptorium/Archives/2010-01

Please do not post any new comments on this page. This is a discussion archive first created in January 2010, although the comments contained were likely posted before and after this date. See current discussion or the archives index.

Announcements

Match and Split tool

User:ThomasV has graced us with a new tool in the never-ending journey of migrating to Page: images and transcluded text in place of the main namespace text alone. The tool runs using his bot and it undertakes a Match and Split of pages where a user identifies the co-existing pages in the main and Page: namespaces. I am calling for some trial works on which we can do testing, so if anyone has candidates, please identify them. Some draft instructions are at Match and Split.

To utilise this tool, you will need to turn it on via your Gadgets. billinghurst (talk) 13:20, 14 November 2009 (UTC)

Found a work. See Special:Contributions/ThomasBot billinghurst (talk) 13:57, 14 November 2009 (UTC)

here is another example where I used it : Pensées/I ThomasV (talk) 18:14, 20 November 2009 (UTC)

I just tried this on History of Norfolk/Introduction, and I have to say it gives new meaning to the word "automagically". Thanks for making it! --LarryGilbert (talk) 06:32, 29 November 2009 (UTC)

Good get Larry, I had forgotten about that work, and it is one that would really benefit. billinghurst (talk) 10:00, 29 November 2009 (UTC)

I just added this button to the toolbar, so that you no longer have to type ==__MATCH__:[[xxx]]== manually. ThomasV (talk) 23:16, 3 December 2009 (UTC)

Update of Gadget Popups

With some hand-holding from Pathoschild, I have updated to the newer version of the gadget Popups. The advantage I have found with this version is that it allows one to copy and paste the title from the popup box. For those who wish to customise, especially admins, have a peek at the customisation available for your monobook.css file. billinghurst (talk) 05:40, 28 November 2009 (UTC)

Link needs correcting please, the wikipedia page was deleted. Cygnis insignis (talk) 09:56, 28 November 2009 (UTC)

Aha, or it was just my incompetence with not enough Wikipedia links. <shrug> Fixed. billinghurst (talk) 10:39, 2 December 2009 (UTC)

Philosophical Transactions articles online

This just hit Slashdot: "One of the world's oldest scientific institutions is marking the start of its 350th year by putting 60 of its most memorable research papers online."[1] Hesperian 03:19, 1 December 2009 (UTC)

I'm not sure just how much is going freshly online by this route, but it's worth noting that in the very early 1800s, about 1809, eighteen large abridgement volumes were printed for back issues of the Philosophical Transactions, covering the original years of publication 1665 to 1800. These are now both out of copyright and already online (at archive.org) from Vol.1, 1665-1672 through Vol.18, 1796-1800. Terry0051 (talk) 13:26, 7 December 2009 (UTC)

(I've started a page for the abridgement series, there are only links so far, but I guess it's a start. The abridgement volumes seem quite well indexed and also there are some useful biographies by the abridgement editors, not present in the original volumes.) Terry0051 (talk) 12:13, 8 December 2009 (UTC)

Irish Times free online for two weeks

The Irish Times has been celebrating 150th anniversary of its first publication. The Irish Times Digital Archive will be free to access from November 30th to December 14th.

The Irish Times Archive found at http://www.irishtimes.com/search/index.html billinghurst (talk) 10:43, 2 December 2009 (UTC)

The embedded archive browser, while allowing one to browse an entire page, seems to restrict PDF downloads to individual articles only. This would make duplication on Wikisource and Commons tedious at best. --LarryGilbert (talk) 17:48, 3 December 2009 (UTC)

Modified version of gadget HotCat

With thanks to Phe's javascript skills (thanks mate), we have made a modification to the gadget HotCat so that it works better in the Index: namespace. Those who use it may need to go through reloading their cache. For relevant info see Commons:Help:Gadget-HotCat. billinghurst (talk) 02:58, 13 December 2009 (UTC)

Proposals

Mark as patrolled

I suggest that we make a change in the "Mark as patrolled" logic that will automatically "Mark as patrolled" when that edit has been reverted. I find a number of vandalism's that have been reverted but are still NOT "Mark as patrolled". Kind of a waste of patrolling when checking for un-patrolled edits if they have been reverted. Jeepday (talk) 01:00, 1 November 2009 (UTC)

If they are REVERTED by an admin using ROLLBACK, they are marked as patrolled. If someone uses UNDO, then they stay as are. Maybe this is the one reason why Rollbacker permission is useful. -- billinghurst (talk) 04:25, 1 November 2009 (UTC)

I noticed on a few occasions a "mark as patrolled" link next to my own edits, which doesn't make too much sense. Is this configurable, or has this to be adressed by the developers? Paradoctor (talk) 00:47, 18 December 2009 (UTC)

Unless you're running a sock farm, that's a bug. ;-) Hesperian 01:03, 18 December 2009 (UTC)

"That one, he knows too much."

Admins and those added to Autopatrolled list do not need to be patrolled and hence will never be so. Users are able to request they be added to the autopatrolled list, or admins often just do it when they are comfortable that a user has demonstrated that their edits in the range of namespaces is not problematic. I generally do that sort of review over a weekend when I have a little more time to be reflective over a range and history of edits. billinghurst (talk) 01:01, 18 December 2009 (UTC)

Thx for the info, I asked because I just can't resist clicking. ;) Paradoctor (talk) 01:34, 18 December 2009 (UTC)

Janitorial collaboration each month

Validation month is going excellently (and I say that as a reluctant WSer who hates pagescans with a passion), and it occurs to me we might want to do something similar in the future having a janitorial task in the site header each month, perhaps in December we could do pages that have {{numbers}} problems, in January we tackle {{refs}} problems, in February we focus on {{incomplete}} works and such. Again, to encourage participation, I think it helps when we have a list of the works that need fixing - and then strikethru them as they get done. Seems much more "rewarding" than simply removing the template from a work and knowing nobody will ever "see" your progress. Thoughts? Do we have room for one more "Collaboration"? Sherurcij ^{Collaboration of the Week: Author:Khwaja Kamal-ud-Din.} 05:53, 28 November 2009 (UTC)

After flicking through the history of pages at WhatLinksHere&target=Template%3ANumbers, the solution to this 'problem' would be to stop dumping uncorrected OCR into mainspace. Cygnis insignis (talk) 09:52, 28 November 2009 (UTC)

Excellent idea, and the solution to the 'problem' of incomplete texts is to stop abandoning works halfway through adding them. However, that is exactly why we have clean-up templates, because it's better for WS to have a badly formatted work that contains page numbers, than to not contain the work at all...but best of all to have the work and have it properly formatted. Sherurcij ^{Collaboration of the Week: Author:Thomas Carlyle.} 15:33, 28 November 2009 (UTC)

I am in favour of getting our house in order and improving our framework, though I do have a preference for pagescans as they seem the best means of robust validation. It was my intention to keep a list of documents (though smaller) needing validation and to add it to WS:PotM, and I was thinking of having it replace the previous list. Rather than a new venture, I think that they interchange well with(in) both CotW and PotM depending on what it is we are looking to fix. billinghurst (talk) 12:45, 28 November 2009 (UTC)

As a general pointer along these lines ... Hesperian has written a script that identifies validated works that have not been transcluded which outputs at User:Hesperian/V. People are welcome to grab any of these works and fix them, especially the long runs of pages. For those pages that should not/will not be transcluded I have been putting Category:Not transcluded and follow that link for some general info

Plus we also have Due's scripts at

• User:Bookofjude/headerless
• User:Bookofjude/authorless

billinghurst (talk) 04:51, 10 December 2009 (UTC)

Maybe something like w:Template:Active Wiki Fixup Projects that provides a list of house keeping projects, with links to pages describing the processes (i.e. w:Wikipedia:Unreferenced articles). JeepdaySock (talk) 11:50, 10 December 2009 (UTC)

Has benefit. billinghurst (talk) 08:44, 12 December 2009 (UTC)

• Category:Problematic
• Category:Works needing image cleanup for those who are good with images
• Category:Nonstandard_texts
• {{Migrate to djvu}}

Alternate_Account

After a short discussion at Wikisource:Administrator's_noticeboard#Alternate_Account I built Draft Wikisource:Alternate accounts, leveraged heavily from w:Wikipedia:Sock puppetry, (checked meta wiki but they don't have much posted m:Meta:Suspected sockpuppets) took out bunches that just does not apply here because we are not making anything new or trying to change the world. Jeepday (talk) 01:05, 5 December 2009 (UTC)

It says best practice. I would hope that we would be looking to apply this, rather than leave users to determine whether they wish to follow best practice. Either we need to upgrade it to something enforceable or we are looking to hold people to best practice. billinghurst (talk) 06:34, 5 December 2009 (UTC)

Removed "best practice" Jeepday (talk) 11:22, 5 December 2009 (UTC)

Phasing out the use of {{PD-old-70}}

As {{PD-old-70}} does not always indicate the US copyright license, I have extensively replaced them with tags specifying the US licenses, mostly {{Pd/1923}}. There are still about 100 pages at Category:PD-old-70 not yet re-tagged because I have not been able to tell when the works were published. Does anyone know how long British organizational copyright lasts? This is why I have not re-tagged many articles from The Times. If you know which US licenses apply to the remaining PD-old-70 works, please help re-tagging or propose moving to Canadian Wikilivres if no US license.--Jusjih (talk) 02:57, 5 December 2009 (UTC)

