Talk:Oregon Constitution/Article I

Äþelwulf, this is great -- so glad to have someone else to work with on this. As I'm sure you'll agree, there seem to be little judgment calls all over the place in how to approach this, and I think it will be good to bounce ideas back and forth.

Here are a few things eating at me:

A technical issue: list formatting, wiki markup, and CSS

The formatting of numbered lists has a strong impact on readability (and scannability). In official Oregon law, they look like this:

(1) blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah

(2) blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah

But, they're much more readable if formatted like this:

1. blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah
2. blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah

In my opinion, it may or may not be important to keep the parentheses, but reformatting so that the numbers are held to the left of the text's margin would be a big benefit to readers.

So, the problem is this: using wiki code, is there any way to adjust the formatting in terms of parentheses, periods, roman numerals, capital and lower-case letters, etc.

I believe it's possible to manipulate all that stuff through CSS, but I don't think MediaWiki gives the appropriate hooks to do that.

Any thoughts on this?

An editorial issue: notes on the laws

I think it would be a great service to the reader to provide links, where possible, to the legislative or ballot action behind a certain section, paragraph, etc. How best to do this? I think probably using <ref> tags and a "Notes" section would probably be the best approach, but I'm curious what others think.

-Pete Forsyth (talk) 22:53, 9 December 2008 (UTC)

Thanks. I'm glad you like my work. It's fun to do my part to build the Wikis.

The issue of formatting lists also annoys me. I wanted to make sure how the Constitution is printed in the Oregon Blue Book is duplicated as close to the letter as possible (including even the dashes, which look like em-dashes in the Blue Book instead of en-dashes). That's why I ultimately chose to type the numbers exactly as they appeared, as opposed to using wiki markup. They really need to allow different kinds of ordered lists!

Is changing the format of the text permissible? I'm annoyed by the underlining rather than italicizing of "ex post facto" and "habeas corpus". Italicizing it would technically make a derivative work, I believe. All these hazy boundaries in copyright law get confusing.

A thought just came to me: Are bits of this source text copyrighted by the Secretary of State? I know laws themselves aren't, and in my mind the Constitution is implicitly included. But what about the stuff in brackets, such as info on amendments and the "[sic]" notes? Those are surely editorial comments by the Sec. of State, right? Maybe we have to figure out a way to replace those with notes of our own, where necessary.

Speaking of, a nice idea I had is to go all out with the idea of wikifying substantial portions of Oregon legal documents to demonstrate to the Legislature the superior capabilities of a wiki. Why not add the texts of the bills and ballot measures that amended the Constitution? Considering that a few measures in the '90s added roughly 40 percent of today's Bill of Rights (§41–45), I figure they're notable enough for their inclusion on Wikisource, as well as Wikipedia if they're not already there. The same probably applies to laws affecting the now-repealed sections concerning liquor (§36 and §36a) and capital punishment (§36).

Oh, the possibilities! Athelwulf (talk) 05:08, 10 December 2008 (UTC)

As far as I'm aware, there's never been any question that the Constitution is entirely in the public domain. It's the Oregon Revised Statutes that were claimed under copyright by the Legislative Counsel; however, even that has been reversed by the committee decision we son earlier this year. So as far as I'm concerned, the only issue is what we, as WikiSource editors, consider important to preserve the accuracy of the document. Personally, I would not see changing an en-dash to an em-dash as compromising the integrity of the document.

There is no copyright notice on the online version of the Constitution.

One thing I notice, though: there is a cool index to the Constitution, but it isn't hyperlinked! There's no copyright claim on that either, so it might be a good idea to copy that over here as well, and link it to the Constitution pages.

Oh the possibilities indeed! -Pete Forsyth (talk) 18:03, 10 December 2008 (UTC)

That's a wonderful idea to wikify the index. I've gone through and eyeballed how many pieces we could split the index into. I think eight pieces are nice and manageable: A-B, C, D-E, F-J, K-N, O-R, S, and T-Z. Does this sound good to you?

Let's use HTML to make the lettered lists for the Constitution, like so:

1. Blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah.

1. Blah blah blah blah blah.
1. Blah blah blah blah blah blah.
1. Blah blah blah.

Athelwulf (talk) 10:24, 12 December 2008 (UTC)

Let's continue the discussion on the main talk page. Athelwulf (talk) 12:44, 12 December 2008 (UTC)

Awaiting Resolution of WP the Justice Courts Page

Posted this over on the w:Justice Courts discussion page on Wikipedia:

Hello. I am a member of the WikiProject Oregon and in here in w:Oregon, we too have "Justice Courts". So I was wondering if we could have this pages content moved to a new page w:Justice Courts (New York) so that we can set up a corresponding page w:Justice Courts (Oregon) that describe our Justice Courts, and this page (w:Justice Courts) be a umbrella article and/or disambiguation page. Thoughts? Lestatdelc (talk) 17:30, 27 December 2008 (UTC)

..and I'm awaiting a resolution of that so we can put up the proper content on that page. Lestatdelc (talk) 17:36, 27 December 2008 (UTC)

I don't know what a Justice Court is, but I'm guessing I'm about to learn. I would suggest simply starting w:Justice Courts (Oregon), and then when there's already something there we can resolve the disambiguation issue. You should be able to simply perform the page moves yourself; if for some reason you can't, I'm an administrator over there, and can probably smooth the process.

By the way, I think it's best if we keep this sort of discussion here centralized on Talk:Oregon Constitution, so we don't have to watch too many discussion pages. Thanks for bringing this up, though. -Pete (talk) 17:32, 28 December 2008 (UTC)