Wikisource

Wikisource:Scriptorium/Archives/2022-01

< Wikisource:Scriptorium‎ | Archives
Warning Please do not post any new comments on this page.
This is a discussion archive first created in , although the comments contained were likely posted before and after this date.
See current discussion or the archives index.

Index for multiple images

I know that I can make an index for a PDF, or a Djvu file, or for a single image. Can I make one for a (small) set of two or more images, without having to combine them into a single file? Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 21:00, 1 January 2022 (UTC)

@Andy Mabbett Yes, you can. For an example, see Index:Fourth_Folio Languageseeker (talk) 21:21, 1 January 2022 (UTC)
This section was archived on a request by: Very helpful example; thank you.Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 11:45, 2 January 2022 (UTC)

112 Days' Hard Labour

The work of Hubert W. Peet, Quaker journalist and imprisoned WWI conscientious objector, who died in 1951, just fell out of copyright.

So here's his 1917 essay "112 Days' Hard Labour", which I have just transcribed. A safe, healthy and happy new year to you all. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 00:00, 1 January 2022 (UTC)

This is very relevant to my interests! Thanks. —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 05:07, 2 January 2022 (UTC)

December 2021 Monthly Challenge

 

Oh, Come All Ye Faithful! Hear the joyful and triumphant news (well it was Christmas...): the Monthly Challenge again broke its record and reached 7056 processed (proofread, validated or marked without text) pages, surpassing the record set in November by another 977 pages. This represents roughly a third of all processed pages at Wikisource in December (~21k).

In total, the eight Monthly Challenges of 2021 have processed 28,251 pages. If we maintain the December velocity, this will be about 87k at the end of 2022. Can it happen? There's only one way to find out (well two, if you include time-travel, but The Time Machine was already proofread way back in MC #1 in May).

A selection of proofread works from December:

Validated:

Moving into the bright new year of 2022, we have a new thing for the MC: Public Domain Day! The primary focus in January is works that have fallen into the PD:

And some other works in the Challenge:

In short: fun for all the family, regardless of whether that family is nuclear, biological or chemical! It's cold and/or damp out there for the Northerners and there might even be hungry bears. Stay at home, safe, warm and dry with the only good hungry bear: pooh bear! For the Southerners, drop-bears aside, that near-zenith Sun is trying to mutate your very skin: the The Sun Also Rises wouldn't do that to you! Stay safe, stay inside, and stay proofreading. Inductiveload—talk/contribs 16:37, 3 January 2022 (UTC)

prinssbot

user:prinssbot will run the script Wikipedia:User:Ahechtbot/transclusioncount.py to update the data for module:transclusion count to ensure up to date data for template:high-use. it will run at a rate of one edit every 30 seconds. and will be monitored while running. it will only edit subpages of module:transclusion count/data. Serprinss (talk) 00:58, 4 January 2022 (UTC)

forgot to mention it will run on a weekly basis Serprinss (talk) 01:06, 4 January 2022 (UTC)

A Study in Scarlet

So, basically in Monthly Challenge (January 2022), we have Index:Beeton's Christmas Annual 1887.pdf that contains A Study in Scarlet. However, there is already A Study in Scarlet (Index:A study in scarlet.djvu). What's next? Mnafisalmukhdi1 (talk) 12:07, 6 January 2022 (UTC)

@Mnafisalmukhdi1: See Help:Disambiguation. Xover (talk) 12:32, 6 January 2022 (UTC)

Unnecessary changes without community consultation.

Some time ago, keeping header/footer open on first edit was removed and changed to a guessing game. I ask that this feature be restored. There is no logic to it's current implementation because after editing the header, I close it to gain more vertical editing space. Opening a new page for edit, I want it open. I consider this a reasonable request for an unnecessary change. Ineuw (talk) 17:53, 6 January 2022 (UTC)

That has never, to my knowledge, been the intended behaviour. It's always just been a simple binary on/off based on the proofreadpage-showheaders option (which is usually controlled by the icon in the toolbar), and doesn't have (and never had) special handling for non-existing pages. Inductiveload—talk/contribs 18:07, 6 January 2022 (UTC)
There was an option on the Preferences/Edit, grouped near the top of the page which is now titled "General". It either opened the header, or kept it closed when opening a Page for edit. It might be worth to take a look at the edit history of the module.Ineuw (talk) 18:17, 6 January 2022 (UTC)
The only header/footer-related setting that has ever been in the ProofreadPage module is "header & footers on/off". As it has always been stored in the user preferences, it has always been persistent (i.e. when you reload a page, it takes the setting it last had). Recently, the location in preferences was moved within the Editing tab from "Editing → General" to "Editing → Proofreading interface options". Just as before, it's hidden when you have the editing toolbar on (the logic there apparently being that there's an icon for you if you have the editing toolbar, so you don't need the preferences entry too, not sure I agree that really avoids confusion, but there it is). Inductiveload—talk/contribs 11:06, 7 January 2022 (UTC)

A Study in Colour

I was just going to add the images for page 16 however the page appears out of alignment by one place. The image should be on the page before. Can this be realigned please? Thanks Sp1nd01 (talk) 22:04, 6 January 2022 (UTC)

@Sp1nd01: Nothing is missing. You picked a Google scan pdf, where at one time they deleted all graphics. The missing picture is a page decoration. Perhaps you can find a djvu copy on the internet archive. Ineuw (talk) 23:13, 6 January 2022 (UTC)
Thanks, I am unable to find a copy on the internet archive, however hathi trust appear to have the same text with better quality images here, so I added those. Hope that's ok for now. Sp1nd01 (talk) 10:32, 7 January 2022 (UTC)

Creating a category for an author

Hi all!

Can a category be created for a specific author? E.g. I would like to create a category such as "William Morris" to tag onto the documents they have authored so these can show up easily on a category page. Or, is there already a way to see all the documents that are assigned to a specific author? I know William Morris has an author page, but I feel like this does not include all their work, so I am more interested in understanding if their is meta data that can be used to find all their bits of work that might already exist, and not if creating a category for that specific author might be possible. Best - Jamzze (talk) 13:34, 7 January 2022 (UTC)

There are two way to handle this:
  1. All Morris's works at Wikisource (and any not at Wikisource) should be on his author page. If they are not, they should be added. Thus, there should be no pages that would be in a hypothetical category that are not also on the author page, so the category doesn't do anything new.
  2. For the technical side of things (i.e. finding a list of all works by Morris), you'd be better off with a query like this: https://w.wiki/4eYj than relying on Wikisource to keep thousands and thousands of categories correctly filled. Also, a category can get very fuzzy as to whether it contains works, editions, parts of works, disambiguations, versions, translations or what. A Wikidata query will let you target exactly what you want. Indeed, one day, Wikisource should probably be pulling that data from Wikidata itself rather than maintaining it separately. If any data is missing, the correct thing to do is add it at Wikidata rather than construct a parallel system here.
Inductiveload—talk/contribs 14:31, 7 January 2022 (UTC)
Interesting note, I believe (IIRC) that the way WS historically used to deal with authors, way back when, was by using categories, but the community came to the determination that the categories were not as efficient as the extra namespace. PseudoSkull (talk) 15:19, 7 January 2022 (UTC)
Thank you for this! I agree with the future aspect of pulling data from wikidata - seems more effective. Thanks again. Jamzze (talk) 23:46, 7 January 2022 (UTC)
yeah, categories are a crowd source hack, for subject indexing, from before wikidata. (and maintenance pain point) we should implement a "wikisource author" item like "commons category" [1] so we could leverage search, and use wikidata to generate lists of works. --Slowking4 亞 Farmbrough's revenge 23:49, 7 January 2022 (UTC)

List author works

@Inductiveload: Piggybacking off of your comment above, just to confirm, your understanding of Wikisource policy and best practice is that we should list all works on an author page, even if some of them have unacceptable copyright restrictions to actually host said works here, correct? —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 01:50, 8 January 2022 (UTC)

Well I don't know if it's policy policy, but if I'm adding a list of works, I'll often add copyrighted ones too and an explanation (eg {{copyright renewal}}). You can also link to the work externally if it's hosted legally elsewhere. This can happen, e.g. non-US sites like bibliowiki was, as well as sites that present work under licences like CC-BY-SA. There's obviously a limit, as current authors like JK Rowling are around 100 years from any PD work, so there's not much point, but sometimes there are exceptions like Cory Doctorow. Inductiveload—talk/contribs 11:13, 8 January 2022 (UTC)

Template:initials

I don't know that I can really point at this template as being inherently bad (or else I would've sent it to WS:PD), but one issue I have with the template is that in some cases we may never know what the author's full name was beyond initials. Especially considering that most of the people we collect data for lived in times when documentation was scarce and much harder to come by than today (and it gets worse the further back in time you go), a part of me doesn't think we should put so much emphasis on the research by means of a large maintenance template. Also, for more modern and perhaps obscure authors, finding a middle name may require research that the author, who is still alive and well today, doesn't want you doing, and I need not elaborate what kind of research I'm talking about. I think that wanting further information on an author's name is a valid sentiment to have, but there should be another way to resolve this sentiment; perhaps a category, or a less in-your-face notice. Thoughts? Pinging @Beleg Tâl, @Billinghurst: PseudoSkull (talk) 23:26, 8 January 2022 (UTC)

