Wikisource:Scriptorium/Help

How to download a whole work

Hello all. I have just finished proofreading The Chronicles of Early Melbourne (if anyone felt like validating, please be my guest...) I now wish to download the entire work in pdf format so that I can do some more efficient searching within the work than is possible on Wikisource. However, when I attempt to download - whether the button in the top right hand corner in mainspace or the sidebar link, I just get 77KB of the title page, whereas I want the whole work, please! There are some cryptic remarks from @Billinghurst 7 years ago which seems to be exactly what I am experiencing, but they don't allow me to work out what I should do to rectify my situation. Alternatively, is the slightly worrying remark from @EncycloPetey back in 2019 the answer? If so, in order to have a full work epub, we have to graft the TOC into the first page? I suppose I could do this temporarily, download and revert - otherwise it's going to look awful! Thanks. CharlesSpencer (talk) 10:13, 3 March 2025 (UTC)

Having a TOC on the main page has been relatively common practice, and the {{AuxTOC}} template is there for when the chapters are not listed in the source. If the subpages are not listed on that page, I don't know how the tool is supposed to find them. — Alien  3
3 3 12:29, 3 March 2025 (UTC)

Thank you for this - I have successfully downloaded the whole work in pdf with your help, having put the ToC in the first page. If that is common practice (which I was not aware of) I will happily leave it there.

As an aside, may I say that - as a not stupid person, and a Wikisource editor of 15 years' standing with several complex templates to his name - I do think it is hugely important to be helpful to the purpose of a question rather than express surprise at someone's ignorance - sometimes, frankly, in order to demonstrate one's own superior knowledge. It is neither helpful, nor pleasant to be on the receiving end of. This was not a question born out of idleness - I had spent some time researching the Scriptorium archives, whence I cited two examples which really didn't answer my question, but were instead slightly cryptic or oblique, or based on a supposition of knowledge which the question plainly didn't support. Yet Alien's passive aggressive response is "how [else is] the tool...supposed to find them". If I knew that, why on earth would I have asked the question? A simple "Do this and this will happen", or "Sticking the ToC on the title page will give the tool the info it needs" in this case - is what this context called for. Researching further in Help:Preparing for export, I find absolutely no trace of "Put the ToC in the first page so the Tool knows what to include". Instead I find

☐ Do make sure that either:

1. ☐ Every page you want in the export is linked from the root page, or
2. ☐ Every page you want in the export is linked from a page that is linked from the root page and is inside a container with the class ws-summary (see {{AuxTOC}} or {{export TOC}})

which makes a lot of sense to someone who already knows the answer, but very little/zero to someone seeking the answer. This is unfortunate, since the title of the namespace is Help: not Oxymoron: (there - a little touch of passive aggressive intellectual superiority (considerably more in sorrow than in anger) to illustrate my point.) I shall now edit Help:Preparing for export to be more practically helpful.

Please do not think that I am not grateful for all the help that numerous people have freely given me over the decade and a half that I have been an editor - I am, and my contribution to Wikisource would be nowhere without them and their help. However, may I make a heartfelt plea to the most experienced editors who make the whole undertaking function not to be casually cutting in their responses but instead to attempt helpfully to answer all questions? It will take an extra 1% of effort, yet I believe will compound considerably to the benefit of all Wikisource participants - and crucially, will aid in the recruitment of new editors. If I were a noob and saw the cutting sort of response that my most basic of questions - "How do I download it?" - received, I would probably have given up and gone home long since. Thank you. CharlesSpencer (talk) 15:22, 14 March 2025 (UTC)

CharlesSpencer there is a similar question, due greatly to the long "helpful" speel that appears when you do this thing. That thing is to follow a link from a commons upload of djvu or whatever that has the s:Index:{{PAGENAME}} link in the proper place in the book template.

The answer to that question is to use the "Create" link at the uppermost right of the page. That answer is terse and when I typed it, full of happiness because I figured it out without help and felt on this occasion a bit superior (which was a feeling I did not often have then).

I mention that here because for those who do not read documentation, terse is so good. Lack of terse in documentation is the reason I don't read it. Terse is like pulling a bandaid off quickly, while reading documentation is like soaking it in water, slowly curling the edge up, taking an aspirin or something to kill pain, soaking it again until you forget what you wanted to do that required that bandaid to be removed.

That documentation you get by following the link from the djvu file to here is the enemy of actually making the Index page and accomplishing proof-reading. I'm going to defend User:Billinghurst the wikisourcerer (I am not defending Billinghurst the escalation bot, R.I.P.!) because I learned a lot, a very lot, from that terse sourcer. One thing being the endpaper hack (see User:RaboKarbakian/The Other Style Guide/Endpapers; I think I used {{bc}} in Main or something equally against the rules. That hack was Billinghursts solution to the argument that ensued (which is not what an escalation bot does at all).

Anyone doing anything of a collaborative nature anywhere, needs to be aware that there are a lot of different kinds of people and to put personal offense on a back burner until it is clear that there is really good reason to have that offense.--RaboKarbakian (talk) 15:47, 14 March 2025 (UTC)

Hi RaboKarbakian - thank you for your helpful contribution. If I may make an observation with respect to your final - and very valid - point, I have not taken personal offense at all. I have finally - after many years of feeling this - spoken up about a cultural behaviour which has, in my experience of 15 years on the site, been growing slowly over time. Interestingly, Alien333 appears to have been a WS editor since only 1st December 2023, yet has seemingly picked up on, and adopted, this cultural vibe in only 15 months. This cannot be of benefit to the WS project long-term as it risks alienating future editors (unintentional alien pun there!). I don't think there's anything unique to WS about this, BTW. It is (quite) a common behaviour in technical/technocratic circles where technical knowledge is assumed. That works fine on the wiki of the Institute of Electrical Engineers (assuming such a thing exists), where a base load (intentional pun this time!) of knowledge can reasonably be assumed, but much less so on a public project.

May I try to illustrate my point in another way? IRL, I belong to a mutual which has existed since 1874. If it still behaved today as it did in 1874 - without any cultural adjustment since then - it would be dead, buried and forgotten. As it is, it is in vibrant good health. In the last five years alone - just 3% of its lifespan to date - it has consciously changed its corporate "tone" to a less formal mode after canvassing members, it has updated its logo to be fresher and more browser friendly, and it has generally updated itself, I would say more rapidly than it ever has before (my father has been a member since before I was born, so I have a longer view than some other members might) - all to stay relevant to the modern world, and crucially to be able to continue to recruit new members. WS will always need new members, but it may need to change itself culturally in order to accommodate them. If it doesn't, it risks withering on the vine as retirees are not replaced by new participants.

You are - again! - absolutely right that terseness is the natural mode of expression of some people, and can often be a highly efficient form of communication. Absolutely nothing wrong with that. And Billinghurst is both a master of succinct expression and very probably one of the main reasons I am still on the site at all after a decade and a half. Some terseness can also be due to very reasonable frustration with the TLDR; crowd. I absolutely do not subscribe to the TLDR; vibe (in fact it really annoys me), whereby idleness and lack of intellectual curiosity can be effectively excused by using somebody else's goodwill, time and energy instead. Also, TLDR;ers tend not to learn from their initial exploitation of others' knowledge, and so come again and again to the trough, selfishly repaying those who help them only with further demands on their time. However, when I, as an experienced user, and after meaningful research cannot find the answer to a fairly basic question, something is surely empirically wrong, would you not agree?