I don't think we can delete all of them; if we have a PD-US-no-renewal, we should probably have a PD-old-xx beside it, if possible, to make public domain status in Canada and Germany and possibly elsewhere clear.--Prosfilaes (talk) 03:21, 5 December 2009 (UTC)

This page by the UK Copyright service says: "If the author [of a literary work] is unknown, copyright will last for 70 years from end of the calendar year in which the work was created, although if it is made available to the public during that time, (by publication, authorised performance, broadcast, exhibition, etc.), then the duration will be 70 years from the end of the year that the work was first made available." I think the upshot is that there is no "organizational" copyright, only a copyright based on the author's lifetime, or if the author is unknown, the work's creation or publication date. (The chief exception is the perpetual Crown copyright.) --LarryGilbert (talk) 03:56, 5 December 2009 (UTC)

We have some further discussion at Wikisource talk:Newspapers#United Kingdombillinghurst (talk) 04:15, 5 December 2009 (UTC)

For Prosfilaes, it is now possible to enter authors' death years in {{PD-US-no-renewal}} and {{PD-US-no-notice}} to better serve those in countries and areas without the rule of the shorter term, like {{PD-US-no-notice|1950}} for relevant authors who died in 1950. Then PD-old-xx is no longer needed. For LarryGilbert, it may mean that The Times published since 1926 may have to go to Canadian Wikilivres because they were not in the public domain in the United Kingdom in 1996, then the USA copyrights for 95 years since publication til year end. Golan v. Holder in April 2009 got an unconstitutional ruling against URAA copyright restoration of non-US works based on the speech freedom in the First Amendment of the US Constitution. A federal district court ruling is not automatically binding nationwide, so I prefer to err on the side of caution until no more appeal is possible.--Jusjih (talk) 02:20, 6 December 2009 (UTC)

I'm glad to hear of Jusjih's latest improvement in his series of improvements of the templates to facilitate placing the p.m.a countries' info on nearly every template. But this is odd: Jusjih and I both started a discussion about the London Times obituaries' copyrights independently of one another on the same day. I was doing routine license cleanup from Category:Works with no license template and picked the London Times very much at random. I hadn't seen the discussion he started here about 12 hours earlier. My first impression is that I understand there are two Golan cases, and at least one of them only applied to entities that had profited from these formerly U.S. public domain works. ResScholar (talk) 09:49, 6 December 2009 (UTC)

There's one Golan case, thought it's bounced up and down the court system, and while the court find in favor of the plaintiffs (loosely speaking "our" side), there haven't been remedies handed down yet (I think; I can't find anything here more recent than April), but most interpretations of what the Judge said are that any remedies are only going to cover people who had used these works prior to 1996.--Prosfilaes (talk) 16:10, 6 December 2009 (UTC)

Okay, the other issue that came to mind was whether each London Times page, obituary or otherwise, needed a separate copyright notice describing copyright status in p.m.a. countries, giving the year of publication each time [on each page] (Billinghurst did many of the pages, and he expressed a desire to see some kind of notice regarding non-US countries).

I don't think so. Let me bring up the PD-US-no-renewal template to illustrate.

The paragraph would have to be altered to make the description of the copyright include not only terms beginning with p.m.a. but those beginning with date of publication, or a whole new template would need to be produced. (*clarification: these Times articles would need to measure their terms of copyright starting with the date of publication because that is how the lengths of copyrights for anonymous works are measured in the U.K. 07:20, 7 December 2009 (UTC))

Or we could do a minor modification to PD-US-no-renewal and not give quite as much information.

We could add the last sentence and the link from the PD-1923 template, without adding a cumbersome qualification or a new specialized template. We could expand on Jusjih's work and make the sentence appear through a conditional statement in the template, by typing 0 for the year, for example. And it could be placed on the main page and apply to all the sub-pages.

ResScholar (talk) 02:16, 7 December 2009 (UTC)

Extension of remarks: I wanted to include more than that sentence from the template, but in the middle of typing my note I lost track of what I wanted to include. I found more that I would now wish to include even if it's not exactly the same as what I had originally intended. There is a sentence that appears in the PD-1923 template on author pages that explains copyright status further:

It may be copyrighted outside the U.S. (see Help:Public domain) "However, works published before 1923 may be in the public domain in countries where they would ordinarily be copyrighted (due to the term of 70 years [or less] after the author's death having not yet expired) but whose legislature has waived copyright by accepting the rule of the shorter term)."

These explanations (tangentially) mention the p.m.a. concept to those completely unaware of it, as well as its prominent exception, and, of course, they can learn more through the "Help:Public Domain" link. (By the way, this old explanation from an old template glosses over Columbia, Guatemala and Honduras, which have terms of 80, 75 and 75 years p.m.a., respectively, and so also have pre-1923 works that have not yet expired—another clarification for which we have Jusjih to thank because he introduced it in his "Pd/1923" template.)

As I said, this default, generic message could be added to the template when a trigger year of 0 is used, with the intention of providing an expanded use of an existing template for a "collection" of works by the same author (or corporate author in this case) with works published during a variety of years. ResScholar (talk) 06:24, 7 December 2009 (UTC) 07:20, 7 December 2009 (UTC)

We have {{PD-anon-1923}} and {{PD-anon-1996}} for anonymous and pseudonymous works. As {{PD-US-no-notice-post-1977}}, {{PD-US-no-notice}}, and {{PD-US-no-renewal}} are retrofitted to enter authors' death years when they will expand on the bottom, it may be possible to create a parameter for publication years. I prefer to see these the last three tags limited to works published within the USA. For the latest ruling of Golan v. Holder on April 3, 2009, Judge Babcock ruled in the conclusion [2]: "Congress has a legitimate interest in complying with the terms of the Berne Convention. The Berne Convention, however, affords each member nation discretion to restore the copyrights of foreign authors in a manner consistent with that member nation’s own body of copyright law. In the United States, that body of law includes the bedrock principle that works in the public domain remain in the public domain. ......" The USA does not copyright foreign works published through 1922 even if still copyright-restricted at home, so if we want a new tag based on the latest ruling of Golan v. Holder on April 3, 2009, I can make something like PD-2009, but I just want to know whether doing it is wise now.--Jusjih (talk) 21:13, 13 December 2009 (UTC)

I am also moving Wikisource:Possible_copyright_violations#Golan_v._Gonzalez to this page to catch more attention.--Jusjih (talk) 22:00, 13 December 2009 (UTC)

Remove Anglo-Saxon IW from main page

Since the Anglo-Saxon WS has been closed, and all the works, presumably, have been moved here, shouldn't we take the IW off the front page? It's a little confusing, especially as it's the very top one on the list.--Prosfilaes (talk) 23:42, 9 December 2009 (UTC)

Done, and I will seek forgiveness later if need be. ;-) 04:00, 10 December 2009 (UTC)

Experimental tool for copyright advice

I've been experimenting with a Web application called OpenExpert to see how feasible it is to create a simple expert system for advice on whether a work is still copyrighted. I've been basing its questions on info from the Cornell copyright page. It's on an open-access demo server right now, but if enough people like it and think it should stick around, I could see about grabbing the software and putting it up somewhere more permanent. See what you think. --LarryGilbert (talk) 18:36, 15 December 2009 (UTC)

This is an excellent idea... but it needs some serious disclaimers. Hesperian 01:05, 16 December 2009 (UTC)

Questions

Index page without and with Table of Contents

index without TOC and with TOC, can we remove the blank column when adding a TOC? Or should we use a layout similar to fr:Livre:Bulletin_de_la_société_géologique_de_France_-_Tome_1.djvu (layout provided by MediaWiki:Proofreadpage index template) Phe (talk) 10:20, 7 October 2009 (UTC)

I very much prefer the layout at fr:Livre:Bulletin de la société géologique de France - Tome 1.djvu, which wastes much less screen real estate. But I do not think it can be implemented here without further editing our own copy of MediaWiki:Proofreadpage index template, which I am personally nervous about doing. Tarmstro99 (talk) 14:15, 19 November 2009 (UTC)

I'm comfortable with the idea, and I even looked at doing it, then ran away as it is a maze of coding in which some familiarity was required. billinghurst (talk) 04:06, 10 December 2009 (UTC)

There being no negative comment or other opinion, I have implemented the suggested change (with some coding help). here billinghurst (talk) 13:40, 12 December 2009 (UTC)

Having sat with it for a few days, I find I like the old version much much better. This is especially the case for index pages with not content data: the new version gives me a big white square of unused prime real estate, and then I have to scroll down to see the page list. See, for example, Index:The library a magazine of bibliography and library literature, Volume 6.djvu :-( Hesperian 02:11, 17 December 2009 (UTC)

I would think that we would be encouraging (at minimum) for Contents to be transcluded, either the Page:(s) where they exist, or one prepared for navigation. I had thought that this was part of the general discussion. billinghurst (talk) 07:10, 17 December 2009 (UTC)

ye

Has anyone ever see the rendering of "ye" in the image caption of Page:Makers of British botany.djvu/83 before? The plate is a reproduction of a figure from a 1683 book. Presumably this is an archaic rendering? Does anyone know if it is possible to reproduce it in wikicode/html/css/whatever, or is my "y^e" the best I can hope for? Hesperian 07:41, 21 October 2009 (UTC)

Interested in the answer as I have seen similar overlay with the with the abbreviation for Number where the o was superscript and the period centred directly underneath.-- billinghurst (talk) 09:02, 21 October 2009 (UTC)

Like "Nọ? Eclecticology - the offended (talk) 22:36, 21 October 2009 (UTC)

w:Thorn (letter) covers the ground of these variants, but uses an image to reproduce this one with the e on top. Charles Matthews (talk) 09:51, 21 October 2009 (UTC)

You might be able to find one in unicode. [3] —Dark ^talk 10:34, 21 October 2009 (UTC)

I just use a normal looking 'ye' because I haven't found a good alternative, and the positioning of the 'e' isn't really that important. But I wouldn't use an image for any portion of non-symbolic text because readers would not be able to copy and paste that portion of text. Special symbols could be images if needed. —Mike 02:25, 27 October 2009 (UTC)

I heard a clamor. What seems to be ye problem? ;) Paradoctor (talk) 02:12, 5 December 2009 (UTC)

Wikimedia Strategy

Hi, good people of Wikisource.

