User talk:Alien333

Welcome to Wikisource

Hello, Alien333, and welcome to Wikisource! Thank you for joining the project. I hope you like the place and decide to stay. Here are a few good links for newcomers:

• Help pages, especially for proofreading
• Help:Beginner's guide to Wikisource
• Style guide
• Inclusion policy
• Wikisource:For Wikipedians

You may be interested in participating in

• Proofread of the Month
• Monthly Challenge
• Requested texts

Add the code {{active projects}}, {{PotM}} or {{Collaboration/MC}} to your page for current Wikisource projects.

You can put a brief description of your interests on your user page and contributions to another Wikimedia project, such as Wikipedia and Commons.

Have questions? Then please ask them at either

• Wikisource:Scriptorium; or
• Wikisource:Scriptorium/Help

I hope you enjoy contributing to Wikisource, the library that is free for everyone to use! In discussions, please "sign" your comments using four tildes (~~~~); this will automatically produce your username if you're logged in (or IP address if you are not) and the date. If you need help, ask me on my talk page, or ask your question here (click edit) and place {{helpme}} before your question.

Again, welcome! Beeswaxcandle (talk) 09:33, 6 June 2023 (UTC)

For some reason I removed it two months later, without having read any of it, and it was certainly one of the worst decisions I've made. Readding it now, it's long overdue as a useful reminder to myself to actually pay attention. — Alien  3
3 3

Italics

Please note that italics do not carry across line breaks. You either have to stop and restart on the next line. or (better) remove the line breaks.

Regards -- Beardo (talk) 16:55, 24 August 2023 (UTC)

Yes, sorry, I know, it's just that it took me a little while to realize and that when, then, I tried to go back and correct myself, I missed a few. I'm pretty new at this and so I more or less learned by experience.

˜˜˜˜ Alien333 (talk) 17:44, 24 August 2023 (UTC)

No problem. I think most of us have learned that way. I recently learned from Wikisource:Scriptorium#De-linting.. that there is the page linked there which lists such errors. -- Beardo (talk) 18:38, 24 August 2023 (UTC)

Titles on subpages

Making this change in the header of the subpages will turn Poems (Nora May French) by Nora May French into the correct Poems by Nora May French EncycloPetey (talk) 19:59, 20 December 2023 (UTC)

Ok! Sorry, I'll correct it. Alien333 (talk) 19:21, 21 December 2023 (UTC)

Template:asc

You may find {{{asc}} useful, especially for A.M., B.C., and roman numerals that are printed in capital small caps. Yes, you could use {{sc}} with lower-case letters, but typically books do not use lower-case letters for these things, and putting lower-case into the text with small-caps will not preserve the case when someone grabs the text using copy-paste, such as for a quote in a school paper or for quoting in a Wikipedia article or on Wikiquote. The advantage of {{asc}} is that you can write the text in the correct case and still get it to display in reduced capitals. --EncycloPetey (talk) 20:54, 23 February 2024 (UTC)

OK! Alien333 (what I did and why I did it wrong) 11:17, 24 February 2024 (UTC)

Page:Poems Barrett.djvu/134

Check your module , >><<< seems to misbehave , by throwing a supurious closing SPAN tag? ShakespeareFan00 (talk) 17:24, 1 May 2024 (UTC)

If you are talking about the nearly-empty poem, there was a cleaner way to do it (and I corrected it), but if it's not that I don't see what you mean about that closing SPAN. As far as I can see, it only adds a </span> at the same time as adding a <span>. — Alien333 (what I did & why I did it wrong) 17:31, 1 May 2024 (UTC)

Reminder to vote now to select members of the first U4C

You can find this message translated into additional languages on Meta-wiki. Please help translate to your language

Dear Wikimedian,

You are receiving this message because you previously participated in the UCoC process.

This is a reminder that the voting period for the Universal Code of Conduct Coordinating Committee (U4C) ends on May 9, 2024. Read the information on the voting page on Meta-wiki to learn more about voting and voter eligibility.

The Universal Code of Conduct Coordinating Committee (U4C) is a global group dedicated to providing an equitable and consistent implementation of the UCoC. Community members were invited to submit their applications for the U4C. For more information and the responsibilities of the U4C, please review the U4C Charter.

Please share this message with members of your community so they can participate as well.

On behalf of the UCoC project team,

RamzyM (WMF) 23:10, 2 May 2024 (UTC)

Poetry collections

Thanks for completing so many small books of poetry by authors whose works we do not have, and which won't be found in most libraries.

Would you consider also doing Fiddler's Farewell (1926) by poet and violinist Leonora Speyer? (external scan) Her poetry won the Pulitzer in 1927, so it's a significant work, by a poet for whom we have no works at all. --EncycloPetey (talk) 02:58, 9 May 2024 (UTC)

I could, but I'd need you to get it, as I'm not a member at Hathi and it'd be a bother to download each of the 136 pages manually.

If you are more interested by the author than the specific collection, there are two scans of A canopic jar (external scan) (external scan) available on IA, which I prefer. — Alien333 (what I did & why I did it wrong) 06:29, 9 May 2024 (UTC)

Fiddler's Farewell is the Pulitzer winning work, so it's the one I'm interested in, but I cannot grab Hathi downloads either. --EncycloPetey (talk) 14:27, 9 May 2024 (UTC)

Poetry foundation says it's available in the Poetry magazine, which to my surprise we do not have but that is on jstor, more specifically in the issue of Jan. 1926, and the poem itself, p201-205 is there, which according to jstor is in public domain as © 1926 Poetry Foundation. I'll get at it some time soon, probably after finishing Index:Poems Shipton.djvu, but I think eventually I'll try to do the whole magazine. — Alien333 (what I did & why I did it wrong) 14:56, 9 May 2024 (UTC)

Note: did she get the prize for the poem or the book? Because there appears to be a collection of the same name (136 vs. 5 pages), that is the one at Hathi, and the poem after which it appears to have been named, that is what I found. EDIT: after just looking on WP it appears to have been for the book. Once more unto the breach, then... — Alien333 (what I did & why I did it wrong) 14:58, 9 May 2024 (UTC)

