Wikisource talk:Community collaboration/2007

Please do not post any new comments on this page. This is a discussion archive first created in 2007, although the comments contained were likely posted before and after this date. See current discussion.

See also the Archive Index.

Author:Henry James

He has a featured article at w:Henry James and wrote plenty of shorter "tales" and essays. I previously made a bunch of url links to works on the author page itself and the external links section at WP has general links to places hosting his works as well.--BirgitteSB 04:32, 19 February 2007 (UTC)

Put him up for a week beginning May 28 Sherurcij ^{COTW:Harriet Beecher Stowe} 01:33, 29 May 2007 (UTC)

Author:Lady Gregory

She has a featured article a w:Augusta, Lady Gregory. Although I don't know that we have gotten our house style in the formatting of plays down this would be a good chance to make some decisions. Also she did work as a translator of Irish poetry which is easier than plays. I haven't seen alot of Irish lit here period so it would be nice to work on that gap in coverage as well.

• The Kiltartan Poetry Book, Project Gutenberg
• The Kiltartan History Book, Project Gutenberg
• New Irish Comedies, Project Gutenberg
• Gods and Fighting Men, Project Gutenberg
• Three Wonder Plays, Project Gutenberg
• Visions and Beliefs in the West of Ireland
• Our Irish Theatre

--BirgitteSB 04:43, 19 February 2007 (UTC)

Author:Henry Ford

w:Henry Ford, while his best known writings were perhaps his anti-semitic diatribes in the Dearborn Independent, he also wrote a 1920 autobiography and gave a number of speeches to his workers - I'm sure digging around could find more interesting tidbits!Sherurcij ^{Collaboration of the Week: Author:Wilhelm II} 07:28, 2 August 2007 (UTC)

Marlowe

Author:Christopher Marlowe has only a few works; a lot of his works are readily available: [1] and PG. John Vandenberg 03:26, 14 August 2007 (UTC)

Plotting ahead

As we have (almost) settled on an Australian for the next CotW, we should start working on a long list of suitable important figures from other nations and fields. John Vandenberg 14:38, 16 August 2007 (UTC)

1. Russians: Author:Nikolai Gogol only has one work; there are others[2]

   Strong support, Sherurcij ^{Collaboration of the Week: Author:Captain Cook} 06:18, 20 August 2007 (UTC)

2. Scientist: w:Alfred Nobel (of Nobel fame), his will, 250 patents, w:Nemesis (Alfred Nobel play), poetry & letters:[3][4][5][6];

   Strong support, Sherurcij ^{Collaboration of the Week: Author:Captain Cook} 06:18, 20 August 2007 (UTC)

3. w:Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen, first winner of the Nobel prize in Physics;

   Not sure he has enough works, or notability, to justify devoting a week so soon while there are so many even more "depressingly small" corners of WS. Sherurcij ^{Collaboration of the Week: Author:Captain Cook} 06:18, 20 August 2007 (UTC)

4. w:Ernst Werner von Siemens, an SI element and large company are is named after him.

   Not sure he has enough works, or notability, to justify devoting a week so soon while there are so many even more "depressingly small" corners of WS. Sherurcij ^{Collaboration of the Week: Author:Captain Cook} 06:18, 20 August 2007 (UTC)

5. Scots : w:Mary I of Scotland
6. Sportswoman: a woman?
7. Popular novelist: Author:J. R. R. Tolkien: OCLC:79426452^{all editions} OCLC:23706617^{all editions}

   Only has two works, not enough room for growth imho to justify devoting a week so soon while there are so many corners of WSthat can be so greatly expanded upon. Sherurcij ^{Collaboration of the Week: Author:Captain Cook} 06:18, 20 August 2007 (UTC)

8. A religious person: w:Bartolomé de las Casas, companion of Christopher Columbus: [7] [8]
9. Modern free culture: Author:Eben Moglen; our author page lists lots of external links; I expect that many will have acceptable licenses (even if we dont have copyright tags to suit at the moment, which is all the more reason to have a few people working on it to discuss any new tags that may be necessary). John Vandenberg 21:43, 22 August 2007 (UTC)

Thanks for your comments above; one scientist is enough for this year, and Nobel will be easy as well.—unsigned comment by Jayvdb (talk) 09:12, 20 August 2007.