I've come over from strategy.wikimedia.org. We're interested to know two things about how you work here on Wikisource.

First, do you have any competitions? On en:wp there are quite a few different competitions that seem to help motivate editors to do good work and more of it.

Here's an example:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:CUP

More can be found at:

http://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Editor_awards_and_rewards#Contests

Does Wikisource run anything like that?

Also on en:wp there are a number of WikiProjects which help editors to bond as smaller communities within the larger one.

Here's an example:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Military_history

More can be found at:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WIKIPROJECT

Can you point to any sort of sub-communities within Wikisource which help editors bond as a smaller group within the project as a whole?

Answers to these questions will be valuable to us as we work on Wikimedia Strategy. I will be grateful for any information you can provide. --Bodnotbod (talk) 18:18, 25 November 2009 (UTC)

I've located these groups:

• Wikisource:Collaboration of the Week
• Main page highlights new texts and Feature text.
• Wikisource:Proofread of the Month and recently every participant gets recognition for participating each month, eg. User:Mattwj2002 no matter how large, or how small. This month we had 8 newbies participate on the project, and it is a great way to learn the ropes.

Can anyone think of any more? FloNight (talk) 18:51, 25 November 2009 (UTC)

Noting that we are a smaller community, so we are able to more closely manage matters wholistically with a smaller group of volunteers/admins, we are at that point of close working relationship, and assisting editors in their parts or in the whole. It seems to be working well as disputes are not prevalent here, and newbies seem to feel welcomed, and work progresses. At this time we are more collegiate than competitive, even across the languages of WS there is a level of cooperation.

Pretty easy ... We have our customised {{welcome}} aiming to get all our new users. And that covers general welcome, our special projects, and our Wikisource:WikiProjects. Apart from the customised welcome, because we have auto-patrolling, each visitor is essentially assisted to our methods & means; given guidance and assistance in joining our projects or assistance with their works of interest to our standardised format.

We have been working quite productively on Wikisource:WikiProject DNB in recent times, making progressive jumps and getting quite productive in getting more source and crosslinks with information to Wikipedia. billinghurst (talk) 02:09, 26 November 2009 (UTC)

Wikisource:WikiProject DNB is an excellent example of collaboration project here. I'll add it to our list. The people working on the strategic planning wiki and focusing on the community health of wikis are brainstorming about the different ways that the the local wikis and the Foundation might be more helpful in making collaborative projects work better. My general observation is that the success of most of these projects (on all wikis) is driven by the people that start them. And too often if the people organizing them get busy or loss interest then the project stop. It would great if we could find a way to get enough momentum behind them that they don't cease to exist. FloNight (talk) 08:26, 26 November 2009 (UTC)

The DNB project here is "twinned" in a cross-wiki way with the one on enWP, w:Wikipedia:WikiProject Missing encyclopedic articles/DNB. This was quite deliberately done (the part on WP is technically a subproject of a bigger WikiProject, but still). I'm not aware of other examples of twin projects of this kind, but it would be interesting to know more. Charles Matthews (talk) 08:43, 26 November 2009 (UTC)

Interesting. I'll note the the cross wiki aspect of the project. This adds a way to bring more people in to work on it on both wikis. FloNight (talk) 09:03, 26 November 2009 (UTC)

[outdent]

sometimes it is about branding; sometimes it is about critical mass. I like the work of biographical works as they are directly related to the crux of putting referenced works onto WP. Similarly, the pairing of other works where the original content is at WS and the encyclopædic article is at WP. There is the scope for a Poetry project. Similarly some of the history projects could do well to consider housing relevant texts at WS, or vice versa we let specific projects know that a work exists, eg. the PotM work Notes on the churches in the counties of Kent, Sussex, and Surrey is relevant to the projects on those three counties of the UK. Though often requires good means to provide ready references (special templates per work) from WP to WS. billinghurst (talk) 10:49, 26 November 2009 (UTC)

Golly, it looks like we're going to end up presenting ourselves as a community rich in structured collaborations, where in fact the opposite is true. My personal view is that our low community overhead is an ingredient in our success. We're not running around tagging talk pages into projects, arguing best practice across a range of style manuals, running competitions and dishing out barnstars left right and centre. We're just getting on with the job. Maybe the strategy dudes need to be hearing this, rather than an enumeration of the occasional collaborative effort. Hesperian 11:14, 26 November 2009 (UTC)

Data shows that Wikimedia wikis, including Wikisource, are not retaining editors as well as they could. See data. The ideas is to identify what motivates people to contribute to wikis so that we can do a better job of keeping people interested in editing. Research studies show that positive recognition of contributions of volunteers is a way to retain volunteers. Or course people that don't want to participate in Wikiprojects don't need to get involved in them. But there is some indication that these Projects do encourage content creation and give satisfaction to people involved with them. For the most part, instead of inventing loads of new projects or processes under the Strategic Planning process, I think we should support and expand the existing ones. That is the reason that I want to collect the information about the current projects on the various wiki. FloNight (talk) 12:29, 26 November 2009 (UTC)

I thank Hesperian for his comment, we need to hear precisely what people are thinking; any input is marvellous. To address points raised or implied by Hesperian: the primary aim of any sort of contest must be that it improves the content of the project. If a contest isn't doing that it is cruft. Some contests on en:wp have been very good at increasing the quality of articles and encouraging people to provide great pictures. Essentially, where something works well we want to think how we can support that. But if a project says "we don't run contests because x, y and z" then that's all taken to heart too.

In terms of creating sub-communities, some projects have quite a small population as it is. They likely don't need additional ways of bringing people together because the primary editors are already well aware of each other. On Wikibooks the fact that each book has a tendency to be a community of its own likely means that sub-communities occur naturally there. It is more of an issue in en:wp where there is an increasing atmosphere of hostility; newbies are becoming increasingly alienated by harsh treatment when they make their first edits. On a smaller project people may be treated much more kindly. So it is worth considering if introducing sub-communities to en:wp might engender a bit more kindness and give newbies a way in where they will be given a helping hand. Wikisource may not require anything like that and that's what I'm here to find out. --Bodnotbod (talk) 14:18, 26 November 2009 (UTC)

I'm not sure I interpret that graph the same way, Flonight. For most of the projects there, including Wikisource, they're keeping the number of editors about stable, which is what we'd expect in the long run. But as for Hesperian's comment, part of what causes me to take time from Distributed Proofreaders for here is that fact that I can do things so much quicker and flexibly here; I can type in Alice's Adventures in Cambridge, without fighting about page scans and images, and it will get done sooner than through DP. But the dark mirror of that is that projects that are created in DP are inexorably drawn towards a complete, well-proofread end, whereas here, there's too many projects that are started and sit in limbo indefinitely. At least personally, any project that encourages the completion of projects, especially validation of them, would make me feel more happy about spending my time here.--Prosfilaes (talk) 15:09, 26 November 2009 (UTC)

And to put it terms of community, we do a lot of individual projects; more group validation and the like, and more emphasis on it, would help reduce the feeling like everything was one-man projects.--Prosfilaes (talk) 15:14, 26 November 2009 (UTC)

What Hesperian said! & What Prosfilaes said! Very nice! They are both right, and that is very much how are little patch is successful, and pretty much without the bickering. Common goals, no particular savage ego, though our subject matter lends less to content disputes. Noting also why we had the suggestion for November WS:PotM, and in some ways it success.

One reason recently for our combined efforts is work of ThomasV on his valuable Proofread Page extension that has allowed us to add further rigour to our work, and is very much a joint tool, and one that is very supportive of how we can do our work to a consistent quality and cooperatively by allowing us to move in a direction and to lift our standards, do note however that getting such extensions into place in the Mediawiki upgrade regime is becoming problematic. Being able to look to how there is a smoother and more time efficient process to get valuable extensions in place through the rigamarole would be sweet!

For our project it often varies on why people are here

• Some to produce a quality product of the work as a meritable work that deserves sharing
• Some to exhibit the opus of works of a specific person
• Some to bring an old text out for modern reading
• Some as source material for other places/projects, especially WP.

All can lend themselves to projects, though the character of each project relates to the commonality of the goals. Each will have its own quirks and each has a different level of requirement for support.

