User talk:RaboKarbakian

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February 2025
Towards a New Architecture

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Author authority control

On Author pages, the authority control should be placed following the copyright license, not ahead of it. This sequence should remain consistent across all Author pages. --EncycloPetey (talk) 14:04, 26 February 2025 (UTC)

EncycloPetey: I am sorry. I ordered them by my own confidence level and in the back of my mind I knew this might be wrong. I have done this on not hundreds of authors but perhaps scores of authors and I was wondering if there is a tool that might check the list of authors in my history and switch the two if necessary.--RaboKarbakian (talk) 15:23, 26 February 2025 (UTC)

Someone might have a bot that can make that change. Sadly, I do not. I do see that you also have been removing unnecessary lines of code about birth and death dates, and that cleanup is appreciated. --EncycloPetey (talk) 15:25, 26 February 2025 (UTC)

EncycloPetey: Today, for me (it has not been so on other days) the style sheet of the authority control template is making that template appear before the PD template. That truly might be the reason that I switched them around to begin with. Can you look at In the Abyss and tell me if the stylesheet is changing the order for you also?--RaboKarbakian (talk) 14:13, 21 March 2025 (UTC)

That's not an Author page. In the mainspace, the order of templates is the opposite of what it is for the Author pages. --EncycloPetey (talk) 15:08, 21 March 2025 (UTC)

EncycloPetey: I am befuddled for a reason for this. I want to ask "why" but in some previous training I learned that "Why" is a way to put people on the defensive and that it should be avoided. So, in the quest of information (which I do not have) I ask: "What could possibly be the reason for this inconsistency?"--RaboKarbakian (talk) 15:14, 21 March 2025 (UTC)

The order was established long ago. I have always assumed that, on an Author page, we want the license to appear first, because we frequently had editors contributing works that were still under copyright. So the license template is prominently displayed. But on a Versions page, or an Edition, we want information about the particular edition, its Library of Congress, and Internet Archive links to appear prominently. --EncycloPetey (talk) 15:19, 21 March 2025 (UTC)

Thank you. That makes sense and a little logic goes a long way to helping my memory with things like this. I (even if it looks to be otherwise sometimes/often) like to require as little from the stylesheet as necessary.--RaboKarbakian (talk) 15:24, 21 March 2025 (UTC)

Amazing Stories/Baron Munchhausen’s Scientific Adventures

Something has gone wrong with the dates on the first four stories here.

Also, is it possible to remove the mention of the editor ? It seems particularly unnecessary here when Gernsback wrote the stories. -- Beardo (talk) 01:27, 27 February 2025 (UTC)

Beardo! Thanks for finding the date error! After getting them really wrong, they should be fixed now. They were wrong at wikidata.

the things that annoy you

About the editor. When I first added it to the original template, it was great for compilation books (poetry and short stories) but it became annoying when working on the magazines (at that time it was St. Nicholas). A very dirty hack would be to remove "editor" from wikidata. I do not like this solution because the data should be able to stand alone to fill a citation.

A better solution would be to add a way to suppress a property to Module:WD version. Like "editor=no" or in the versions template, where the author becomes annoying in the same way "author=no". That second one is really confusing because in the Versions template, it is usually best to use {{WD author}}

I am going to add to my list of requests at the module for this.

Probably this is going to be really easy. Look at how {{WD author}} works! A {{WD amazing}} could be easily fashioned from the existing module!!

the things that annoy me

I really don't like the "03" in the volumes, and I was pretty far into things when I saw the Amazing Stories link and realized my volume was completely different and that the issues also have that leading zero.

The Amazing stories link can be rewritten to use the WD version module. And I would be happy to move all of the existing volumes and such that have that leading zero. (a break was taken here to look at the source of the WD templates)....

I can see and understand what great scripting fun was had for the existing Amazing Stories link; I kind of want to do this myself and I would probably have made about the same link. But, lets rework it and get rid of those unnecessary zeros.

a side question

Do you have the Blue OCR button in your toolbar?--RaboKarbakian (talk) 14:46, 27 February 2025 (UTC)

Before I continue...

...I wanted to check, is my upload at File:Towards a New Architecture-047.png consistent with how you'd like to structure things here? Or do you want the full page scans to persist as their own separate items, with cropped versions saved under distinct file names? -Pete (talk) 21:48, 6 March 2025 (UTC)

Pete: My intention for uploading the pages that had images on them was to make those images available. If those images could have been uploaded to commons, that would have been just great because of the crop tool. But they have to be here.

