User talk:CharlesSpencer

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Hello, CharlesSpencer, 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:

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Again, welcome! — Cygnis insignis (talk) 13:59, 21 September 2009 (UTC)

Thanks!

Thank you for your help with the United States Statutes at Large! That’s a project in need of contributors, and all assistance is very greatly appreciated. Don’t sweat the details on formatting at this point; just getting the raw page text proofread is 90% of the battle. Just curious, why volume 33? Doing research on the early 1900s? :-) Tarmstro99 (talk) 17:15, 22 September 2009 (UTC)

My pleasure. It's purely accidental, in fact: Judge Kilbreth (who was Collector of Customs for NY/NJ from 1893 to 1897 when he died in office), and whose estate is discharged by Chapter 721 of Vol 33, was my great$^{n}$ grandfather, and I had no idea that he had a private act of Congress in his name. I found the link on Google (and, I'm ashamed to say, thereby learnt of the very existence of Wikisource!) and felt that the least I could do was correct the OCR and proofread. Then my curiosity (and pride) was piqued by seeing how well formatted the earliest pages of Vol.1 were, and asked myself how I could do the same... I think I understand transclusion conceptually, but I'm blowed if I understand where the formatting is viewable/copiable from for US statutes... CharlesSpencer (talk) 08:27, 23 September 2009 (UTC)

In Page: namespace, use header/footer

On the US legislative pages, you are ending up with a double sidenote. I had a go at one page in the Page: namespace and moved the {{sidenotes begin}} into the header, and {{sidenotes end}} into the footer, and that seems to have done the trick United States Statutes at Large/Volume 33/Fifty-Eighth Congress/Private Acts of the Second Session‎. -- billinghurst (talk) 03:48, 31 October 2009 (UTC)

So that's what was causing that! Thanks. CharlesSpencer (talk) 16:37, 3 November 2009 (UTC)

Procs. & similar

Hello.

I hope I didn't wind up making more work for you by touching up those Presidential Procs. from Vol. thirty-three. I came across an orphaned and mis-named Proclamation issued by Roosevelt and it was only by chance that it turned out to be from the same Volume you seem to be working on. Anyway, once I pinned down the post-1936 numbering scheme for what Volume 33 shows as Proclamation No. 5, I gave fixing the content up a shot to see if I could learn that crazy thing. It worked just fine when all the content was on one djvu page to begin with but I gave up on trying to transclude something that spans more than one page (like Proclamation 503 does) and still have that source tab pop up at the same time.

Set me straight, if you have the chance, on this multi-page thing as well as anything else I might need to know moving forward. Thanks. George Orwell III (talk) 17:28, 7 January 2010 (UTC)

George, ANYONE who's prepared to help with a bit of proofreading of Vol. 33 is welcome in my view! I am not, I'm afraid, an expert on transclusion, so I can't really be sure that I can help. The multi-page stuff I've done is literally just a series of single page transclusion commands strung together, like here. I do know that there's an experimental transclusion structure that takes multiple pages as arguments, but it would probably take me a while to track it down again... I think I've also mis-named my directory structure, so that Tarmstro99's Statutes at Large header doesn't work properly - I should have used 58th, not Fifty-eighth! The only clever multi-page thing I've discovered so far is ((Hyphenated word start)) and ((Hyphenated word end)) as in pages 1089 and 1090 where the word Township breaks across the page end like this: ((Hyphenated word start|town|township)) ((Hyphenated word end|ship|township)) - notice that the template supplies the hyphen for you. Does that help at all? Oh, and the numbering for the proclamation that you found - is that a Library of Congress linear numbering system or something? Thanks. Kind regards, CharlesSpencer (talk) 15:55, 8 January 2010 (UTC)

Saw your comments, so I have had a look at the setup for multi-pages.