Today, I came across another unintentionally unhelpful "answer": Template:Anchor link has the cryptic optional parameter 3, "subpage = name of different subpage of the work, where the anchor is on a different subpage". This is illustrated without any context at all by reference to two complex index-like pages, Page:A Compendium of Irish Biography.djvu/617 and A Compendium of Irish Biography/Authorities. I have literally no more awareness of the purpose of parameter 3 than I had before I went to the documentation!

I think I have taken more than enough of your time with my reply, so I will end there. Thanks again for contributing to the conversation. CharlesSpencer (talk) 13:42, 15 March 2025 (UTC)

I am deeply sorry for what I said. There was no intent on my part, in any way, to express surprise at someone's ignorance - sometimes, frankly, in order to demonstrate one's own superior knowledge. What I was trying to say, and I visibly failed quite badly at it, and sorry for that, is that, from a technical standpoint, I don't know a reliable way of answering the question "what is part of this work?" that does not rely on a user giving the list (it would be nice if we could find one, but I don't know of any), so, yes, there has to be a ToC on the main page (this to answer your question: If so, in order to have a full work epub, we have to graft the TOC into the first page?). The intended meaning was essentially:

• Put an auxtoc on the main page if the works are not listed
• Yes, I do think we don't have an alternative

On what Help:Preparing for export says: Every page you want in the export is linked from the root page, in saying that the rest has to be linked from the first page, is trying to imply that it should have a table of contents (to contain the links). And, you're right, it does it badly. We have a chronic issue with documentation.

The irony is, that I wholeheartedly agree on the importance of a welcoming environment, without the sort of biting I have just contributed to. As you say yourself, I was not two years ago in the position of new user coming along and getting bitten occasionally (and getting discouraged by that), and have noticed other instances of biting here and there (and tried to—well not prevent, that's not the right word, but indicate to the biter that it was suboptimal behaviour). I think that it is one of the key problems of a wiki community.

I have previously noticed I have difficulties communicating with others, especially figuring out what subtext people read in what, since essentially forever. This predates, by a lot, my involvement with WS. I had previously assumed that it wasn't that bad, and that it would not be much of an issue to my contributing. It does not give me an excuse to be rude, and so as I am unintentionally rude and I fail to compensate, perhaps I should just shut up; keep proofreading and avoid discussions. — Alien  3
3 3 18:32, 15 March 2025 (UTC)

Honestly, I cannot see anything that looks like some demontration of superior knowledge or whatever... The original answer was brief, but absolutely neutral and polite. --Jan Kameníček (talk) 10:46, 16 March 2025 (UTC)

Thanks all - appreciate you taking the time to address my points. We are all agreed - our documentation needs work! And Jan, this lovely article from the BBC [1] openend my eyes to the amazing variety of socio-cultural interpretations that we all (mostly unknowingly) apply when hearing or reading something. There's another article I can't now find which says that only Japanese uses more phatic langauge than Anglo-English, and that, for example, Bulgarian uses the least among European languages. CharlesSpencer (talk) 17:48, 24 March 2025 (UTC)

True. We all, myself included, have to bear in mind that we are from different socio-cultural environments, and so the more we have to try to assume good faith. Besides, many of us also often struggle with time constraints because we have to save the time for our online activities from our offline life, and so we just try to be brief and efficient. --Jan Kameníček (talk) 18:50, 24 March 2025 (UTC)

I hope all here will forgive me stepping into a conversation that I find enlightening after the fact.

I come from a lived experience that includes traumatic (physical assaults, ostracization, targeted extended "pranks") and so I am hypervigilant to social cues (simultaneous with seeking community in places that lack visual nonverbals and tone of voice). My shorthand metaphor is "I speak social skills as a second language," and I learned the very hard way of the importance of speaking in the vernacular and watching closely for signs of local culture (and the importance of accurately interpreting those cues).

All that said, I notice the terseness, but have so far perceived them as helpful for the most part. I have other lived experience that led me to develop a distrust of too much warmth in communication with new folk. That period of time was one in which it was always the people who were reserved and often displayed strong antipathy to my presence that I later found were trustworthy and consistently were the ones not trying to cheat or steal from me.

However, I have frequently observed a very strong correlation - the more words I use, the higher the probability that readers simply disregard a message without reading, or they read only the first sentence and the last sentence as if the sentences between do not exist.

Attention is something that is harvested without consent for monetization on many platforms today (hence what motivated me to volunteer here is constitutional law expert Lessig's "Code and other Laws of Cyberspace 2.0). So I totally get why others online are fatigued by long hyperlexic messages such as this.

And -- on both sides -- with answers to questions, I often misread ill intentions into messages when I'm not at my best (which is often, physical disabilities are what create an abundance of time but a shortage of cognitive capacity for learning new things without mistakes).

So, again - all this to say, thank you all so much for communicating with the intent to understand and achieve a more amiable place to collaborate. And thank you also to everyone here, and several more wikisourcerers (I am so totally adopting that term now) who have helped both directly and indirectly.

It's good faith attempts to figure out how to get along the best in the long run, to find out how to make things work... with a limited amount of contributors bailing out the currently large ocean of work from the wooden vessel in which we voyage together.

I'm starting to put bugs in the ears of a couple friends who I think would be similarly well-suited to someday occasionally proofreading. And since I'm already doing much of their tech support, I'm hoping to make their entry a bit less intimidating (mostly because of the regular seemingly-contradictory/obsolete/incomplete help documentation that gives enough info for people who already know how things work here, but are difficult to navigate for n00bs such as I am.

Gratefully Ours - autumn Grayautumnday (talk) 23:47, 14 April 2025 (UTC)

Guidance for an open license work work that contains some images that aren't open licensed

I recently managed to obtain a copy of The collapse of NATM tunnels at Heathrow Airport a report published in 2000, by the UK's Health and Safety Executive into an industrial accident in 1994, intending to scan it and upload it to Wikisource. The document is a work of the Health and Safety Executive, however contains at least three photographs that are noted as being "Reprinted with permission from...(Non-UK government entity)", so I do not believe those photos would are covered by Open Government License or Crown Copyright.

I feel like there was guidance for dealing with this situation, but I can't locate it.-- The Navigators (talk) 19:51, 23 March 2025 (UTC)

I think the procedure for that is removing these images in the file before you upload it, by putting a black rectangle over them for example, and then use {{image removed}} in the transcription. — Alien  3
3 3 20:08, 23 March 2025 (UTC)

Thanks, that looks like what I was looking for, and how to approach handling it.

(Now I just need to make some time to get to the library for their nice scanner. Life has decided to get very busy lately....)-- The Navigators (talk) 05:52, 30 March 2025 (UTC)

Errata glitch found

See Orlando Furioso (Rose)/Canto 27#109, in the final line of Canto XIX., where a correction from the errata has been applied, but is displayed incorrectly by the template, causing the overlapping of text. At first I thought this is caused by the fact that the original text is being used to determine the display, but the correction is wider than the original text, however the original text and correction are the same width. --EncycloPetey (talk) 19:46, 27 March 2025 (UTC)

• See another instance here. TE(æ)A,ea. (talk) 00:14, 28 March 2025 (UTC)

The span is inheriting a text-indent: -1em style from its parent, so to fix it a text-indent: 0 style should be inserted in the errata template, which I have just done. Arcorann (talk) 00:18, 28 March 2025 (UTC)

Thanks! --EncycloPetey (talk) 01:55, 28 March 2025 (UTC)

transcribing maps?

does wikisource transcribe maps like the one in Page:Pentagon-Papers-Part IV. A. 5.djvu/103 or leave them be? if maps are transcribed, how are they transcribed? ltbdl (talk) 03:47, 28 March 2025 (UTC)

It's an image with text on it; we can't really transcribe image, so I'd say either just leave the image, or, if you really want to transcribe it, blank the labels and use {{overfloat image}}, but I think no one'll hold it against you if you just put the image. — Alien  3
3 3 07:01, 28 March 2025 (UTC)

ok, thank you! ltbdl (talk) 07:47, 28 March 2025 (UTC)

example of 2-1 column TOC?