Also, I had those page images without watermarks. Another very good reason for me to make the originals available. And that fulfilled my greatest requirement which was that the images should not be marred by watermarks (each page had three!). Stripping the watermarks from PDF can only be expected of works from Hathi, however.

Personally, I would have rotated that image and made some color adjustment but the group of people working on those images should determine what they look like. But when in doubt, with image work, less is better.

I very much approve of uploading into the same name while here at source.

If at commons, it would have been better/kinder to upload into a different name (unless things have changed there). That would have allowed the originals to have easier access for any person who might be interested in processing them differently. Truthfully, when I started there, my reason for uploading the original and my processed image into different names was that I hoped that someone who knew what they were doing would process those images correctly someday.

Those are all of my opinions about this set of images. Making them available was my only intention. Thank you for asking; I would have liked to have more to answer you with. Maybe this will help: your image looks like what is provided at gutenberg for the post-processors.--RaboKarbakian (talk) 12:38, 7 March 2025 (UTC)

Rabo, thanks for sharing your thinking on this. I certainly agree that further improvement on my edits is possible and desirable. As I often do, I was trying to hit a happy medium, what is good enough to be useful to an end user, but not so time-consuming to do that it substantially impacts my ability to complete the task. I.e., I think at this quality it's worthwhile to include the in complete, proofread pages and remove the "problematic" tag. If somebody wants to remove halftone screens, optimize black and white balance, straighten, or refine crops great! But IMO those things are not strictly necessary for the purpose of completing a work. (I also agree that "less is better" in terms of lossy manipulation; I like to leave interstitial edits even when I do perform more aggressive edits.)

In this case, I may not continue, because I'm unclear on the copyright status of the photos themselves. The photos have not been "translated" like the text of the work. Is a photo copyrighted in France and published before 1930 in the public domain in the US? Maybe, but until somebody who knows the laws better than I do explicitly shares such a judgment, I'm reluctant to forge ahead. -Pete (talk) 22:18, 11 March 2025 (UTC)

Pete:The first (and only) photograph that I looked at before responding is Page:Towards a New Architecture (Le Corbusier).djvu/13 which claims to have permission to use. It seems to me that if the book was published in the United States, within our copyright rules and years, then the photographs were also. At first, the Winnie the Pooh words were within copyright everywhere, due to some milestone of A. A. Milne's death having been achieved; but the images were not because the illustrator's death had not hit that milestone yet. That seems different than "Permission to use this image in this book".

But keep your doubts, because my "instincts" have been wrong many times and the rules are anything but simple.--RaboKarbakian (talk) 11:21, 12 March 2025 (UTC)

Big beautiful book projects

First of all, I’ve sent for the book. Hopefully it will be sent, but if it’s rare enough it might not be. [I myself own a few of the old readers, but not this 1930 example.] I have been dealing with “book projects,” but unfortunately not much in the way of “big beautiful.” Lots of text, not a lot of images. And when there are images, they are not all that interesting. Your three other Rackhams have been sitting in unprocessed requests because they’re all too rare and won’t come out of special collections. For your scanning example, I would recommend scanning in a (small) public-domain book as an example, as I don’t quite understand your explanation and wouldn’t want you to needlessly violate the law. For some of the Rackhams, I’ve been waiting on SnowyCinema to develop his QuickProofread system, which would really help with, e.g., The Castle Inn (one image, 371 pages of novel). Most of my scanning right now is developed towards a book with a lot of images, although they’re not all that interesting: Japanese, the U.S. government’s official, 21-volume guide to the language. I’m going to combine all of the volumes into one part once I’m finished with scanning. The only other of my recent uploads (I’m a little behind on it because I keep finding new projects) is Index:Compendium Maleficarum.djvu—there are already images on Commons, but they’re not very good. I can upload the images if you would be interested. Another thing I almost forgot: a few years ago, I sent in requests for a number of Rackham’s early works in Little Folks, but they’ve been ignored for a while. I asked my ILL contact to put them through again, and one came back! File:Reginald's Comic Song (The Songs of Simple Simon).pdf. TE(æ)A,ea. (talk) 00:16, 8 March 2025 (UTC)

In these last few years, when I can understand the "not letting the old books into the public" (Raggedy Ann's Alphabet Book had blue crayon scribbles throughout), I have been imagining going to these universities and scanning them while there.

