Help:Beginner's guide to maintenance

Where to find pages in need of maintenance

First, you might browse Category:Wikisource maintenance.

Alternatively, you may find pages that need help while you are browsing the site or looking for something else.

General

The {{header}} might be missing some things. Author, translator, title

Year

All works in the main namespace should have a year of publication in the header but many are missing this piece of information. The header has a parameter for this:

| year =.

If this is not present, it can be added. Only the year of publication can be recorded. If the day and date are known, they can be entered under the notes parameter for users to read.

If a year is not possible, decade or century can be added here instead. (eg. "1950s" or "19th century".) Use the year wherever you can.

All works with no year are listed here: Category:Undated works

Licences

All works should be licensed to show that they are legal to hosted on Wikisource and how they can be reused by readers.

Most common... PD-old PD-1923 PD-US-no-renewal PD-1996

Fed Gov etc

Translations

Creative Commons

All works without a license template are listed here: Category:Works with no license template

• For more information, see Help:Copyright tags

Categories

Usually, each work will have at least four different categories. Some common, some rarer. If a work does not have all the correct categories, you should add them as best you can.

The common categories are:

1. What it is. The type or form of the work. Category:Works by type.
   • ie. poems, essays, novels, executive orders, speeches, etc...
2. What it is about. The genre (mostly for fiction) or subject (mostly for for non-fiction) of the work.
   • Category:Works by genre‎, ie. drama, erotica, satires, etc...
     • See also Category:Fiction by genre, ie. Horror, Mystery, Romance, etc...
   • Category:Works by subject‎, ie. Physics, Art, History, etc...
     • See also Category:Works by country‎, if the country is the subject, ie. United States, Australia, China, etc...
3. When was it published. Add the year to the header. If a precise year is not known, decades and centuries work too. Category:Works by date‎.
   • This category is added by the |year = parameter in the header. You only need to add it there. You do not need to add it with the rest of the categories at the bottom of the page.
4. Why it is free. If it is in the public domain, and why, or the free licence under which it has been released. Category:Works by license
   • These categories are added by the licence. See: Licences.

The complete tree of categories for works starts here: Category:Works. It includes the following, which will sometimes apply to some works:

• Category:Works by award‎ (if the work won an award)
• Category:Works by language‎ (for the original language of translations or for language as the subject)
• Category:Works by series‎ (if the work is part of a series)

Sometime these categories may be combined into one category (eg. Category:Horror short stories). Categories may also cover the era (eg. Category:1910s plays), the country of origin (eg. Category:American poetry) and other identifiable groups.

• For more information, see Help:Categorization

HotCat

HotCat is a useful gadget for quickly adding, changing or removing categories to a page.

To turn it on, go to the your preferences and, under Editing tools, check the box with the description "easily add / remove / change a category on pages, with dynamic suggestions". Then save.

• For more information, see Help:Gadget-HotCat (this help page is on a different project).

Wikify

Wikisource's style guide describes how a page should look. Some pages on Wikisource do not match the style guide. These pages should be edited to fix them.

Some pages are copied with "OCR errors" (mistakes made by a computer) and other problems. Often these pages are not backed by a scanned source.

Other pages

Author pages-->No initital (move) & redirects (alt names)