• Section markers need to bracket your text on a page, so when using section begin at the start of the text on the page, and section end where it needs to end. In this scenario, start and end on 1019, nothing required on 1020 (as whole pages don't need sections), and start and end on 1021. Which gives you the output at User:CharlesSpencer/503.
• Note that sidenotes go left and right which can look ugly (like a saw), so I have a very crude workaround using {{force sidenote}} which shows the sidenotes as set in Page environment, then when transcluded it forces them to the one side.

Anyway, if you need some guidance, fell welcome to ask. billinghurst (talk) 16:38, 8 January 2010 (UTC)

O.K. - that's a good start but not exactly what I had in mind. First off - side notes & similar are a symptom of the publication -- not the original issuance or the authorization/approval in itself. While I completely agree side notes are almost always a must when appearing under some context, sub-page(s) or sub-division(s) within the Statute at Large Volume project(s), they are "technically" not authored nor approved by the President in any way, shape or form as far as I know. Having them transcluded along to articles or works outside of the publication and into other bodies of work is not always desirable, though admittedly, can be useful as a supporting tool in certain narrow applications I suppose.

The "feature" I had envisioned here was that Source tab automatically appearing at the top which would lead back to the validated (or Proofread?) page when clicked. At least I thought I saw it work like that somehow. At any rate - I'm all for consolidating and complimenting efforts whenever it makes sense to and this duplicate publication of Proclamations in particular makes it an inevitability even without the current numbering scheme in place...

though bringing all the existing Executive Orders up to a uniform level to match the missing or out-of-print ones getting discovered and being added wouldn't hurt moving things along on the Proclamation front either (HINT HINT bot requests)  ;) George Orwell III (talk) 20:11, 8 January 2010 (UTC)

Oopsie. Will see what time I have tomorrow. billinghurst (talk)

You'll have me out of a job

Nice to see things are happening with the template. I am around if you need me, either leave me a note on my talk page, or come into IRC, http://webchat.freenode.net channel #wikisource (/join #wikisource) — billinghurst sDrewth 10:56, 8 April 2010 (UTC)

Was going to mention the use of some parameters that are non-essential for a template, and you may not wish to have them appear when left empty, then you would code them with a pipe, eg. {{{parameter|}}}. You can also nest parameters in the same way {{{parameter1|{{{parameter2|{{{1}}}}}}}}} where you would use either p1, p2, or the first $1 parameter. — billinghurst sDrewth 12:56, 8 April 2010 (UTC)

Talkback

bing bong — billinghurst sDrewth 11:29, 8 April 2010 (UTC)

to embed another template

To look how I have used a template as a basis and a build, have a squiz at {{IrishBio ref}} — billinghurst sDrewth 14:12, 16 April 2010 (UTC)

Long time no see

Hi. I hadn't noticed you back. My bad. Just noticed that you had been using a paragraph lead with {{gap}}. The community has previously addressed and determined that it was outside the guide for editing, and preferring the double line break of a new paragraph. Described in WS:Style guide. — billinghurst sDrewth 00:32, 24 September 2016 (UTC)

@Billinghurst:Oops! I had better change that then! Thanks for the tip. CharlesSpencer (talk) 09:33, 24 September 2016 (UTC)

@Billinghurst:Potentially double oops! Should I also be editing out the <p style="text-indent:{{{ti|2.00em}}};"> from my Template:USStatPension template would you say? All of US the US Statutes at large use a particular style of pagination, so I had worked on the principle that it was worth preserving. Do you agree?CharlesSpencer (talk) 10:12, 24 September 2016 (UTC)

I ran a bot through to cleanse the gap template from the work. For US Statutes, if it was added for a particular reason/purpose then we have always allowed variation for purpose, so it can stand. If it needs a clean up, you just need to ask a bot operator to assist. — billinghurst sDrewth 07:49, 25 September 2016 (UTC)

I am pretty sure that I copied it from Tarmstro or one of the other major US Statutes at Large editors who have used it widely across the USStat project. Since it appears to be received formatting, I think I'll leave well alone. Thanks. CharlesSpencer (talk) 22:12, 3 October 2016 (UTC)

United States Statutes at Large/Volume 33/Fifty-Eighth Congress/Private Acts of the Second Session

So I saw your message about recent completion and was intrigued enough to look in. Saw the mention of Template:USStatPension/doc and looked at that. Then peeked at page 1295 aka Page:United States Statutes at Large Volume 33 Part 2.djvu/4. Saw a goof, but can't see how to fix it.