Newbie tables of contents question - Increasing spacing between rows to match scanned TOC page.

TOC proofread: https://en.wikisource.org/w/index.php?title=Page:Code_And_Other_Laws_of_Cyberspace_Version_2_0.pdf/5

Questions:

Is it important to duplicate the additional empty row spacing according to scan page layout (as I've been attempting to do)?

If it is, how do I either

a) add additional empty rows *and* get them to show up in the published page or

b) increase the space in the subcaption/"book part X" rows above and below the text?

(or c) is there a better way to increase spacing?)

What I've tried:

"TOC l | 3 |||"

"TOC 3|"

"TOC 2-1| |"

empty lines/additional line breaks

Results: I either get red text errors in the preview, or the additional rows simply don't show up in the preview.

Thanks for any suggestions/pointers on formatting TOC row height, adding blank but visible rows, or other more appropriate formatting.

Grayautumnday (talk) 22:54, 28 March 2025 (UTC)

Hello. When you add a line into the TOC, it has to contain something. So to add an empty line I suggest {{TOC row l|3| }}. --Jan Kameníček (talk) 23:33, 28 March 2025 (UTC)

additional question regarding title/TOC/blank pages - should I be putting "invisible" page numbers in the page headers? What's the template for that? Grayautumnday (talk) 23:12, 28 March 2025 (UTC)

We usually write page numbers only to the headers of the pages which contain such numbers. However it is not really important, as the headers are not transcluded to the mainspace anyway. I can see that you are using the {{rh}} template, you can also try {{rvh}}. --Jan Kameníček (talk) 23:33, 28 March 2025 (UTC)

further question: on this book, pages 3 to 9 are created and most are validated, but they're not listed when I search for subpages of the original PDF - is this a function of these pages needing to have a template added to show them as subpages of the scanned book? Grayautumnday (talk) 23:25, 28 March 2025 (UTC)

line breaks + basic accessibility request?

Help need 1: Line Breaks -- are there any tools or methods to remove all line breaks from an OCR transcription, or to find-replace line breaks?

What I tried: I tried doing find for all variations of newline HTML entities as well as attempting to cut and paste a line break into the find box in Firefox. I also went and explored the other OCR engines and tried setting OCRs to "treat the page as a single line of text" and "treat the page as a single block of text" but neither kept line breaks from being included.

Help need 2: Accessibility/usability issues for newer editors/proofreaders

It is extremely difficult for me to find relevant template or styleguide info to very specific use cases by re-reading every "newbie" page and searching "help"/"template" pages. (I've run into accessibility issues in FOSS communities before, but wikisource resources for newbies, in a few notable areas, it's quite remarkably something else wrt gaps in info accessibility for neurodivergent newbies!)

What I tried: - searches for basic phrases such as "ask for help" or "post a request for help" in Help/Help:Talk/Template/Template:Talk pages - no results. Zero user-friendly/disabled-accessible links to ask for help from Scriptorium page or from ANY of the "new proofreader/editor" help pages. Additionally, there's a Scriptorium/Help/Archive but no Scriptorium/Help.

Pretty pretty pretty please can there be added some easy-to-find -very obvious- links to where post help requests when all proofreading/formatting guides and all relevant searches are thoroughly scoured and no answer found?

Especially since basically every reference page/reference section on "finding and using templates" throughout all the help pages have been deleted/removed???

I have a significant amount of time and energy to dedicate to proofing and validating, and it's important to me to conform to accepted standards. But the roadblocks to learning and finding answers to difficult questions here are incredibly steep and just seem to be getting more intense as I keep learning.

I'm happy to research and fill in information if more experienced editors create and put up skeleton outlines for help pages that have been removed, but without them it's feeling particularly unwelcome here (despite the very warm welcome when I manage to actually find this page again to post new questions!)

Sorry for the long winded message.

Please help? Grayautumnday (talk) 09:56, 29 March 2025 (UTC)

On 1:

• multiple users made scripts to do that. My own iteration of that is at User:Alien333/nobr.js. If you add importScript("User:Alien333/nobr.js") to User:Grayautumnday/common.js, a link should appear in the sidebar that unwraps paragraph.
• else, if you've got the editing toolbar activated, you can use find-and-replace with the search icon on the right, put \n in the search field, enable Treat search string as a regular expression, and then press Replace all, and it'll remove all line breaks.

On 2:

We have do have an issue with documentation, especially on templates.

However, on mentions of this page, I must say there aren't none. First on the welcome message everyone has received: Have questions? Then please ask them at either Wikisource:Scriptorium; or Wikisource:Scriptorium/Help. Also, if you look at WS:Community portal, linked in the menu on every page, the second link in the tab "community" pages at the top left is Requests for help, linking to here. And the bottom of Help:Contents, also linked to in the menu on every page, has:

Do you need assistance? Post a request!

which also links to here. So, there are already quite a lot of references to this page.

But yes, besides that, we have a problem with template documentation, and user-friendliness could be better. — Alien  3
3 3 10:32, 29 March 2025 (UTC)

this is a lifesaver. I've got a strong tendency to go straight to searching docs (aka rtfm :0>) and clicking through relevant links. I almost never end up getting down to the bottom of a page -- well, like if the section I've clicked through to doesn't have the answer I need, I tend to back up or start over with a new set of "template: __" search terms or "" quoted literal strings of basic phrases I'd expect to see in the text (eg "blank pages" or "no text") and then just limit searches to Help/Templates or sometimes turn on a talk page for a relevant category to see if I find something there.

So it sounds like I got far enough to not need the super-duper-basic stuff, and that's what was catching me up and biting me in the foot, so to speak.

But d00d, seriously, thanks for the tips. Maybe it'd help if I hadn't gotten sucked into editing wikisource by a super-technical legal text on cyberlaw (where the endnotes pages has endnotes of its own - doh! I've switched to creating/proofing pages at the end, so I can create the links to all the refs and then go back to the beginning to properly link all the endnote refs. )

It's an adventure! Grayautumnday (talk) 12:58, 29 March 2025 (UTC)

sheesh, hey - does this add itself to the "User" editing menu? If so, can you recommend any other daily-driver general-purpose scripts you use for yours? Grayautumnday (talk) 13:02, 29 March 2025 (UTC)

It adds itself in the "Tools" menu, in the "General" section, somewhere next to the "Page information" button.

There's the gadgets (in Preferences): if you haven't already, I strongly recommend the {{nop}} inserter, the {{running header}} inserter (these two save time), and the "preload next page image" thing (makes pages load faster).