*sigh* I've given up, looks like it's Hathi or nothing. I've started taking the pages. EDIT: on top of all the rest, the preview images are scaled down. Well, 700*1000 will have to be enough, and I'm not going to go 136 times through their download dialog — Alien333 (what I did & why I did it wrong) 15:15, 9 May 2024 (UTC)

Well, there it is: Index:Fiddler's Farewell.djvu. The PNGs were acceptable at best, all pdf mergers I found (the three that let me upload 136 pages) made it terrible, for some reason the OCR on djvu conversion appeared not to work, and it has two watermarks, but it's there. As I said, will get at it at some point during next week. — Alien333 (what I did & why I did it wrong) 15:53, 9 May 2024 (UTC)

@EncycloPetey It's done. — Alien333 (what I did & why I did it wrong) 10:48, 11 May 2024 (UTC)

Thanks! --EncycloPetey (talk) 14:34, 11 May 2024 (UTC)

Transclusion in page order

Hi @Alien333,

As EncycloPetey said above, many thanks for completing so many poems. However, in the case of Poems (Baldwyn), I am inclined to believe the transclusion should be in page order, regardless of the ordering in the table of contents. I am in no way asking you to change it, although at some point, someone with greater concerns about the matter may add an (what I would consider "loud") template on the main page indicating it doesn't conform to Wikisource standards, unless things have changed since the last time I recall this happening. At the very least, information for the future. As an aside, if you are interested in having some of your work validated, especially more famous works (like the Fiddler's Farewell) mentioned above, we would be happy to have it included in the Monthly Challenge, if you are okay with that. Up to you though.

Regards, TeysaKarlov (talk) 20:42, 9 May 2024 (UTC)

Fiddler's Farewell is more or less an exception and at request, most of the time I just do random books called Poems. Feel free to include anything you want. I have collections from ~20 content pages to >400, so there's probably something of the right size.

On TOC's, I've already encountered the same problem with Poems (Cromwell), so if correction there is it would have to be done there too. I made that decision on the basis that it would be awkward to not be able to navigate in the sense of the TOC (and maybe also out of laziness of having to scroll through the TOC to find the right capitalization of the titles). — Alien333 (what I did & why I did it wrong) 20:57, 9 May 2024 (UTC)

Given how far you have already progressed with Fiddler's Farewell, I might just leave it as is. You are ever so efficient with the use of those ppoem templates.

I suspect that the previous/next sections of the header were to imply flipping forward and backward through the actual pages of the text (just like a real book!), but in terms of sensible, I don't see a great deal of difference. I guess just consider this a heads up then, unless someone else has graver concerns. Regards, TeysaKarlov (talk) 23:38, 10 May 2024 (UTC)

We'll probably be able to include Fiddler's Farewell quite soon.

(Honestly, regarding ppoem, most of the work of figuring when to put what end/start is done by a script of mine nowadays, alongside with indenting.) — Alien333 (what I did & why I did it wrong) 07:17, 11 May 2024 (UTC)

It's done, so you can include it. — Alien333 (what I did & why I did it wrong) 10:47, 11 May 2024 (UTC)

Disambiguation pages

Hi, I noticed that you've added new works to various disambiguation pages (not everyone does). The convention adopted with these appears to be:—

1. the list is alphabetised by author surname;
2. if there's more than one work of the same name by an author (usually poems), the first line is quoted; and
3. parts of books (e.g. a short story or essay, or individual poems) are given in double quotes, titles of whole works are in italics.

Chrisguise (talk) 07:51, 13 May 2024 (UTC)

Well, ok, by coincidence I've just made a post to ask for the conventions, and possibly officialize it, as everyone does not appear to be aware of there conventions, for example titles are often left plain. — Alien333 (what I did & why I did it wrong) 08:01, 13 May 2024 (UTC)

I made these up for myself as I went along based on what appeared to be most common practice, and most helpful. Chrisguise (talk) 08:05, 13 May 2024 (UTC)

Poems (Smith)

Hi, I noticed that you've used {{AuxTOC}} to create a table of contents for this work when it has one of its own (albeit in a different format to most books). I've just done one (The Canary) which has a (mostly) alphabetised ToC based on first lines rather than titles. For some reason the 'O' section is in reverse alphabetical order. Chrisguise (talk) 17:52, 18 May 2024 (UTC)

Up to a week ago (such as for Poems (Cromwell) and Poems (Baldwyn)), I'd used the original TOC in these cases when the TOC is not in order of apparition, until I was asked about a week ago by @TeysaKarlov to transclude instead in order of apparition, so I also put a second TOC that would match the order of transclusion because it would be awkward to navigate in a totally unrelated order. Usually, I also leave the original TOC after, with the links (like in Poems (Hazlett-Bevis)) but the one in Poems (Smith) was incomplete (did not show poems of the same name, only the first one) so I delinked it. What do you think I should do? — Alien333 (what I did & why I did it wrong) 18:26, 18 May 2024 (UTC)

@Alien333 Sorry if I caused confusion. I was not suggesting to modify the TOC in any way. All I meant was that all the previous/next links for each poem should follow in page order. That aside, what do you mean by "(did not show poems of the same name, only the first one)"? The table of contents seems to have many (if not all) of the poems in Poems (Smith), although I have not checked every one, to see if it is incomplete. However, if a table of contents is missing an entry, you can add an auxiliary line(s) to the original TOC (e.g.~Page:Eliot - Middlemarch, vol. I, 1871.djvu/9). Hope that helps, and thanks again for all your poetry efforts, TeysaKarlov (talk) 21:22, 18 May 2024 (UTC)

There were entries like "To Willie", of which there are two (Poems (Smith)/To Willie (Willie, may thy life abound) and Poems (Smith)/To Willie (Willie, may thy life be pure)), but the original TOC listed only one. Same for other poems that shared a title. Led to redlinks in the toc when @Duckmather linked it. Thanks for reminding me of the aux-toc lines, I'd forgotten they existed.

If pages should always be transcluded in order of apparition, when the TOC is not in that order, a secondary, auxiliary TOC is I think useful for navigation. At any rate, it is for proofreading, because often in poetry titles on the pages of these poems are in all-caps, and the correct capitalization is only present in the TOC. This makes it for most poetry collections a headache to transclude without a TOC in order of apparition to find what is the exact name of the following/preceding poem.

