User talk:WhatamIdoing

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Again, welcome! Beeswaxcandle (talk) 07:31, 24 August 2011 (UTC)

Automated import of openly licensed scholarly articles

Hello WhatamIdoing,

We are putting together a proposal about the automated import of openly licensed scholarly articles, and since you are an active Wikisourceror, we'd appreciate yourcomments on the Scriptorium. For convenience, I'm copying our proposal here:

The idea of systematically importing openly licensed scholarly articles into Wikisource has popped up from time to time. For instance, it formed the core of WikiProject Academic Papers and is mentioned in the Wikisource vision. However, the Wikiproject relied on human power, never reached its full potential, and eventually became inactive. The vision has yet to materialise.

We plan to bridge the gap through automation. We are a subset of WikiProject Open Access (user:Daniel Mietchen, user:Maximilanklein, user:MattSenate), and we have funding from the Open Society Foundations via Wikimedia Deutschland to demo suitable workflows at Wikimania (see project page).

Specifically, we plan to import Open Access journal articles into Wikisource when they are cited on Wikipedia. The import would be performed by a group of bots intended to make reference handling more interoperable across Wikimedia sites. Their main tasks are:

• (on Wikipedia) signalling which references are openly licensed, and link them to the full text on Wikisource, the media on Commons and the metadata on Wikidata;
• (on Commons) importing images and other media associated with the source article;
• (on Wikisource) importing the full text of the source article and embedding the media in there;
• (on Wikidata) handling the metadata associated with the source article, and signalling that the full text is on Wikisource and the media on Commons.

These Open Access imports on Wikisource will be linked to and from other Wikimedia sister sites. Our first priority though will be linking from English Wikipedia, focusing on the most cited Open Access papers, and the top-100 medical articles.

In order to move forward with this, we need

• General community approval
• Community feedback on workflows and scrutiny on our test imports in specific.
• Bot permission. For more technical information read our bot spec on Github.

Maximilianklein (talk) 18:27, 20 June 2014 (UTC)

Index:Child-life in Japan and Japanese child stories (Ayrton, Matilida Chaplin. , 1901).djvu

Want to get going on this? I could get it done in about 2 days (exc. images) but you expressed an interest. :) ShakespeareFan00 (talk) 23:55, 2 January 2015 (UTC)

Do you think we should finish validating the main one first? WhatamIdoing (talk) 17:22, 3 January 2015 (UTC)

It can proceed in parallel, In any case this one is mostly done, but needs someone to validate, which is perhaps slightly tricker than proof-reading.ShakespeareFan00 (talk) 02:45, 4 January 2015 (UTC)

Watchlist

What's wrong with the watchlist here? The timestamp isn't at the left but buried in the middle. I have tried using the same skin as at en.wiki but it doesn't help. Here's a comparison:

• 18:56 Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Case‎ diff hist (en.wiki)
• diff hist N! Page:The Federalist, on the new Constitution.djvu/25‎ 17:14 (here)

Valjean (talk) 19:00, 25 December 2021 (UTC)

It's probably your settings. There are multiple configurations, and whichever way you learned first is the One True™ Watchlist format. Check both Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-rc and Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-watchlist . If you happen to prefer the style that I happen to prefer, then see phab:T202916 for a workaround that will force the One True™ style every single time you load a page. WhatamIdoing (talk) 03:05, 26 December 2021 (UTC)

The warnings of history

The Civil War happened, in spite of these warnings:

• https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Page:The_Federalist,_on_the_new_Constitution.djvu/30

Now we have arrived at another such juncture in the political climate, where there is talk of individual states breaking off. Idaho has been building up to this for a while. They'd love to secede. Hamilton and Jay would be horrified. -- Valjean (talk) 01:02, 26 December 2021 (UTC)

@Valjean, I haven't gotten to that page yet, but I've heard people in California talk about secession for at least 20 years – not for any sort of practical reasons, but because they felt like some parts of the US had such radically different values that it was like talking to someone from a different country. I don't think it will happen, especially if Brexit screws up the UK in the expected ways. Being a small part of a big economy is generally better for your small part of the economy than otherwise. Just imagine telling a freedom-loving person in Couer d'Alene that it's only a half-hour drive to Spokane, but they can't do that any more unless they get a passport and get government permission (we call it a "visa") to go there. See also Quebec's secession movements, which apparently died out when people realized they'd be taking their fair share of the national debt with them. WhatamIdoing (talk) 03:25, 26 December 2021 (UTC)

Validation process

Thanks for validating some of the work at the Federalist papers. Is there a group which does this where I can appeal for action? I'm losing interest in proofreading when so much of my work is just left there unvalidated. -- Valjean (talk) 16:20, 10 January 2022 (UTC)

@Valjean, the initial proofreading step is the one that makes the biggest difference for the reader. You're doing something valuable, even if nobody else ever touches it.