Middle names only became more customary in the 19th century as the newly rich looked to mimic a practice that was used by the truly rich/nobles. I think that it may also align with families decreasing in size. If you feel that a person has a doxing issue, omit it, or stick it on the talk page. Typically when I am researching middle names and have no luck determining what they are, then I move them to the talk page with commentary, so using the difference between author and author talk as my indicators. Part of the reason that the template is of use is where we have 19th century authors with just initials, no first or middle name. Be guided by sense, it is not a policed area. — billinghurst sDrewth 00:38, 9 January 2022 (UTC)
@Billinghurst: I think slapping it on a talk page is much more reasonable; I just think a box like this shouldn't be slapped onto a main page unless absolutely crucial. The names you mentioned with both the first and middle initial missing are a good case for that, while I don't know that I can say the same for one with just the middle initial missing. PseudoSkull (talk) 00:50, 9 January 2022 (UTC)
The current process came about for good reasons as we were having page duplicates and there were not reasonable efforts being made to expand names. Your thoughts don't solve the problem or better resolve the issue so I am not inclined to agree with your concerns. In short I still prefer the current methodology. My moving the template to talk pages was to help me to know what I had investigated and what I had not and where in my estimation that I was not going to progress further. If there is a concern about doxing having a wikidata page is going to be way more problematic than an author page, and as there are means to manage those problematic cases, I don't see a requirement for change. If you have concerns over the look of the template, or the positioning of the template, then have that as a conversation, not roll it all up into the "I don't like it" argument. — billinghurst sDrewth 20:42, 9 January 2022 (UTC)

Wiki Loves Folklore is back!

Please help translate to your language

 

You are humbly invited to participate in the Wiki Loves Folklore 2022 an international photography contest organized on Wikimedia Commons to document folklore and intangible cultural heritage from different regions, including, folk creative activities and many more. It is held every year from the 1st till the 28th of February.

You can help in enriching the folklore documentation on Commons from your region by taking photos, audios, videos, and submitting them in this commons contest.

You can also organize a local contest in your country and support us in translating the project pages to help us spread the word in your native language.

Feel free to contact us on our project Talk page if you need any assistance.

Kind regards,

Wiki loves Folklore International Team

--MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 13:14, 9 January 2022 (UTC)

Cleanup of "External Links", "See Also" sections in the mainspace

Does anyone know how to generate a list of every page in the mainspace that has a "See also" L2 section (with any capitalization, i.e. "See Also" as well), "External links", "External links and ...", or "... and external links"? I see there are quite a lot of works (all seem to be unsourced works), which use these sections for listing out external links and related works, in the style that we all know Wikipedia uses, and it is inappropriate for Wikisource. External links related to the content presented, that would help with transcription etc., are arguably appropriate to link in the talk page, or maybe even in the header template if absolutely necessary, but definitely not in the transcription space. I'd like to do a mass cleanup of all of these. Can anyone produce a script that lists all instances of this? @Inductiveload, @Billinghurst: PseudoSkull (talk) 16:57, 9 January 2022 (UTC)

Rough search https://en.wikisource.org/w/index.php?search=insource%3A%2F%3D+%3F%28external%7Csee+al%29%2Fi&title=Special:Search&profile=advanced&fulltext=1&ns0=1

Index:The fleshly school of poetry and other phenomena of the day (IA cu31924013268887).pdf

@Fæ, @Chrisguise: This file appears to be broken, as in the pages are not showing on the Index main page or on any of the page namespace pages. Opening it on the Commons PDF viewer does work though. Is this just on my end, or are others experiencing this issue? PseudoSkull (talk) 16:18, 9 January 2022 (UTC)

@PseudoSkull I see it too. Could be anything, I suppose. I've just done the lazy thing and used the DJVU instead: Index:The Fleshly school of poetry - Buchanan - 1872.djvu. Inductiveload—talk/contribs 21:35, 9 January 2022 (UTC)
@PseudoSkull@Fæ Both of the scans of this edition of the work on IA had problems and I made multiple attempts to reconstruct a single complete PDF, from simply moving pages between the two PDF files, to reconstructing a new one from the individual page scan images. Although the resultant files always opened correctly in PDF software (Acrobat, Foxit (reader and editor), they would not display when pulled through into Wikisource from Commons. The information summary on Commons gave the correct file size but after initially showing the correct number of pages, the number of pages collapsed to zero. I'll do work on the transcription but the file may yet require some work. Chrisguise (talk) 16:27, 10 January 2022 (UTC)

Text to follow a circular path

Is there any way, short of SVG, to wrap six or eight Unicode characters into a circle? The ones in rectangular arrays can be managed with Template:Aligned couplet, but I'm stuck on how to do circles. (use case). HLHJ (talk) 20:54, 9 January 2022 (UTC)

The extensions of score and math are the most likely avenues. If it was me I would have just do a screenshot and add it as an image. Don't overthink it in my opinion, as it is not obvious to me that it has value as text. — billinghurst sDrewth 20:57, 9 January 2022 (UTC)
Messy but possible in CSS: https://css-tricks.com/set-text-on-a-circle/
But I agree with billinghurst: just use an image. Hesperian 23:05, 9 January 2022 (UTC)
Yes, Javascript seems worse than an image, really. I'll do that, with a good alt text. Thank you. HLHJ (talk)
Another pretty gross hack is using a table. You can individually rotate characters x degrees with CSS and put them all in cells. :/ —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 17:48, 10 January 2022 (UTC)

Community Wishlist Survey 2022

 

The Community Wishlist Survey 2022 is now open!

This survey is the process where communities decide what the Community Tech team should work on over the next year. We encourage everyone to submit proposals until the deadline on 23 January, or comment on other proposals to help make them better. The communities will vote on the proposals between 28 January and 11 February.

The Community Tech team is focused on tools for experienced Wikimedia editors. You can write proposals in any language, and we will translate them for you. Thank you, and we look forward to seeing your proposals! SGrabarczuk (WMF) (talk) 18:10, 10 January 2022 (UTC)

Tech News: 2022-02

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Recent changes

Changes later this week

  •   The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 11 January. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 12 January. It will be on all wikis from 13 January (calendar).

Events

  • Community Wishlist Survey 2022 begins. All contributors to the Wikimedia projects can propose for tools and platform improvements. The proposal phase takes place from 10 January 18:00 UTC to 23 January 18:00 UTC. Learn more.

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

01:23, 11 January 2022 (UTC)

Indexes with deleted files

I suspect each of these will need a discussion, so might as well start listing them now. PseudoSkull (talk) 16:04, 9 January 2022 (UTC)

Index:Constitution of India (2019).pdf

We'll start with this one. @MSG17, @CalendulaAsteraceae, @Hrishikes: This file was deleted at Wikimedia Commons, per c:Commons:Deletion requests/File:Constitution of India (2019).pdf, and apparently a similar or the same file was deleted earlier at c:Commons:Deletion requests/File:Constitution of India, As on 09 September 2020.pdf. As it is an edict of a government, it may not be public domain in India as was noted in the earliest of the deletion requests, however it would be PD in the US (presumably), so I think the file could be transferred to Wikisource and the index and the pages can be transferred to link to that file. PseudoSkull (talk) 16:04, 9 January 2022 (UTC)