I am what I think could be called a prolific script writer, and more or less everytime I come across something that looks like it could be automatised, I make a script for it. Some of mine you could find useful (it's also a question of preferences):

• User:Alien333/clean.js to do some basic formatting when creating a Page: (it includes my preference for straight quotes, but I could make that customisable if someone wants me to)
• User:Alien333/cuts.js for many more shortcuts, including to the other scripts (feel free to suggest more)

Also a few very minor tweaks:

• User:Alien333/pagenum.js just adds the display page number in parenthesis to the page title, e.g. if you go to Page:Passion-Flowers (Howe).djvu/119 it adds a (109) after, because in the index it's listed as page 109
• User:Alien333/nts.js just automatises the summary for new texts, with "+ [link to work]"
• User:Alien333/sandbox.js removes the trouble of having to care about the WS:SAND header (the "Please do not remove this line" thing)

I would also have recommended User:Alien333/transclude.js for transclusion, though sadly I haven't made an interface for that yet, User:Alien333/mtv.js if you ever want to do movies, and User:Alien333/poemise.js for poetry (a lot of my scripts aim to optimise poetry proofreading, as it's the main thing I do).

The complete list is on my user page.

I also use User:Inductiveload/popups reloaded (popups when you hover over a link) and mul:MediaWiki:TranscludedIn.js (giving links, when in Page: namespace, to the pages that transclude the current page). — Alien  3
3 3 13:50, 29 March 2025 (UTC)

well, again, thank you.

I'm also drawn to poetry in addition to reference works, and - related to our discussion elsewhere - have added a few additional PD poetry projects to my user:talk page if you're ever looking for more works to upload (before I get around to it) - if you do, please add a note so I can include the books in my proofing/validating project rotation Grayautumnday (talk) 20:02, 29 March 2025 (UTC)

These are some awesome scripts I wish I was aware of sooner. The amount of time "nobr" would have saved... Penguin1737 (talk) 23:52, 1 April 2025 (UTC)

There are about 292 user scripts here (though this includes forks and copypastes). I've been thinking for a while that we should make a centralised and exhaustive repository of the diverse tools around. If we do, we should make it proeminent, and actually try to list all useful scripts with explanations. I'm going to try and read these 292 at some point. — Alien  3
3 3 07:15, 2 April 2025 (UTC)

Wikisource:Tools and scripts tries (or tried) to be this. Not sure how up-to-date it is. Arcorann (talk) 22:50, 3 April 2025 (UTC)

More tried than tries. Hasn't been updated for a seriously long while. — Alien  3
3 3 06:07, 4 April 2025 (UTC)

Is there a dedicated discussion page for "someday" to-do/wishlist requests? It'd be nice to know where it is so I can put things in that central spot... and also monitor for tasks that I might have enough of a grasp of current community norms at some point to start ticking off (to make things easier on people coming in as newbies after me). Grayautumnday (talk) 22:36, 4 April 2025 (UTC)

Maybe a repository of new topics added to discussion pages (that is, if I'm not the only proofreader who posts notes on discussion pages of Help/Template docs that seem potentially problematic or unnecessarily tricky). If I'm the only person leaving breadcrumb ideas for possible improvements on discussion pages, then that option is not a feasible one. Grayautumnday (talk) 22:40, 4 April 2025 (UTC)

Thing is, nearly no one watches most talk pages. If you're opening a discussion that could use input from people who don't specifically watch that page, I recommend leaving it at WS:S instead. — Alien  3
3 3 07:58, 5 April 2025 (UTC)

Yeah, that's sort of why I wondered if there might be people who *do* comment on talk pages of templates/help pages when they see something that needs changing but don't have the resources to make changes themselves... or if we have a central "to-do-someday" list (where items don't get archived until something gets done about them. In the first case, I imagine I could probably set a filter watchlist for myself for only changes to template-talk and help-talk pages when I'm wanting to step away from my current focus projects for a bit and check out whether I feel confident enough in my current level of competence to do an okay job of contributing to a projects that will make life easier for the new folk in the future. In the second case, I would add the central task wishlist to my watchlist and keep an eye on tasks that get added that might fall in my area of comfort/competency soon, or do a little research to find out what community norms and expectations are.

I'm not saying that we have such a thing or that we *should* have such a thing. I'm wondering if we have any pages that serve such a function, or if anyone else makes notes on templates/help pages that could use improvements/corrections somewhere (when said more-experienced-user doesn't have the resources to make the fix themselves at the time). Grayautumnday (talk) 18:01, 5 April 2025 (UTC)

template problems

In summary: A) how do I get a line of text to be both double-spaced and centered horizontally + B) which is/are the active/functional templates and working syntax + C) what should I do about what appears to be an obsolete template page?

Detailed versions of those questions:

1. I need to create a Letter-Spaced word. template:sp and template:Letter-Spacing don't appear to work, and the syntax specifying spacing (on the doc page for template:Letter-Spacing are -not- working (almost all chapter start pages on the project I'm focused on have chapter subtitles with letter-spaced words: eg Page:Code And Other Laws of Cyberspace Version 2 0.pdf/172)
2. I tried using what appears to be an obsolete and nonfunctional template. Should I make some sort of note in the source on the doc page of such broken templates? (so that new editors attempting to use that template understand that it would be better to ask for help or propose an alternate different template?) In this case, the non-working template is https://wikisource.org/wiki/Template:LetterSpacing
3. In addition to editing the source of the doc page for a problematic template (I wish we had a "Problematic" flag for non-working tags, btw) -- after researching to see that there are other templates that do the same thing in more recent use, should I then submit this probably-obsolete template doc page for deletion?

Thanks! Grayautumnday (talk) 05:29, 1 April 2025 (UTC)

{{lsp}} works, and is in no way obsolete. Just use its exact title. Template:LetterSpacing doesn't exist; Template:Letter spacing does, and its shortcut Template:lsp does, and they all work perfectly. — Alien  3
3 3 05:44, 1 April 2025 (UTC)

• Alien: I’ve edited your comment to reflect the correct template (not ſ). TE(æ)A,ea. (talk) 12:20, 1 April 2025 (UTC)

  Ah, thanks, got mixed up. (To Grayautumnday: the one-parameter version, which expects spacing like this, is located at {{sp}}.) — Alien  3
  3 3 13:00, 1 April 2025 (UTC)

  Sweet, thanks. I tried {{sp}} - the spacing didn't look like a close match to the original. I suspect the original had 3x the usual space between characters rather than double for those chapter subtitle lines. But I personally feel that plain double spacing gives the reader a clear sense of the intended typographical style and at the same time prevents the perfect from winning in the battle vs the good.

  I'm tickled to see others joining in on editing this book. I was alerted to the existence of Wikisource by an offhand comment/link to this book in the "digital politics/current events" newsletter sent out several days a week electronic by freedom advocate/fiction author Cory Doctorow. Some of my favorite courses in college were on information ethics, intellectual property, privacy rights, etc. And I've been looking for Wikimedia Foundation projects to get passionate about for a long time. I enjoy editing on Wikipedia but my enthusiasm seems to create a hindrance to editing well (as a newbie) wrt avoiding bias. Here, I can exercise bias in what I choose to dedicate time/effort to, and can compensate for my bias by doing my best to represent the appearance and style of a work as closely as is reasonably feasible within the guidelines of the community.

  Hope y'all don't mind my long message. I'm grateful to be in such good company and looking forward to building skills and understanding over time, so to maybe eventually have enough of a handle on the culture and customs here so I can help edit outdated/innacurate help and template docs.

