User talk:Selket

Hello Selket, welcome to Wikisource! Thanks for your interest in the project; we hope you'll enjoy the community and your work here.

You'll find an (incomplete) index of our works listed at Wikisource:Works, although for very broad categories like poetry you may wish to look at the categories like Category:Poems instead.

Please take a glance at our help pages (especially Adding texts and Wikisource's style guide). Most questions and discussions about the community are in the Scriptorium.

The Community Portal lists tasks you can help with if you wish. If you have any questions, feel free to contact me on my talk page! John Vandenberg ^(chat) 09:14, 28 May 2008 (UTC)

If you can give me a few clues on what types of work you are interested in, I can help you get started. I see you run a bot on Wikipedia; we have a lot of bot work here that could be done (some new tasks are being fleshed out on Wikisource:Bot requests), but a bot operator here needs to do some editing before they are trusted with bot.

p.s. you can enable email notifications in your prefs. --John Vandenberg ^(chat) 01:02, 29 May 2008 (UTC)

I'm planning to start with Supreme Court decisions to accompany the articles I'm writing on en. I'm a pretty adept programmer, so if there is anything you need a bot to do let me know. Also, please point me to the relevant policy pages here if you don't mind. --Selket 03:11, 29 May 2008 (UTC)

We dont have a lot of policy at present, however what we have can be found in Category:Wikisource policies and guidelines and Wikisource:Policies and guidelines is the overarching page. U.S. Supreme court documents are not subject to copyright, so there are very few issues except for presentation.

Wikisource:WikiProject U.S. Supreme Court cases is a good starting point, however keep in mind that the WikiProjects are not a driving force here on Wikisource as we have far fewer regular contributors than Wikipedia, so we tend to all come together to slowly work on major projects. At the moment, the real action is at Talk:ACLU v. NSA Opinion, where a group of people are thrashing out how to present this case, with the goal of it being our first legal featured text: WS:FTC#ACLU v. NSA Opinion.

The list that you are working on at Wikipedia are also on Wikisource: w:List of United States Supreme Court cases, volume 5 is United States Reports/Volume 5 (notice that Wikisource permits slashes whereas Wikipedia does not)

Lists of works can also be compiled, however we realise that these list are not published (i.e. they are "original research"), or incomplete by their nature, so we place them in the "Wikisource" namespace. i.e. w:List of copyright case law#United States exists here as Wikisource:United States copyright case law.

It is preferable that all pages on Wikisource have images to accompany them, and of course want the public domain media files to be uploaded to Commons. The only time we want files uploaded onto Wikisource is when they are PD in the US, but not PD in the country of origin. For example, we were not sure about the copyright status of Image:South Africa Act 1909 (Brand).djvu in Britain, but we know that it is clearly PD in the US because of {{PD-GovEdict}} and {{PD-1923}}.

If you have a PDF, it can be converted to a DJVU using Any2DjVu. See "Index:A Concise History of the U.S. Air Force.djvu" and A Concise History of the U.S. Air Force for a very nice example of how we use DJVU files.

One idea on how you can use your programming skills to help with the supreme court cases here on Wikisource is to automatically generate all the missing pages in United States Reports, using the Wikipedia content or some other source. The policy on bots is typically of a smaller community: you are free to run automated edits for any task, however it is advisable to run them in short runs of about 50 edits so others can check the edits, and if the bot is doing lots of good work and we no longer care to inspect the edits, it can apply for a bot flag. John Vandenberg ^(chat) 04:17, 29 May 2008 (UTC)