Noting pages existing in this index, in case of deletion: 1, 3, 22, 221. PseudoSkull (talk) 16:06, 9 January 2022 (UTC)
@PseudoSkull: -- Please see 1 for my opinion on the matter (Please note that the closing admin's opinion was presented without evidence and is merely a personal opinion), as well as 2. Hrishikes (talk) 16:52, 9 January 2022 (UTC)
@Hrishikes: Sounds like a more convoluted and controversial issue than I initially realized. It looks like this then failed WS:CV, so should I then delete the material presented? Or does there perhaps need to be another WS:CV debate about it? As an uninvolved party, I am interested in your opinion on next actions. PseudoSkull (talk) 17:06, 9 January 2022 (UTC)
@PseudoSkull: -- I don't have objection to the presence of those works. I merely objected to the label of edict-gov. If you go through the contents of c:Template:EdictGov-India and Template:PD-INGov, you will realize that those templates are not applicable in this case. Anyway, I have discussed this matter enough times. I am not going to engage this time. Let others debate and decide. Regards -- Hrishikes (talk) 17:18, 9 January 2022 (UTC)
@Hrishikes: See Georgia v. Public.Resource.Org, Inc.. Xover (talk) 18:24, 9 January 2022 (UTC)
@Xover: -- That judgement is not related to the present case. As ruled by the Court, the Code Review Commission functioned as an arm of the Georgia Legislature, therefore annotations done by them fell into the public domain. But India's Law Ministry does not function as an arm of the Parliament. Therefore the Georgia case does not apply here. Hrishikes (talk) 03:38, 10 January 2022 (UTC)
@Hrishikes: If you think the outcome of the copyright discussion was incorrect then please feel free to open an undeletion discussion. But you asserted that my close "was presented without evidence" so I linked you to Georgia v. PRO, which was the SCOTUS decision I referred to in my closing comment. Xover (talk) 08:34, 10 January 2022 (UTC)
@Xover: -- I did not object to the outcome of delete; I objected to the closing comment. The closing comment should be confined to the points raised within the discussion, especially the final outcome, if any, of the discussion. But your closing comment had a lot of extra elements, without appropriate evidence. If you felt like making such additional points, then, instead of closing the discussion, you should have participated in it and made your points in the discussion itself, so that others could respond. I object to this kind of closing comment. Hrishikes (talk) 08:49, 10 January 2022 (UTC)
@Hrishikes: And yet the first I hear of it is in a backhanded comment in an unrelated forum, in a conversation in which I am not involved, ten months after the fact… If you have any complaints about my actions in any context then I would ask that you take it up with me directly, preferably on my talk page but at a minimum somewhere I am notified that you are discussing me. It is certainly possible that I made a mistake or acted on imperfect information in any given close, and there are numerous issues on which a reasonable person might disagree with me. But thankfully our processes are designed such that I do not actually need to be infallible: they are open to all, publicly archived, can be challenged or reopened, and issues can be raised both with the closer and with the community at large. In other words, the kind of sniping you're indulging in here is both unnecessary and counter-productive. Xover (talk) 09:22, 10 January 2022 (UTC)
@Xover: -- I'm sorry if you think it's sniping; it was not intended as such. I did not raise the issue previously, because the outcome of the discussion was deletion which I had supported, so there was no need for me to raise any issue, although I was not happy with the closing comment. But now I referred another user to that discussion. When someone visits an archived discussion, the closing comment is the one which first draws attention, and it creates the first impression about a given topic. This particular closing comment had raised doubts about the points I had made in the discussion, by using terms like, "not plausible", "incorrect", "arguable" etc. So I had felt the need to suggest to the user I had referred, that the closing comment was not evidence-based. My comment, to which you responded, was solely about another, historical, comment, and not directed against you personally. My further explanation was in response to your response, it was not "sniping". So please do not take it personally. Hrishikes (talk) 12:52, 10 January 2022 (UTC)
@Hrishikes, @Xover: Alright, well, due to the above comments, it seems it was the right decision to then delete the pages and the index page both, entirely. Not only did the WS:CV discussion end in a deletion (and two Commons deletion debates on the files also ended in delete to top that off), but both of you seem to agree on the fact that the entry should stay deleted if I am interpreting correctly, while I get that you may not agree on the details as to why. So, I deleted the pages and index both on the basis of them being copyright infringement, and because the source file was deleted at Wikimedia Commons anyway. It doesn't seem likely that the 2019 Indian Constitution issue will end in a keep, but I am no crystal ball. If at any point in the future it is conclusively determined this is not in fact copyright infringement, the work can be re-proofread (the pages I deleted were marked as "Not proofread" anyway so not too much of a biggie). Resolved. PseudoSkull (talk) 02:42, 11 January 2022 (UTC)
@PseudoSkull: So long as the outcome on WS:CV was delete (right or wrong) then these related pages should indeed be deleted too. If there is a genuine disagreement about the WS:CV outcome (which I am not aware that there is) then that needs to be brought up in the form of an undeletion discussion on WS:CV. If, for whatever reason, the outcome of that should differ from the original, then the specific consequences would need to assessed at that point. Xover (talk) 07:08, 11 January 2022 (UTC)

Index:The works of Plato, vol 2 (Dacier, 1701).pdf

This file was formerly File:Worksplatoabrid00stengoog.pdf until it was moved to this name by Jelican9 on 2 December 2021 as a "meaningless or ambiguous name". Later, on 8 December 2021, it was deleted by @Infrogmation: "per uploader del req". Without knowing why on earth the creator wanted it deleted, or who the creator was, it's hard for me to say if a better version of the file exists or might have been uploaded. If it was, it might be a better idea to move the pages in this index to that hypothetical file instead of deleting the pages altogether.

Pinging also @Oryang7, @ShakespeareFan00, @Inductiveload, @CalendulaAsteraceae: who were known to be involved with this transcription in some way. List of pages: 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9. PseudoSkull (talk) 16:28, 9 January 2022 (UTC)

(Although I deleted most of the pages except 8, because they were all meaningless. Only 8 had any actual content.) PseudoSkull (talk) 16:34, 9 January 2022 (UTC)
From what I remember I had mistakenly uploaded a duplicate of File:Works_of_Plato,_vol._1_(Dacier,1701).pdf (formerly File:Worksplatoabrid01stengoog.pdf) under the filename File:Worksplatoabrid00stengoog.pdf as detailed in the deletion log here. However 69.174.144.79 pointed out that it didn't appear to be a duplicate and it may have been the case that I got confused as I had originally cited the source of File:Worksplatoabrid01stengoog.pdf as also being the source of File:Worksplatoabrid00stengoog.pdf as seen here. Either way I'll attempt to submit an undeletion request for the 2nd volume. Oryang7 (talk) 01:21, 10 January 2022 (UTC)
@Oryang7: Alright then, I removed the speedy deletion template. Resolved. PseudoSkull (talk) 02:35, 11 January 2022 (UTC)

Long-inactive WikiProjects

I notice there are several projects in Category:WikiProjects that are inactive and have apparently been inactive for over 10 years, for example Wikisource:WikiProject Barack Obama. Is there a way we can tag these as inactive with a template, or at least a category? Or is there another preferred method of communicating that the information there is largely historical? PseudoSkull (talk) 19:15, 9 January 2022 (UTC)

Why? What is the purpose? Projects are projects, they are only inactive when someone isn't working on them, how do we know? What are we achieving? — billinghurst sDrewth 20:55, 9 January 2022 (UTC)
@Billinghurst: Okay, I didn't think there'd be opposition, so here we go. Q: Why? A: Maintenance. Q: How do we know? A: Given the example I gave above of WikiProject Barack Obama, the evidence I presented indicates to me that the WikiProject itself is not being actively worked on and hasn't been for at least 10 years. Whether or not individuals have edited or created transcriptions related to or by Barack Obama is unrelated however, because those editors may not have even been aware that a WikiProject for it existed. Q: What is the purpose? What are we achieving? A: I think that having a Category:Inactive WikiProjects is useful because it takes out the clutter that exists currently in Category:WikiProjects of many that are clearly abandoned. I get what you're saying, the line between active and inactive is somewhat hard to establish—but the line I suggested was some evidence of complete inactivity on the project within a roughly 10-year period, that is, never having been used by anyone. Note I am not suggesting to do this for projects with only one contributor, who has been active in that project. The category would show the difference between abandoned projects and active ones. I feel like the main category should be for those who are looking for active projects specifically. An inactive template at the top of the page would serve a similar purpose: that is, to let users know the project has been inactive for a long time. If someone wants to reinstate the project, or disagrees with the template/category being placed there, they can remove the template and the category and just start working on it again. Priority: Not a pressing issue, but not every issue has to be pressing to be brought up here—just a convenience and it cleans up a bit. PseudoSkull (talk) 22:47, 9 January 2022 (UTC)
you are importing some wikiproject drama from english, and using maintenance categories, which we really don't do. tidying up inactive projects is a waste of effort. an inactive project is better than none: like a started index, it provides a place for future collaboration. but editors have moved off-wiki in content collaboration, in response to drama such as this on english. --Slowking4 亞 Farmbrough's revenge 00:07, 11 January 2022 (UTC)
@Slowking4: It is unfortunate that you believe I am trying to "import drama" from somewhere because I had no such intentions. I had not even remembered that enwiki had such a system. I ragequitted enwiki long ago and will not be active there again. Very well, there are decent arguments for lacking the template and as I said it is not a pressing issue. If the community doesn't want it, I'll respect it. There are better battles to fight. PseudoSkull (talk) 00:44, 11 January 2022 (UTC)
There is indeed someone being very dramatic here…
@PseudoSkull: I think tagging inactive WikiPojects as {{historical}} is a good idea (and we can make a dedicated template for this if we want a tracking category). It's about managing user expectations: there's nothing worse than being led to believe there is a venue for assistance or source of good practice, only for requests to languish unanswered indefinitely or the guidelines turning out to be way outdated (usually because a patrolling admin drops by your talk page with stern admonishments). There's no need to be aggressive in such tagging (most of them are moribund for 5+ years anyway), and anyone should feel free to remove the tag and start a given project up again at any time, but for most such projects adding the tag should be entirely uncontroversial.
My only real caution would be things like EB1911 where the WikiProject pages might not see any activity but the associated work has ongoing efforts. In those cases the WikiProject might have good and current best practice guidance, and might conceivably run into issues needing discussion (and hence get active discussion on the WikiProject talk page) only every several years. Xover (talk) 06:57, 11 January 2022 (UTC)