Imagine someone wanted to read one of these collections. They could either a) fish for the smallest page number in the TOC, assuming it's correct, and take the "next" links, or b) start from another one, maybe the first in the TOC, and then land at some random point in the collection and then have to go through the "next" links and the "previous" links if they want to read the whole of it. Same goes if they were interrupted and want to re-start reading at a specific point in the book.

This inconvenience exists specifically and only when the order of tranclusion is different from the order of the TOC. That was why first I always transcluded in the order of the TOC, and after learning that transclusion has to be in page order, I add a second TOC that matches the order of transclusion to ease navigation. — Alien333 (what I did & why I did it wrong) 07:44, 19 May 2024 (UTC)

sib links

As long as the target subpage and target display name are the same, you can use this syntax, which is just as compact as the template but without requiring a template. --EncycloPetey (talk) 21:34, 20 May 2024 (UTC)

Fair enough. — Alien333 (what I did & why I did it wrong) 05:06, 21 May 2024 (UTC)

Hello, new reader here...

https://en.m.wikisource.org/wiki/User_talk:Alien333#/editor/0 ImaginarySusan (talk) 09:00, 2 June 2024 (UTC)

Feel free to ask if you have any questions. — Alien333 (what I did & why I did it wrong) 09:07, 2 June 2024 (UTC)

Merci beaucoup!

( High school French... from 40 years ago!)

🙏👩‍🎨🇲🇫💜 ImaginarySusan (talk) 10:12, 2 June 2024 (UTC)

oh I am fumbling. I wrote a bunch of information to you and then thought it might be in the incorrect place so I copied the message to my clipboard and just tried to send that text to you.

I can't seem to recover it now so I'll attempt to rewrite what I contacted you about.

Serendipitously, i crossed your path by researching wireframes on wiki as i am intrigued with learning to write code... but this was my first trip down the "rabbit hole"

I am a poetry enthusiast, also and while wandering around your contributed content appreciated your knowledge.

Also, Alien333 resonates with me for a variety of reasons..and it happened to be your username, which was my first encounter here. ImaginarySusan (talk) 09:12, 2 June 2024 (UTC)

What you sent was only the link to editing this page.

I left the usual welcome message on your page, it's useful.

If you are interested in poetry, I also suggest you take a look at Template:Ppoem, that is as of now more or less the best alternative for formatting poetry.

If you want to get started, here's an poetry index, picked at random: Index:The Poems of John Donne - 1896 - Volume 1.djvu.

Of course, feel free to do whatever you prefer.

If you can specify what sort of books you want to do, I might be able to fish a file in the Internet Archive.

Cheers, — Alien333 (what I did & why I did it wrong) 09:27, 2 June 2024 (UTC)

Oh my! Much appreciated that you responded so considerately! I didnt expect it and you have launched my enthusiasm to pursue this endeavor! I will pick this up upon waking as soon i will be going to sleep, but certainly hope to be in touch with you more if you will find it comfortable and worthwhile to mentor me for a bit!

My favorite poet is Walt Whitman...if I must choose from many I love.

My gratitude to you !

ImaginarySusan! ImaginarySusan (talk) 09:39, 2 June 2024 (UTC)

Here's one of Whitman's collections for you: Index:Drum-Taps.djvu.

(I myself only went down the rabbit hole a few months ago). — Alien333 (what I did & why I did it wrong) 09:53, 2 June 2024 (UTC)

oh thankyou! I will check that out before sleep... and yes, I notic3d your 1 yr. anniversary on wiki was just two weeks ago!

My how far you've come! What an inspiration! ImaginarySusan (talk) 09:56, 2 June 2024 (UTC)

damn auto correct!

Im obviously not proofreading my messages to you...

..as " spell check overnights" was supposed to be oversights*!

Lol. ImaginarySusan (talk) 09:53, 2 June 2024 (UTC)

Oh, and also: you might want to create your user page, with a bit of information about yourself.

User pages are also often used to keep things (such as links) close at hand, since you can go to your user page from anywhere. — Alien333 (what I did & why I did it wrong) 09:30, 2 June 2024 (UTC)

Yet another reply: I recommend you read Help:Proofread.

I'm assuming you want to contribute, of you don't that's fine and then Help:Reading would probably be more appropriate. — Alien333 (what I did & why I did it wrong) 09:34, 2 June 2024 (UTC)

oh yes I will read everything you suggested. It may take me some time..lol

"Back in the day" i started my graphic communication career in typesetting, copywriting and the REAL old fashioned skill of original proofreading! I was very good...and to this day I don't casually read a thing without noticing typos, grammatical errors, and spell check overnights! (Notice the Oxford comma!) Lol.

I am in the NW Pennsylvania area of the US..and an artist, writer and night owl... I see you are in UK?

The morning bird songs are beginning here, as it is almost dawn. I will let you know once I've started reading, and if i get stuck understanding anything.

My best to you! ImaginarySusan (talk) 09:51, 2 June 2024 (UTC)

No, I'm not in the UK, I'm French, so my english is always going to be somewhere between british and american english. — Alien333 (what I did & why I did it wrong) 09:54, 2 June 2024 (UTC)

Eggless recipe book for cakes . . .Index

I wondered the same thing. I suspect it's something in the scan file causing the issue. --EncycloPetey (talk) 20:27, 7 June 2024 (UTC)

Said it in an edit summary for a near-null edit, it's the table { width: 100%; } in the index CSS that naturally causes the info to expand to fill the whole width, as it's a table, and then it's wrapped and it ends up under the image. If we'd put something like td { background-color:red; }, it would also have applied. I would call index CSS applying to default mediawiki layout a problem, but we do need it to apply to pages transcluded, e. g. for the TOC. Maybe we should open a ticket about this. Left a comment at WS:S#Index CSS applying to mediawiki layout to see if others might know a bit more about that — Alien333 (what I did & why I did it wrong) 06:22, 8 June 2024 (UTC)

Baltimore

Yes, for clarity I DO in fact own the city of Baltimore!!! 50.75.166.42 19:21, 14 June 2024 (UTC)

Oh stop it, will you? (WP vandal coming over here) — Alien333 (what I did & why I did it wrong) 19:22, 14 June 2024 (UTC)

Rossetti. Poems

We may need a versions page for this. The original was published in 1890, but there was an expanded 1891 edition. I do not know yet whether the 1901 edition that you are editing follows the 1890 or the 1891, or is further expanded. --EncycloPetey (talk) 19:56, 20 June 2024 (UTC)

Do we have the other editions, to check the difference?

