Talk:Secret History of the French Court under Richelieu and Mazarin

Annotated version?

I am interested in working on a annotated version of this (mainly with links to Wikipedia for all the battles, people & places mentioned). I think using {{annotation switch}} should work as a technical method. Since annotations are still a ... controversial ... practice (and because I haven't worked on proofreading this text before), I wanted to discuss it here first. JesseW (talk) 22:16, 19 August 2022 (UTC)

And I've started it off (with just one annotation, and only copying Chapter 1) here: Secret History of the French Court under Richelieu and Mazarin/Annotated. Comments/complaints/discussion welcomed! JesseW (talk) 22:32, 19 August 2022 (UTC)

@JesseW See Wikisource:Annotations. I am not familiar with annotations and related policy, so if you have questions you 'd better ask in central forums, like Wikisource:Scriptorium or Wikisource:Scriptorium/Help. It will most likely go unnoticed in this page. Mpaa (talk) 22:59, 19 August 2022 (UTC)

Already added a ping on Wikisource_talk:Annotations; now adding one at the Scriptorium too. I asked here first mainly in case any of the people who have proofread this (who presumably have it on the watchlist) had opinions. JesseW (talk) 23:09, 19 August 2022 (UTC)

@JesseW: For context, I am opposed to allowing any annotated editions on enWS (as in: I think we should change policy to forbid them), mainly because we simply don't have any good technical means to produce them. {{annotation switch}} seems reasonable on the surface, but the few examples I've run across in the wild have been incomprehensible messes. If you go down that route I urge strong discipline in adding annotations (as in: "just because you can doesn't mean you should").

But that being said, what are you actually contemplating here? Mere wikipedia links are probably going to be just fine under the updated linking policy, subject to certain limitations (general overlinking, prefer links to Author: pages for people links, etc.). If that's all you want to do then you probably won't need a separate "annotated" edition.

PS. The typical practice on enWS is to centralise all discussions (on WS:S or WS:S/H) and ping elsewhere. Very non-intuitive if you're used to how things are done on other projects, but it does make some sense for the nature of the project (i.e. most mainspace pages are edited once, when finished, and never again, so there's no need to watchlist them). I struggled with this too when I first became active here. Xover (talk) 08:32, 20 August 2022 (UTC)

@Xover: My reading of the draft linking policy is that it generally forbids linking to Wikipedia for places & events, as that introduces emphasis that the original author didn't intend. That's why I thought it better to do it in a separate version. I plan to be pretty sparing; probably not more than one link every few paragraphs (although I haven't read this yet, so I'm not sure -- what I thought would be appealing was to read it for the first time, with breaks to look up the people, places & events mentioned, and then use that work to make it easier for the next person). Thanks for the pointer about not centralizing discussion on work talk pages; that makes sense -- what about Index_talk pages (for works that aren't complete, like this one)? JesseW (talk) 13:15, 20 August 2022 (UTC)

@Xover: Regarding the messiness of existing uses of {{annotation switch}} -- looking at WhatLinksHere, I only see a few uses:

• Page:The Federal and state constitutions v3.djvu/383 (I can't find an actual /Annotated subpage) -- this is indeed a weird mess, and kinda looks like the history might have gotten lost. The only entry in the history is from @TE(æ)A,ea.: on 13 June 2022. Maybe they can clarify what's going on there?
• Narrative of a Voyage Round the World (Belcher)/Annotated/Volume 1/Chapter 3 -- seems generally fine, although there are a few links that need to be fixed up in the ToC. The individual pages (like this one) don't seem particularly messy, at least to me.
• Does Price Fixing Destroy Liberty?/Annotated -- also seems fine, with quite limited annotations that don't disrupt the Page entries as far as I can see.
• An Etymological Dictionary of the German Language/Annotated/Hifthorn -- uses annotations in a ... weird way ... (to expand abbreviations), but does seem clear enough, I suppose.