Collaboration other than authors

This brings up a point I was wondering about, how would "people" feel about some weeks not being specific authors, but just specific genres or somesuch? For example Category:Ancient Egyptian works or Wikisource:Slavery? Sherurcij ^{Collaboration of the Week: Author:Captain Cook} 06:15, 20 August 2007 (UTC)

I think collaboration on era's such as Category:Ancient Egyptian works would work well; definitely worth trying. I think subjective groupings would be less useful, as the subjectivity could detract from the brute force aspect of a collaboration effort. Wikisource:Slavery isnt overly subjective, but it starts CotW on a slippery slope. Another suggestion along those lines is picking a large project (like EB1911) as a CotW to inject a fresh set of ideas and effort. I see a lot of unfinished works lying around that could be finished within a week if the work is divided between a few people. Perhaps that would be a way to handle topical area's as well: require that the project has already been well define before CotW selects it. John Vandenberg 09:12, 20 August 2007 (UTC)

I think John has a good idea. I think every now and then a week devoted to helping finish started (and all but abandoned) projects would be a very good idea. It might also help renew interest in working on it, as well as finish off a project (which, for me, is even worse than not having it).—Zhaladshar ^(Talk) 14:23, 20 August 2007 (UTC)

Which project would seem the easiest to focus upon? My only concern is that something like NSRW or EB1911 is that we'd make so little headway, it would just be a ripple in the grand scheme of things :( But if we/you're all agreed on which project, we might as well toss it on the list of definite "pendings". Sherurcij ^{Collaboration of the Week: Author:Captain Cook} 06:08, 22 August 2007 (UTC)

Perhaps we should start by reviewing projects in Category:WikiProjects and putting a fresh face on each so that it is obvious, to the new user, where each project is at. If the project is completed, we should move it into Category:Closed WikiProjects and propose the work to be a featured text. Wikisource talk:WikiProject Diary of Samuel Pepys and Wikisource:WikiProject Rig Veda both appear to have the complete work uploaded; the former appears to be less formatted towards the end of the diary (no inline notes), and the front page of The Rig Veda needs a tidy up. John Vandenberg 22:21, 22 August 2007 (UTC)

Table help?

I'm terrible at tables, but I'm thinking that's probably our best bet for how to properly display A Voyage Towards the South pole and Around the World/Volume II/vocab. Anybody able to take a few minutes to play around with it? Much thanks Sherurcij ^{Collaboration of the Week: Author:Captain Cook} 21:25, 22 August 2007 (UTC)

And A Voyage Towards the South pole and Around the World/Volume II/spec, perhaps even more importantly. :) Sherurcij ^{Collaboration of the Week: Author:Captain Cook} 21:28, 22 August 2007 (UTC)

Any troubles with Burton?

I would love to see Author:Richard F. Burton featured if possible, he has such a wealth of work, even aside from all the redlinks in his article. Thoughts? Sherurcij ^{Collaboration of the Week: Author:Alfred Nobel} 22:30, 10 September 2007 (UTC)

Seriously, how do you find these? I think it would be a great idea to have him for a weekly collaboration. And the best part, is you don't have to scour the internet looking for works of his because they're very nicely collected on one webpage. :D —Zhaladshar ^(Talk) 23:21, 10 September 2007 (UTC)

I cheated, because I've been toying with the idea of making Burton my new "pet project" once I finally give up on Author:Leo Tolstoy (his novels are over-rated, it's all about the short stories and essays) - so I thought kickstarting that with a COTW for him would be a nice treat ;) Sherurcij ^{Collaboration of the Week: Author:Alfred Nobel} 23:43, 10 September 2007 (UTC)

No, Burton sounds good. Since we nobody has objected yet, I have updated the template to state that Burton is the next CotW, so we can start planning the offensive now. John Vandenberg 10:33, 11 September 2007 (UTC)