  Does anyone know if there's a way I can set a blanket "watch" on most edits to individual template and help pages? If I observe what people with more experience change, I can work to better improve things without making a ton of work for others. :-) Grayautumnday (talk) 05:47, 2 April 2025 (UTC)

  You could do that with a recentchanges filter like this one. Do tinker to find which mix fits you best. — Alien  3
  3 3 06:01, 2 April 2025 (UTC)

So should I (or anyone) add the obsolete/inaccurate template:LetterSpacing page to the "requests for deletions" queue? Grayautumnday (talk) 06:33, 3 April 2025 (UTC)

Oops it looks like someone took down whatever page I was looking at when I ran into challenges with {{Letter-Spacing}} and {{sp}}, so that question is moot.

Tangential question: are template names (full or standardized abbreviations) inside the double curly braces... are they case-insensitive? Will {{letter-spacing|arg|arg|I'm|not|a|pirate}} work the same as {{Letter-Spacing|etc}}? Grayautumnday (talk) 06:40, 3 April 2025 (UTC)

No they are not; that is what I was trying to say. — Alien  3
3 3 07:06, 3 April 2025 (UTC)

So, I am having trouble still with {{letter-spacing}} - here's the page I'm working with: https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Page:Code_And_Other_Laws_of_Cyberspace_Version_2_0.pdf/24

I'm following the instructions located here: https://wikisource.org/wiki/Template:Letter-spacing

But I also found the *obsolete*(?) template documentation page I'd run into before - it's actually *linked to* at the bottom of the {{letter-spacing}} doc page: https://wikisource.org/wiki/Template:LetterSpacing

This is the syntax I'm using (copied directly from the doc page template:letter-spacing):

{{c|{{letter-spacing|four puzzles from cyberspace|1.5em}}}}

which shows up on the published page only as "1.5em"

Please advise? Grayautumnday (talk) 17:22, 4 April 2025 (UTC)

You're using wikisource.org templates! Beware, this is en.wikisource.org. wikisource.org (without the en) is a completely different wiki! Our template, {{lsp}}, takes the spacing first and the text second. — Alien  3
3 3 17:30, 4 April 2025 (UTC)

Title page with frame

I am not sure which editors here know how to place text for a title page into an image frame. This page has the frame image at the desired size, but needs the text content formatted to fit withing the frame. --EncycloPetey (talk) 13:57, 1 April 2025 (UTC)

I think this is at least a good approximation compared to the problematic version. If you want me to tinker with it more, let me know. —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 18:20, 1 April 2025 (UTC)

Thanks! --EncycloPetey (talk) 18:25, 1 April 2025 (UTC)

Piggybacking on to this request since it's the same issue. On Page:Acadiensis Q1.djvu/66, the overflow is working fine and the image scaled properly to the text. When the page is transcluded, however, (see Acadiensis/Volume 1/Number 2/In Bohemia) the image rescales in a way that the text no longer fits or aligns properly. This is true across all four layout options. Any thoughts on how to handle it? —Tcr25 (talk) 16:19, 2 April 2025 (UTC)

Fixed! The issue was that the width=600px was not applying, because as the template doc says, in {{overfloat image}} all template parameters are hard-coded with "px" at the end (probably because mediawiki only lets us use px for images). So, width=600px actually meant "width:600pxpx", which is invalid CSS and therefore had no effect. — Alien  3
3 3 17:18, 2 April 2025 (UTC)

Thank you! Would there be any objections to moving that line to the "Parameters" section where it might be better seen? —Tcr25 (talk) 20:12, 2 April 2025 (UTC)

 Support —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 03:44, 3 April 2025 (UTC)

I'm thinking it's already in the optimal place, at the top of the page like it is. Maybe we could use formatting like what's at the bottom of Help:Contents, to make sure everyone sees it. — Alien  3
3 3 06:00, 3 April 2025 (UTC)

The current placement above the list of parameters (but before those parameters are defined) is suboptimal because it scroll up off screen when one is looking at the bit explaining what to put where. I'd find the warning much more discoverable next to those definitions. I'm not sure embiggening the text would be as effective as having the caution next to where we're talking about which parameters used pixel-based measurement. —Tcr25 (talk) 11:49, 3 April 2025 (UTC)

Inserting spaces in contractions, per dialect in source text

Hi, I have been validating The Country of the Pointed Firs. In spoken dialog (written in Maine dialect) throughout this text, the author clearly inserted spaces in many contractions, which I have been reproducing in the Wikisource text, for example here. As I am midway through this validation, I thought I should confirm with more experienced Wikisource editors: are my edits (inserting spaces) acceptable? Harris7 (talk) 11:09, 2 April 2025 (UTC)

I've taken the same approach with a few works by Paul Laurence Dunbar, usually using {{nw}} to keep the "n't" or "'d" with the rest of the contracted word. —Tcr25 (talk) 12:15, 2 April 2025 (UTC)

If there's a full space between words in the source, then yes, don't see a reason why not to transcribe it. — Alien  3
3 3 12:37, 2 April 2025 (UTC)

I have done the same for The Red Badge of Courage and currently for The Widowing of Mrs. Holroyd. I do recommend documenting the practice of the work's main discussion page, with rationale and a link to (or quote from) a page with a particularly good example of the kinds of choices being made. --EncycloPetey (talk) 16:46, 2 April 2025 (UTC)

In our Manual of Style, we do not include spaces before terminating typography (such as " !") or semi-colons and I think the same applies here: it's not clear why there is a space in "when ’d" but not "s’pose", but it seems pretty arbitrary and some bizarre choice on the printer's side. If, in fact, it was deliberate, please do reproduce them with non-breaking spaces, by typing in "when ’d". —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 03:48, 3 April 2025 (UTC)

Is something like that an instance where {{sic}} might or should ever be considered/used? Grayautumnday (talk) 06:44, 3 April 2025 (UTC)

No, {{sic}} is for nonintentional errors in typography. This spacing is deliberate to represent a different dialect from the surrounding text. Some publishers in the transition period when contractions such as "didn't" instead of "did not" were coming out of slang speech into accepted colloquialisms chose to represent them as "did n't". At this point they are still two words and a normal space should be used. Beeswaxcandle (talk) 07:06, 3 April 2025 (UTC)

• Our last discussion on the issue said that they should be removed, as being more of a publishing artefact than an intentional choice of the author. Personally, I would support keeping the spaces, but I suppose it could be decided on a work-by-work basis. TE(æ)A,ea. (talk) 12:29, 3 April 2025 (UTC)

  I do not see that conclusion (that they should be removed) reached anywhere in the discussion you've pointed to. I only see you stated that you removed them. --EncycloPetey (talk) 17:33, 3 April 2025 (UTC)

Caption/Credit on a Drop Initial

Look at Page:Acadiensis Q1.djvu/69. The illustrator of the drop initial is credited below the image. I cropped out the credit in the image, but I'm not sure how to place the credit line below the image within the {{drop initial}} template. Currently the credit line is above the image. Any thoughts? —Tcr25 (talk) 12:42, 3 April 2025 (UTC)

Try putting the text in {{float left}}, giving it style=float:left. That ought to work. — Alien  3
3 3 13:06, 3 April 2025 (UTC)

Thanks, I've tried {{float left}} in several places before/after the {{drop initial}} template, as well as using the fl parameter within {{di}}, but none of those consistently place it below the image. Placing it at the end of the paragraph works(ish) in Layouts 2 and 4 when transcluded, but not in Layouts 1 and 3 nor in the Page space. (I'd image there would be issues based upon screen size in the other layouts, too.) —Tcr25 (talk) 15:01, 3 April 2025 (UTC)

Sorry, I meant style=clear:left. got messed upThat was what I meant (and it works, see for yourself). — Alien  3
3 3 17:04, 3 April 2025 (UTC)

That's cool! Thanks! So, the float parameter can be placed within the imgsize parameter? I wouldn't have thought that that would work, but I'm glad it does. —Tcr25 (talk) 17:11, 3 April 2025 (UTC)

No, it's just that if you add the floating xxs right after the drop initial (which is itself floated left), and add clear, it'll go left, and the clear will force it to go below the other left-floated element (the di). — Alien  3
3 3 17:12, 3 April 2025 (UTC)

Strange referencing system

Hello all,

I have two questions about how best to set up the references for Index:Taming Liquid Hydrogen The Centaur Upper Stage Rocket.pdf.