Wikisource:WikiProject Biographical dictionaries is a long term project where you would hardly ever see activity on the project page except when I occasionally add works. The project in itself has lots of uses, even just for myself to see what and where. None of the activity takes place there. So again what is an active project and what is an inactive project. We seem to have an solution in search of a problem. Using one project as the source of a holisitic problem is not useful. Work out what it is the real issue with that project and look to see whether it is actually close to complete, or whether it needs a synopsis that addresses the current situation and reflects a new reality of "moribund" though incomplete. The DNB and EB1911 are other projects that don't have high activity on the project pages though on the odd occasion something pops up. So, again, no, go back to my original questions they are not suitably addressed. Otherwise sorting/scoping the projects may be another solution. Working out a better scope for highly active, or long term projects. The problem here isn't activity.
user:slowking4 that was a really unhelpful comment. Your issues with enWP are yours, and you do more importing of the difficulties than anyone else. Get over enWP. — billinghurst sDrewth 10:43, 11 January 2022 (UTC)

other wikis are a cautionary tale. the pattern is clear: "smartest problem solver in the room" + "let's impose order on the chaos" = "hell is other people". you see the same thing at wikidata, where people mass change descriptions to include dates, as discussion continues. i.e. "my ontology" > "your ontology". we need sociological methods in a distributed environment, but the STEM problem solvers do not do soft solutions. we need to adopt librarian standards of practice, but without cataloging hard coding. we could do a wikiproject quality circle, but you would be distracting from editing page space. --Slowking4 亞 Farmbrough's revenge 14:28, 11 January 2022 (UTC)
I think the "issue" (scary quotes intentional) here is that if a user assumes a WikiProject is active, questions can go unnoticed and therefore unanswered. I know from experience at other projects how annoying that can be and how dispiriting it can be. I do not know if that's actually happening, but it's quite possible: not all the WikiProjects will be carefully watched years or even decades after activity, so I think it's not unfair to warn users who don't know that the answers to their questions may be better at WS:S or WS:S/H. Inductiveload—talk/contribs 14:48, 11 January 2022 (UTC)

The Kreutzer Sonata translator

This is an unsourced work that appears to have been taken from this collection, but I'm unsure.

Our work lists Isabel Florence Hapgood as the translator. However, the book I believe was the source lists a "Benj. R. Tucker" as the translator. However we have a problem yet again, because the translator's preface is apparently verbatim the same as this, and that listed there as written by Adolphus Norraikow, suggesting he is the translator.

This was first doubted by an IP on the work's talk page.

So then who is the real translator? PseudoSkull (talk) 17:08, 13 January 2022 (UTC)

@PseudoSkull: The Wikipedia article w:Church_and_State_(by_Leo_Tolstoy) seems to indicate that Benjamin R. Tucker did translate some texts by Leo Tolstoy. I have also found some article on the web explicitly stating that Tucker translated the Kreutzer sonatas https://www.libertarian-labyrinth.org/benjamin-r-tucker/benjamin-r-tucker-1854-1939/. Tylopous (talk) 17:37, 13 January 2022 (UTC)
In general, I would say we should proofread one translation. The whole work isn't that long... In general the Tolstoy works we have were not in good shape and these unsourced translations can be confused between translators, editors etc. One problem we had is that a bunch of the texts were of very poor quality (copied pasted raw OCR) and then someone else might have been replaced by a different version that was cleaner but a different translation but not updated the translator etc. MarkLSteadman (talk) 17:57, 13 January 2022 (UTC)

obsolete licence template offered when uploading a file to WS

When uploading a file to WS, text of one of the licenses offered by Special:Upload says "First published in the United States before 1925", which is an obsolete offer and should be replaced by "1927". When this offer is chosen, the obsolete template {{PD-1923}} is added to the file page. Could this be fixed and if possible, set so that the text offered by https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Special:Upload kept changing every year? --Jan Kameníček (talk) 17:49, 15 January 2022 (UTC)

Merge two Indexes and Delete One

Can someone merge Index:Seven Poems, E. E. Cummings, 1920.djvu into Page:The Dial (Volume 68).djvu/30 and delete the first Index? Languageseeker (talk) 19:43, 15 January 2022 (UTC)

  Done --Jan Kameníček (talk) 21:43, 15 January 2022 (UTC)

Tech News: 2022-03

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Recent changes

Changes later this week

  •   The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 18 January. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 19 January. It will be on all wikis from 20 January (calendar).

Events

  • Community Wishlist Survey 2022 continues. All contributors to the Wikimedia projects can propose for tools and platform improvements. The proposal phase takes place from 10 January 18:00 UTC to 23 January 18:00 UTC. Learn more.

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

19:55, 17 January 2022 (UTC)

Talk to the Community Tech

 

Hello

We, the team working on the Community Wishlist Survey, would like to invite you to an online meeting with us. It will take place on 19 January (Wednesday), 18:00 UTC on Zoom, and will last an hour. This external system is not subject to the WMF Privacy Policy. Click here to join.

Agenda

  • Bring drafts of your proposals and talk to to a member of the Community Tech Team about your questions on how to improve the proposal

Format

The meeting will not be recorded or streamed. Notes without attribution will be taken and published on Meta-Wiki. The presentation (all points in the agenda except for the questions and answers) will be given in English.

We can answer questions asked in English, French, Polish, Spanish, and German. If you would like to ask questions in advance, add them on the Community Wishlist Survey talk page or send to sgrabarczuk@wikimedia.org.

Natalia Rodriguez (the Community Tech manager) will be hosting this meeting.

Invitation link

We hope to see you! SGrabarczuk (WMF) (talk) 00:21, 18 January 2022 (UTC)

Call for Feedback about the Board of Trustees elections is now open

You can find this message translated into additional languages on Meta-wiki.
More languages • Please help translate to your language

The Call for Feedback: Board of Trustees elections is now open and will close on 7 16 February 2022.

With this Call for Feedback, the Movement Strategy and Governance team is taking a different approach. This approach incorporates community feedback from 2021. Instead of leading with proposals, the Call is framed around key questions from the Board of Trustees. The key questions came from the feedback about the 2021 Board of Trustees election. The intention is to inspire collective conversation and collaborative proposal development about these key questions.

Join the conversation.

Best regards,

Movement Strategy and Governance

Xeno (WMF) (talk) 01:50, 13 January 2022 (UTC)

I for one am utterly thrilled that the BoT has elected a serial startup founder involved in fintech, property and recruitment "tech" with an crypto-monkey avatar who hypes NFTs on Twitter and co-founds companies with illegal cookies (there's no option but to accept ad/tracking cookies, which is illegal in Europe). Just the kind of disruption needed. After all, he used to work closely with communities at Reddit and that's a healthy community with a perfectly fine relationship with the parent organisation and the site certainly doesn't push unpopular design decisions top-down and use dark patterns like requiring use of apps to simply read content. Oh and by the way, the way to access some of "the conversation" on the BoT election also needs you to install Telegram on your phone. Inductiveload—talk/contribs 11:03, 13 January 2022 (UTC)
In anyone wonders why the link doesn't show it, he got rid of the NFT ape avatar and deleted the retweet. Inductiveload—talk/contribs 15:15, 13 January 2022 (UTC)
don't know why you are grumpy about BoT now. he merely validates the NFT attitude of Jimbo. it is the same old techno-idealism, with little experience of non-profit governance. they think he has some knowledge of global south. so it goes. --Slowking4 亞 Farmbrough's revenge 03:38, 15 January 2022 (UTC)
Thank you Inductiveload and User:Slowking4 for taking the time to comment. I've included this input for consideration. Xeno (WMF) (talk) 00:36, 22 January 2022 (UTC)
Please note an additional question has now been added. There are also several proposals from participants to review and discuss. Xeno (WMF) (talk) 00:36, 22 January 2022 (UTC)

Question about the Affiliates' role for the Call for Feedback: Board of Trustees elections

You can find this message translated into additional languages on Meta-wiki.
More languages • Please help translate to your language

Hi All,

Thank you to everyone who participated in the Call for Feedback: Board of Trustees elections so far. The Movement Strategy and Governance team has announced the last key question:

How should affiliates participate in elections?

Affiliates are an important part of the Wikimedia movement. Two seats of the Board of Trustees due to be filled this year were filled in 2019 through the Affiliate-selected Board seats process. A change in the Bylaws removed the distinction between community and affiliate seats. This leaves the important question: How should affiliates be involved in the selection of new seats?