The issue about projects is that they need administrative support, and at WS, many of us want to get on with the transcribing and reproducing the work, not sit back with the less glamorous (boring?) components. So some of the thing that would be helpful for us are (quick brain dump) into the start of a wishlist. billinghurst (talk) 21:12, 26 November 2009 (UTC)

Wishlist

1. Getting our help and support pages into a applicable framework
2. Assistance in standardisation of some of our templates
3. A search engine that gives us better results, and part of this may also be assistance with good meta data management
4. Finding some vols who love the process of organisation
5. A means outside of enWS to exhibit some of our projects for wider consumption

I've noted this list, and will consider it as I write recommendations for the Strategic Planning task force about ways that the Foundation can help wikis do these type of things. FloNight (talk) 07:53, 6 December 2009 (UTC)

My wishlist, which has been discussed on IRC with a few other members over the past year, would be for WMF to allow us to keep hard copies of certain texts at their office. If they'd pay for shipping for one book a month or so, even better. We're still organising a group of volunteers who have all pledged money to purchase rare and unique texts off eBay and such...but would really like to know the hard copies end up somewhere as well. Sherurcij ^{Collaboration of the Week: Author:Thomas Carlyle.} 08:30, 6 December 2009 (UTC)

Copyright notices for Gutenberg?

Can anyone tell me what copyright notices are required for a Gutenberg text posted in Wikisource? In particular, I began to insert de Maupassant's novel [[Bel Ami] Ineuw (talk) 19:06, 26 November 2009 (UTC)

That it is a Gutenberg text is irrelevant as they cannot own the copyright for transcribing a work (no intellectual property rights). The copyright tag will be what is relevant to apply to the author. You might attribute the source as being from Gutenberg in the Notes, alternatively on the talk page using {{textinfo}}. billinghurst (talk) 20:38, 26 November 2009 (UTC)

Billinghurst, thanks for the clarification. — Ineuw (talk) 14:40, 27 November 2009 (UTC)

Quran translations in 40 languages

Guys, I found something awesome on the Internet Archive it is still being proceed by the Internet Archive. So far it has been processing almost a month. It is the Quran in 40 languages. The link can be found here. It will take a long while before we have all of the DJVU files, but when we do we will have the Quran on a bunch of wikis. Anyways, what do you guys think? --Mattwj2002 (talk) 09:25, 28 November 2009 (UTC)

That's interesting, although there are two issues: the name of the translators are not mentioned (I think it is important in this case), and I am a bit suspicious about the neutrality of the translation when it is promoted by the Saoudi government. I feel the same about the Bible's translation distributed by the Jehovah Witnesses, as an example (see w:Criticism of Jehovah's Witnesses#Biblical criticisms). Yann (talk) 10:20, 28 November 2009 (UTC)

For what it's worth, most modern translations you'll find of the Quran are distributed by the Saudi government; it's a huge deal for them, and the vast majority of (North American) Muslims will use it as their English copy without any concern over accuracy. In part this is because there are no blatant differences between it and other translations, and in part because it's part of the religion that any translation is flawed and not to be trusted, only as a "primer" until you can learn the Arabic original. I wouldn't worry too much about the Saudi aspect as we'd certainly mention it in the header text, just so long as the copyright license is acceptable. Sherurcij ^{Collaboration of the Week: Author:Thomas Carlyle.} 16:05, 28 November 2009 (UTC)

That can be true. But the second question is what the Wikisource thinks about it and if the Wikisource is like to accept possible uncorrectness in the translations. I cannot compare it. -jkb- (talk) 09:20, 29 November 2009 (UTC)

As long as it is a published translation, we will accept it even when it is known to be incorrect. For the same reason we don't reject 19th century encyclopedias for bias. It is what it is, just make sure the origin of of the translation is accurately labeled. Copyright is a more likely concern.--BirgitteSB 03:40, 6 December 2009 (UTC)

Standard suite/Wikisource-specific

Right at the end of the "standard suite/wikisource-specific" menu below the editing box we find <section begin= /> <section end= />. My question is about the underlining, meaning that each of these falls into three parts. Is this as intended? Generally tags are paired up so that you click once to get the open and close parts together. Charles Matthews (talk) 11:37, 29 November 2009 (UTC)

My incompetence in being unable to get the right coding (as per a talk page somewhere I admitted my uselessness), and the file is differently configured than at WP. In the end, I cheated and simply added them to my monobook.js file and they appear as toolbar buttons. Saved scrolling so is better for me.billinghurst (talk) 11:53, 29 November 2009 (UTC)

I've changed it so that the open & close are each a tag, and will leave the cursor in the name parameter. -Steve Sanbeg (talk) 23:54, 29 November 2009 (UTC)

• Isn't the normal pairing of such tags because you then want to type your information between the pair? However with these tags there should generally be a page full of text already. So if they are paired you will have to insert them both in the correct location for "begin" and now have to cut and paste the end part to its correct location. Or cut and paste the text that should be between them. At least that is how I remeber using them, and I could be missing something.--BirgitteSB 00:27, 1 December 2009 (UTC)

Yes and no, as the section tags need to be specifically labelled, putting in surrounding tags for a block of text means that you have to go back and label each individually. For section, I type the tag name, and copy it to clipboard, add the section begin tag, then add section end tag and paste in the corresponding section name.

I don't mind whether "begin" and "end" are in the same unit or not: but the situation was of six separate units, which wasn't very useful. Charles Matthews (talk) 13:13, 1 December 2009 (UTC)

Yep, my gooby. I have been rescued! billinghurst (talk) 11:15, 2 December 2009 (UTC)

You can highlight text and click a button to format it, so you can avoid some of the cut & pasting that way. But these aren't really paired tags in the usual sense, since the software doesn't support nested tags, so if the open and close were one element, then you'd need to type in the name in both places. Currently, if you highlight something and click the link, it'd format as <section begin="something"/>-Steve Sanbeg (talk) 16:48, 3 December 2009 (UTC)

10 Volumes of Photographic History of the Civil War

Hi guys, I was thinking about adding these 10 Volumes of Photographic History of the Civil War to Wikisource and the Commons. I think they are 10 great volumes for Wikisource and the Commons seems excited because of all of the old photographs. These books are filled with Civil War photographs that are all public domain because the book was published in 1911 in New York. Anyways, I just thought I would mention I am going to work on these volumes. Here is some links to the volumes:

The Photographic History of the Civil War Volume 1

The Photographic History of the Civil War Volume 2

The Photographic History of the Civil War Volume 3

The Photographic History of the Civil War Volume 4

The Photographic History of the Civil War Volume 5

The Photographic History of the Civil War Volume 6

The Photographic History of the Civil War Volume 7

The Photographic History of the Civil War Volume 8

The Photographic History of the Civil War Volume 9

The Photographic History of the Civil War Volume 10

Please let me know what you think. --Mattwj2002 (talk) 06:59, 3 December 2009 (UTC)

Looks like a really interesting project. Hesperian 07:00, 3 December 2009 (UTC)

I'd love to tackle the Commons-side categorization. If you upload with Commonist, just create a category for Category:The Photographic History of the Civil War and don't worry about categorising the images beyond that. I'll check in on the category and handle subcategorising all the images so they can be properly used on WP and other projects. Can probably harass me to handle whichever volume has Gettysburg as well - since I visited there a year ago and loved reading about the history. Sherurcij ^{Collaboration of the Week: Author:Thomas Carlyle.} 07:22, 3 December 2009 (UTC)

119 Files are already uploaded, the images are great and categorization is really needed. Check the categories--Diaa abdelmoneim (talk) 13:34, 18 December 2009 (UTC)

The djvu file should contain the text, if we get those we can add the jpg files to page space via an Index. I would like to see these volumes at Source. Cygnis insignis (talk) 14:05, 18 December 2009 (UTC)

Bibliographies?

Are annotated bibliographies ok? I'm currently proofreading a transcription of this work, and would like to put it up here. Regards, Paradoctor (talk) 18:22, 3 December 2009 (UTC)

If it is a published work that is in the public domain, then you are in the right place. If the annotations are part of the original work, then they are totally okay. If the annotations are yours, then they would not belong in the body of the work, and we would need to have a discussion on whether annotations were to go the talk page, subpage(s), or as transcriber footnotes.