Is there some other annotated work that you have seen that is worse, or do you disagree with me about one of the 4 above? JesseW (talk) 13:32, 20 August 2022 (UTC)

I also do not like annotated versions very much but I consider having them alongside a non-annotated text to be a smaller evil. Links to Wikipedia are such a distortion as they add there something which the author did not intend: reference to a specific text, which may be describing things in such a way that the author may not agree with and would never refer to. If the reader needs reference, they can easily find anything of their choice, no need to direct them somewhere of our choice. Links to WS author pages are imo OK as these pages contain just lists of authors' works without offering any specific points of view or evaluations. The same applies to links to WS portals, containing just lists of our works on the given topic. --Jan Kameníček (talk) 13:57, 20 August 2022 (UTC)

@Jan.Kamenicek: I understand you are opposed to annotations (you've said so elsewhere many times), but I'm not sure I follow what else you are trying to express here. Are you disagreeing with Xover about whether Wikipedia links are permitted in un-annotated versions? Did you mean that you think using {{annotation switch}} in the Page namespace is an unacceptable way to produce an annotated version (I'd really like to know that, if so, before I put a bunch of work using it)? Is there something else you meant that I missed? JesseW (talk) 14:37, 20 August 2022 (UTC)

I think I have not argued against annotated versions until now, but that is not important. I am saying that Wikipedia links in an un-annotated version are bad and if somebody really wants to add such links for some reason, creating annotated version is smaller evil than adding them to the un-annotated version. --Jan Kameníček (talk) 17:46, 20 August 2022 (UTC)

Great, thanks for clarifying. I might have gotten you mixed up with someone else. (edit: I was thinking of what you wrote on the Wikilinking RFC) JesseW (talk) 17:54, 20 August 2022 (UTC)

@JesseW: I haven't looked at the current transclusions. My reference is pages I've ran across while working on something else, shook my head in disgust, and moved on. With sufficient good judgement (i.e. what you describe sounds reasonable) it's possible to produce something that won't have me tearing my hair out, so my reluctance is mainly because the results tend not to be.

I'm quite sympathetic to Jan's point of view: I disagree on what the policy should be, but the position is entirely valid and I share the concerns it expresses (see e.g. Unintended emphasis in the policy). That being said, I also think that what you sketch out as the plan above sounds like a reasonable one that would be permissible under the policy (see e.g. Links to other Wikimedia Projects and Context-appropriate links; but subject to Overlinking, Unintended emphasis, and Interpretative vs. non-interpretative links). If the goal is just relatively-sparse wikilinking of unambiguous terms to enWP then that is exactly what the policy aims to allow, and something that is much preferable to the various invariably-poor technical means to produce an annotated edition. Once you're into adding footnotes or inline commentary it's a completely different ballgame, and one I'm inclined to ban completely until and unless we get better technical tools for managing these (my position is the same on translations, for the same reasons, incidentally). Xover (talk) 11:54, 21 August 2022 (UTC)

PS. You may also want to consider primarily using {{wdl}} for linking. By pointing at a concept at Wikidata you'll avoid problems related to page moves etc. on enWP. And {{wdl}} may be changed over time to, for example, have a different preference ranking (order of projects it links to), make optional whether to display the link at all, show the link without decoration or a different color, or maybe a custom decoration/color to make its status explicitly clear, etc. For a lot of the likely links it will be advantageous (i.e. for geographic places Wikidata will tend to be precise, but Wikipedia can often conflate levels of geographic division or similar). This will also make it easier to avoid anachronisms like linking to United Kingdom (Q145) in a work written when United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland (Q174193) was the relevant legal entity). Xover (talk) 12:08, 21 August 2022 (UTC)

Thank you! I agree with pretty much all you said, and very much appreciate the suggestion to use {{wdl}}. I think I'm going to go forward with making a /Annotation subpage, and using {{asw}} to add {{wdl}} links to relevant unfamiliar (in my opinion) terms. If later policy discussions suggest it would be suitable to be merged into the main version, that will be easy to do, and it seems like there aren't any absolutely not responses to the limited links I'm thinking of. JesseW (talk) 14:22, 21 August 2022 (UTC)