The question is broad in the sense that the answers may refer not just to the two seats mentioned, but also to other, Community- and Affiliate-selected seats. The Board is hoping to find an approach that will both engage the affiliates and give them actual agency, and also optimize the outcomes in terms of selecting people with top skills, experience, diversity, and wide community’s support.

The Board of Trustees is seeking feedback about this question especially, although not solely, from the affiliate community. Everyone is invited to share proposals and join the conversation in the Call for Feedback channels. In addition to collecting online feedback, the Movement Strategy and Governance team will organize several video calls with affiliate members to collect feedback. These calls will be at different times and include Trustees.

Due to the late addition of this third question, the Call will be extended until 16 February.

Join the conversation.

Best regards,

Movement Strategy and Governance

Xeno (WMF) (talk) 02:24, 21 January 2022 (UTC)

Naming convention (The Black Cat)

I wonder what naming convention should be used for short stories published in The Black Cat (magazine). Should they be published as subpages ae they are now, or under their own titles as suggested in WS:Naming conventions? Ankry (talk) 00:19, 21 January 2022 (UTC)

Where do you see on WS:Naming conventions the suggestion that they should not be subpages? Periodicals (including magazines) are published here with their contents as subpages. See Help:Subpages#Periodicals. --EncycloPetey (talk) 01:13, 21 January 2022 (UTC)
@EncycloPetey: Thank you for your response. Frankly, there is nothing about sets of works there; only the suggestion that subpages should be used for lenghty works which unlikely appies to periodicals and that title should be the page name (which is likely title of the short story, when a page presents the story only and not the complete magazine). This may be misleading if a user does not check how it is used in practice. Ankry (talk) 06:33, 21 January 2022 (UTC)
As usual, the documentation is not especially clear and hasn't been re-reviewed (in this case, for 8 years or so, 6 as a draft). The phrase in question dates to the first revision of the page and there was a lot less periodical content then, and lots of collective work articles were actually not subpages. There is a link to H:Subpages, which does have a periodicals section, as noted above, so I suppose you can argue the intention was OK.
But it can probably be made clearer: #Clarify_use_of_subpages_in_Wikisource:Naming_conventions. Inductiveload—talk/contribs 14:34, 21 January 2022 (UTC)
yeah, the short story "own titles" are an artifact of the old web 1.0 non-scanned back era. as we migrate to scan backed, the title will reflect the periodical. you could make a case for stories that appeared in multiple locations / scans, to have a disambiguation page, but name should not matter too much if linked to the right wikipedia article. i.e. Renascence (Millay) i could move / rename, but too lazy. --Slowking4 亞 Farmbrough's revenge 00:18, 22 January 2022 (UTC)

Help with avoiding unbalanced HTML

Hi there,

A user reached out to advise me that my use of if statement is creating unbalanced HTML.

The purpose of it is that wherever cont = FALSE, a new paragraph will be added at the start of the template.

So when constructing pages like Social Security Act 2018 (Version 56)/Section 5, where the first paragraph of Page 26 is just continuing (cont) the final paragraph of page Page 25, it will neatly continue the paragraph, rather than incorrectly starting a new paragraph. The reason the opposite isn't the default is that only a few instances in these legislative documents will continue a paragraph. It's an exception, so the template formatting reflected that.

That said, I do want to avoid unbalanced HTML, is there a way I can identify how the HTML is unbalanced, and how I can avoid this? Supertrinko (talk) 05:03, 21 January 2022 (UTC)

Maybe, using the page header/footer is the right way to balance the HTML? However, this should be done using templates to avoid problems with VE. Ankry (talk) 14:13, 21 January 2022 (UTC)

Index Pages with Category:WikiProject Emory University Libraries

There are a number of Indexes that have [[Category:WikiProject Emory University Libraries]] in the Pages section in the Index NS. Is it possible to remove this from the Pages section and properly tag the Category? Languageseeker (talk) 19:58, 21 January 2022 (UTC)

Yes, it is possible, but I cannot explain why the page is not sorted as when the category is in the Pages section. See for example Index:A memoir of Granville Sharp.djvu, now it is sorted under "W" and not "A". Mpaa (talk) 22:49, 21 January 2022 (UTC)
I think it is a bug in how categories are handled in ProofreadPage Extension, as they are sorted according to the category name and not the page name, but maybe there is a rational for it? Mpaa (talk) 22:55, 21 January 2022 (UTC)
See task T299824 Mpaa (talk) 10:14, 22 January 2022 (UTC)

Clarify use of subpages in Wikisource:Naming conventions

As noted below, Wikisource:Naming conventions is not very clear with respect to the use of subpages. Since 2010 (when the page was written), it has said Use of subpages is encouraged for lengthy works. While certainly true, this is a pretty brutal simplification and also not quite representative of current best practice: subpages are not required for single-page works, but they are pretty much expected (if not required) for multiple pages from the same work. The days of spraying thousands of articles as top-level pages (hello, DNB00) are in the past.

I think it could be improved by saying something like :

  • Generally, each edition of a work has one, and only one, top-level page. The work may be divided into subpages which must be placed under that page.
    • Use of subpages is encouraged for lengthy works, especially for works with well-defined textual units like volumes, books or chapters.
    • Works with independent textual units (e.g. periodicals, encylopaedias, and other collective works) should use subpages

Notes/logic:

  • Note that if a work does have subpages, there should be a single mainspace "home page" for the edition.
  • Retain "encourage" for lengthy works. There is a fuzzy line here that will not be possible to define to the extent needed for a bright line policy in 100% of cases since it depends on length of the work, type of division if any, relative lengths of divisions, etc.
  • Be more emphatic with collective works. Should rather than must because there could theoretically be exceptions. The New-England Courant/Number 1 is one I can think of where dividing into subpages may not be needed.

Thoughts? Inductiveload—talk/contribs 14:31, 21 January 2022 (UTC)

i suggest adding "parts" in legislation to the examples of "well-defined textual units" Serprinss (talk) 04:43, 22 January 2022 (UTC)
While we're at it, we could also add a suggested standard to naming these subpages, e.g. chapter names or titles of articles in periodicals. DoublePendulumAttractor (talk) 04:00, 24 January 2022 (UTC)

Should we undelete The Land of Mist?

I noticed that The Land of Mist was deleted in 2007 and is now out of copyright. Should we routinely undelete these scanless works, or leave them be? There is a transcription project for this, and I don't expect it to take that long.--Prosfilaes (talk) 03:33, 24 January 2022 (UTC)

I definitely don't think we should routinely undelete non-scan backed texts. If the text is of good quality and someone wants it for a starting point to proofread from a scan that's a different matter. For most works it will be better to start from a scan, but for texts with a lot of intricate formatting it can save a lot of effort. And there could be some instances where the text is one that could not reasonably be scan-backed (born digital, scan is exceptionally hard to come by, etc.) such that it would be reasonable to accept it non-scan backed even as a new text (and by the same token also undeleted without a scan). But as a basic principle we should require scan-backing and at a minimum Proofread status for anything added to mainspace now, with only fairly obvious exceptions (born digital etc.), regardless of whether it is added new or comes by way of undeletion.
No need to be religious about it of course, so if someone wants the text for reference temporarily while proofreading that's fine. And undeleting old revisions of a now scan backed text in order to preserve edit history is a good idea. Xover (talk) 05:54, 24 January 2022 (UTC)

Tech News: 2022-04

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Changes later this week

  •   The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 25 January. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 26 January. It will be on all wikis from 27 January (calendar).
  • The following languages can now be used with syntax highlighting: BDD, Elpi, LilyPond, Maxima, Rita, Savi, Sed, Sophia, Spice, .SRCINFO.
  • You can now access your watchlist from outside of the user menu in the new Vector skin. The watchlist link appears next to the notification icons if you are at the top of the page. [11]

Events

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

21:38, 24 January 2022 (UTC)

Proposal to create an Image Lab

Many books have images that either need to be added or updated with higher quality versions. Currently, there is no place on enWS to request the addition of such images. Therefore, I propose to create an Image Lab page similar to the Scan Lab one where users can request the addition of images to a text. This page would also have a ping function so that users capable of adding images can be notified when a new request is posted. Such requests will be limited to texts that the user is currently working on or texts in a community challenge. Languageseeker (talk) 14:58, 8 January 2022 (UTC)