The scans at Hathi, some of them are from a university close to me and while they are good scans for the text, they are terrible for the images. How they got to Hathi is left to the imagination except for the watermarks that were left on them. It looks like a big google project. And the scans are consistent and can be easily deconstructed because of this consistency. But the beautiful books; the image heavy books, and especially the important books like Fun with Dick and Jane and the Little House books--in the late 1990s my friend had a scanner that would scan 1200dpi. She, and later me, were so new to computers then; and the home computers then were also really cranky about working with files that large. 600dpi is great! 1200dpi for Dick and Jane seems like a good idea though, when you think of the generations that learned from them; the Roosevelt and Eisenhauer youth. Probably they stopped using them, but maybe not. I have no idea how little kids learn to read these days. But, I ramble.

I can well imagine small groups in a wikimedia project, touring their local universities, armed with disposable white gloves, having appointments with the universities libraries and one of the great scanners there and rescanning the beautiful books that are there.

The magazines too! Every magazine I spend time with here, I find something very interesting in the ads. Example: "101 ways to use a pencil" back when they were a new invention, for example. What a great document that must be! Maybe somewhere at that company (which still exists and makes pencils) has an old copy of it.

Inside, I piff a bit when I see kids stuff, it is an AdultExceptionalism. The child inside piffs a bit also, because the new stuff isn't Captain Kangaroo (CaptKangarooExceptionalism?). When I was working on the books that I thought were PD, I started to remember the Captain reading them to me; feeling so sad when Choo Choo lost his tender. Those were formative years where I really wanted to learn to read. I never knew that there were Raggedy Ann books, but along with that patent, I discovered an industry. Who knew? My piffs are not so loud any longer. At the least, Dick and Jane deserve a good publicly available scan.

Big books! I got a handful of Watty Piper books that were too big for my scanner before I had the idea for the top and bottom scanning and I turned them back. I should get those back and scan them now; refine the script. I am pretty sure I made a djvu of Katy and the Big Snow, it was rough but useable.

I will do whatever images you need, happily. I am going to download that Little Folks pdf today. I am going to keep imagining going to Calvin University and scanning Dick and Jane. My dutch friend never heard of Calvin; I was surprised. Also, good to know that Snowy hasn't completely disappeared.--RaboKarbakian (talk) 13:28, 8 March 2025 (UTC)

• He’s been a bit on-and-off lately, but he’s definitely still around. Most of the books on HathiTrust are imported from Google Books, which allows more ready attribution to the universities from which the books were scanned. The scanner I used years ago had dedicated DPI settings, but it was a lot harder to scan actual books, as opposed to loose pieces of paper. The new scanner, which is the freely available one at the local college, had generically named “Standard,” “High,” and “Photo” levels—I scan the text in “High” PDF, and the images in “Photo” TIFF. You could probably figure out what those levels of quality mean by looking at the scans. Funnily enough about the white gloves, the practice on that has changed: unless the books is metallic or poisonous, you’re not supposed to use them. For the newspaper letters, you’d be surprised what they let go. I just got to see a letter from Coca-Cola, urging businesses to keep buying their products—despite the reduced sugar content, done to help with the war effort. Despite how cool it is, and how big the company is, they don’t actually have a copy of it! The nice thing about the books in general collections is that they’ll be shipped out—that’s how I got Sterrett’s Arabian Nights, after all, although was in somewhat poorly condition. I had a book shipped for one of the items on my requests page, and it’s unfortunately just too large for my scanner. The images are in Category:Compendium Maleficarum images. TE(æ)A,ea. (talk) 18:31, 8 March 2025 (UTC)
• Another one, from the same issue: File:The Maker of Ghosts and the Maker of Shadows, 2 (April 1896).pdf. TE(æ)A,ea. (talk) 21:09, 11 March 2025 (UTC)

We did this one already The Land of Enchantment/The Maker of Ghosts and the Maker of Shadows. It is good to have the issue date!--RaboKarbakian (talk) 11:47, 12 March 2025 (UTC)

I am right now very confused about Little Folks from USA and Little Folks from Britain. I am thinking that these two (three if you count the first Simple Simon) are from the British mag due to authors/illustrators and the date which is a year before wikipedia claims that the American LF started. I guess I need confirmation before I start making and moving things.--RaboKarbakian (talk) 12:49, 13 March 2025 (UTC)

• RaboKarbakian: Based on metadata from the actual scan I was shipped, it’s the British one. In any case, Rackham would have had no connection with the United States at this early date. Also, for “The Maker of Ghosts,” I put the “2” in the title because it’s the second part (the first part having been published in an earlier issue). TE(æ)A,ea. (talk) 13:35, 13 March 2025 (UTC)
• Two more Rackham Little Folks items: File:The Terrible Trouble of Forty Winks.pdf (the last part of “The Maker of Ghosts”) and File:The Mines of Experience.pdf (in two parts). TE(æ)A,ea. (talk) 14:48, 21 March 2025 (UTC)