After a quick look at the work, I would like to point you towards .djvu files and also to have a look at our proofreading schema. Doing some more work on the files and having them beefed up at Commons, saves a lot of work at this end. billinghurst (talk) 20:57, 3 December 2009 (UTC)

Sorry, should have been more precise: My concern is WS:WWI#Reference_material, as bibliographies are basically that, lists. DjVu preferred? No problem, I created my first 700-page PDF in 2003, I believe. ;) Paradoctor (talk) 21:46, 3 December 2009 (UTC)

"unless it is published as part of a complete source text." would hold. As long as it was published as a book, nobody is going to have a problem with it.--Prosfilaes (talk) 02:51, 4 December 2009 (UTC)

Even if the part is the whole? Logically speaking, I see no problem either, but when I start thinking logically, people usually start complaining. ^_^ Ok, thanks for the confirmation, with a little luck, Djvu and transcription should be up by Saturday. Regards, Paradoctor (talk) 03:50, 4 December 2009 (UTC)

I think you are fine as this seems to be a discreet publication. The problem was in the past when there were things like a list of prime numbers or pi to X decimal points. It was argued that such reference material was published in the appendix page of some book, but there was no intention of adding the book. This was before ProofreadPage so we were not using files like we do now. We could probably change the rule into requiring the use of ProofPage without much fuss. The biggest problem with this stuff was that it would be edited to change a few numbers and no one active here had a clue if this edit corrected an error or inserted one. As it was all equally meaningless numbers to our eyes, we didn't feel we were able to maintain it to a minimum level of quality.--BirgitteSB 03:26, 6 December 2009 (UTC)

There is a copyright problem. Several entries are copies from "Scientific Abstracts", probably still copyrighted. /Pieter Kuiper (talk) 00:17, 18 December 2009 (UTC)

As stated, this can be solved in case there really is a problem. Paradoctor (talk) 00:30, 18 December 2009 (UTC)

Request for usurp User Myst

Hello, I'm Myst on the French Wikipedia, and i want to usurpt User:Myst to complete my SUL. Thanks. 90.48.15.203 22:07, 3 December 2009 (UTC)

This will need to be asked at Wikisource:Administrator's noticeboard#Bureaucrats if you expect some action. billinghurst (talk) 03:06, 4 December 2009 (UTC)

Inclusion question

Do state laws in the United States, such as the ones that can be looked up here, meet the guidelines for inclusion? I found the guidelines a bit hazy when I read through them (probably because of my being used to Wikipedia's notability guidelines, which I can't tell if you have here). Ks0stm (talk) 05:30, 7 December 2009 (UTC)

See WS:IO; in this case, 1) PUBLISHED and 2) IN THE PUBLIC DOMAIN would be sufficient to meet WS criteria. billinghurst (talk) 06:35, 7 December 2009 (UTC)

And for the record, Wikisource has no notability guideline; if it's published and in the public domain, or is otherwise of historical note, and it is a "work" (not a collation of information, a list of numbers, or a table of data with no accompanying text) we will accept it. Our inclusion guideline instead takes the place of a notability guideline, and it has specific details of what is acceptable and what is not. Jude (talk) 07:08, 7 December 2009 (UTC)

Also for the record, state laws are in the public domain in the US as "edicts of government" (and can be tagged {{PD-EdictGov}}). See § 206.01 of the Compendium II: Copyright Office Practices: "Edicts of government, such as judicial opinions, administrative rulings, legislative enactments, public ordinances, and similar official legal documents are not copyrightable for reasons of public policy. This applies to such works whether they are Federal, State, or local as well as to those of foreign governments.". - Htonl (talk) 15:04, 7 December 2009 (UTC)

The only state that specifically places most of the works from all three branches of its State government into the Public Domain is California.
FWIW... use THIS as a guide - it is a bit dated but has been dead on for me in the few instances where this has come up. George Orwell III (talk) 19:40, 10 December 2009 (UTC)

California may be the only state to expressly disclaim copyright in its works, but that is not the end of the matter, since labeling something copyrighted doesn’t make it so. Although the issue does not come up frequently, the majority view (reflected by the Copyright Office policy statement quoted above) is that state governments cannot hold copyright in (at a minimum) their statutes or judicial opinions. The most in-depth contemporary discussion I am aware of is Veeck v. Southern Building Code Congress Int'l, Inc., which concluded that copyright protection for a privately authored model building code evaporated when two Texas municipalities adopted the provisions of the model code, verbatim, as their local municipal law. Veeck is only a circuit court opinion, so it isn’t binding nationwide, but its reasoning seems to track older Supreme Court cases pretty closely. That doesn’t prevent state governments from falsely claiming copyright protection in statutes or other legal materials (as the State of Oregon famously did last year, before retreating in the face of public opposition), but it does suggest that claims of that sort stand on an extremely shaky legal foundation. Tarmstro99 (talk) 20:23, 10 December 2009 (UTC)

Until I see a real legal citation where the internal, woefully outdated, now nearly abandoned Copyright Office manual born in 1973 is indeed given some sort of legal standing or recognition - I do not feel comfortaable following that line of reasoning/notion. Your points and citations are well taken here but I believe each state has its own set of issues (Florida comes to mind) and therefore applying the Federal protection in such a sweeping way to individual states is not so simple. Kansas is not Texas nor is it Oregon and I believe that is the state (or statutues?) in question. I'm not saying I'm right - just that more proof would be better to present, vet and then cite when this comes up again. George Orwell III (talk) 22:03, 10 December 2009 (UTC)

The issue is not often litigated, for better or worse—it is probably just as well that the states, Oregon excepted, have expressed no discomfort with making their statutes more broadly accessible online and have not raced off to court to prevent it. In consequence, we may all be waiting quite a while for a better precedent than Veeck (and the cases upon which it relied). Note also, however, that when it comes to copyright law, state-by-state variation is no longer relevant—that is the meaning of Section 301(a), which abolished state copyright law (with vanishingly few exceptions, such as pre-1972 sound recordings). Congress was quite clear about this: “All corresponding State laws, whether common law or statutory, are preempted and abrogated” by the 1976 Copyright Act. When measuring the extent of federal copyright protection, in other words, Kansas and Texas really do not stand in a different position from Oregon and California; any differences in their local laws are immaterial to the single federal scheme of copyright protection that Congress created in 1976. Tarmstro99 (talk) 22:32, 10 December 2009 (UTC)

The HOUSE is only HALF of Congress. A Conference Report trumps all the Committee Reports before it. Sorry, I'm confused. Following that line of reasoning would then mean only the Dept of Commerce wouldn't have been precluded from securing copyright protrction rather than every Federal Agency in Sec. 105? (yes I understand - Sec. 301 opted for the House language in the passed language anyway if I read it right).
So whatever in blazes was in question originally does/does not fall under 106 (102, 103)? George Orwell III (talk) 00:03, 11 December 2009 (UTC)

One of my favorite copyright lawyers discusses the issue here. Cases cited are Banks & Bros. v. West Pub. Co., 27 F. 50 (C.C.D. Minn. 1886) and Veeck v. Southern Building Code Congress International, Inc., 293 F.3d 791 (5th Cir. 2002).--BirgitteSB 18:22, 11 December 2009 (UTC)

BTW California disclaims copyright on ALL works created by the stare, not merely the statues. For example if the CA Board of Agriculture prints a flier to distribute to homeowners on dealing with Japanese Beetles in their gardens it is public domain. We are only saying that actual statutes enacted by other states are public domain, not every single work produced by state employees.--BirgitteSB 18:30, 11 December 2009 (UTC)

Just to add a couple more points on this: note that the exact same language that I quoted above appears in the Senate report on the same legislation (“All corresponding State laws, whether common law or statutory, are preempted and abrogated”), so this is not a case where the House and Senate differed in their understanding of the bill before them. (And Bill Patry is one of my favorite copyright lawyers, too! My own take on the Oregon case (which generally jibes with his) is here.) Tarmstro99 (talk) 02:08, 12 December 2009 (UTC)

← While I can appreciate the significance of the Veck case - I don't see how it can be applied across all 50 states by simple association. Somewhere, the idea was injected that States are trying to claim protection using some state statute to usurp Federal law rather than under Title 17 as all 'authors' are entitled to. The problem lies (I believe) in those instances where either copyright is clearly claimed on the State's website, within the State's publication itself or by the entity responsible for compiling/publishing/hosting that area of State records or whatever (New Mexico for example). In most of these cases, the claim is Not that the work does not belong to the public and authorship some how precludes the public from access to it but that the terms of it's use clearly shows the work is intended for each individual exclusively and not for re-use in such a medium as WS. Kansas, for example, states in their disclaimer. . .

I just don't understand why the trigger (a claim of copyright was clearly given ©) and that's why certain works generally falling under some area of government could not be hosted here in some instances but the same litmus test does not apply in this case or anything else regarding Non-Federal governments.

Moving back to covered ground, previous discussions basically reasoned that only works that had to do with recognized legal proceedings (Judicial) or statutes, slip laws, session laws, etc. (Legislative) qualified for hosting here based on what some internal Copyright Office manual had outlined in spite of the lack of this outline being cited as having any legal standing or binding effect whatsoever by a court of law or even via some regulatory code. This meant that works by "individuals" who happen to be an Officer of one of the branches of government (Governor, Justice, Senator, Judge, President, etc) that were in the form of an interview, a speech, an initiative etc. do not meet the threshold set by said internal Copyright Office manual. This notion is claimed to be a sound trigger for meeting WS standards for hosting and the reasoning given (generally) follows such citations as. . .

Ok fine - Court Cases, the Decisions, individual Opinions cannot be copyrighted because, at the end of the day, doing so is contrary to "sound public policy" or simply part of anybody serving within Judiciary's normal job if you like. Obviously the finished product of the legislative branch (passed legislation) cannot be copyrighted and, by extension, the discourse and debate, interim reports, and any other body of work delivered in a fixed medium during the process that eventually got the legislation passed, such as an interim House Committee on the Judiciary report or the floor statements made during consideration, also enjoy the exclusion from the claim to copyright following the same logic as the Judiciary's.