First, what is the best way to deal with references which are cited on one page, e.g. superscript 10 on page 11, but for which the contents of the citation appear only on a later page, i.e. on page 12 in this case? Before answering, please also consider whether the approach would clash with the means to resolve question 2.

Second, what is the best way to deal with a reference which is reused/duplicated, and for which the duplicate contains additional content? E.g. superscript 2 initially appears on page 6, with the corresponding citation information appearing on page 6. But then again on page 11, there is additional text in/above the footer, providing further information in regard to reference 2, and without a corresponding inline superscript on page 11 to attach it to?

Thanks,
TeysaKarlov (talk) 04:08, 5 April 2025 (UTC)

Would it work to set the re-used number footnotes as {{ref}} instances? I'm having trouble wrapping my head around the mechanics. --EncycloPetey (talk) 04:45, 5 April 2025 (UTC)

Just go ahead and put the contents of that citation on page 11: once the work is transcluded, they will all just appear together anyway. If you want to make it clear what is happening, you can insert an HTML comment to other editors. You lost me on that second question. If two references are the same, it's okay to copy/paste the same text to two references. —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 04:46, 5 April 2025 (UTC)

@EncycloPetey @Koavf Sorry for any confusion regarding my second question. Upon much closer inspection, I am hoping/assuming that the "2" is actually an "8", and so it refers to a reference from the previous page. For the first question, glad that copying is acceptable. It seems by far the simplest solution. Thanks, TeysaKarlov (talk) 05:05, 5 April 2025 (UTC)

Please never apologize: I'm not very smart. Thanks for your kind words and hard work. —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 05:23, 5 April 2025 (UTC)

For question 2, I agree that that was an 8 not a 2.

For question 1, what I've done in cases like this is put a <ref name="whatever">&nbsp;</ref> on the first page, and then <ref follow="whatever">actual content</ref> on the second page, but I think no one'll mind if you just move it to page 11. It's like for TOC cells that continue across a page, sometimes we just have to move stuff to not exactly the page where it was. — Alien  3
3 3 08:15, 5 April 2025 (UTC)

@Alien333 I did consider the nbsp; approach, but as always, it would require placing nbsp; at the start of all references, even those which don't cross pages, just to keep the spacing consistent. If the frequency of next-page references proves high throughout the entire text, or however far I get, I might go back and switch them, for the sake of (possible) future validation. Regards, TeysaKarlov (talk) 21:56, 5 April 2025 (UTC)

There's also the zero-width space, ​. That wouldn't cause spacing issues. — Alien  3
3 3 07:26, 6 April 2025 (UTC)

@Alien333 Was not aware of the zero space, and I agree this does not cause spacing issues (with hws/hwe). If I might ask one last question, do you know why hws and hwe both require a second parameter, which contains the entirety of the to-be-transcluded content? It would be much simpler, in this example especially, to only contain the entire transcluded content in hwe? (It would be even simpler if a footnote-friendly version of {{upe}} existed, but maybe that is trouble). Thanks, TeysaKarlov (talk) 20:50, 6 April 2025 (UTC)

Can't help you with hws & hwe, I've pretty much never used them in my life. — Alien  3
3 3 05:24, 7 April 2025 (UTC)

@Alien333 All good. A quick test seems to indicate that the second parameter of hws is irrelevant if you are not displaying any content with the first parameter. Regards, TeysaKarlov (talk) 20:53, 7 April 2025 (UTC)

P.S. For anyone wishing to replicate, use the following:

<ref name="ref14">{{hws|&#8203;|&#8203;|hyph=}}</ref> and <ref follow="ref14">{{hwe|&#8203;|&#8203;}}Reference Text</ref>. This avoids both any copying from one page to another, and any errant spaces. Thanks all for the help and suggestions.

Regards, TeysaKarlov (talk) 21:09, 7 April 2025 (UTC)

If I was doing it I would have used an approach similar to Alien333's, but with an empty ref tag <ref name="pXXnXX" /> on the first page (I believe I've done this before, but it'd take a while to work out exactly which work used it). No nbsp necessary, no need to do anything special in the ref-follow tag either. Arcorann (talk) 06:22, 7 April 2025 (UTC)

Putting a named ref without content, or a ref with that name that has content, throws an error (hence the nb/zw sp). — Alien  3
3 3 06:30, 7 April 2025 (UTC)

Formatting of quotation marks at different heights

Does anyone know how to format the quotation marks such that one of the quotation marks is higher than the other such as on Page:Further Poems Emily-1929.djvu/210? ToxicPea (talk) 14:54, 5 April 2025 (UTC)

Maybe we should add an fl param like {{di}} has to do that. — Alien  3
3 3 15:31, 5 April 2025 (UTC)

@DoctorWhoFan91: yes, this way of putting the " in the li is what I'd have done and sort of works, but it's true that it ends up being too big; — Alien  3
3 3 19:37, 5 April 2025 (UTC)

I'm not sure if one quotation mark can be put in a higher position while being the same size; I don't think we don't to be that exact either- there are much more obvious visual discrepancies that we don't do anything about because such discrepancies are usually largely irrelevant. DoctorWhoFan91 (talk) 19:49, 5 April 2025 (UTC)

@CalendulaAsteraceae, you've worked on {{li}}. Do you know if it would be possible to implement the desired behavior? ToxicPea (talk) 00:53, 6 April 2025 (UTC)

footnotes, endnotes, and refs in general

on Help:Footnotes and endnotes, it recommends enclosing a footnote in "<ref>" tags. But what I've seen most often in recent change logs is proofreaders using the "{{ref}}" template? What are the most current recommendations, and are the current usages discussed or documented anywhere that I can refer to as I work through learning the ropes? Grayautumnday (talk) 01:43, 6 April 2025 (UTC)

So here's the workaround I used for page Page:The birth of tragedy, or Hellenism and pessimism (Nietzsche).djvu/13

I used template:ref, but was unable to get the asterisk to display properly, even switching it to the html entity for a raised asterisk "&ast;".

So I switched it to {footnoted text]{{ref|identifier|&ast;}} and -- unlike what was advised on the footnotes/endnotes help doc (to use "<ref>" and place the footnoted text actually up in the text at the location of the footnote) -- instead used the guidance on the template:ref page (to place the footnoted text down at the end of the page following {{note|identifier|&ast;}}.

