User talk:Tarmstro99/Archives/2008

More frustration

Whenever I hit save page or show preview on the house report it adds two lines of whitespace to the header. This happens only for the house report. I am using Firefox 2.0.0.8. Why does this keep happening? Psychless 22:56, 19 December 2007 (UTC)

A little hard for me to explain because I’m not clued in to the technical details, but here’s my best attempt: This is a side-effect of the updated JavaScript that User:ThomasV has been working on for the Page namespace. What is happening is an attempt to make it easier to include the text (and only the text) of Page-namespace pages in other pages via transclusion, omitting non-textual items such as page numbers. So what he has been doing (see, for example, this edit) is to move the page numbers up to the header section (which is nested within a set of <noinclude> tags so the page numbers won’t get copied when the page is subsequently transcluded. Then the script automatically adds two lines of blank space below the header before the start of the actual text. If you begin to put the page numbers in the header section yourself (as I’ve done here, for instance), the output should be what you are expecting. I have a feeling that is not a very helpful explanation; let me know if I need to try again. Tarmstro99 01:53, 20 December 2007 (UTC)

Actually it was just what I was looking for. I was hoping it wasn't some bug that was only affecting me. That sounds good then; I'll just make sure to put the page numbers up there, like I have been doing. Psychless 21:55, 20 December 2007 (UTC)

Unfortunately, my work on the report will have to end until I get the chance to download the pdf file. It's a really massive file considering I have a 20k dialup connection. I'll try and get it downloaded in the next few weeks. If you have anything else I can help with on the first 185 pages I'd be happy to do it. Psychless 23:49, 20 December 2007 (UTC)

Understood, the PDF is kind of huge. Be happy to snail-mail you a CD if you wish; just click the “e-mail this user” link if you want and tell me where it should go. Thanks very much for all your help either way. Tarmstro99 01:54, 21 December 2007 (UTC)

The CD arrived today and I've successfully retrieved the PDF file from it :). I'll resume work on the house report in the next few days. Thanks again. Psychless 22:51, 14 January 2008 (UTC)

IP welcome

Hello,

Please could you sign when you welcome anonymous IP. Thanks, Yann 23:41, 4 March 2008 (UTC)

Happy to do so, although it's been some months since I’ve welcomed anonymous IPs. Tarmstro99 15:13, 5 March 2008 (UTC)

Collaboration project

This weeks collaboration project is G. W. Bush. Please take the time this week to identify and/or transcribe one important work by, or involving, this very prominent person who is relevant to us all. John Vandenberg ^(chat) 02:35, 7 March 2008 (UTC)

Index pages

hi, I answered you on my talk page. sorry for the delay; ThomasV 10:37, 16 March 2008 (UTC)

Large DjVu

Hello, Erik Moeller uploaded them for me. I don't know if he still does that. Maybe ask on #wikimedia-commons. Regards, Yann 20:53, 23 April 2008 (UTC)

Regex

Thanks so much for that - saved me doing all 200 by hand :) Cheers, Daniel 22:26, 24 April 2008 (UTC)

legal case naming convention

There is a discussion on Talk:ACLU v. NSA Opinion about naming conventions of pages in cases. If we anticipate the worst case scenario, where every piece of paper presented during the case was eventually put onto Wikisource (i.e. including via FOI whenever that eventually happens), is there a naming convention that we can use now that will almost certainly result in page names that are both meaningful, and not ambiguous? John Vandenberg ^(chat) 08:42, 3 May 2008 (UTC)

The way the courts do it is to assign each case a unique docket number, then to assign everything filed in that case its own sequence number starting from 1. (So the plaintiff’s complaint, which is the first document typically filed in any civil case in the U.S., would be docket entry #1. The next thing that any party, or the court itself, added to the record would be entry #2, and so on.) This has the advantage of avoiding any ambiguity—I can say, give me a copy of item #57 in the docket for case number 08-5536, and out of the millions of legal case filings in the U.S. each year, there will precisely one that fits that description—but at the cost of being entirely undescriptive of what that document actually is. Presumably the case-number-then-docket-number framework is an unattractive one for us; it’s poorly suited to serve as a convention for naming pages here.

It’s tempting to say, “just use the case name as the page title, then add other entries as subpages.” But in the United States, at least, case names change over the course of the litigation. Perfect 10 v. Google, Inc. and Perfect 10 v. Amazon.com, Inc. are, respectively, the trial court and appellate court opinions in the exact same case. None of the parties changed, but the court of appeals just decided it would prefer to list the defendants alphabetically. And the court of appeals doesn’t get the final say on the name of a case, either: Whichever party files a cert petition in the Supreme Court gets listed first in the case caption, no matter whether they were a plaintiff or a defendant in the lower courts.