As for finding folks to help, I think Inductiveload is still active with the Collaboration of the Month. They often have room for a few "filler" projects towards the end of the month. Maybe this could be added to it? WhatamIdoing (talk) 01:57, 11 January 2022 (UTC)

Indeed, lack of validation is not a mark of "no one cares". Very many works never get validated (or, rather, have not yet been validated, and are not likely to become so soon), but they're transcluded, available, readable and even exportable. Even in the Monthly Challenge, we get more works proofread than validated. Validation appeals to some people but not others, and that's part of the happy variation of life. In fact, on average, there is an accelerating preference for proofreading, but not for validation, which can be seen in the status-by-time graph. But that's OK, at least by me: one can argue if 200 proofread pages is better or worse than 100 proofread-and-validated pages, but both are positive in their own ways.

With respect to the MC, it does accept works of any status and has a few slots for proofread works that just need validation and/or transclusion. This isn't to say that if a work does end up in the MC it will always be proofread and/or validated (a handful of works "fail" each month not though any fault of any contributor, it's just what people want to get up to).

I would say that a MC nomination of the Federalist would be a good idea anyway (assuming you want other people to jump in at this stage). While yet more US political history isn't, personally, my thing (not being American or particularly enthused by their politics in general), it's an important work for people who are interested in the field, and it's a long-standing core text that could really be improved by scan-backing. Inductiveload—talk/contribs 09:38, 11 January 2022 (UTC)

ec... Oops! I didn't refresh the page and didn't see your comment here before I just left a message on your talk page. -- Valjean (talk) 16:02, 11 January 2022 (UTC)

Working on a project by yourself can feel lonely, even if you can do it by yourself. WhatamIdoing (talk) 15:59, 11 January 2022 (UTC)

You're right. Without any reaction it gets boring. -- Valjean (talk) 16:02, 11 January 2022 (UTC)

Some people like the solitude and get upset when others "muscle in" on "their" proofreading. Perhaps they just like the idea of doing a thing by themselves, or they're actually reading as they go. Others like to feel like like "part of a team" on a specific work. Others are more focussed on just finished off old incomplete works, and a few people like to turn yellow works green by validation. The Monthly Challenge is rather more suitable for the latter groups rather than than the first one, and it sounds like you might enjoy it.

I would say that finding or starting WikiProjects would be a good way to join "a team", but generally they're also extremely quiet, since there's often not a huge amount to say, unlike, for example, Wikipedia, where there can be quite a bit of side-channel discussion on topics. Inductiveload—talk/contribs 16:19, 11 January 2022 (UTC)

My experience at the English Wikipedia is that WikiProjects work best when there are dozens of consistently active editors involved. My experience at the English Wikivoyage is that creating smaller groups is pointless when it's feasible to have all the conversations in one place (or a couple of places).

I think that it'd be a good idea to post this for the monthly challenge. If we stick with it, at a steady rate of one or two pages a day, it could take us most of a year to get it done. WhatamIdoing (talk) 05:17, 14 January 2022 (UTC)

Here's one lone page to validate. It kinda stands out when one looks at the index. -- Valjean (talk) 17:17, 21 January 2022 (UTC)

Since I marked that page as proofread, I can't mark it as validated. WhatamIdoing (talk) 22:49, 22 January 2022 (UTC)

Help with formatting

I need help here:

https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Page:The_Federalist,_on_the_new_Constitution.djvu/487

I have played around with the spacing in the last section but can't get it right. I don't understand coding and just copy what others have done, but that means there's a lot I'm doing wrong. I'd like to align the page numbers so they are right-justified. -- Valjean (talk) 20:45, 14 January 2022 (UTC)

You've taken on quite a complex page there, @Valjean. I think it needs one of the "dot" templates from Category:TOC templates. WhatamIdoing (talk) 02:29, 15 January 2022 (UTC)

Thanks for that idea. I just wanted a break from the more boring pages. -- Valjean (talk) 05:28, 15 January 2022 (UTC)

Do you have any idea why I can't edit my user page? It seems to be transcluded and what should be the edit tab says this: "view on meta.wikimedia.org". Clicking that tab does take me here. -- Valjean (talk) 15:28, 17 January 2022 (UTC)

If you want to edit what you see, then go to Meta-Wiki. Your normal user page at Meta-Wiki is your global user page (displayed at all wikis, unless you've created a local page). If you want to create a local user page here, then click on https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/User:Valjean?action=edit WhatamIdoing (talk) 02:56, 18 January 2022 (UTC)

That worked! Thanks. -- Valjean (talk) 03:24, 18 January 2022 (UTC)

Backing away from this project

Per my comments here: Wikisource:Community_collaboration/Monthly_Challenge/Nominations#Index:The_Federalist,_on_the_new_Constitution.djvu. -- Valjean (talk) 01:11, 10 February 2022 (UTC)