If it helps, the 1901 one says "new and enlarged" and "First complete edition printed November 1890, Reprinted December 1890, January 1891, August 1891, 1892, 1894, 1895, 1896, 1897, 1899, 1901". — Alien333 (what I did & why I did it wrong) 20:13, 20 June 2024 (UTC)

From a quick look at the TOCs of the 1890 one and the 1891 one, they all look the same.

The 1890 edition was in itself already marked "new and enlarged", so I think all three are of (nearly) the same text, already expanded from some earlier collection of poems, maybe this 1866 one, this 1872 one, or that 1888 one. More likely, each edition expanded from the last one, since they all share the same beginning and some poems are added progressively at the end. — Alien333 (what I did & why I did it wrong) 20:40, 20 June 2024 (UTC)

New texts

Indeed, the problem has been corrected now. --EncycloPetey (talk) 18:38, 22 June 2024 (UTC)

(Note: that was four hours before you reverted, I think it's just {{spl}} that got you confused.) — Alien333 (what I did & why I did it wrong) 18:40, 22 June 2024 (UTC)

Poems, 1909-1925

This collection of poetry by T. S. Eliot was first published in 1925; here is a link to the 1926 reprint on IA: (external scan). The collection includes editions of some poems we already have, but also some that we do not. It is about 100 pages. --EncycloPetey (talk) 23:44, 10 July 2024 (UTC)

Will do, after finishing Index:Poems Hornblower.djvu. I intent to overwrite Poems (Eliot) for this, as it's unsourced and its contents are included in this 1926 collection. — Alien333 (what I did & why I did it wrong) 07:33, 11 July 2024 (UTC)

That's a different collection, with completely different poems. T. S. Eliot published a series of Poems books, starting with that one. Subsequent volumes had a year range as part of the title, and the contents were different each time. It would probably be better to turn that into a versions page as a result of the differences between the many editions. --EncycloPetey (talk) 14:51, 11 July 2024 (UTC)

The TOC of the 1926 book you pointed me to contains the subsection "Poems (1920)", that contains exactly the same poems as the other one (compare this and that). — Alien333 (what I did & why I did it wrong) 16:16, 11 July 2024 (UTC)

Subsection, yes, but there are also additional poems not in the 1920 edition. So the two editions are different from each other, yet both are titles Poems. And the 1932 edition contains further poems not in the 1920 or 1926 edition, and we will want to host the 1932 edition as well. My point is that we will eventually have additional editions, and the page Poems (Eliot) is the logical place to disambiguate those editions. So, rather than put the 1926 edition at that location, convert it to a disambiguation page listing the 1920 and 1926 editions, and providing us a place to also list the 1932 edition in future. The alternative is to have to redo all of the internal and external links the next time an edition of his poetry is transcribed here. --EncycloPetey (talk) 17:25, 11 July 2024 (UTC)

Ok then, I'll put it at Poems (Eliot, 1926). Note: All of these editions will anyways (I think?) be listed at Poems, so I don't know if it's worth putting a separate dab page at Poems (Eliot). — Alien333 (what I did & why I did it wrong) 07:48, 12 July 2024 (UTC)

@EncycloPetey: Done (though I'm not sure the titles, quotations and poems are positioned the right way). — Alien333 (what I did & why I did it wrong) 13:30, 15 July 2024 (UTC)

Template:Sandbox/PleaseDontDelete.css

I'm curious, if you move this page to your userspace, does it keep the "sanitized CSS" content model, or automatically switch to unsanitized CSS? It does the former for me, but since I'm an admin, I have the ability to change a page's content model, so it occurs to me that you might see different behavior. —CalendulaAsteraceae (talk • contribs) 06:30, 24 July 2024 (UTC)

Yep, that works, it has the right content model. Thanks! — Alien333 (what I did & why I did it wrong) 07:24, 24 July 2024 (UTC)

Glad I could help! As you can see from the deletion log for Template:Sandbox/styles.css, this is a useful (if slightly silly) trick. —CalendulaAsteraceae (talk • contribs) 20:57, 24 July 2024 (UTC)

I'd seen it already, but I'd thought it was just for testing. — Alien333 (what I did & why I did it wrong) 05:32, 25 July 2024 (UTC)

Poems (Shore)

Hi, You might want to take a closer look at the transclusion of the works in Part III. There seem to be bad interactions between 'ppoem' (where used) and your personalised version of it. Also between the 'pseudoheading' templates and normal ones (e.g. small caps). It looks like you probably need to use entirely one or the other, not mix and match. Chrisguise (talk) 06:04, 1 August 2024 (UTC)

My template only spits out a ppoem with some lines that have an additional styling, it's completely compatible as I've seen in my 78 other books where I've used it. I already saw and fixed an issue like that yesterday at Poems (Shore)/Olga, it's just caused by a mismatch of ppoem start/end across a page break, namely stanza/follow. It only happened in part III, because that's where the longest poems are, so more chances to mess up start/end's. — Alien333 (what I did & why I did it wrong) 07:26, 1 August 2024 (UTC)

All fixed now. — Alien333 (what I did & why I did it wrong) 07:39, 1 August 2024 (UTC)

There are places where lines starting with a character name (formatted using 'small caps') are right aligned, not left, and instances where the character name formatted with 'pseudoheading' are overwritten by the following text (i.e. the following text seems to be left aligned). Chrisguise (talk) 21:21, 1 August 2024 (UTC)

I've fixed already, it's caused by a lint error with an unclosed div. Did I miss some? — Alien333 (what I did & why I did it wrong) 07:47, 2 August 2024 (UTC) EDIT: I've re-read all of part III, and I still haven't found any left. — Alien333 (what I did & why I did it wrong) 08:01, 2 August 2024 (UTC)

Belgic Confession

This is a complete work. The volume it was transcribed from contains a set of documents pertaining to the Reformed Dutch Church in America. This will need to be moved to be part of the containing volume, and that will take some investigation to be sure everything is organized correctly. I am working on that, but am also plagued by computer issues today, which is hampering my progress. --EncycloPetey (talk) 18:41, 14 August 2024 (UTC)

Yeah, I realized after reverting, sorry. — Alien333 (what I did & why I did it wrong) 07:37, 15 August 2024 (UTC)

TIF files from TE(æ)A,ea.