Yet, when it comes to works by the Executive or entities of the Executive Branch, the above reasoning does not apply, the trigger for acceptable hosting becomes mobile and that little 'c' with the circle around it matters most of all. In some instances even, Senators aren't Senators all of the sudden when they a give speech, aren't working to insure sound public policy (as they interpret it) and so that too does not meet the WS criteria. Am I missing something? George Orwell III (talk) 21:32, 11 December 2009 (UTC)

An aside here: note that Veeck merely applied some (admittedly much older) Supreme Court cases, which remain binding nationwide until reversed by that Court. So it is not entirely correct to state that Veeck carries no force outside Texas, Louisiana, and Mississippi. The Supreme Court has stated that judicial opinions cannot be copyrighted, and its reasoning would appear to extend equally to statutory law (indeed, the Supreme Court based its reasoning in part on earlier cases holding statutes to be public domain). Tarmstro99 (talk) 02:08, 12 December 2009 (UTC)

I do not or did not disagree wth that. What did the post-1978 Federal law excluding any implied or existing state laws have to do with this again? Who was trying to usurp Title 17's exclusions or protections by instead claiming some local statute exactly - Texas, Veeck or SBCCI? George Orwell III (talk) 03:52, 12 December 2009 (UTC)

I am not sure if I follow you entirely. What exactly do you mean by "works of the Executive or entities of the Executive Branch"? It is a broad enough category that I imagine it contains both copyrightable works and administrative rulings which are uncopyrightable. The original question here seemed to be about legislative documents, so I am not sure what sorts of documents that you imagine we disagree about.--BirgitteSB 21:50, 11 December 2009 (UTC)

Forgive me for being so unclear; I don't know how to lump the various works under one overall category that makes sense. Basically, these are works most recently booted/debated such as Sarah Palin's resignation speech or the Obama interview with Matt Lauer for example. I have yet to understand how on the one hand, say the questioning of attorneys by a Justice of the Supreme Court during legal proceedings resulting in recorded testimony (OK) differs from a news reporters interview of the President of the United States questioning his policy position(s) (not OK) or how the opinions and/or interpretations of ruling Judges, the floor statements, party platforms or committee reports generated by members of a legislative branch (OK) differ from policy statements, political speeches or press conferences given by the governor of some state (not OK). If the "rule of thumb" here is

. . . works of the U.S. Government, defined in the law as works prepared by an officer or employee of the U.S. Government as part of that person's official duties, are not copyrightable. This provision applies to such works whether they are edicts of government or otherwise. . .
− § 206.02 of the Compendium II: Copyright Office Practices apparently the 1984 version

further expanded by mutual consensus here to include like works generated by State or Local level kindred counterparts found in the Federal Government (President = Governor = Mayor in short) then I don't understand the recent application or criteria applied and need a review or something to clarify the standards for inclusion on WS I guess.

Re Claim of Copyright: Nearly all public domain works online are claimed as copyrighted in the terms of use for the website. Even Wikisource has blanket claim of the CC-by-SA license there. Terms of use are simply not written in a granular way. The only fully accurate TOS I ever remember reading regarding the copyright of hosted works is sacred-texts. Most everyone just writes a blanket claim of the copyright of the most restricted work in the entire website for the TOS. There is no penalty for such claims and no incentive to be as confusingly complex as accuracy would require. A website's TOS simply cannot be relied on as an accurate statement of the copyright status of all the individual works found on that website. --BirgitteSB 22:09, 11 December 2009 (UTC)

Points all well taken here and not really in dispute by me so much. The notion (if I understood it right) was that no matter the disclaimer given or the clear presence of © covering certain materials or areas hosted on a State's site (such as those found outlined for the 50 States mentioned earlier} because of a case in Texas where I'm not even sure the State of Texas was named or Oregon's lack of political fortitude to pursue the matter in court equates to using a blanket mentality here covering all the states. All I'm thinking here is that while I believe in the principle the public owns whatever public officials generate, it is best to check for issues on a state by stae basis is all.
FWIW, I've tried to create the appropriate banner ({{CC-Whitehouse.gov}}) that I think would cover a good number of the works frequently questioned regarding Obama's or his Administration but getting the automatic citation thing to work (hidden text in template) was above my pay grade. George Orwell III (talk) 23:56, 11 December 2009 (UTC)

You seem to be conflating things. Works of the US federal government, with a few exceptions, are not copyrightable. That's black and white: USC Title 17, Chapter 1, Section 105. The fact that laws and judicial opinions aren't copyrightable is case law, as cited above. The interview with the President is complex, but I think the lines we followed there is that interviewer's words and the structure of the interview were copyright NBC and there was no need to muddle with it. I don't remember the recorded Supreme Court case case, and would find it at least open for debate, but in the President's interview, the recorder was a private party in league with the interviewer to produce copyrightable content for commercial sale, where as in the Supreme Court case, the recorder is the US government, and even the precreated speeches aren't created to sell commercially.

I don't see any point in using the CC-Whitehouse.gov template unless we can find something that's not clearly the creation of the federal government (and hence PD) that would be covered by it.--Prosfilaes (talk) 01:33, 12 December 2009 (UTC)

Well I beg to differ as far as the Super Bowl Sunday interview goes... The template is accordance with White House copyright guidelines. It was created in hopes of putting to rest questions about material published on WhiteHouse.gov such as that interview's transcription or Press Conferences and so on. Water under the bridge if you say so.

Back to the matter at hand; I'm clear on Sec. 105 and the definitions for it found in Sec. 101. I do not, however, buy into the Copyright Offices 'definition' of what construes to be an edict of Federal Government or not. I'm pretty sure "edict" is not specified or defined let alone mentioned even once in Title 17; only "works of the U.S. Government" is to the best of my research. I don't buy into the notion that certain things are works of government officials, created in line with their official duties while others are not just because the internal Office manual says so. Without some precedent of this Copyright Office manual having weight or enjoying standing in a legal setting, I don't think they are an authority on definitions or much else here. Its incredulous to accept it without citing something to support that within the Code of Federal Regulations. The fact that Compendium Sec. 206.01 mirrors the interpretations found in the body of laws and court cases to date that were mentioned earlier or that it has wording that includes State, Local or foreign government edicts is happenstance if anything. The same based-in-wishful-transference rather than some sort citation or legal precedent applies in the opposite way in Sec. 206.02 when the Copyright Office goes back on it's "strictly edicts" to include anything as long as it was created in the course of Official duties ('works for hire' was added in 1999-2000 though not cited). Please believe me, I get the whole . . .

Wheaton’s holding, as has been shown, derives from an analogy between judicial opinions and legislative acts as together constituting “the law,” which is not subject to copyright.

. . . thing - just that the exclusion extends into the Executive as well (besides Proclamations and Orders of course). I just don't subscribe to the idea that making speeches, giving interviews or similar uses of the bully pulpit is not part of the typical Executive's way of carrying out their sworn duties just like the folks working in the other two branches of government are doing. I find no definition of "official duty" in Title 17, Sec. 101, 102, 103, 105 or 106 either. So basically, I see no validity in claiming just because we can't codify or define these works as laws or edicts that they should be disqualified - nor should any of this matter anyway when all these authors are elected by the people if not salaried by the people (the real owners of the crap they all pump out). George Orwell III (talk) 03:30, 12 December 2009 (UTC)

I don't understand what you're talking about. Federal Government is one thing, edicts are another. We understand that works of the executive branch of state governments is copyrighted.--Prosfilaes (talk) 11:39, 12 December 2009 (UTC)

Why would works created by the Executive or Executive Officers be any different when it comes to copyright exclusions as the works of the Judicial or the Legislative branches enjoy, Federal or otherwise ( & in the instances where it its not at the Federal level while opting not to try to explictly assert copyright/authorship at the same time)? Are they not created during the course of carrying out official duties as well? George Orwell III (talk) 12:14, 12 December 2009 (UTC)

Because there are court cases on the major works of the judicial and legislative branches being in the public domain. Speeches and other creations of the judicial and legislative branches may not fall under those exceptions where they aren't laws and judicial rulings. At a deeper level, because laws and judicial rulings have to be copied verbatim so people can know their exact legal obligations and restrictions. Executive copyrights, however, don't have the same effect; money and stamps only have value when copying is restricted, and the various other publications don't have the same immediate impact on people that restricting the copying of the laws does. What anyone gains by restricting the copying of a driver's manual, I don't know, but there seems to be little evidence that the states are prohibited from doing so.--Prosfilaes (talk) 02:11, 13 December 2009 (UTC)

←

At a deeper level, because laws and judicial rulings have to be copied verbatim so people can know their exact legal obligations and restrictions.

Finally. I think you've alluded to the principle that makes this entire reasoning behind the convoluted notion that just the laws matter but civic knowledge, public participation and overall good citizenship, as obtuse as that may seem at times other souls, are not worthy to host or are being excluded for possible legal backlash a bit circular and silly IMO.

"Laws matter", "Edicts only" whatever "the cosmically-assigned axe-to-grind" of your choice may be here have only risen to the level that they have because the pseudo-first idiot to try to claim his compilation of court proceedings equated to authorship somehow; leading to exclusive protections; leading to exclusive distribution & in the end had hopes to sell that compilation to make MONEY ironically enough was a COURT CLERK/REPORTER. I believe the second idiot was a Legislative officer of the same sort with the same intent to restrict access to inflate value for personal profit. Everybody and every legal case and every new medium standardized since Reporter A and Clerk B are just variations on that same theme. Had some Governor's speech, appointment-book or goof-ball journal entries interested anybody enough to convince an aide to try and turn them over for a quick buck while said Governor was still breathing somehow - I will bet those too would be specifically cited in the manual of no-no's by now as well. While the consequences of making "bad decisions" or "thought it was OK to do that" is more likely to lead to jail time wheb it comes to the lack of access or understanding of legal paramaters; comparable consequences exist well outside the realm of any body of compliled decisions and opinions to date IMHO.

