I'm a reader, sitting with my laptop in the coffeeshops of Freo, enjoying both the old tech of bound books and the new of wiki interaction—and the jolly fun conversion of texts between the two (as in: paper → scans → Wikisource → pagination → printer → signatures → paper → binding).
I'm a Software Engineer with the WMF Community Tech team. My official account is User:SWilson (WMF). I work for or provide services to the Wikimedia Foundation, but this is my personal account. Edits, statements, or other contributions made from this account are my own, and may not reflect the views of the Foundation.
For my movement-wide user profile, please see Meta:User:Samwilson. I'm also on the #wikisource IRC channel as 'samwilson', if you want to chat.
The West Australian and other newspapers: The Fremantle local history collection has been keeping clippings from newspapers for sixty years or more, and a few years ago I started a database of these. Many from before 1954 (i.e. the public domain ones) are available on Trove, so I've an idea of adding some of these issues to Wikisource.
Miscellaneous Papers on Mechanical Subjects by Joseph Whitworth: Contains one of the original papers about mechanically flattening reference plates (which activity I am, from time to time, engaged in: three great slabs of granite and umpteen rounds of grinding…).
Base Facilities Report: In 2011 an old US Navy laundry building in Fremantle was scheduled for demolition, and the history of the US Navy's 'occupation' of Fremantle was brought to public attention. This was one of the documents used to determine what else was extant from those days (nothing) and to help the case for the retention of the shed.
The Voyage Out by Virginia Woolf: Probably the best-proofread book I've read from Wikisource (i.e. required the fewest fixes post-validation).
p. 58: "I always think it's living, not dying, that counts. I really respect some snuffy old stockbroker who's gone on adding up column after column all his days, and trotting back to his villa at Brixton with some old pug dog he worships, and a dreary little wife sitting at the end of the table, and going off to Margate for a fortnight—I assure you I know heaps like that—well, they seem to me really nobler than poets whom every one worships, just because they're geniuses and die young. But I don't expect you to agree with me!"
Moll Flanders and Roxana: Quite a lot of typos in this one; so many that I only read the first book of the two in this work. I do like reading 18th century novels though.
“To trust people is a luxury in which only the wealthy can indulge; the poor cannot afford it.”
— p.35, a thought of Margaret’s.
“You remember ‘rent’? It was one of father’s words — Rent to the ideal, to his own faith in human nature. You remember how be would trust strangers, and if they fooled him he would say, ‘It’s better to be fooled than to be suspicious.’ — that the confidence trick is the work of man, but the want-of-confidence trick is the work of the devil.”
King Solomon's Mines (1907) by Henry Rider Haggard: Another one with unneccessary hyperlinks for normal words. Not a very good book either. Hardly any typos to fix though!
Adds a sidebar link which shows a list of lint errors for the current page and every page linked from it. Should work on all Wikimedia projects. To use, add this to your global.js page on Meta: mw.loader.load('//en.wikisource.org/w/index.php?title=User:Samwilson/LinkedLintErrors.js&action=raw&ctype=text/javascript');
Adds a toolbar button to clean up OCR text. This is a fork of part of MediaWiki:TemplateScript/proofreading.js, to reimplement it as a toolbar button. To use, add this to your common.js page: mw.loader.load('//en.wikisource.org/w/index.php?title=User:Samwilson/PageCleanUp.js&action=raw&ctype=text/javascript');
Adds a toolbar button for converting all quotation marks, apostrophes, and dashes to their correct nicer typographical selves. To use, add this to your common.js page: mw.loader.load('//en.wikisource.org/w/index.php?title=User:Samwilson/CurlyQuotes.js&action=raw&ctype=text/javascript');
Adds a toolbar button to switch to full-screen editing in the proofreading interface. To use, add this to your common.js page: mw.loader.load('//en.wikisource.org/w/index.php?title=User:Samwilson/FullScreenEditing.js&action=raw&ctype=text/javascript');
Add a link to the Wikidata item to an Index page's metadata table. To use, add this to your common.js page: mw.loader.load('//en.wikisource.org/w/index.php?title=User:Samwilson/LinkIndexToWikidata.js&action=raw&ctype=text/javascript');
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