I think few add images because the process is super-tedious. Smoothing the workflow might help more than adding a request channel.
  • integrating Common's Croptool into the workflow here, and making it so it can cut out multiple images from a page at once, white-adjust and sharpen, and copy the new file and its caption/name to commons.
  • digital-native files, like Journal of Glacial Archaeology/Volume 3/Prehistoric and Medieval Skis from Glaciers and Ice Patches in Norway, have internal image files intrinsically separate from the text. I, on request, manually extracted, named, uploaded, and captioned the images in that short work, and it took forever. I wouldn't mind it taking forever, but it could have been done by a bot.
Anything we can do to speed the extraction and integration of images will improve our texts and save a lot of volunteer time for other purposes. I suggested this in a Community Wishlist, but the idea was rejected for lack of a clear description of the problem. The WMF Growth Team are/were also looking for simple tasks to add to their edit-WP app (meta:Growth/Personalized first day/Structured tasks). Fixing missing-image templates would work well, and we might try for a Wikisource consensus to request it. While I somewhat doubt new editors will stick around because we gave them simple, tedious, semi-automatable tasks, they might discover Wikisource, use our material, and then start editing. HLHJ (talk) 20:27, 9 January 2022 (UTC)
@HLHJ Plug time: something that might help is toolforge:ws-image-uploader. It's supposed to make uploading images from a book a (bit) less painful. It will eventually also do the SDC data where possible, but for now it just does a normal information template, since there is no useful Commons template for this data that I know of (see commons:Module_talk:Artwork#Entry_point_for_illustration-type_images for a resounding silence on the subject).
What WSIU doesn't do, quite deliberately, is auto-extract from the file. This should never be done if it can be avoided, because the images found in PDFs and DjVu are completely trashed by the compression (see H:EXTRACT for some representative examples). The image should always be extracted from the "most original" file at the source (often a JPG, PNG, JP2 or TIFF, depending on the source). User:Inductiveload/jump to file will get you a direct link to the image in many cases. Thus, better integration of CropTool as it stands would only help users produce "Placeholder" quality images that will need to be replaced with properly extracted images.
Sadly, properly extracting images is quite difficult in the general case, since it's extremely easy to trash fine detail in an image while trying to eliminate paper texture. Help:Image extraction/With GIMP provides a method to extract images using GIMP, but it's certainly not the only way. However, I know of no automatic way to extract images that works for any but the simplest cases: human judgement seems pretty hard to eliminate. Inductiveload—talk/contribs 20:57, 9 January 2022 (UTC)
Inductiveload, thank you. toolforge:ws-image-uploader does look useful. Automated image numbering and copying of metadata would be nice; I will try it when next I need to upload such a series. The skis article has higher-res images, on the source website and on Google Drive; I linked them from the Commons PDF-file page but I think it wasn't clear to me if they are under a suitable license; I'm glad to learn there's a tool for getting higher-res images, too. Maybe we also need better discoverability of existing tools.
If we asked academics, they'd upload their own images to Commons instead of Google, which would save us time; maybe I should make a get-outreach-impact-on-your-CV-fast-with-Wikimedia poster and send it round some academic librarians? I did some how-to-guide writing a while back at Wikiversity:Ga naar Wikipedia and Wikipedia:Help:Wikipedia editing for researchers, scholars, and academics, I don't know how useful it's been.
I've traced some into SVG manually; Inkscape's new centerline tool actually does surprisingly well with straight-line parts of line diagrams. This Imagemagick command for de-yellowing images has in practice worked pretty well for me, but that's probably partly luck. Examining the results of a bunch of preset filters to see which one looks best is certainly the sort of semi-automated task the Growth app could do. I think they should build a Wikicaptcha, especially now Google charges all the larger websites hefty fees for training Google's self-driving car software; it would get us a lot of socially-useful work. After all, reCAPTCHA used to do charitable PD-text OCR before Google bought it. I don't think they will, tho. HLHJ (talk) 01:15, 10 January 2022 (UTC)
@HLHJ a palette of presets is an intriguing idea. That could be a fun project, though the end-to-end integration will be quite some work, since it has to essentially combine "jump to file", "crop tool", a parametric image processing pipeline, metadata collection and upload (i.e. WSIU). So it probably will not be achieved by any WMF team since they will likely not be assigned time to implement it.
As for the ImageMagick command, yes, that does work for images with very good fore/background separation and no pale grey parts that are similar in lightness to the background. For the very simple images, indeed, a tool to do that kind of processing might be good. Though as soon as there's a single splotch that needs the eraser tool, you have to abort and go to a real image editor anyway (or re-implement GIMP/PS as a Toolforge tool!). Inductiveload—talk/contribs 07:53, 10 January 2022 (UTC)
GIMP as a Toolforge tool... sounds like a bit more than an afternoons' coding  . A Commons-API plugin for the GIMP sounds more feasible. On the simpler end, a Toolforge tool to adjust whitebalance would be useful for photos and might be made usable to improve greyscale and black-and-white diagrams on yellowing paper, which are a large proportion of PD book illustrations (UI of colour and contrast curves, with some common presets on buttons?). Serial improvements seem acceptable here; if there's still a print-coloured splotch to remove, at least it's better than when it was discoloured with a print-coloured splotch. I"ve used the Commons API, but never written a Toolforge tool, so I have little idea of what this entails. HLHJ (talk) 18:42, 15 January 2022 (UTC)
Inductiveload, I tried using the upload tool, but couldn't figure it out for my use case. I wanted to upload these images from this Gutenberg e-book, not so much for Wikisource as for the reuse of the images, but there's no overall PDF. So there's no index page possible. I may be missing somethign obvious. I posted a similar problem almost a year ago, though, and have not had anyone tell me an obvious method yet. The Gutenberg images are decent-quality in both cases. Another major use case with good-quality images is PMC, the US database of medical academic papers: they have an API for full-resolution images, sometimes even TIFFs.
Separately, might it be useful for the workflow to have lousy overcompressed semi-autoextracted images with templates under each saying that a better version may be available, search for / upload it here (link)? The transcriber could add the metadata to the template, perhaps including the relevant section of the book text in the template as an extended description (example), and when someone else found a better version, it could automatically transfer the metadata. Finding a higher-res version of an existing image is also an automatable task (Tineye did it quite reliably). HLHJ (talk) 12:55, 26 January 2022 (UTC)
@HLHJ it's not a general-purpose batch-upload tool, it's specifically designed for Wikisource (hence the name) and it also specifically assumes an index page exists as this is best practise.
However, you do not need an index to exist to use WSIU. If you do not, then you have to fill in the data manually, something like phab:F34931538 (you may need to adjust the generated description). For completely general uploads, independently of Wikisource and index pages, tools like Commons:Pattypan may be better.
From a Wikisource perspective (as opposed to a Commons perspective), the ideal thing to do is to find a good scan, upload it and create the index page, which will both allow the tool to pre-fill some data, as well as break ground in the proofreading process. Inductiveload—talk/contribs 13:10, 26 January 2022 (UTC)

Desktop Improvements update and Office Hours invitation

Hello. I wanted to give you an update about the Desktop Improvements project, which the Wikimedia Foundation Web team has been working on for the past few years.

The goals of the project are to make the interface more welcoming and comfortable for readers and useful for advanced users. The project consists of a series of feature improvements which make it easier to read and learn, navigate within the page, search, switch between languages, use article tabs and the user menu, and more.

The improvements are already visible by default for readers and editors on 24 wikis, including Wikipedias in French, Portuguese, and Persian.

The changes apply to the Vector skin only. Monobook or Timeless users are not affected.

Features deployed since our last update

  • User menu - focused on making the navigation more intuitive by visually highlighting the structure of user links and their purpose.
  • Sticky header - focused on allowing access to important functionality (logging in/out, history, talk pages, etc.) without requiring people to scroll to the top of the page.

For a full list of the features the project includes, please visit our project page. We also invite you to our Updates page.

The features deployed already and the table of contents that's currently under development


How to enable the improvements

 
Global preferences
  • It is possible to opt-in individually in the appearance tab within the preferences by unchecking the "Use Legacy Vector" box. (It has to be empty.) Also, it is possible to opt-in on all wikis using the global preferences.
  • If you think this would be good as a default for all readers and editors of this wiki, feel free to start a conversation with the community and contact me.
  • On wikis where the changes are visible by default for all, logged-in users can always opt-out to the Legacy Vector. There is an easily accessible link in the sidebar of the new Vector.

Learn more and join our events

If you would like to follow the progress of our project, you can subscribe to our newsletter.

You can read the pages of the project, check our FAQ, write on the project talk page, and join an online meeting with us (27 January (Thursday), 15:00 UTC).

How to join our online meeting

Thank you!!