I have uploaded djvus. Index:The Mines of Experience-1896.djvu and Index:The Terrible Trouble of Forty Winks.djvu--I feel clueless about how to deal with them here and at wikidata. I rarely feel this much cluelessness. I still need to do the images for Forty-Winks but I am pretty sure that the images from the book are better than anything I can do with the pdf. I am going to work on the Art Songs, which I am the regular amount of clueless about.--RaboKarbakian (talk) 16:48, 24 March 2025 (UTC)

• Also, could you create the three images (1, 2, 3) from Art Songs of Japan, please? TE(æ)A,ea. (talk) 17:51, 21 March 2025 (UTC)

That "2" is music notation; are you sure you want that via pixel manipulation?--RaboKarbakian (talk) 19:15, 21 March 2025 (UTC)

• Yes; unlike the music in the rest of the book, which is intended to be read, this music is just advertisement for other sheet music. TE(æ)A,ea. (talk) 23:02, 21 March 2025 (UTC)

I accidentally chopped about "an inch" of the cover off when I was working on this. If you find it to be too annoying, I can surely put the two pieces back together. And of course, the wikisourcerer musicians do not do adverts here!--RaboKarbakian (talk) 16:48, 24 March 2025 (UTC)

• Your images (for Art Songs) look fine; I didn’t even notice the crop. I’ve just finished proofreading the two new Rackham Little Folks indices, but I’ve left the transclusion for you as well as I see that you have begun putting these works under the work title. I noticed the images for the Compendium Maleficarum pages which I have proofread; could you add the illustrated border to the image on the title page, please? I have finally finished scanning the text of my longest-running project (21 vols.), and now just need to scan the images from the last volume in high quality. I also need to go back and get some of the volumes I had scanned, as the copy from which I scanned was missing a few pages. Then, I just need to find a way to combine 5,000-odd pages’ worth of PDFs…. TE(æ)A,ea. (talk) 00:23, 26 March 2025 (UTC)

About Art Songs: when I looked at the IA cropped image (included in the djvu) apparently they cropped at the same place. Also, the line at that edge is on the original and is only close to where I accidentally cropped (yes, a little defensive here) and truly on the original. Anyway, it has been repaired/fixed and is good now.

About Little Folks: I did the image for Forty Winks and it looks pretty good for having started with a bitonal scan. That being said, there is something between me and commons right now and I will get to them as soon as I have direct access, which will not be today. Without the Volume number, I feel like I am well, to quote an old joke "farting in the general direction of" where to put those. So, I will start my day with them, not end it and that should help some with my disorientation. Pretty silly, I guess but there you go.

TE(æ)A,ea. So, I woke up this morning certain I would find the volume information in the Rackham bibliography. I did not find it, then I screwed up the Compendium index and now I learn (and should have known) that The Mines has two additional images. I am frustrated and also being frustrating! So, two more images and I really should check that other bibliography (it had a better listing iirc.) So, sorry and sorry and better days to everyone!--RaboKarbakian (talk) 14:10, 27 March 2025 (UTC)

• I checked both bibliographies that we have (Latimore and Haskell, 1936 and Rota in Hudson, 1960), but neither gives the volume and issue information. Latimore and Haskell has more detailed information on each item, while Rota has very minimal information but his list is more complete. (I would also like to go through and try to Wiki-link the references in these two lists, like you’ve done for the books in Latimore and Haskell.) TE(æ)A,ea. (talk) 14:59, 27 March 2025 (UTC)

I had forgotten about that border! Things were working more bad than the usual on that computer. When I tried to reboot, there was an mDNS job that was preventing it. Not being online or on the internet at all, I got pretty frustrated with this and have started removing software. Anyway, soon with that too! Thanks for the reminder.

I think that pdf job sounds just great! Especially as the scanning is already done. Let me do it, please! 3 volumes at a time, we could get it done in 2 weeks or so I guess. I could work on that while you are scanning the images. Just volunteering.--RaboKarbakian (talk) 14:10, 26 March 2025 (UTC)

• I thank you for your volunteering! I still need to clean up the scan before I combine and upload it; there are a few pages missing here and there, and volume 2 probably needs to be completely re-done as the copy from which I was scanning was missing about 50 pages. For Little Folks, unfortunately little is known, and the existence of an American periodical of that name just makes things worse. I really need to finish it up next month; I hope, sooner rather than later. TE(æ)A,ea. (talk) 14:46, 26 March 2025 (UTC)

Author:A. H. Johnson (novelist)

Hello. Do you have any indication that they wrote any novels ?