There is no class nor differentiation or privilege between the neatly organized; easy to comprehend; value adding organization of last year's tax code changes with all its individuals' contributions needed to create it properly attributed from the mis-spelled transcription of the tongue-in-check yet unbelievable shallow politicized response given by Governor So-and-So after a State of the Union Address as the counter-point to the National message delivered just moments before. Restricting the access of either is contrary to the generally accepted core democratic principle(s), the public interest at hand, the due process guaranteed, the creation of sound public policy and so on. Nobody can (rationally) "define" the normal or abnormal duties of an officer of government, what is and is not created in the course of his or her work day much less the term "work" itself. I understand just because one is an officer of the government for a paycheck, that fact of life does not equate to automatic copyright exclusion for everything that person comes up with. Then again - I wouldn't know how to market the 1967 Colorado State Motor Vehicle Driver's Manual (Rev. 292.A) into a vast empire nor would it be my intent. Give me the appointment list of all special interest lobbyists visiting the White House last month and then.... no difference. I haven't come across any of Nixon's hi-kus in the Fed Reg either if it matters.

.

Well having thoroughly disenfranchised the original OP from making a single peep on Kansas State law and whatever it was that riled him/her up enough to warrant asking in the first place, I'll try to move on to something else. I can fully appreciate the realities of hosting some works, having issues with others and further still - knowingly turn a blind eye just because volunteerism is too time consuming in light of the project or work you are neck deep in at the moment, but this indictment, for lack of a better term, of bits and pieces or now dormant & unpopular yet still extremely imperative they be smuggled off & hosted elsewhere based on some the cease & desist boogie-man will get you as you type that -- tis' true!!!!! for the Compendium II has decreed it seems (to me at least because both would have about the same legal standing for apparently never appearing in a legal court/decision until now) sort of ridiculous if not disingenuous for guideline or policy justification as does the existence of an Edict banner at all...

It is, therefore, the true policy, influenced by the essential spirit of the government, that laws of every description should be universally diffused. To fetter or restrain their dissemination, must be to counteract this policy; to limit, or even to regulate it, would, in fact, produce the same effect.

…

If either statutes or decisions could be made private property, it would be in the power of an individual to shut out the light by which we guide our actions.

All of prior quoted and the above came directly from within the Vreeks decision btw George Orwell III (talk) 18:47, 13 December 2009 (UTC)

rule of thumb here is [works of Federal employees quote] further expanded by mutual consensus here to include like works generated by State or Local level kindred counterparts found in the Federal Government (President = Governor = Mayor in short) I disagree that it is further expanded this way. State and Local level must fall under edicts of government to be uncopyrightable. Forgive me, but I think you might be at the point when you are first realizing the full ugliness of copyright law. It won't fall into neat mutually exclusive columns; it's a train-wreck strewn all over the place. You just have to look at stuff on a case-by-case basis, or else generalize in the abstract. There really isn't any reliable middle-ground. Decisions on copyright are made, and reviewed, and reversed all the time. We have a far from a perfect record in both directions. Don't rely on something being kept or deleted extrapolate out to copyright in general. Rely on the solidity of the reasoning given. Frankly sometimes there just needs to be a decision made. And even more frankly, sometimes both choices are wrong. Copyright is not necessarily something that can always be determined. Sometimes the most accurate answer is "Unknown."--BirgitteSB 03:07, 12 December 2009 (UTC)

Books, pagination and long quotations

I am working on formatting some sections of The Life of John Milton: Narrated in Connexion with the Political, Ecclesiastical, and Literary ... (1880) by David Masson. It is fairly strait forwards as I have two OCR copies of the work and can compare them with edit diffs. However I have a few questions.

Although I have placed several copies of documents into Wikisource, they have all been treaties and the like. I have yet to put a part of a book into Wikisource. Please could someone point me towards what is considered to be some of the better formatted books Wikisource?

Should I paginate a book along the lines of the edition I am using as a source or should I just keep to chapters?

What is the usual practice of including longer quotes (a paragraph or more) within the text of a book? For example here is a snippet taken from Page 36, with the original lines format, and with the style of longer quote:

On the same 7th of June on which there were the five

additional exceptions for life and the order for the arrest of

Joyce and Peters there were two other incidents in the

history of the Act of Indemnity. One was the completion

of a resolution by the Commons in these words : " Resolved

" and declared by the Commons in Parliament assembled

" that they do by this their public act, for and in behalf of

" themselves and every one of them, and of all the Commons

" of England, of what quality or degree soever they be, — ex-

" cepting only as is, or shall hereafter be, excepted by this

" Parliament in an Act of Free and General Pardon, Indemnity,

" and Oblivion, now under consideration, — lay hold upon his

" Majesty's free and general Pardon, in his late gracious

" Letters and Declaration granted, tendered, or expressed."

I can not use this style unless I force line lengths to be fixed. It seems to me I could just put double quotes at the start and end of the quote but with long ones that could be confusing. Alternatively I could use <blockquote> ({{quote}}) but that would create paragraphs where none exist in the edition I am copying the text from. What is considered best way to handle such quotes in books on Wikisource? --Philip Baird Shearer (talk) 14:09, 8 December 2009 (UTC)

Regarding the unusual quotation style: I have run into that elsewhere, and I just removed the extra quote marks, thus punctuating it like a modern book. --LarryGilbert (talk) 21:40, 9 December 2009 (UTC)

The following doesn't wrap, but if you select and copy text from it, it won't contain line breaks:

On the same 7th of June on which there were the five additional exceptions for life and the order for the arrest of Joyce and Peters there were two other incidents in the history of the Act of Indemnity. One was the completion of a resolution by the Commons in these words : " Resolved " and declared by the Commons in Parliament assembled " that they do by this their public act, for and in behalf of " themselves and every one of them, and of all the Commons " of England, of what quality or degree soever they be, — ex- " cepting only as is, or shall hereafter be, excepted by this " Parliament in an Act of Free and General Pardon, Indemnity, " and Oblivion, now under consideration, — lay hold upon his " Majesty's free and general Pardon, in his late gracious " Letters and Declaration granted, tendered, or expressed."

Is that what you had in mind? Paradoctor (talk) 23:09, 9 December 2009 (UTC)

P.S.: If required, the text can be justified. Paradoctor (talk) 23:21, 9 December 2009 (UTC)

Personally, I like to lay this out as

... a resolution by the Commons in these words : " Resolved <noinclude><br/>
" </noinclude>and declared by the Commons in Parliament assembled<noinclude><br/>
" </noinclude>that they do by this their public act, for and in behalf of...<br/>

so that the quotes and line breaks appear in the proofing view (i.e. page namespace) but not in reading view. Hesperian 23:38, 10 December 2009 (UTC)

Call me dense, but what is the purpose of the <nowiki> tags? Paradoctor (talk) 22:17, 11 December 2009 (UTC)

Call me dense. Paradoctor (talk) 22:19, 11 December 2009 (UTC)

It seems to me that to format the text as it was printed in a book published over a century ago is not desirable, as styles change (for example we do not write with spaces before semicolons). This text will be read using a browser (we do not indent the start of paragraphs and we only use single spaces after a full stop), therefore it seems to me more sensible to block quote such sections as is often done in modern formats (it also helps with automated text reading for those visually impaired). -- Philip Baird Shearer (talk) 13:52, 12 December 2009 (UTC)

Model United Nations

The Model United Nations(or MUN's), as everyone would know is a platform where extensive research is inevitable.. Given this, does wikisource have any articles which would have content which is more suitable for a MUN research?

As in giving more importance to current events of a region and its impacts on the world relationships?

Wikisource:Texts by Country is helpful (for some countries), and Wikisource:United Nations carries a lot of their real resolutions, so you can figure out how they're phrased, what sorts of things they say and such. What country are you? Sherurcij ^{Collaboration of the Week: Author:Thomas Carlyle.} 18:04, 8 December 2009 (UTC)

Rescue job Medina Charter

Doing a cleanup of headerless pages, and found this Medina Charter. Does someone with information about the work want to cleanup and get in order for {{header}} and licence. Thx. billinghurst (talk) 13:27, 9 December 2009 (UTC)

The discussion on its talk page indicates some dissension about which translations are reliable, apocryphal, copyrighted, etc., etc. It looks as if some knowledge of Arabic will be important if not required to research this. --LarryGilbert (talk) 18:10, 14 December 2009 (UTC)

I can handle basic Arabic needs, I can't translate the whole thing from its original Arabic; but if given the original Arabic I can at least tell you whether ours begins and ends on the same sentence, whether they're numbered correctly, etc. I can also navigate Arabic wikisource well enough to add the treaty, if somebody can just find it for me. Sherurcij ^{Collaboration of the Week: Author:Thomas Carlyle.} 18:36, 14 December 2009 (UTC)

Went looking for a reliable copy but ran into a wall of contradictions and controversy. The wikipedia page has the ones used for the WS version linked in 'External Links' now, FWIW George Orwell III (talk) 00:26, 18 December 2009 (UTC)

by psalmkid:

Is it alright to add small poems? —unsigned comment by Psalmkid‎ (talk) .