I'm still not in a place where I can really wrap my head around what transclusion actually is, why it's done, when it's done, what it does, and what needs to be completed in order for it to happen properly... but does the above usage work in the longterm (when it comes time for transclusion) and not just in the short term (getting the text to display properly here in the individual pages)? Grayautumnday (talk) 06:08, 6 April 2025 (UTC)

Template {{ref}} is only used for some specialised applications. Do not use it routinely, but stick to the advice in the Help page. The Help page is not a recommendation, it's a norm for doing routine references. We don't replicate the *,†, etc. footnoting from some works, but change them all to numbered footnotes. This is the house style and is done because each page in a chapter will have its own series of footnote markers, which doesn't work in the mainspace.

Transclusion is the process by which the text in the Page: namespace is brought through into the mainspace. It is more important what a text looks like in mainspace than in the Page: namespace. A good experience for the end-reader is the goal. Beeswaxcandle (talk) 06:40, 6 April 2025 (UTC)

To add to Beeswaxcandle's comment, using <ref> tags normally is sufficient for this case. We let the system generate the footnote number. When in page space, the footnote will display automatically, but you can put <references/> or {{smallrefs}} in the footer if there's stuff there. When transcluding the text in mainspace, either a <references/> tag or {{smallrefs}} can be placed at the bottom and it'll put the entire chapter's footnotes there.

And since you asked, what you did won't work well when transcluded. It'll put the rule and footnote in the middle of a block of text. (If you still want the rule on the page, it should be in the footer, followed by a <references/> tag.) Arcorann (talk) 04:52, 7 April 2025 (UTC)

Does what I've corrected (Page:The birth of tragedy, or Hellenism and pessimism (Nietzsche).djvu/13) fix these issues? Are there any other challenges needing to be addressed?

(I'm still having issues wrapping my head around the concepts of mainspaces and transclusion, so I'm instead just reading all of the conversations here -- I suspect that exposure to concepts and looking at referenced pages will make that easier with time -- as well doing my best to detangle disparate or incomplete/unclear instructions in template/help documentation with the help of others here. Periodically re-reading newbie documentation has also been helpful so far, as there are layers of implication that make more sense as I build experience.) Grayautumnday (talk) 17:40, 15 April 2025 (UTC)

Microsoft Altair source code

At the end of this page there is the link of Microsoft Altair source code. Is it eligible for upload on Wikisource? 151.95.19.249 14:14, 7 April 2025 (UTC)

Sadly not, The authors are still alive, and the stated work has a clear copyright notice. ShakespeareFan00 (talk) 15:10, 7 April 2025 (UTC)

Note Wikisource:What Wikisource includes specifically mentions pure source code as excluded. MarkLSteadman (talk) 17:42, 7 April 2025 (UTC)

Importing .csv and .text file data with Chinese characters into a template

This index Index:Dictionary of the Foochow Dialect.pdf had partly transcribed by another Chinese project in 2019. They got the data by crowdsourcing and compiled into "DFDCharacters.csv" for pages from 1748 to 1874 and "DFDRadicals.txt" from page 1742 to 1747. Source files can be found from this Github. However, the .csv file can't render the Chinese characters correctly. Besides, I have no idea on how to import the .csv and .txt data into the wiki template "Template:DFD index". Are there any tools that I can use to do these jobs? Any help is very appreciated, thank you. Cerevisae (talk) 14:53, 8 April 2025 (UTC)

This is a pretty ropey answer, but I know that there are tools to convert CSV to a spreadsheet (pretty trivial, Excel, Google Sheets, and OpenOffice can all do this), then tools to convert spreadsheets to HTML tables, then HTML tables to MediaWiki. :/ There is no way to directly upload a CSV or TXT here or automatically convert them locally. —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 21:18, 8 April 2025 (UTC)

Justin (koavf), yes, converting it directly to a Wiki template would be hard.Cerevisae (talk) 12:28, 9 April 2025 (UTC)

There are CSV to Mediawiki converters online. If you have the data in a spreadsheet it's also possible to convert it straight to Mediawiki using online converters. (In fact, with the right formulas you can do the conversion in the spreadsheet itself.) Arcorann (talk) 01:09, 9 April 2025 (UTC)

I could probably make something to parse the data and turn it into the format used on the pages, if you don't mind. There are a couple of non-trivial bits to note, and it'll probably require parsing all of the .csv, .txt and .html files to get as much of the info out as possible. Arcorann (talk) 01:07, 9 April 2025 (UTC)

Arcorann, that would be awesome! Thanks for your offer! Cerevisae (talk) 05:31, 9 April 2025 (UTC)

A CSV file is just a text file separated by commas. If the data is in there, the question is whether the program can read it.--Prosfilaes (talk) 00:06, 11 April 2025 (UTC)

Download file from HathiTrust: The Truth about Vignolles

This work has a full scan here; would someone with access please upload it to Commons for match & split? —Beleg Âlt ^BT (talk) 18:36, 9 April 2025 (UTC)

For Hathi, I use a script to repeatedly click the buttons, though it's quite slow. I've got the first 190 pages ready, will do the rest tomorrow if no one's downloaded the whole thing in the meanwhile. — Alien  3
3 3 20:02, 9 April 2025 (UTC)

@Beleg Tâl, @Alien333. I have uploaded the scan from Hathi. I wasn't sure if you wanted it uploaded as a replacement (here [2]) or as a separate file. Apologies if you had wanted the latter. Also feel free to delete/readjust the pages for match and split (now 402 pages compared to the original with 400). Or I can do so on my end and re-upload. Regards, TeysaKarlov (talk) 22:15, 9 April 2025 (UTC)

There is also a download helper available. --Jan Kameníček (talk) 12:52, 10 April 2025 (UTC)

ooh nice! —Beleg Âlt ^BT (talk) 14:38, 10 April 2025 (UTC)

Thank you! and yes, while I would have been fine with a separate file, I'm glad you uploaded it as a replacement :) —Beleg Âlt ^BT (talk) 14:39, 10 April 2025 (UTC)

Transclusion problems

I am trying to transclude table of contents and index pages of the Bohemian-American Cook Book, but it does not work for some reason. In the page namespace the pages look fine, but their transclusion collapses for some reason. I found out that I can make the trasclusion work upto page317 when I finish the index table early by including TOC end in the end of this page, but the following pages cannot be added. It seems as if I hit some size limit... -- Jan Kameníček (talk) 21:53, 12 April 2025 (UTC)

@Jan.Kamenicek Checking the categories at the bottom of Bohemian-American Cook Book, the work has indeed fallen into Category:Pages where template include size is exceeded. At some point @Alien333 converted some of these very long tables of contents into Template:SimpleTOCs, to sneak under the size limit. If Alien333 has an automated method of doing so, it might save you a great deal of trouble in the conversion? Regards, TeysaKarlov (talk) 21:59, 12 April 2025 (UTC)

P.S. Another option might be using regex, if that functionality was ever set up on Wikisource (or else manually using find and replace), given that it is mostly TOC row 2dot-1's, which can become SimpleTOC line's without too much trouble. I am also not sure how expensive namespace links are, but if you could part with those, maybe that would save on page size. Regards, TeysaKarlov (talk) 22:05, 12 April 2025 (UTC)

There's a regex search-and-replace tool integrated into the editing toolbar, though for cases like this I'd probably put a bit of temp JS code in my common.js (a bit bothersome to repeat the search manually on over 10 pages.