When I added the two opinions in White v. Samsung Electronics America, Inc., I put each in its own subpage and linked them together with the header’s previous and next fields. Whoever added all those pleadings from Friends of the Earth, Inc. v. Watson just gave each page its own unique name—it’s inelegant, but as long as there’s some type of listing of all the various pages relating to the same case, it seems fine. Either of those approaches is probably workable for the short-to-medium term. The hard question becomes what to do when we’re trying to store substantially all the contents of the file in a given case. When that day comes, I think we may very well be forced to fall back onto something like case-number-then-docket-sequence ordering. Not sure what exactly we can do in the interim to make that process more manageable when it ultimately happens. Tarmstro99 19:03, 3 May 2008 (UTC)

Could you weigh in on this specific case "ACLU v. NSA", so that we can organise it to be a featured text. I think we need to add the opinions of the higher court judges to this one before it is featured. John Vandenberg ^(chat) 19:58, 3 May 2008 (UTC)

Whatever the naming inconvenience, I really do not see any alternative to describing federal court documents other than by court, docket number, and docket entry number. This is how it is done on the CM/ECF system. There are millions of documents on the system. It is well organized. There is no issue of changing names. I have a proposal to the Administrative Office of US Court urging them to make their database of court opinions available to the public. Part of the proposal is to use these citation elements in the file title and or name. And, in the world of lower federal court opinions, since the Adobe pdf file is the official version of documents, then it behooves those working in the space to explore the pdf technologies. See: http://www.hyperlaw.com/topics/2008/2008-05-07-HL-to-AO-lower-court-opinion-access-1.pdf Alan Sugarman/HyperLaw

H.R. Rep. No. 94-1476

hello,

since you have three columns of text in these pages, I thought that you might be happy to increase the width of the pages.

you may do it manually, by adding something like style="width:45em" to the properties of the div in the header.

ThomasV 17:43, 5 May 2008 (UTC)

Appreciate the tip! Perhaps I’ll try experimenting with that. The narrowness of the columns is really only a problem in the side-by-side ProofreadPage view—the three columns become much more legible in the full-width Copyright Law Revision (House Report No. 94-1476) (as you can see). Tarmstro99 17:52, 5 May 2008 (UTC)

My first Act

I've imported a statute from the 110th Congress (U.S. Stat. volume 122). Can you look at it for me, I'm kinda new to Wikisource. United States Statutes at Large/Volume 122/110th Congress/Public Law 110-2. I can't get the page numbers to work.Markles (talk) 21:20, 24 October 2008 (UTC)

Fixed! Do you by any chance have page scans of the original reference source? That’s really what the Page: namespace is for. Thanks for all your help on the Statutes at Large! Tarmstro99 (talk) 00:54, 25 October 2008 (UTC)

• Drat. I didn't scan it, I just cut-and-paste from http://frwebgate.access.gpo.gov/cgi-bin/getdoc.cgi?dbname=110_cong_public_laws&docid=f:publ002.110. We still need to distinguish between pages, right? —Markles 01:43, 25 October 2008 (UTC)

Oh, it’s definitely still appropriate to indicate pagination, it’s just that the Page: namespace has a more limited purpose, and that is to hold page scans (with accompanying transcription). The little blue page number links in the margin customarily indicate to the reader that they may verify the correctness of a text by referring back to an original scanned page image. Where there isn’t a page scan for the reader to refer back to, we have plenty of other ways to mark the internal pagination of the original document, where it is relevant to do so. Most of them are collected under Category:Page numbering templates. I generally use {{pl}} for this purpose (because the marks it produces are minimally intrusive and include anchor links), but other editors prefer some of the other page break templates. Tarmstro99 (talk) 11:19, 25 October 2008 (UTC)

If I may cut in (I was holding off with bated breath), we have been through the "using Page: namespace without images" issue before, and it wasnt pretty. (Psychless did much of History of Iowa without pagescans on wikisource). I see this is available here, but I dont see a complete volume 122. Notably missing are pages 1 & 2 from here (assuming we reconstructed the volume from the segments kindly sliced up there). If we cant find a complete Volume 122, I suggest that we upload a djvu of Public Law 110-2, and move the two current pages onto it. John Vandenberg ^(chat) 11:39, 25 October 2008 (UTC)

Or ... we could put together a djvu of all the slices, and leave two blank pages at the beginning to be added when someone has access to them. The big question is whether it will be less than 20Mb, but as they are nicely scanned in blank and white, it looks like they should easily fit within our limits. John Vandenberg ^(chat) 11:45, 25 October 2008 (UTC)

• This is all far above my pay grade to understand, I'm sorry to say. Let me add something: the same document is available as a pdf at http://frwebgate.access.gpo.gov/cgi-bin/getdoc.cgi?dbname=110_cong_public_laws&docid=f:publ002.110.pdf. That gives us better ideas about margin notes and formatting.—Markles 12:53, 25 October 2008 (UTC)

I think a lot of History of Iowa was put online before we started relying on scanned images to the extent we presently do, so I’m not certain how representative that particular text is as a guide to current best practices. (I put a good portion of The Records of the Federal Convention of 1787/Volume 3/Appendix A up without page scans, but have been redoing them to link up with the scanned images now that those are available.)