Is a dismbiguator in the name needed ? -- Beardo (talk) 01:02, 9 March 2025 (UTC)

Beardo: Author:A. H. Johnson already existed. It was a redirect to Author:Arthur Henry Johnson; so I expanded it. Everything I know is at ISFDB. "Novelist" is probably wrong and too generic but birth and death years are unknown. With three science fiction credits, (science fiction writer) is "better" but longer and perhaps the birth year and death year will become known.--RaboKarbakian (talk) 13:23, 9 March 2025 (UTC)

I see. Perhaps "fiction writer" ? -- Beardo (talk) 19:33, 9 March 2025 (UTC)

It's really supposed to use the year, so I moved it to Author:A. H. Johnson (fl. 1929) per our typical author disambiguation conventions. I suppose the convention is for situations exactly like this, where the actual occupation may be ambiguous, preventing more page moves later. SnowyCinema (talk) 20:00, 9 March 2025 (UTC)

I have amended all the links to the redirect page and marked that for speedy delete. -- Beardo (talk) 22:17, 9 March 2025 (UTC)

Aesop's Fables

Hello, thank you for all of your work at Portal:Aesop's Fables. I noticed that in this edit you changed Perry 606 from "The Crow and the Dove" to "The Boys and the Frogs". I have checked Perry's Babrius and Phaedrus, and "Crow and Dove" is correct. What was the reason for this change? Tim Smith (talk) 10:49, 14 March 2025 (UTC)

Tim Smith: I have no clue the reason I did that. I went (back) down that rabbit hole again and realized that The Frogs and the Boys have no Perry index, being just a Townsend fable and simply changed it back. I cannot even figure out the reason I would make such a typo! Thank you very much for finding it.--RaboKarbakian (talk) 11:41, 14 March 2025 (UTC)

I think I see what may have happened. On this page there are several indexes, "Perry", "Mille", and "Other". "The Frogs and the Boys" appears as Mille 606, so maybe you accidentally mistook that for a Perry index. Thanks for fixing it. Tim Smith (talk) 12:41, 14 March 2025 (UTC)

Blanking on speedy deletion

Hi! When you nominate pages for speedy deletion, please don't remove the content when adding the {{sdelete}} tag (even if it's a redirect). It helps admins process the requests to see what's the content being nominated for deletion. Thanks and have a good day, — Alien  3
3 3 11:57, 18 March 2025 (UTC)

Unsourced

Where does it say that unsourced means without a scan ? Note that the templates {{no source}} and {{no scan}} refer to two different situations. -- Beardo (talk) 19:28, 24 March 2025 (UTC)

Beardo Back in the late 2010s I spent a lot of time cleaning here. Author pages and version pages. I was not alone in this endeavor there was also at least Beleg Tâl. A lot of moving non-scan backed works from Good Title to Good Title (unsourced) so that Good Title could become the versions page. And the link was easy also: paste the title twice, put the pipe in the middle and close the bracket before the (unsourced) in the second paste.

So, unfortunately "ease of paste" is the reason that (unsourced) is the same as not scan backed. Not a "good" reason but a "real" reason. As I was not the only person doing this there will be a lot of similar cases. Also, consistent so if a better solution is found, they can be more easily repaired via software.

If this is an important issue to you for this one work, do scan back it and I will move it to a more sensible name and the versions page can go into that namespace.

I have this thing in my mind, it is probably not valid most of the time but that thing is: that a not scan backed work is possibly some one trying to sell me the Brooklyn Bridge.

Being scan-backed is a big deal here, and I appreciate this about here. Also, the Beleg Tâl escalation software was the nicest at wikidata and the first to concede when it was clearly wrong (about a symbol from the ascii set).--RaboKarbakian (talk) 13:29, 25 March 2025 (UTC)

Capsak or Caspak?

You've spelled it both ways in your recent edits, without explanation. --EncycloPetey (talk) 18:57, 28 March 2025 (UTC)

EncycloPetey That is a good question. Wikidata has Caspak trilogy and so do the notes at Volume 1. Everywhere I look it says Caspak. Where did I spell it the other way? (not an unusual thing for me, that.)--RaboKarbakian (talk) 19:59, 28 March 2025 (UTC)

Easiest way is to check your Special:Contributions/RaboKarbakian. There were several places I noticed. --EncycloPetey (talk) 20:36, 28 March 2025 (UTC)