As a heads up, TE(æ)A,ea. does book scans, and the TIFs are raw page scans, uploaded here so that the files can be grabbed, cropped, processed, and the resulting images then uploaded here or at Commons. In general, raw scans that are TIF format are not suitable for use as is, but are uploaded here temporarily. --EncycloPetey (talk) 18:29, 17 August 2024 (UTC)

Addendum: And sometimes the images need to be researched separately. So, for example, The Vampire by Summers is in PD in both the US and UK, but some of the illustrations are not. The frontispiece is a painting by a Hungarian artist who died in 1961, so his paintings are not yet hosted at Commons, because they are still protected in the EU by copyright. Illustrations that are works of art and photos of that art, can have licensing that differs from the book in which the illustrations appear. --EncycloPetey (talk) 18:38, 17 August 2024 (UTC)

Ok, thanks for the explanation! — Alien333 (what I did & why I did it wrong) 19:10, 17 August 2024 (UTC)

Frances Ellen Watkins Harper

We have Index:Poems (IA poems00harp).pdf that has not been started, but seems well within your personal sphere of activity. She is severely underrepresented on Wikisource. --EncycloPetey (talk) 19:22, 1 September 2024 (UTC)E

I originally intended to stop at a 100 of them and then go transcribe something else, I've already done 90 (91 counting T. S. Eliot, but I usually do women authors for the gender gap, so that one is a bit apart) and I have ten more in stock, but I'm continuously finding new ones I want to do. Will do, thanks for the suggestion. — Alien333 ( what I did
why I did it wrong ) 22:40, 1 September 2024 (UTC)

@EncycloPetey: Done. — Alien333 ( what I did
why I did it wrong ) 22:33, 2 September 2024 (UTC)

QuickTranscribe and other proofreading software

Sorry for the late reply, MediaWiki doesn't seem to have a very robust way to mark messages unread. Well, it turns out the document you found, User:SnowyCinema/QT.py, was a place I jotted ideas down for the project a long time ago, a document I completely forgot about and doesn't have any relevance to the code right now.

I point you to User:SnowyCinema/QuickTranscribe, the main project page, if you're interested in details. It's not completely up to date, and there are a few more features not mentioned there. I even was toying with poetry collections and anthologies very recently with QT (Fox Footprints, poetry; Lords of the Housetops, anthology).

I am extremely impressed by your work here with poems and your ability to just churn these out! I would love to collaborate with you. I'll work to get my code documented and cleaned up for you soon, and also would love to have a lot of this work we both did centralized in one place, like a frontend application. I'm getting to a point where I think I'm ready to come back to the project, so I appreciate you for giving me some motivation also!

We'll be in touch about teaming up in our vision to populate Wikisource ridiculously quickly! :) SnowyCinema (talk) 03:02, 5 September 2024 (UTC)

On poetry, taking a look at Page:Fox Footprints (1923).pdf/58, I noticed there seems to be an issue with styling (assuming it's generated auto), as it really doesn't match the scan (details).

On my churning them: very much related a) to my efforts to get good OCR before starting, I feel like proofreading time is directly proportional to OCR quality and b) to my scripts and {{tpp}}.

On QT (I don't even know how I found that page (: ), a wild thought, as I haven't even read the codebase (I intend to do so soon), but maybe I could lend a hand? I consider myself a decent Python and JS programmer, for the better or for the worse. — Alien333 ( what I did
why I did it wrong ) 18:50, 5 September 2024 (UTC)

Your feedback on the CSS work in that collection is valid. You'll probably notice my styling is usually not exactly perfect to the original because for one I'm no CSS guru, and for two I focus on getting work out faster, with a focus on content over exact styling because this proofreading work is already horribly time-consuming as is, even with these "extra tools" I created, let alone without them. But, I try to keep everything in CSS classes so they can more easily be changed if needed. I know "the rules say" you have to get it perfect, but I hope you understand why I make this "is it readable vs. does it look perfect" compromise. Proofreading a novel and a film a day or whatever, with a few extra hours of admin maintenance and QT coding etc. sprinkled in, was completely consuming my entire life as it was.

(That's not whatsoever an exaggeration by the way—Wikisource was a serious personal addiction issue if I may open up a bit. I was having trouble living. I'm wagering I'm balanced and stable enough to be able to continue this by now, however.)

ANYWAY, yes, going to do some work on documentation at the very least. I want to make this a collaborateable project. The one thing I will say is that the code I have is intrinsically not fully automatic. There are always edge-cases every couple of works that require some manual intervention, but overall it makes a whole bunch of the process much smoother. So when a frontend or more UX-friendly build is made, we can design it so manual intervention is easy. SnowyCinema (talk) 19:31, 5 September 2024 (UTC)

(I'll probably improve poem code so that it takes all poem pages in larger blocks so modification is easier. I designed it with defaults that are generally correct to early 20th century styling.) SnowyCinema (talk) 19:46, 5 September 2024 (UTC)

To be fair to you, in my 91 collections, I've only seen the same type of styling once (and yet, that didn't have {{sc}} on first words). — Alien333 ( what I did
why I did it wrong ) 19:49, 5 September 2024 (UTC)

Totally agree on the time-consumption side, but eh, what am I going to do with my life instead? Some occasional drama/wikistress/mistakes makes me step back enough so that it doesn't eat up the whole of my life (and the rest is devoted to programming anyways, so...)