I agree that the best overall solution would be for us to have a complete DjVu of United States Statutes at Large/Volume 122 to link to, but that day is still a ways off. (By the time the ever-less-aptly-named Early United States Statutes catches up to Volume 122, optimistically around the year 2011 or so, perhaps the 20MB Commons upload limit will no longer be a constraint.) As a second-best interim solution, though, I have taken Markles’ PDF link and converted it to DjVu. So we at least have scans of a portion of the source document to refer back to.

In any case, Markles, please continue doing what you are doing. It is great to have the content available on WS, whether it is in the precise format we are accustomed to seeing or not. Issues surrounding formatting and verification shouldn’t dissuade anybody from adding content to our library; those can be dealt with separately after the content is posted. Tarmstro99 (talk) 17:50, 25 October 2008 (UTC)

{{RunningHeader}}

How do I edit the "Running Header" on a page? For example, on Page:United States Statutes at Large Volume 1.djvu/181? —Markles 18:38, 26 October 2008 (UTC)

Click on the “[+]” icon (the leftmost in the row of editing icons immediately above the text edit box) to toggle the page header/footer edit boxes on or off. Tarmstro99 (talk) 19:34, 26 October 2008 (UTC)

• Ta-da! That was non-intuitive. Thanks.—Markles 23:00, 26 October 2008 (UTC)

USCode

Please see my proposal at Wikisource talk:WikiProject US Code, and discuss it there. Thanks!

Carryover Footnote

How do I get the carryover footnote to work here: United States Statutes at Large/Volume 1/1st Congress/1st Session/Chapter 4?—Markles 21:35, 1 November 2008 (UTC)

Like so. This one took me a long time to figure out originally, but there are a couple of other places in the Statutes at Large where the same technique has come in handy. :-) Tarmstro99 (talk) 01:28, 3 November 2008 (UTC)

Did I mess up a carryover footnote

I can't figure out what's the problem with the last few paragraphs of United States Statutes at Large/Volume 1/1st Congress/1st Session/Chapter 20. Did I mess up a carryover footnote?—Markles 15:02, 14 November 2008 (UTC)

Here’s your answer — it turned out there was a mismatch in the section marker names in the <section begin/>…<section end/> tags. The values assigned to begin and end are case-sensitive and must match; if they don’t, the entire page gets transcluded by the {{Page}} template (including the {{sidenotes end}} call, which was producing the odd visual results). Tarmstro99 (talk) 18:33, 14 November 2008 (UTC)

Italicized v

Does the "v" have to be italicized in such names as "Marbury v. Madision"? It's awfully clumsy.—Markles 02:51, 15 November 2008 (UTC)

I do that only because it matches the original source. Tarmstro99 (talk) 16:18, 17 November 2008 (UTC)

• Yeah, but… it's so clumsy. We can put link brackets around case names, but if we use the italics then we need to create piped links which is cumbersome. Frankly, I understand the need to be faithful to the original text. But at the same time, we usually ignore indents and don't care if the sidenotes are forced to the same side even though the original has them on the outside margins. —Markles 18:52, 17 November 2008 (UTC)

I generally haven’t been linking the case names (except to link to the corresponding volume of the U.S. Reports), partly because the piped link syntax requires extra work as you point out, partly because virtually none of these cases are on Wikisource or likely to become available here in the near term, and partly because the case names in the early volumes of the Statutes at Large are frequently incorrect. Tarmstro99 (talk) 18:59, 17 November 2008 (UTC)

vauge PD release on copyvio

If you have some time, and can see an aspect of copyright law that could be clarified regarding the works in question, your opinion on this would be appreciated at WS:COPYVIO#Thought_is_Your_Enemy. I dont think we need a legal opinion regarding Sherurcij's opinion; he is quite clear he is voicing his opinion in lieu of something more substantive being offered. :-)

Alternatively, if you can put me towards some case law dealing with similar cases, I'll fetch them and do some research. John Vandenberg ^(chat) 22:45, 17 November 2008 (UTC)

Hey

I notice your administration confirmation discussions begin at the end of the month, how frightening and dreadful! *feigned shock* But never fear, I have the solution! Quickly, get to work on this week's Collaboration of the Week, Author:e. e. cummings! The sources are all there, it'll only take a few minutes of your time! Sherurcij ^{Collaboration of the Week: e. e. cummings‎.} 21:08, 19 November 2008 (UTC)

don't forget to archive some threads here

alway remember: "WARNING: This page is 38 kilobytes long; some browsers may have problems editing pages approaching or longer than 32kb. Please consider breaking the page into smaller sections."

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