Boys' "Adventure" authors

I'd love to see an "adventure" author featured one week - the first one to come to mind is Author:William Gordon Stableswho wrote books for boys 12-15 about the Crusades, shipwrecks, ancient battles, dinosaurs, pirates, cannibals and everything else. The chief problem I see is a lack of online texts (technically a good thing, since we don't just want to be a Gutenberg mirror) - though if we could find hardcopies I'd be happy to scan/OCR them and parse them for WS - so if any of you have any books by Stables lying around - let me know, otherwise are there any other "prolific" authors of such "pulp adventure" who currently dono't have any/many works on WS? Sherurcij ^{Collaboration of the Week: Author:Richard Francis Burton} 20:16, 24 September 2007 (UTC)

Unless anybody wants to ask for an other author, I'm thinking we'll do Stables and then maybe Turgenov? Sherurcij ^{Collaboration of the Week: Author:Stratemeyer Syndicate} 23:09, 17 October 2007 (UTC)

Sounds good to me. For what it is worth. Hiyo Rogo 01:29, 18 October 2007 (UTC)

Stables is OK. After that w:Ivan Turgenev? Are there many English editions that are PD? John Vandenberg 01:41, 18 October 2007 (UTC)

See the link [9]. I believe they are all PD. Hiyo Rogo 01:45, 18 October 2007 (UTC)

Ivan Turgenev

A possible future choice. Ivan Turgenev has very few works listed, but there are a number available. Found a bunch at [10]. Just a thought. Hiyo Rogo 00:52, 13 October 2007 (UTC)

Rabindranath Tagore

Bengali poet, won the Nobel Prize in 1913, a large number of works available in English. Author:Rabindranath Tagore is currently very patchy (only one full-length work is complete). There's a good selection at Gutenberg and some more that aren't in Gutenberg at the Internet Archive and at Google Books. Also w:Rabindranath Tagore is a featured article at English Wikipedia.--Pharos 07:20, 1 November 2007 (UTC)

1. Nobel Prize for Literature
2. Has plenty of PD translations
3. From a country we're not likely to see again
4. Somebody most of us have not heard of

• That's four points in its favour, as far as I'm concerned. Promise to make an impassioned plea on WP for its editors to come visit WS and help us during this COTW? Sherurcij ^{Collaboration of the Week: Author:Ivan Turgenev} 07:53, 1 November 2007 (UTC)
  • Can do. There are a lot of very thorough editors on South Asian topics — hopefully one or two of them can be attracted over here to help.--Pharos 08:09, 1 November 2007 (UTC)
    • I hope you don't mind I've updated the collaboration myself. This seemed to be what you wanted, and it's Nov. 2, and I'll be busy later anyway ans so I might as well start now.--Pharos 17:48, 2 November 2007 (UTC)

oooh! ooh!

Wikisource:Pulitzers - this seems like it could be a hell of an index, as long as we focus on the pre-1923 texts. Sherurcij ^{Collaboration of the Week: Author:Ivan Turgenev} 07:25, 3 November 2007 (UTC)

Winston Churchill

Author:Winston Churchill needs a good cleanup. There are a lot of copyright issues there, some of which we could solve by putting our heads together, and there are a lot of other works that we could added under {{PD-UKGov}} and maybe even {{PD-1923}}. John Vandenberg 05:47, 21 September 2007 (UTC)

My only concern is that, while he meets the notability requirements, he does have a number of works already listed. That said, let's still plan on using him. Sherurcij ^{Collaboration of the Week: Author:Jefferson Davis} 21:04, 29 November 2007 (UTC)

Arabic

I found a ingle work by w:Suyuti on Archive.org - can anybody find any other free translations? Sherurcij ^{Collaboration of the Week: Author:Stratemeyer Syndicate} 21:36, 12 October 2007 (UTC)

There's an 1881 translation of History of the Caliphs by HS Jarrett, but I can't find it anywhere online.--Pharos 05:52, 1 November 2007 (UTC)

Did Author:Abu Hamid al-Ghazālī instead. Sherurcij ^{Collaboration of the Week: Author:Abu Hamid al-Ghazālī} 22:13, 18 December 2007 (UTC)

Current ones?