On styling, I get your point, and I also like keeping things in stylesheets, but to me that's exactly the point of them, that it takes what, a few minutes, to look at the file and set up the styles? It's not like other stuff like header & footers, . . . vs {{...}}, which are more minor and time-consuming (I still do them, but I haven't yet gone fully "speed first"). It happens to everyone to have not exactly the same styling (primarily because publishers are apparently puzzle maniacs), but I think stylesheets are rare enough (once a work) and small enough (usually only 2-4 rules, at least for me) to be worth doing manually. — Alien333 ( what I did
why I did it wrong ) 19:47, 5 September 2024 (UTC)

@SnowyCinema: what I meant with the placement & margins etc of the title is that instead of doing

{{cblock|TITLE
{{dhr}}
{{ppoem|
text
of
the poem}}}}

TITLE

 

text
of
the poem

you can just do

{{ppoem|TITLE

text
of
the poem}}

which gives basically the same result, sparing a template (the break is slightly smaller, but in my experience most of the time it's the right one).

TITLE

text
of
the poem

— Alien333 ( what I did
why I did it wrong ) 21:37, 5 September 2024 (UTC)

43000th edit!

Just in case you didn't know, as of me typing this you are on 42,999 edits. So next one shall be 43,000th. Congrats. ExclusiveEditor (talk) 05:39, 8 September 2024 (UTC)

Thanks. (Looked at my ec after seeing my name in that banner thing, I suppose?) — Alien333 ( what I did
why I did it wrong ) 08:45, 8 September 2024 (UTC)

Yes. ExclusiveEditor (talk) 19:50, 16 November 2024 (UTC)

Poetry collection requests

Would it be too forward of me to give you requests for certain poetry collections I find here or there? I think you're quite well suited to transcribe these. They're annoying for me and I'm not too interested in verse honestly, but lots of disambiguation pages need blue links. Is a requests page in your user space warranted, that I can add requests to? SnowyCinema (talk) 22:52, 30 October 2024 (UTC)

Will do whatever's given to me, as long as it's not old enough to have ſ.

(It's incredible how far specialization can go, now I can do most of the poem formatting on a page by typing four characters and pressing one shortcut.)

As to where, you can just drop them here, I don't mind. — Alien  3
3 3 09:32, 31 October 2024 (UTC)

Alright, I'll put some here for now.

• War Drums (1899), a poetry collection by Louis Edward Scharkie (external scan). He was Australian and this is almost certainly his Findagrave: https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/159763780/louis-edward-scharkie - for the disambiguation page War Drums
• Cofachiqui, and Other Poems (1884) by Castello Newton Holford (external scan) - just for his author page
• Pebbles and Shells (1895), by Clarence Hawkes, a bit on the longer side... (external scan)

This is something to start off with. I would highly recommend a request subpage, because I'll find myself throwing a ton here (if you want). SnowyCinema (talk) 13:39, 31 October 2024 (UTC)

There it is, if you really want it: User:Alien333/Poetry requests.

Also, a side note, though I won't die on these hills: I tend to prefer works

• without watermarks, because those are always a bore
• that don't have already-uploaded scans (to be able to redo the OCR myself.)
• available somewhere else than at hathi's (I don't have membership and it's really a pain to get each page individually). (for War Drums I'm going to take (external scan), at IA).

— Alien  3
3 3 13:47, 31 October 2024 (UTC)

Yo, you're an absolute hero! Thanks! Seems like the guy died young, just after he got his first collection of verse out. This could've been one of the quintessential poets in Australia. Wonder what disease it was. Well, now his voice can be heard again!

Hopefully also the NaN problem isn't causing you too much trouble. In an Index page, next to the transclusion status ("Fully transcluded") there's a button that lets you check and see if all the pages are transcluded. This might help you find out if errors happen in transclusion in the future! Wow, great, clean, quick work, impressed as usual! SnowyCinema (talk) 18:35, 1 November 2024 (UTC)

I did use the transclusion button, but it's not perfect and it counts <pages> tag errors as transclusions. (the NaN was caused by an OCR error, when I reused the page numbers in my code.) — Alien  3
3 3 18:37, 1 November 2024 (UTC)

side note: I've been here for a year and a half, actively for a year, so sometimes I want to protest that I'm not that clueless, but I often discover things I should have known, the latest being that the "Entered according to Act of Congress", &c is actually copyright note, and not something added by the LOC. — Alien  3
3 3 19:23, 1 November 2024 (UTC)

Would it be okay if you used title case for the poems of the works I request? It will make it easier for me to disambiguate. It's up to you—but it's my personal preference and I'm only requesting it. Some things can make the casing iffy, like for example the novel Resurrection Rock is listed in some places as "Resurrection rock" (in sentence case), which is an issue because the title of the novel (being "Resurrectio Rock") is named after the title of the fictional rock in the novel which is itself a proper noun ("Resurrection Rock").

Similarly with Cofachiqui, and Other Poems/Grant county, it was named after a county in Wisconsin, which is (at least nowadays; I don't know if in 1884 this would have been valid) traditionally spelled "Grant County". When I make the Wikisource portal for that Wisconsin county, it would be nice if the work titles I list there match the casing of the portal, being Portal:Grant County, Wisconsin (in the future). Do you mind if I move at least that one to Cofachiqui, and Other Poems/Grant County? SnowyCinema (talk) 20:10, 2 November 2024 (UTC)

I generally stick to the case of the TOC, and when there is no TOC (or it's {{asc}}), as poem titles (and running headers for that matter) are most of the time all-caps, I don't have a way to determine the original title, so I choose to not make assumptions because title case is not applied consistently across the centuries and all over the world.

I make an exception for cases where I am sure that a word should be capitalized, mostly for proper nouns. Feel free to move Grant county, I wasn't aware of the custom of capitalising the word county in county names (not being american). — Alien  3
3 3 09:44, 3 November 2024 (UTC)

"He didn't write one poem titled "Pebbles and Shells", but fourteen (and not versions, all clearly distinct)"

Lmao. This is what I'm here for. SnowyCinema (talk) 19:18, 8 November 2024 (UTC)

Testing the DT API.