On what to replace to: IIRC I've never tried {{simpleTOC}} (last time I had to face an issue like this it was for a >20-pages-long four-column TOC, with dot leaders), but looking at the code it looks simple enough. Will try replacing and report back. — Alien  3
3 3 05:31, 13 April 2025 (UTC)

Update: that worked. Also, @Jan.Kamenicek: I noticed that in a few places, for section titles that did not include a section leader to the right or a page number, you added a link. These should probably get wst-toc-aux. — Alien  3
3 3 05:54, 13 April 2025 (UTC)

Oh, and realised but these links are also broken. — Alien  3
3 3 06:10, 13 April 2025 (UTC)

@Alien333: Awesome! I knew there were also some more minor problems to be fixed, but stopped searching for them as I was afraid I would have to rewrite everything. I will fix them now. THANKS very much! --Jan Kameníček (talk) 08:30, 13 April 2025 (UTC)

And thanks to TeysaKarlov too, I did not know the Simple TOC template, it is great, will use it in similar cases now. --Jan Kameníček (talk) 08:49, 13 April 2025 (UTC)

@Alien333: I have tried to rework in this way the Contents page too, but it seems that the class=wst-toc-aux does not work with this template. Is there anything that can be done about that? --Jan Kameníček (talk) 10:16, 13 April 2025 (UTC)

{{Auxiliary toc styles}} should do the trick. — Alien  3
3 3 10:32, 13 April 2025 (UTC)

Ah, hang on, there's a slight problem, which is that simpleTOC doesn't actually use tables but divs. So rather just add .wst-toc-aux { background-color: #E6F2E6; } in the index styles. Also, for some reason, there isn't a class parameter, but as it's just divs you can wrap a div around it.

Or, at that point, perhaps just wrap these lines in {{auxTOC}}. — Alien  3
3 3 10:38, 13 April 2025 (UTC)

Thanks, I used the last option as the best accessible for me :-) --Jan Kameníček (talk) 10:53, 13 April 2025 (UTC)

Proper formatting?

Hi all! Could someone more experienced have a look at Page:Some Aspects of the Tariff Question.djvu/15 to see if I have done the formatting right? Thank you! (I'm especially unsure of how to do the indentation of the paragraphs, if at all.) ⟲ Three Sixty! (talk, edits) 13:16, 15 April 2025 (UTC)

Three Sixty This page looks very nice! Wikisource, in general, does not use paragraph indents.

I think you were referring to the indentation of the block of text between toc entries though. I rather like the ":", which you used, as it is very basic wiki function. It would be nice if it indented on the right side as well.

While looking at it, I spent a handful of seconds considering ways to indent both sides of the text blocks. {{bc}} with |width=80%| or some such percentage might do it.

But surely your formatting is more than adequate.--RaboKarbakian (talk) 14:35, 15 April 2025 (UTC)

A side note: try to not use : for indenting in content. Use {{gap}} for single lines, {{lm}} for blocks of text, and {{bc}} if you also want the right side, but : is a: bad semantics (supposed to be description lists; b: invalid html (dt without dl); c: bad accessibility (screen readers). — Alien  3
3 3 15:50, 15 April 2025 (UTC)

Yeah, I knew about the description list thing, which was why I asked for a better solution. Thanks to you both! ⟲ Three Sixty! (talk, edits) 15:58, 15 April 2025 (UTC)

Alien Clearly I had no idea of this. Do you know how often I have used this since 2007? So ";" in the first line is <dl>? There are three in the <d's right? <di>? I think that ";" must be dt and ":" must be di.--RaboKarbakian (talk) 16:04, 15 April 2025 (UTC)

This is ;.

this is :.

From that, you can see (by inspecting) that ; is dl, : is dt. I don't think (?) there's a third one. — Alien  3
3 3 16:07, 15 April 2025 (UTC)

You also have spaces flanking every em-dash. When items are connected by an em-dash in older texts, there is typically a half-space on either side, and by convention, Wikisource collapses those half-spaces. --EncycloPetey (talk) 19:20, 15 April 2025 (UTC)

The fact that they are not traditional uses of em-dashes, but more of a navigational thing, made me unsure. I'll remove the spaces if that is the convention. ⟲ Three Sixty! (talk, edits) 19:27, 15 April 2025 (UTC)

This is dt

this is dd

this is another dd

Well, "di" is "dd", but you can see that in straight-up html, dt emboldens and dl should be (?) just a container--RaboKarbakian (talk) 16:14, 15 April 2025 (UTC)

Ah, yes, that was it. — Alien  3
3 3 16:19, 15 April 2025 (UTC)

Alien So it is just bad formatting then, unless you type the <dl /> tags around its use?--RaboKarbakian (talk) 16:41, 15 April 2025 (UTC)

If you actually use just one ; and then just one :, in that order, it's good formatting.

Else it's bad formatting. (Trying to type the tags manually seems like a bad idea to me. MW never interacts in a nice way with manual HTML.) — Alien  3
3 3 16:45, 15 April 2025 (UTC)

I was thinking that they must be enclosing the editable space with <dl />. dd does not require a dt, but it is supposed to be enclosed within a dl. It is easy to know this because dd (definition description) does not need to be followed by a </dt> (definition title). If they have indeed enclosed the whole editable space within dl tags, then using it that way in a toc is "bad form" maybe, but not bad "formatting".--RaboKarbakian (talk) 17:43, 15 April 2025 (UTC)

Depends on what you mean by "the editable space". Like the whole page is not enclosed in dl. (And this time I checked what I was about to say :).) — Alien  3
3 3 17:48, 15 April 2025 (UTC)

Help adding a newspaper article

I managed to make the index Index:St Andrews Standard Nov 3 1875.pdf, but I want to turn the first article on the first page into an article here as it's the only one worth my time to proofread; I created Deer Island for it but not really sure how to enclose the portion of the text...muchless crop off the partial-left-page on the scan, etc. Thanks for help. Fundy Isles Historian - J (talk) 02:17, 16 April 2025 (UTC)

• You have proofread the text at Deer Island from the article-specific Index:/PDF Index:St Andrews Standard Nov 3 1875 Deer Island.pdf. In my experience, this is usually considered acceptable on its own; even though we prefer full works, we have historically recognized in the context of newspapers that this is not always feasible. Since you have created the index for the whole issue, however, your work at the article-only index should be moved over to the first page of that index. The only other work for that index you should even bother doing is to create the header at the top of the first page just to provide some bibliographical information about your article. I am not sure what you mean by “enclose the portion of the text”—could you explain? As for cropping off the partial page scan, I could do that if you really want it, but that’s not a problem in terms of transclusion—while it doesn’t look too pretty it doesn’t inhibit future transcription work for the index. TE(æ)A,ea. (talk) 03:26, 16 April 2025 (UTC)

Formatting of US Court filing headers

How do I replicate the format of some of the court filing headers such as on Page:20250407103341248 Kristi Noem Application To Vacate Injunction.pdf/89? ToxicPea (talk) 22:53, 19 April 2025 (UTC)

I also need help with Page:Abrego Garcia v. Noem District Court of Maryland Memorandum Opinion - April 6 2025.pdf/1ToxicPea (talk) 00:27, 20 April 2025 (UTC)

@ToxicPea A table is usually the best option. I have added a table for p. 89 (being perhaps unnecessarily pedantic with the line breaks). For your request about page 1, you could also copy/modify from Page:United States v. Trump - Government's Motion for Immunity Determinations.pdf/1 if you are unsure where to start. If you still need help, let me know. Regards, TeysaKarlov (talk) 00:30, 20 April 2025 (UTC)