Yes, absolutely! However, you should be careful to make sure they are poems written by real poets; generally meaning they were published in a legitimate book at some point (some exceptions exist, where they were carved into a rock three hundred years ago, or something like that) - and that they're no longer in copyright. (The easiest way, is that anything written before 1923, or written by somebody who died before 1926, is good to add). Any help we can give, let us know. Sherurcij ^{Collaboration of the Week: Author:Thomas Carlyle.} 19:25, 14 December 2009 (UTC)

Written by somebody who died before 1926 is questionable; it doesn't work for the US or Mexico or the Ivory Coast, and it doesn't even necessarily work for other nations, if the poet registered for copyright in the US properly or the poems weren't published until after 1977. Written before 1923 is your safest and easiest bet, though works by someone who lived in a life+70 nation and died before 1926 might be worth asking about (or checking up yourself, if you're willing to dig that far into copyright.)--Prosfilaes (talk) 00:12, 18 December 2009 (UTC)

Spelling correction?

Constitution of Kiribati has at least one typo ("mist" for "must" in the "Changing the Constitution" section) — but that typo is visible at the source website. Can we change it? As an en:Wikipedia administrator, I'm quite familiar with correcting errors there, but I don't know whether it's a good idea to change spelling here or to leave texts as close to the source as possible. 24.93.116.128 02:13, 15 December 2009 (UTC)

I'm new to this place, but for the text I'm prepping for upload, I simply provide both: The original version with all the pittoresque warts, and the version edited by me to perfection. ;) Paradoctor (talk) 02:24, 15 December 2009 (UTC)

Generally we look to reproduce works, and there is capacity to work around these, eg. {{SIC}}, {{sic}} (they are different}} and capacity for making notes, eg. the pair {{ref}} and {{note}} billinghurst (talk) 06:57, 15 December 2009 (UTC)

Author:Onwutalobi Anthony-Claret

Seems like a case of WS:OR. Hardly the author even fulfills the requirements for Wikipedia, the author article there swimms in a small biosphere of circle-referenced articles arround w:en:Codewit Global network. --Martin H. (talk) 15:28, 17 December 2009 (UTC)

There's quite a few authors we have that don't fulfill the requirements for Wikipedia. When Wikisource is complete for pre-1923 works, we'll have an author page for every author who ever posted an article in a magazine. The real question is do his works fit our inclusion policy, which is an issue for Wikisource:Proposed deletions.--Prosfilaes (talk) 23:36, 17 December 2009 (UTC)

index pages

Following discussion with BillingHurst I've added two fields to index pages :

• editor, for books where it is necessary to have it
• progress : it works with a javascript selector, and adds a category to the index page, describing the work that needs to be done.

ThomasV (talk) 14:09, 18 December 2009 (UTC)

MultiLicensePD?

{{MultiLicensePD}} indicates that a work is both licensed under the GFDL and entered into the public domain. Legally and logically speaking, that is the same as simply putting it in the public domain. Is it not? Maybe I'm missing the point. --LarryGilbert (talk) 19:24, 20 December 2009 (UTC)

I tried to read the explanation at w:Wikipedia:Multi-licensing and either I am not sufficiently awake, not sufficiently patient or not sufficiently drunk (or combinations of these) to be able to enlighten you. There is commentary about our move to http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/ changing the basis of the licencing too. I know that only one user has it in play, so I think that we could retire it from prominence at Help:Copyright tags and either just have a lead to it as a link, or just list at the category. billinghurst (talk) 22:16, 20 December 2009 (UTC)

Who died in 1939?

Of interest because of the 70 year rule. There are at least: Author:Havelock Ellis; Author:Ford Madox Ford; Author:Sigmund Freud; Author:Zane Grey; w:Joseph Roth; Author:William Butler Yeats. Also in a more academic vein: Author:Moses Gaster; Author:Reginald Lane-Poole; fr:Lucien Lévy-Bruhl; w:Harold Temperley. Charles Matthews (talk) 12:01, 21 December 2009 (UTC)

This discussion would be better suited for Wikilivres, since very few things will be lapsing into public domain in the United States anytime soon. See Help:Public_domain, and Wikisource_talk:Scan_parties#I'm_confused for further explanation. Prosody (talk) 17:24, 21 December 2009 (UTC)

Indent and paragraph indent

⁠This is related to a previous discussion, "What is the go with {{Indent}}?"

⁠I created the template {{para indent}} and the short name redirect {{pi}} to overcome the confusing issue of the {{indent}}, which in reality should be moved to a template named {{leadin indent}}, or {{leadin tab}}, or {{firstline indent}} for that's what it is.

⁠billinghurst provided the insight when I attempted to indent entries in the TOC tables of the The Popular Science Monthly Project. {{para indent}} works acceptably well for me (for now), but my HTML knowledge is very limited. — Ineuw (talk) 16:33, 20 December 2009 (UTC)

⁠I used pi to replace the deprecated 1st version if indent {{indent|0}} in the The Doctrine and Covenants Section 16

{{pi|{{verse|verse=1}}xxx}} doesn't work. — Ineuw (talk) 22:33, 21 December 2009 (UTC)

USS Taurus(PHM-3)

I added this for information about the PHM program and the USS Taurus in particular. I really wasn't sure if it should be added. If someone could advise. —unsigned comment by Bigroger27509 (talk) .

It would seem to meet our criteria of In/Out and public domain. I have created an Index page at Index:USS Taurus.djvu. There are a lot of photos there, and generally it is best to take screenshots of each individually upload in addition to the DjVu format. I will move the file to Commons where it is more accessible. billinghurst (talk) 03:36, 22 December 2009 (UTC)

Back to the future (of the PSM project)

⁠For those who are interested in coordinating the proofreading of The Popular Science Monthly Project, I posted this document, detailing the strategy developed during work on Volume 1. I hope this helps. — Ineuw (talk) 17:29, 22 December 2009 (UTC)

Wikisource:Featured text candidates could do with your opinion

We are very much open for nominations of texts, and for people to express their opinions on existing nominations. We need a decision for January, and can even put in place February, +++. Thanks. billinghurst (talk) 13:06, 23 December 2009 (UTC)

What to do with Alice's Adventures in Wonderland

The work Alice's Adventures in Wonderland is listed as a transcription of a facsimile of an early edition, and we also have a scan of a 1907 illustrated version. Seeking opinions from the community on whether we should be looking to do

• Source the linked pdf version, and therefore {{versions}} control
• Migrate to the Index: ns version

billinghurst (talk) 21:10, 23 December 2009 (UTC)

I've been mulling over a similar dilemma with What Will He Do with It?. The version first uploaded here was taken from Project Gutenberg--a single, huge text with few or no changes. I subsequently discovered a scanned DjVu file on Commons. I ran Match'n'Split™ to line up the existing text with the scan. As I've been proofing, I've noticed that the edition scanned and put up on Commons is significantly different--much punctuation and capitalization has changed, not to mention the name of one of the characters. So I've been thinking I ought to keep both versions. (Alas, the whole point of my work was to split up that huge Project Gutenberg text--so that would still need to be done.) --LarryGilbert (talk) 22:03, 23 December 2009 (UTC)

I've tried something with Chapter 2 but it doesn't seem to work. --Zyephyrus (talk) 23:09, 23 December 2009 (UTC)

I would also support seperate versions. I think preference should be given to the version with page scans, and once it 100% done consider deleting the version that is more dificult to validate. JeepdaySock (talk) 11:36, 24 December 2009 (UTC)

Year in the {{header}} template

When we utilise the year within {{header}} we need some better guidance on its use, and I don't think that as a community we have decided on this matter.

Is the year

• The year of the copyright of the edition?
• The year of publishing of the edition? Remember that copyright and reprints can vary
• If a translation
  • the year of the foreign language edition?
  • the year of the translation?

Implications are where we display year in the header can give different connotations, and we are lacking the clarity to properly inform billinghurst (talk) 23:17, 24 December 2009 (UTC)

Perhaps the earliest one. Cirt (talk) 00:11, 25 December 2009 (UTC)

The date of publication seems to me the most important one. If more specific meaning is needed for clarity or because multiple dates are involved, maybe more fields need to be defined. --LarryGilbert (talk) 01:11, 25 December 2009 (UTC)

Seems to me that trying to define additional fields within the basic header template for what amounts to citation information of one degree or the other opens up more questions than it would resolve given the amount of reasonable space to work with. We tried utilizing the {{edition}} & {{Textinfo}} templates to carry citation-related info instead of cluttering up the {{{notes}}} parameter with it for Presidential Executive Orders, but readers unfamiliar with Wikisource rarely made the connection to jump to the discussion tab to see that info on their own. Inserting an optional citation bar between the light-green and blue portions of {{header}} solved that nicely; maybe the solution here is applying something similar to the basic header template too.

At any rate, I'd think leaving the basic header unaltered and flat out creating a helper template to support secondary information, if so desired, is preferable to trying to squeeze the usefulness out of the current {{{year}}} parameter (which, oddly enough, doesn't even auto-CAT the work to the corresponding [[Category:yyyy works]] from what I can tell???). George Orwell III (talk) 06:44, 25 December 2009 (UTC)

It should auto cat {{#if:{{{year|}}}|[[Category:{{{year}}} works]]}} billinghurst (talk) 07:36, 25 December 2009 (UTC)

I would guess most non-WS-familar readers would infer that it is the year the cited author had first created/written the work just by the output's position directly after ‘by Author Author’ in the header when viewed normally, no? If that is the case, then in my view the above holds true - you've injected more issues by its use then you've resolved if the work falls under one of the other scenarios listed at the top. George Orwell III (talk) 08:27, 25 December 2009 (UTC)