Testing the DT API. — Alien  3
3 3 15:34, 7 December 2024 (UTC)

Answering to myself (if it works)! — Alien  3
3 3 15:45, 7 December 2024 (UTC)

even that autoindents (moving up for testing, sorry of this pings). — Alien  3
3 3 15:53, 7 December 2024 (UTC)

Wikidata links

How are you figuring out which Portals need a link at Wikidata to Wikisource? I see you just linked seven of them. I had asked if someone could modify an existing bot to do just that. RAN (talk) 18:47, 22 November 2024 (UTC)

With the bit of code I linked to at WS:S#Qid. It is, in fact, a bot, these were only the test edits. — Alien  3
3 3 18:49, 22 November 2024 (UTC)

And to answer your question about the logic, I explained it in detail at the BRFA, there. — Alien  3
3 3 18:51, 22 November 2024 (UTC)

• Good stuff! It just found another 7. Does the bot check Category:Surnames for linking to Wikidata? The bot found individual news articles and portals, so far not surname categories. I only created the concept of surname categories a week or so ago, to link portals of people with the same surname. That way if you had two people with similar names, you could look at the category to work out who was the correct person. --RAN (talk) 17:37, 23 November 2024 (UTC)
• Can you fix an error I made. Wikidata item Q7344166 links to an article instead of Portal:Robert Ensko. The error needs to be corrected at Wikidata, I corrected it at this end. --RAN (talk) 14:38, 3 December 2024 (UTC)

  (I wasn't aware of the ... circumstance you mentioned at Mike Peel's talk.

  Now it makes more sense why you would ask for individual edits.

  Sorry, but I feel uncomfortable making possibly controversial edits for another user.

  This doesn't change anything as far as the bot is concerned, or sitelink corrections in general, as that is an uncontroversial task.)

  Question: what is supposed to be the point of surname categories? (I don't know any of the wider context around that story.) From what I can see, they just duplicate d:Special:WhatLinksHere/[id of name page]. — Alien  3
  3 3 13:50, 4 December 2024 (UTC)

The surname categories let you look to see if a person has an entry under a variation of the name. Someone might be "A.J. Smith" or "Allen J. Smith" or "Allan J. Smith" or "Allen James Smith" or "Allen James Smith I" or "Allen James Smith, Sr." or "Allen James Smith Sr."

• (Oh, and I did do that edit.) — Alien  3
  3 3 13:51, 4 December 2024 (UTC)

  Another question, related to your block, if you don't mind answering: people at WD consider that your creation of certain items was wrong (I don't know whether that was right or wrong and I have no intention to try and find out); couldn't you just comply, e.g. promise to not create any items that aren't immediately notable due to having a sitelink? Not being able to make any edits at WD, at all, is going to be a big obstacle to editing here (as most of our data is there, &c). — Alien  3
  3 3 14:07, 4 December 2024 (UTC)

• We already have a process for nominating entries for deletion at Wikidata. That process was skirted, I complained and asked for 5 deleted items to be restored, created by a third party. This all started earlier as a harassment campaign when I reversed an edit by someone with admin rights, they then retaliated by nominating the previous 400 images I loaded for deletion at Commons. When that was reversed they posted a message at Wikidata that someone should do the same there. I was permabanned out-of-process by an editor who had just one month of experience. We already have a 10 year old objective rule at Wikidata that the entries should have a "public and serious" sources which I abide by. If I agree to follow these new, vague, and subjective rules, they will just continue to harass me. The guy that nominated the 400 images will just delete whatever I add and ask that I be banned again under the new vague rules. Unfortunately there are just two bureaucrats and no Arbcom committee at Wikidata. Several people wrote me saying they were afraid of getting banned too if they supported my side. It is also crazy that the guy who created the entries that I asked be restored is still active. The whole project suffers since I would spend 8 hours each Friday adding Library of Congress images and create Wikidata entries for the people in the images. Same for the two local historical societies I belong to. I would scan and add the images and create a Wikidata entry for them. See for example: d:Q116700477 and d:Talk:Q106445178, that chart took me three months of research scouring historical papers in the archive. I stopped all three projects, and even if unbanned, will not start up again. Finding where I left off will be too difficult. --RAN (talk) 17:54, 7 December 2024 (UTC)
• Your bot would also be great at Wikiquote, there are also entries not linked to Wikidata. The problem there is that there is no backlink from Wikiquote to Wikidata for the bot to see. The site could also benefit from closer integration with Wikidata. I asked at Wikiquote:Wikiquote:Village_pump about adding the "authority control" and the "sister projects" template, but there are too few people contributing, no one responded. We could set up a test of the template with the backlink. --RAN (talk) 20:03, 9 December 2024 (UTC)

  The advantage of these specific cases of the header |wikidata= parameter is that we can be certain that the item matches the author (or at least it isn't our responsibility but that of the editor who added the parameter). For bot-volume editing, if the bot is going to make some decisions, I want to be sure that the error rate will be low. I will probably add the surname cats sometime soon, because there it is still pretty clear (there likely won't be two "instance of" "family name" with the exact same item name). But for other pages, e.g. authors, I'm not that sure, cf Elizabeth Gifford, there were plenty of WD items called "Elizabeth Gifford", but none the right one (born after, or died a while before, publication of work). If the bot went solely by item names, here it would have linked the author to one of the incorrect items. We can do a more complex algorithm, but it should be thought out carefully (the more steps there are, the greater the chance of error). — Alien  3
  3 3 20:32, 9 December 2024 (UTC)

Interest in being an adminstrator?

Hi Alien333, is adminship something you would be interested in? If so, I'm prepared to nominate you. Take some time to think about it and read up what it entails. Beeswaxcandle (talk) 06:56, 10 December 2024 (UTC)

I would be interested.

I think the main uses I would make of a mop, would be:

• The administrative backlog (e.g. edit requests tend to be dealt slowly, I'd keep an eye on that).
• I have also some technical knowledge (HTML, CSS, JS, and Lua), so I could help with that sort of stuff.
• (although minor) speedy delete myself the M2 pagemove redirects I leave behind instead of leaving more work to the admin team.

I am unsure of whether I am ready for the job, though I guess that'll be the community's role to decide, for these reasons:

1. I find myself clueless more often than I would have liked.
2. I have the impression I sometimes have some trouble communicating with other users.
3. Something that I should disclose, in all fairness, is that in about nine months' time I will start something IRL which will reduce my leisure time, so I won't be as active as I am today, though I won't go inactive.