On behalf of the Wikimedia Foundation Web team, SGrabarczuk (WMF) (talk) 22:11, 24 January 2022 (UTC)

Note, if anyone wants a sticky header without also hiding all the tools behind buttons and increasing clicks needed, it has always been possible to do this in "normal" Vector skins:
.skin-vector-legacy #mw-head {
    position: fixed;
    background-image: linear-gradient(to bottom,#ffffff 50%,#f6f6f6 100%);
}

And in Monobook, something like this may work too: 

.skin-monobook #p-cactions {
    position: fixed !important;
    z-index: 10;
}
.skin-monobook #p-cactions li {
    padding-bottom: 0 !important;
}

.skin-monobook #p-personal {
    position: fixed !important;
}
Inductiveload—talk/contribs 13:36, 26 January 2022 (UTC)

{{incomplete}} incorrectly adding transcluded pages to Category:Incomplete texts without a source

It seems that {{incomplete}} is added transcluded pages to Category:Incomplete texts without a source. See for example, All Over Oregon and Washington. The correct behavior would be to add this to such as Category:Incomplete texts. Languageseeker (talk) 04:56, 27 January 2022 (UTC)

There is no way the {{incomplete}} template can know that the page has a associated index from it parsing context. In theory the PRP extension may be able to add a magic word like {{INDEXNAME}} or something (which may be generally useful for other things too). But there is not even a phab task for that, let alone an implementation.
You can add the source parameter in the meantime, which is what controls the categorisation. Inductiveload—talk/contribs 12:49, 27 January 2022 (UTC)

Middlemarch

Please move to Middlemarch (1871b) to make way for versions page in preparation for the transclusion of Middlemarch (1874). Languageseeker (talk) 15:02, 22 January 2022 (UTC)

  Done, moved to Middlemarch (1871), as per request in Wikisource:Bot requests#Middlemarch. Mpaa (talk) 15:39, 29 January 2022 (UTC)

Tech News: 2022-05

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Recent changes

  •   If a gadget should support the new ?withgadget URL parameter that was announced 3 weeks ago, then it must now also specify supportsUrlLoad in the gadget definition (documentation). [12]

Changes later this week

  •   The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 1 February. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 2 February. It will be on all wikis from 3 February (calendar).

Future changes

  • A change that was announced last year was delayed. It is now ready to move ahead:
    • The user group oversight will be renamed suppress. This is for technical reasons. This is the technical name. It doesn't affect what you call the editors with this user right on your wiki. This is planned to happen in three weeks. You can comment in Phabricator if you have objections. As usual, these labels can be translated on translatewiki (direct links are available) or by administrators on your wiki.

Events

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

17:42, 31 January 2022 (UTC)

What to do about incomplete, non-scan backed texts that have been sitting around for more than a decade

I've recently been thinking about what to do with the several hundred texts that are incomplete, non-scan backed texts that have been sitting for more than a decade. It's extremely unlikely that anyone will ever finish them. The current approach is to create a deletion request for each, but that seems to be quite annoying for the community. Can we think of a good, uniform policy to deal with these texts? Languageseeker (talk) 15:49, 27 January 2022 (UTC)

  • I don’t think any policy or policy change is necessary. There are other maintenance categories with lengthy (time-wise) backlogs; this category should not get special treatment. I have been going through this category, and changing the status of a number of pages listed in it which should not have been listed; but, for the many that are correctly listed, I do not think that project-level changes need to be made to accomodate them. The few hundred texts listed here are a small fraction of the total number of works hosted, so it is not as if these works still existing somehow reflects poorly on the project as the whole, and certainly not to the extent that large-scale changes are needed. “It's extremely unlikely that anyone will ever finish” many, or perhaps most, of the hundreds of index pages you have created: and yet, they have not been nominated for deletion. Similarly, there is a large problem with the over one million pages which have been created as “not proofread”: certainly that is a more pressing concern that a few hundred pages, especially as a number of those pages do are not properly placed in the category. TE(æ)A,ea. (talk) 16:11, 27 January 2022 (UTC)
    • @TE(æ)A,ea. I'm advocating for the deletion of these pages because they're almost impossible to finish without adding a scan first. Incomplete scan-backed works can easily be picked up by another user and the work will continue smoothly. I know that in the grand scheme of things, they are not that many, but what is the value of keeping them? Most of these are mere fragments of larger works. I'm not necessarily advocating a policy change, but I do think that it's important to figure out what to do with these texts that are over a decade old rather than shoving them into the back of the proverbial closet. Languageseeker (talk) 23:47, 27 January 2022 (UTC)
      • extremely unlikely > 0. upload the scans and migrate them and i will work them. delete them, and i will not work them. deletion is not a quality improvement process. compared to non-proofread backlog, this one is trivial. --Slowking4 亞 Farmbrough's revenge 02:32, 28 January 2022 (UTC)
The answer to the question in the title of this section is: find scans, create indexes, and complete them. A decade is a short time and there is no hurry.

The category in question is a maintenance category, not an "everything must be fixed as quickly as possible, otherwise everything we know and cherish will die" category. Works in the category are known to need attention when someone has an interest. When the works were initially uploaded they were interesting to someone. So, there will be someone else out there who is also intersted. The category is intended to signal that a scan needs to be found. The works are not harming the Project by being here while they wait for a scan to be found and uploaded. We have set up fairly tight criteria for deletion over the years, with copyright, spam, and nonsense being the primary targets. Incomplete and not-scan backed are not deletion criteria; nor should they be. Beeswaxcandle (talk) 04:15, 28 January 2022 (UTC)

Is there a need to delete them? I know there's the feeling that they "clutter", but realistically, this does not have an impact on Wikisource. They're there in case someone wishes to attach a scan. What is gained by going through and deleting them? Supertrinko (talk) 00:35, 1 February 2022 (UTC)
There are only 505 pages in the category right now, which doesn't seem at all insurmountable. BD2412 T 04:01, 1 February 2022 (UTC)
It isn't insurmountable but keep in mind that we are asking to find and prepare a high-quality scan and then proofread up to the current text for each work. It isn't something where a single person can easily knock 10 off the list in a day. MarkLSteadman (talk) 04:31, 1 February 2022 (UTC)
I'd think that the initial task would be to find and prepare a high-quality scan. The proofreading would not take precedence over the proofreading required for thousands of other works in progress. BD2412 T 06:53, 1 February 2022 (UTC)
If the works truly don't have a clear source, then it is not a simple task to find a matching scan because it isn't clear which edition, location, translator etc. it is sourced from. In general, my understanding is that the proper course of action in such a situation is to create two versions and then go through proposed deletions with community consensus to delete the unsourced version. MarkLSteadman (talk) 22:38, 2 February 2022 (UTC)
My thoughts on this are:
1. I would try to focus on the even smaller number of texts which have major quality problems (e.g. that that have major style problems or have raw OCR in them, or have fidelity issues) or would benefit heavily from proofreading (e.g. they are missing images or footnotes that would help the text immensely). In general, I think having a complete poorly-formatted raw OCR, even scan-backed, is far worse than having half a book of nicely formatted non-scan backed text and hence I don't think these works are the quality floor at the moment (YMMV of course).
2. Scan-backing and hence the ability to have clear edition-based metadata and the ability to invest in texts over time (doing multiple passes, adding links where appropriate, etc.) is what distinguishes WS from other sites. Scan-backing raises the quality ceiling substantially and I would definitely suggest doing that (along with creating Wikidata / licensing information say) as the first step before investing in a work because much of that work might be wasted.
3. At some point we may decide that we have chipped away at the backlog of either incomplete or non-scan backed enough that we decide that we want to enforce those policies on main NS works as a community but that will generally lag burning down the backlog. Get community consensus on a way foreword, and then try to work through the backlog like we do for other quality and maintenance issues. We are doing this to an extent through monthly challenge where we can motivate and highlight these works and you are seeing people spending significant time to go through and proofread some of these works. But proofreading hundreds of works will take time given the current community size. It also to a certain extent conflicts with other goals that people have that motivate them to contribute (e.g. expanding the coverage of a certain author or subject, or completing scan-backed works) MarkLSteadman (talk) 04:24, 1 February 2022 (UTC)
@Beeswaxcandle, @Supertrink, @BD2412, @MarkLSteadman, @Slowking4, @TE(æ)A,ea.: Thank you all for your thoughtful responses. It seems that the general consensuses is to leave them in place and gradually scan-back them. Languageseeker (talk) 21:39, 2 February 2022 (UTC)
General observation, I think these kinds of questions come up because our collective notion of what main space is for is a little hazy/poorly defined. Our beginner's guide, if read literally, implies that transcluding a work to main space should happen only after all pages are proofread and validated; but that's pretty far out of step with common practice, and there are many cases where it can be really valuable to the reader/the public to have a work available even if it's not fully proofread. A couple years ago, @Kaldari: was working on a nice system that would made it easier to search (and for search engines to crawl) our featured texts, which can be useful for those times someone really only wants to find high quality texts, and would rather not be distracted by stuff that's incomplete or rough around the edges. But even that, I think, is a pretty basic step toward a set of problems that probably needs a more sophisticated approach.
I don't have a clear answer about what should be done, because as I understand it, we don't have clarity on the underlying issues. In some instances, it can be really useful for a reader to be able to search on, or browse, material even with the knowledge that it might be incomplete, and they might find stuff that is very difficult or impossible to find elsewhere on the web or in most libraries. In other instances, we want to put our "best foot forward," and the middling-to-poor quality of a large amount of Wikisource content does a disservice to those works that are really painstakingly and beautifully complete, and to the readers who want to find those. We tend to have discussions from a perspective that we can only have one or the other. But with a clearer vision and some software development, I think it should be possible to have both. But it's a pretty big discussion, and I'm not aware of any entity that's prepared to take it on. If only we had a multi million dollar organization whose main goal was to support the work of our community of volunteers......but I digress. -Pete (talk) 22:33, 2 February 2022 (UTC)
One challenge is that "incomplete" itself can cover a broad set of things. Does it mean you need the whole complete works of an author / United Nations Treaty Series text etc. to transclude a portion or a complete periodical (which isn't likely to be doable anyways because of copyright)? Is it okay if you haven't proofread the advertising or indices etc.? Is it okay to proofread and then transclude a single story from a periodical? Within Category:Incomplete texts without a source you have things like Harvard Law Review which has transcription projects / scans for some volumes but other volumes haven't been started "so incomplete" and the scans haven't been found or located: "without a source".
Re finding and organizing works, it is definitely a challenge and I appreciate the effort put in by those volunteers who work to validate / enrich Wikidata / verify that is ready for export etc. to hopefully provide the raw material for such a system. MarkLSteadman (talk) 22:57, 2 February 2022 (UTC)