Chap. 10. ends with

at the rate of thirty dollars per month in lieu of that he is now receiving., payable to his legally constituted guardian

I see two things immediately, which I think are the same problem. There is ".," and then no ending period. The Chap. 9 above has

at the rate of twenty-four dollars per month in lieu of that he is now receiving.

Could it be that the "receiving." is hard-coded, and the "| coda = , payable to his legally constituted guardian|" isn't being jammed in correctly?

Here's a completely different example at Page:United_States_Statutes_at_Large_Volume_33_Part_2.djvu/195, Chap.952,

and pay her a pension at the rate of eight dollars per month.such pension to cease upon proof that the soldier is still living.

given

|coda= such pension to cease upon proof that the soldier is still living.|

More can be found with search for coda in these pages. Shenme (talk) 05:48, 5 April 2020 (UTC)

Thank you so much @Shenme: - I obviously messed up the template last time I edited it, since it never used to behave like that - let me see if I can fix the coda problem... CharlesSpencer (talk) 17:55, 5 April 2020 (UTC)

Hi @Shenme: - hope everything's going OK for you during these strange times! I have (I think) solved the template problem, and checked all of the coda= and additional= parameters which needed to be modified as a result of my template fix. If finding an unsolvable error on page one hasn't dampened your enthusiasm, please give it another look! Regards CharlesSpencer (talk) 14:39, 20 April 2020 (UTC)

Peeking again

1362 FIFTY EIGHTH CONGRESS. ⁠Sess. II. Ch. 331-335. ⁠1904.: this drew my attention because of extra text, so I looked closer. So a couple typos in the texts. I'd thought I'd seen an anomaly in template output, but I just had misread, thinking some words missed. Devilishly difficult when so much is repeated, but you know that!

I've looked at 5 pages now, up to page 1366 and found text goofs on two, but no template problems.

BTW: I see you having fun with tariffs to/from China. I really like seeing the dots, really!

OBTW: I peeked and the umlauted vowels stuck out their tongue at me, so (diff). Shenme (talk) 02:02, 27 April 2020 (UTC)

Thanks so much for validating - it's so helpful of you! I am ashamed to say that I had completely missed the umlauted characters... And I am going to have to learn {{Dotted TOC line}} - that looks awesome. Maybe we could even use it for the indexes to the entire Volume (one day...) CharlesSpencer (talk) 14:30, 27 April 2020 (UTC)

Just happened to come across the definition of the cryptic "H'k Tls." at the start of the tariff duties list. Poking at page 2214 I found it saying

"Customs duties shall continue to be calculated and paid on the basis of the Haikuan Tael."

Thus the "H'k Tls." is "Haikuan Tael" which is mentioned at w:Tael and even has a redirect w:Haiguan tael.

This recovering old Englishes and usages is strange, I even found myself cross-eyed at "per ct" b/c so used to seeing it even shorter as "pct" these days. Shenme (talk) 20:45, 27 April 2020 (UTC)

Given under my hand ...

So I was playing with more treaties and followed you at Treaty of extradition with Brazil. Got to the last page and hit problems with {{USStatProclamation}}. Two deviations from what is found in the source of the last page 2100, and then one glitch from some template or another?

First deviation is very minor, in that the template substitutes

"ratifications of the two governments"

vs

"ratifications of the two Governments"

But then second deviation is a different wording. Template substitutes

In testimony whereof, I have hereunto set my hand and caused the seal of the United States of America to be affixed.

whereas the source has

In testimony whereof, I have caused the Seal of the United States of America to be hereto affixed.