On the other side, it could be said in my favor that:

1. In one year I couldn't know everything.
2. No one has ever mentioned that to me, so it's just an impression.
3. From reading around, admins have from time to time had periods of reduced activity and this was apparently not seen as too much of a problem.

I'd like your opinion on these three (possible) issues, or any other you have noticed. If, taking all of that into account, you think me ready, then I accept. (And btw thanks for welcoming me back in June of last year.) — Alien  3
3 3 09:29, 10 December 2024 (UTC)

1. Recognising that you're not sure is a strength in my view. Then asking before jumping into a solution is a pattern I see in you.
2. There are always some people with whom it is harder to communicate with—particularly as we're restricted to the written word.
3. Yes, there are times for all of us when RL gets in the way of doing what we really want to do. My own editing pattern has been very variable—partly depending on what works I'm focused on, but also what else is going on in my life. As long as the tools are being actively used and an admin is keeping up a minimum of 50 edits over 6 months, it's not a problem.

I'll go and do the nomination now. It is customary for candidates to confirm their acceptance of a nomination. Beeswaxcandle (talk) 07:46, 11 December 2024 (UTC)

HathiTrust scans

Hi @Alien333,

At some point, I thought you had figured out a way to get Hathi scans, but then randomly passing by your Poetry Requests page, it seems I might have been mistaken. Thus, I have uploaded File:From an Old Garden (Cloud).djvu and File:Travelling Standing Still (Taggard).djvu to Commons. If you would prefer the pdfs instead (to redo the OCR in some other fashion), I can also upload those. (P.S. Congrats on your admin nomination above).

Regards, TeysaKarlov (talk) 20:42, 15 December 2024 (UTC)

Well, until today, I hadn't. I hadn't tried, assuming that they'd somehow prevented just fetching the images (and I don't want to spend a single cent to fund and support these attempts to essentially paywall and privatise the public domain). But once you gave me the idea, I've been fiddling with it for a few hours and I managed to find a painless JS solution to do that (could also have clicked n times "save image as", but very time-consuming). Maybe I should write it or mention it somewhere, others must have asked themselves the same question. (On the admin nomination, it was very unexpected. I feel like some were passed over, that arguably are more knowledgeable than me but were never nominated, but eh, it's not my business, maybe they have issues I'm not aware of or they don't want to be admins.) — Alien  3
3 3 16:21, 16 December 2024 (UTC)

(For curiosity's sake: How did you download it? With the images I got, the end result is about twice as large as the ones you uploaded. If you have the "real" file, it maybe means that the displayed images are stretched, in which case I should zoom less before fetching.) — Alien  3
3 3 16:36, 16 December 2024 (UTC)

Hi @Alien333,

I downloaded them with institutional access, so no scripts necessary, just clicked download really (in pdf format). There only appear to be resolution options when downloading images, instead of a pdf, so maybe I should have done that and then converted to djvu. Not something I know a great deal about. If the OCR on my pdf to djvu downloads are still useful, feel free to ask for more in future, but if your JavaScript option is better, and simple enough, then maybe it is worth more of us using it (and describing somewhere).

Regards, TeysaKarlov (talk) 19:56, 16 December 2024 (UTC)

Thanks for the offer, but as it stands I think I'll do it on my own. (The OCR I use ([1]) has the advantage of recognising emdashes as emdashes & not hyphens. On the other hand, it only works for pdfs, but I haven't managed to get ocrodjvu working (python version issues).)

After a more detailed analysis of image quality: I've thought a bit more about it and I can bring it to the point where it actually downloads the best images available. These are not the pdf, but the individual images (with the full-res option on). For scale, my sketchy way of fetching the display images is about twice as large as downloading the pdf, and downloading the images individually (which is a tedious process but can in fact be automated much easier) is about 4/3 larger than my sketchy way. So, in the end, automating it the "right" way would be better than institution access. Will do tomorrow, and possibly in the coming weeks discuss this at WS:S.

Well, jokes' on me: downloading the high-res images gives a result the same size as the institutional pdf, except it's more blurred (may or may not be due to making one more conversion (jpg → pdf & pdf → djvu)). In the end, looks like the way I did it at first is better (I still have a suspicion of streched images, but that isn't much of a problem.) — Alien  3
3 3 20:59, 16 December 2024 (UTC)

Easy LST

Hi, just letting you know that "Easy LST" is turned on by default for new users and most of our editors have no idea that there is an alternative. Personally, I think it should never have been implemented, but I was a lone voice at the time. Beeswaxcandle (talk) 07:24, 20 December 2024 (UTC)

I know it's default (as I arrived after it was set up, so at first I had it too. It got me very, very confused when I transcluded my first work, after which I just turned it off when I found out that was possible). 100% agree with you on it being a bad idea.

The main issues I can see with the current way are:

a) new users tend to not know what it means, and think it just gives a limit that can both be used for start and end; so it's not easier to understand

b) it requires putting ## ... ## twice for a single section break; the manual way does the same, but I'm saying that Easy LST doesn't help type much less either

c) users even have to type more in cases where the begin is not right after the end (e.g. there's a separator that shouldn't be transcluded in either)

However, I get where it's coming from, as typing the <section ...="..."/> can be bothersome. I think there is probably something better to be salvaged from this. To me, the "right" way of doing it would have been just making a ##x#y## shortcut, where it expands to something in the lines of (in pseudo-code)

result = ""

if !x.match(/^\s*$/) (meaning is not of the form ## # ... ##)

then result += '<section end="'+trim(x)+'"/>'

if !y.match(/^\s*$/) (meaning is not of the form ## ... # ##)

then result += '<section begin="'+trim(y)+'"/>'

return result

While we're on it, I'd like to ask you a question about section titles. Personally, I think that individual labels that do not follow an easy pattern only take more time. In my first work, I labeled chapter beginning/ends with c[chapter num], and it was a nightmare to keep track of it when transcluding. Ever since, I always call the sections, a, b, c, d, &c in that order (so end=a, begin=b, end=b, begin=c, &c, and reset to end=a on every page). If this gets consensus, the above proposal could be even better, such as ### to put a end & begin, #### for only end, and ##### for only begin. It would need no more work.

What do you think of that? — Alien  3
3 3 11:27, 20 December 2024 (UTC)