Unify disambiguation pages into mainspace with redirects from Author space

Per the discussion at User talk:Billinghurst#Author dab vs. work dab, we currently have a situation wherein it is unclear whether there should be separate disambiguation pages in the Author: namespace for ambiguously-named authors, and in mainspace for ambiguously named works (compare Author:Henry IV, which redirects to the disambiguation page, Author:Henry, with the mainspace disambiguation page Henry IV). This apparently promotes some unnecessary duplication of content (both pages list all individuals named "Henry IV"), and the problem is potentially clearer with something like John Brown (which currently contains both works and authors), or Author:John Smith or Author:John Skelton (for which disambiguation pages could be made for works). Wikidata also apparently can only handle a single disambiguation page per title. The proposal on the table is therefore:

Clarify policy to state that all ambiguous meanings, both works and authors, should be on a single mainspace disambiguation page, with a section header for ==Authors==, and
Change policy regarding redirects to permit cross-namespace redirects from ambiguous author names to those mainspace disambiguation page sections.

This would entail the moving and/or merging of approximately 600 extant Author: space disambiguation pages. In passing, I also note an inconsistency as to whether mainspace disambiguation pages are at last-name-first titles (see, e.g., Anderson, John, Herbert, William, Wilson, John vs. Andrew Clark, Henry Bradshaw, Henry Brooke). BD2412 T 08:22, 26 January 2022 (UTC)

@Billinghurst, @Xover, @EncycloPetey: participants in the previous discussion. BD2412 T 08:25, 26 January 2022 (UTC)
I have skimmed through the discussion indicated and am not convinced by the argument that we need to kowtow to Wikidata. Wikidata is intended to be the servant in the background, not the goddess with whose whim all most conform. WD needs to accommodate the way things are done, not the way things could have been done if only we had been more enlightened x years ago when our structures were set up. However, what is the real size of this problem that this solution is attempting to solve? How many of our dabbed author names are the exact title of a work that could be hosted? Beeswaxcandle (talk) 04:31, 28 January 2022 (UTC)
This situation will arise, and be complicated, any time we have multiple persons with the same name who have biographical books or articles. Samuel Johnson was the name that triggered the discussion. Potentially any and all places we've had to disambiguate authors could propagate this issue. Having disambiguation solely in the Mainspace also means we would not have to hold any names available in the Author namespace for disambiguation. So, no need in future to move a page like Author:William Shakespeare because we would no longer require the pagename for disambiguation. The goal is not to patch the leak, but plan ahead as the problem is likely to only get worse. --EncycloPetey (talk) 05:01, 28 January 2022 (UTC)
@Beeswaxcandle: per EncycloPetey, well-known authors tend to have works written about them and therefore named for them; I suspect that multiple authors sharing a name multiplies the possibility of this happening. BD2412 T 06:19, 28 January 2022 (UTC)
I understand all that as a general statement, but what's the real size of the problem. Let's take a recent author dab page I created: Author:Thomas Turnbull. How many works are there called Thomas Turnbull? Note, works, not articles, as articles are subpages to their parent work and therefore should not appear on a dab. Or, if Thomas Turnbull is not famous enough, try Theodore Roosevelt junior. The biography we host for him is called American Boys' Life of Theodore Roosevelt, which would not belong on a dab page called Theodore Roosevelt because it has a different title. It is the same with the majority of biographies. It is rare for them to have the bare title of the subject's name. Remember, dab pages are not navigation pages, rather they are "which one did you want" pages. Beeswaxcandle (talk) 06:51, 28 January 2022 (UTC)
There's a bit of inside baseball there. If someone who is not steeped in the structure of Wikisource is looking for works by a given "Henry IV", what are they going to do? They'll go to Henry IV. Perhaps that is as far as they should need to go to find the list of authors, as well as works. BD2412 T 06:54, 28 January 2022 (UTC)
Samuel Johnson and William Shakespeare are the first place we really meet this due to the sheer volume of biographical interest in them. But biographers are inordinately fond of, for obvious reasons, titling their monographs with the name of their subject. We will run into several of these cases as our collection grows, if with fewer entries on average on each dab than for the two popular examples mentioned initially. That being said, I don't think the number of such cases is very large in absolute terms. A few hundred, tops, maybe? I'd be surprised if we count the cases in number of hundreds rather than number of tens at any point in the near future. You could certainly argue that the tail would be wagging the dog if this minority of extra complex cases dictated how we deal with all ~600 non-complex cases, but I think the number is still too large to allow special pleading. Were it just one author, or maybe even two, then perhaps; but it's going to be large enough that we can't reasonably special-case every one of them. We need a consistent approach, and that means the approach has to accommodate both the simple and the complex cases. Xover (talk) 07:52, 1 February 2022 (UTC)
@Beeswaxcandle:: "articles are subpages to their parent work and therefore should not appear on a dab"; I am unaware of any decision that subpages should not appear on a DAB. That would make it impossible to disambiguation short stories, poems, newspaper articles, correspondence, plays, or any work that appears within a periodical, anthology, or edited collection. --EncycloPetey (talk) 20:12, 12 February 2022 (UTC)
@Beeswaxcandle: While I share your view of Wikidata's role in general, there are certain realities we need to live with in the short term. Among them the fact that Mediawiki sets the technical limits of what we can do by what behaviour it implements in its functionality; that certain Mediawiki functionality, here in particular interwiki links, delegates its effective behaviour to Wikidata's data model; and that this model is formed in great part from English Wikipedia's concept model. We can disagree all we want with this, but unless we adapt to the reality of the situation we will have broken or incorrect interwiki links (and endless fights with our sister projects who are presumably generally happy with the status quo).
We may of course attempt to change reality, but that's rather a large task so I don't give it good odds for success in the short to medium term. In the medium to long term it is conceivable that we could achieve something that better caters to all the constituents and concerns, but it'd take quite a bit of effort in defining what that solution is and advocating for its implementation. In particular, despite a few fairly dogmatic claims here and there about what dab pages are and are not, I do not believe we have universal agreement on that even within Wikisource. We would need to get to such agreement, at a fairly tedious level of specificity and detail, before we could productively start advocating for global changes across the movement. Xover (talk) 07:39, 1 February 2022 (UTC)

Undeletion

Hi, Could someone please undelete these pages? This is in the public domain in India since 2008. And these are republication of earlier works. The date of first publication is given for each volume. See The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi. Thanks, Yann (talk) 20:52, 26 January 2022 (UTC)

Those pages do not identify the file type of the source scan. They were deleted because the title made it impossible to connect to any existing scan. An Index page must have a name identical to the scanned file on Commons in order to function. --EncycloPetey (talk) 22:46, 26 January 2022 (UTC)
The scans are now available. So we could restored these pages, and rename them to the appropriate name. Thanks, Yann (talk) 10:00, 28 January 2022 (UTC)
What scans? Where? What are they named? I do not see a scan named File:The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi/Volume II so the index page Index:The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi/Volume II would have nothing to link to. --EncycloPetey (talk) 20:19, 12 February 2022 (UTC)

Australian Aboriginal Flag now under Commonwealth of Australia copyright

The Australian Aboriginal Flag is now under Commonwealth of Australia copyright (24th January 2022) - w:Australian_Aboriginal_Flag#Copyright --kathleen wright5 (talk) 00:00, 25 January 2022 (UTC)

@Kathleen.wright5: How would that impact things here? I have posted at Commons:Undeletion_requests/Current_requests#File:Flag_of_the_Australian_Aborigines.svg for undeletion of a common file, but I'm not seeing how this is special to Wikisource. —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 03:40, 25 January 2022 (UTC)
The flag looks so simple in the design. I just found the correct link.--Jusjih (talk) 01:37, 15 February 2022 (UTC)
Retrieved from "https://en.wikisource.org/w/index.php?title=Wikisource:Scriptorium/Archives/2022-01&oldid=12223520"