The other place you have that template used is page 2121, where the result matches the source text.

The last glitch is an extra bit of text leftover, viz. "Secretary of State. |}" at the very end of the page. I don't see where it came from.

Having fun otherwise, with my partially detached retina getting lasered tomorrow. Shenme (talk) 01:16, 1 May 2020 (UTC)

Ack, another. In the Spanish treaty it has

be it known that I, Theodore Roosevelt, President of the

but in the other Brazil treaty and template it is

be it known that I, Theodore Roosevelt, President of the

Consistency is not a common characteristic of the US government? ;-) Shenme (talk) 00:06, 3 May 2020 (UTC)

It's Greek to me

A long time ago you explored using <math> in order to simulate header lines that had two dates split horizontally. While fitting the task, using <math> still produced textual oddities. I've been playing with that.

Could you take a look at this page, where I am comparing two additional re-workings of your effort? I've made the text non-italic, ensured the spaces don't get stripped, and then (3rd case) tried to make the dates fraction even smaller.

Does my proposed third case look good enough to replace the previous version? (Another example of the previous version is seen here.) Shenme (talk) 04:07, 1 May 2020 (UTC)

Peeking again ( {{USStatPensionSplitLateEnd}} and preamble param value )

I'd scanned over the template help docs awhile ago, and remember there were special notes about how to include blanks at the end of param values. On page Page:United States Statutes at Large Volume 33 Part 2.djvu/14 the first entry has the glitch "Volunteer Infantry,and pay", missing a separating space. The parameter 'preamble' has

|preamble = first lieutenant Company K, Thirtieth Regiment Maine Volunteer Infantry, |

One solution would be to add a trailing blank to the preamble value. But how to do that?

I suppose another idea would be to have the presence of a preamble value then somehow force a separating space in

{{{preamble|}}}and pay

but at least at one point everyone seemed scared of template conditionals?

A side note is that I proofed several pages at the start pp. 1297-1304 and then also toward the end pp. 1710-1715 and was happy to notice the typo rate much less after you had done so many pages. It's fiddly bits all the way through! Shenme (talk) 21:12, 3 May 2020 (UTC)

Hi @Shenme: Sorry to have been away for a while, my computer bricked late last week and, although - thanks to the Cloud - I have recovered most of what was on it, the sole total loss is a very long and complex work document which I will now have to recreate from scratch, references included. As a result, WikiSource has had to fall down my list of priorities for a while, sadly.

Looks like your laser treatment was a resounding success - I had to read Page:United States Statutes at Large Volume 33 Part 2.djvu/14 twice to find the typo you'd spotted! In these situations, it's dear old &nbsp; that needs to be used - a fact that took me ages to work out first time round. I've now corrected the typo on that page, so please validate whenever you wish.

On the treaties:

• I need to have a really good look and see whether {{USStatProclamation}} is worth adapting. If every treaty is subtly different, and the template would therefore need to be made aware of "G/governments", {{sc}}, "hand and seal" vs. "seal", "as amended", etc. etc. etc. then it should instead probably be used only crudely just to generate the formatting and basic text and then subst:ed to allow "refinements" to be made ex post
• I too am totally puzzled by the weird "Secretary of State. |}" business - I currently have no idea what's causing it, but will have a proper look when I have time
• Thank you so much for the "H'k Tls." research - fascinating stuff, isn't it?

On the <math> improvements, I think your third version with the smaller date lettering is vastly superior. I tried to make it use {{sc}} also for the date word (without success) - which only now do I notice is the actual formatting in these headers!!!

Thanks again. Regards CharlesSpencer (talk) 16:45, 10 May 2020 (UTC)

Most glad to hear from you, as these parlous times lend fears aplenty. The treatment worked, but leaves vision and eye so irritated for the moment that I need something engrossing and *external* to divert attention. Fortunately there's tilting at awry punctuation here!