I'm thinking either Author:Sabine Baring-Gould (sadly, an author, so boring, though works are very interesting) or Author:Jefferson Davis (much more interesting historically, works are slightly less interesting). Then we have that author coming up in January, any others I'm missing? Sherurcij ^{Collaboration of the Week: Pulitzer-winning writings} 03:23, 23 November 2007 (UTC)

Scratchpad

Anybody wanting to help with dozens of PD translations of Napoleon's speeches, see the dropdown menu at this site, great resource. Sherurcij ^{Collaboration of the Week: Author:Henry Ford} 02:13, 15 August 2007 (UTC)

sheet music

We dont have good sheet music support on Wikisource as far as I can see. On Complete_Encyclopaedia_of_Music/A/A I was able to convert some very simple sheet music into their raw components. With some help from w:Wikipedia:WikiProject Music, we could build templates to make this simple(r). If there is interest here and on Wikipedia, we could do some preparation and then do a joint collaboration week. John Vandenberg 06:04, 21 September 2007 (UTC)

And maybe we could put some effort into Wikisource:WikiProject Lyrics, which looks like it never lifted off. John Vandenberg 06:14, 21 September 2007 (UTC)

I'm not sure if it would be worth the effort to revitalise the "failed" Wikiproject, but would suggest instead just making Wikisource:Song lyrics the collaboration instead? The sheet music idea still fascinates me, but I think might be too labour intensive to convince people to "spend ten minutes helping out with the collaboration" if it involves a whole new type of editing/material. Just my two cents. Sherurcij ^{Collaboration of the Week: Author:Richard Francis Burton} 06:37, 21 September 2007 (UTC)

I was hoping that with some effort on our behalf to kick things off, and do some examples, it would bring in a set of Wikipedians that would otherwise be uninterested in Wikisource. These newcomers are likely to be good contributors as they would be very concerned about fidelity. There is another wiki project that started doing something similar to this less than a year ago: w:International Music Score Library Project (see [11]), but they are hosting the scores as PDF :-(. PG also has works we could use: [12]. I'll try to do one and report back. John Vandenberg 08:26, 21 September 2007 (UTC)

FYI, works of Maurice Ravel will be in the public domain on January 1st, 2008. That might be an opportunity to do something special... Yann 09:20, 21 September 2007 (UTC)

I've set up Author:Maurice Ravel with the major works listed on the WP page. John Vandenberg 13:56, 21 September 2007 (UTC)

Assuming nobody has any legal challenge to that, I like the idea of featuring a "newly-PD" author and agree with making Ravel our first COTW of the new year - and making Wikisource:Song lyrics a sooner one?. Sherurcij ^{Collaboration of the Week: Author:Richard Francis Burton} 20:16, 24 September 2007 (UTC)

When we do tackle sheet music, we may need to take into account some legal issues. This page describes how This Land Is Your Land is public domain, contrary to what the "Ludlow Music" company originally understood, because it pivots around the date of publication. More info here, including a PDF scan of the original pamphlet the sheet music was published on. I'm going to work on this one as the proof of concept, because we already have the lyrics and because the court case has brought out a lot of details that make it interesting beyond the words and notes. John Vandenberg 04:17, 27 October 2007 (UTC)

w:List of recordings preserved in the United States National Recording Registry is a good list to morph into a Wikisource collection. As it is a featured list on WP, the people involved will probably be the sort who would spend an afternoon on Wikisource. John Vandenberg 04:58, 27 October 2007 (UTC)

bugzilla:189 looks like it would be very useful for sheet music. The bug is in a holding pattern. John Vandenberg 21:18, 18 December 2007 (UTC)

In previous inquiries with Brion, I learned that the issue with Lillypond and the feature it is bundled with (WikiTEX?) is one of security. Until developers fix the bundle to Brion's satisfaction on that issue, it will not be implemented. I think it is unlikely Lillypond would be implemented out side of the bundle. So unless we can recruit a developer to volunteer their time to this issue there is little we can do about this issue.--BirgitteSB 16:33, 19 December 2007 (UTC)

Sofar as I can tell, there is no current way forus to add his sheet music, is that correct? With January approaching, not sure how we'd approach this. Sherurcij ^{Collaboration of the Week: Author:Arthur Schopenhauer} 21:15, 27 December 2007 (UTC)

Requested translation

Per request at am.wikipedia.org, I have translated the Amharic letter from Haile Selassie I to the President of Bolivia, into English, at the Image talk page. Regards, am:User:Codex Sinaiticus 02:44, 29 December 2007 (UTC)