As for experimentation, I am most proud of the seal on one treaty and another. Having fun as I come across templates I didn't know about!

Sorry to hear of a true loss realized. It is the loss of time - now twice over - that hurts most. Looking forward to more relaxed times for you. Shenme (talk) 21:20, 10 May 2020 (UTC)

That's very kind of you to say. Thank you. Quite a lot of the stuff not on the cloud will have been family history research, which, although ultimately replicable, takes an awfully long time to do, and I really can't be sure what I've lost. I have now tracked down a chap in far-off Norwich who may be able to desolder the solid state disk chip from the motherboard and recover the data - for only a very reasonable sum, no doubt. Fingers crossed...

I have had a very brief look at treaty proclamations, and there are so many micro-variations, I think that subst:ing is the way forward. I have now done this for the Spanish treaty - which was itself idiosyncratic, since it didn't use the words "as amended" in the proclamation text, despite it, err..., having been amended! And the rogue |} was hunted down and shot as soon as I had subst:ed and it was still there, thus proving that it couldn't be caused by the template. In the end, it turned out to be a rogue {{multicol-end}} in the footer, in addition to the {{multicol-end}} immediately before the Proclamation section. Glad I finally tracked that one down...

I don't know where you are in the world, but here in the south of England we have glorious sunshine but on a body of chilly polar air, so I wish you as good or better a weekend as we are due to have. Stay well. Charles CharlesSpencer (talk) 16:29, 15 May 2020 (UTC)

Hi @Shenme:, I haven't heard from you in a while, and I just wanted to be sure that your eye treatment continues to heal and give you utility and pleasure and that you and yours are well generally during these continuing strange times. CharlesSpencer (talk) 15:09, 8 October 2020 (UTC)

Hiya! These are uncertain times, and so I have been furiously pursuing minutiae to avoid furious madness. ;-) The eyes are fine, and the incidents (w:Detached vitreous) can't happen again now that they've happened to each eye. I do not like the lasers - last time I whimpered so badly the doctor fled the room once done tacking down the tear. Stoic opera is a strange combination I suppose.

Someone noticed that there were no actual scans backing the text over at Bible (King James), the Authorized King James Version. Legacy of the wild west days at WS where everything was accepted? Someone else found us scans to actually compare against. And given I was already interested in marginal notes from poking around e.g. Page:United States Statutes at Large Volume 33 Part 2.djvu/1043, I was amazed that what WS had looked nothing like the scans.

It was bare text, and Bible_(King_James)/Matthew looked nothing like it should be Page:KJV 1772 Oxford Edition, vol. 2.djvu/206. I've been busy over that-away. Worse, I've been struck by the idea that making the WS pages look like the scans is not the best we can do. The marginal notes containing references/pointers to other sections... why can't they be actual wikilinks?! I believe that the marginal notes in the statutes also _sometimes_ have references to other pages? Oh yes, as seen in that example page /1043 I linked. Why couldn't that "Vol. 27, p. 593. Ante" and "p. 2330. Correction." be clickable?

So a couple thousand lines of code later I've got a program at least reading WS pages and finding some of my transcription errors. After that will be getting the program to automagically rewrite the marginal note references text into real wikilinks. A dry "3 John 5, 8." becoming a useful "3 John 5, 8." Hey? Got me back into programming anyway.

Over at United States Statutes I've sometimes been doing index pages, e.g. Page:United States Statutes at Large Volume 33 Part 2.djvu/1285. It is *the* most mindless thing I can think of that still exercises some brain cells.

Were you able to recover / recreate your lost texts? I know I always end up feeling like I haven't been as clever / complete when redoing something. And watching a friend throw out years of notes upon retirement freaked me out. At least their papers were 'done' and published, but the effort accumulating the notes! Yikes! The output doesn't really capture all the work that went into the effort.

And I've heard about all the - now we're not locked down whoops now we are - going on over there. Hope that's not caught you out (in?) badly. We've been in the "elder ghetto" for months now. Thus my pursuit of minutiae. Great times for such? Here's hoping your spring is marvelous and *personally* enjoyable. Shenme (talk) 00:43, 13 October 2020 (UTC)

Not doing body links to page namespace

With tables of contents and the like, we would not present MAIN -> PAGE namespace links as navigation links. They are just going to have people not in the space to read the work as we are looking to present it. We have the marginal page numbering that allows people to get there if they truly wish to head to that namespace. If you truly wish to have active links in the PAGE -> PAGE then we have some navigation templates, though honestly I don't find much value in them, though I did use and develop them. <shrug> — billinghurst sDrewth 23:36, 6 June 2020 (UTC)

Thanks for clearing that up - as I was doing it, I really wasn't convinced it was the right thing to do, as the little yellow page numbers looked a little out of place, and I knew that one day they would end up green - and still looking out of place... However, I copied the structure from here, which impressed me as a very well managed project, so against my better judgement I imported it. P.S. Hands off my clever little namespace-aware occurrence of the word "Pages" in pages 13-16 of Miss Rogers's ToC (it always appears on page 12) - you accidentally wiped it a couple of times when you reverted ;-) !!!!! CharlesSpencer (talk) 10:54, 7 June 2020 (UTC)

 Comment Ineuw often follows their standards, often not updated from something based off an old approach that we have since improved or thrown away. There are better people to follow for modern standards. — billinghurst sDrewth 23:27, 9 October 2020 (UTC)

Hi @Billinghurst, quick one for you on a collateral subject. The very last footnote of this page (footnote 8) has a reference to page 133 of this document. How would I improve the linking in the footnote to arrive at the appropriate point on this page in the main namespace instead, please? Thanks. CharlesSpencer (talk) 15:28, 8 October 2020 (UTC)

[[The Psychology of Shakespeare/Chapter 4#133|piped with the text]] All page numbers are anchors, so you just need to add that anchor to the target page. Of course if you want a specific point on a page then you can add an anchor with {{anchor}} / {{anchor+}}. — billinghurst sDrewth 23:23, 9 October 2020 (UTC)

Awesome @Billinghurst - thank you. Pretty sure I've put it in correctly, but {{default layout|Layout 2}} doesn't seem to preserve the highlighted text - I have a very slow computer on very slow broadband, so I see the highlighted text for a second or so, then {{default layout|Layout 2}} expresses itself and the reference text is indeed the very start of the page, but no longer highlighted. Any ideas? Thanks, kind regards CharlesSpencer (talk) 15:28, 12 October 2020 (UTC)

Yes, {{anchor}} does have a highlight function, and I see it operating on the target as expected. Works for me. — billinghurst sDrewth 00:44, 13 October 2020 (UTC)

We sent you an e-mail

Hello CharlesSpencer,

Really sorry for the inconvenience. This is a gentle note to request that you check your email. We sent you a message titled "The Community Insights survey is coming!". If you have questions, email surveys@wikimedia.org.

You can see my explanation here.

MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 18:48, 25 September 2020 (UTC)

Page:The Psychology of Shakespeare.pdf/145, a note

Just wish to flag {{fqm}} to you, as it does a better and easier job than {{dent}}. Typically on a page like that, I would just wrap those poetic sections in {{block center}} (or {{block center/s}} and {{block center/e}} pairs where split over pages.) I will note that I am just a simple bloke, doing simple things. — billinghurst sDrewth 03:05, 19 October 2020 (UTC)

Roman numerals in page titles

Hi, by policy we change chapter numbers to Arabic for page titles. So, the Melbourne work should be "The Chronicles … /Chapter 2" for example. See Help:Subpages for more detail. Beeswaxcandle (talk) 18:00, 14 August 2024 (UTC)

Thanks! Great timing - all changed now. CharlesSpencer (talk) 18:13, 14 August 2024 (UTC)