Wikisource:Scriptorium/Help

How do we add works without usable scans?

Atlas Games has released a number of Ars Magica books under the CC-BY-SA 4.0. However, as they put it "The Licensed Material is the TEXT of the game books. It does not include the the trade dress, artwork, cartography, or logos." So we can not just upload the PDFs of the books. What's the best way to handle this? Prosfilaes (talk) 07:51, 5 January 2025 (UTC)

I'd say just leave it. There are plenty of awesome and useful texts published and actually free that we can work on instead of wasting time on texts where the publisher is deliberately making it difficult to reuse it (undermining the seemingly open license). There's no even half-way good way for us to host this text unless and until someone else we recognise as a reputable publisher republishes the text in a form that is actually free. Any hoop-jumping we do before that happens is just going to water down our commitment to verifiability and openness, and create maintenance problems for ourselves down the road. Xover (talk) 08:09, 5 January 2025 (UTC)

We could just upload scans of the work, and slap a "copyrighted text" thing on any image in the book. Probably just a hassle, but at least we have another (technically-)free work in the database. CitationsFreak (talk) 00:18, 29 January 2025 (UTC)

• Prosfilaes: The way to go about it would be to take the PDF and manually hide every image. Is there even a PDF available? I only see print copies available for sale. There appear to be illustrated borders on every page, requiring manual editing of each page. You could, of course, simply add the text without uploading a PDF; that is a common practice here, as I’m sure you know. TE(æ)A,ea. (talk) 01:18, 29 January 2025 (UTC)

They're available on line, and I bought most of them in a Bundle of Holding a few years back. It's probably not something I'm going to end up doing, given the difficulty and trademark limitations. I do think Xover is a bit unfair; the goal was to permit people to make books in the setting, and, in their words:

There's also a whole argument about copyright and RPG rules, and one point of this license is to just sidestep it. Go ahead and make a techniques/forms based magic system RPG of furry space wizards. We were not ever going to sue you, but now you can be sure that no future owners of the game could either.

The release was more of a simple way of doing that, rather than the publisher deliberately making it difficult to reuse.--Prosfilaes (talk) 00:02, 30 January 2025 (UTC)

Page Numbering that Incorporates Chapter

I was proofreading ToCs in Index:United States Army Field Manual 3-13 Information Operations.djvu, and I noticed that the page numbering incorporated the chapter number and page number by placing a hyphen between both numbers (for example, chap. 5, pg. 1 as 5-1, or chap. 2, pg. 19 as 2-19). This made it very inconvenient to add {{scan page link 2}} templates to ToCs, as I had to look over every single page (the numbering system was not incorporated into the <pagelist>). I then decided to go the <pagelist> to add the page numbering into the index page for the purposes of making it easier to navigate and add chapter ToCs in the future.

However, I could not find a solution that would do produce this numbering system in the <pagelist>, without me manual entering "𝑥-𝑦" (𝑥 corresponding to chapter number, 𝑦 corresponding to page number) for every single page. I tried to find a solution myself, looked at Help:Page numbers, and searched the help request archives, all to no avail. Is there any existing way that I could enter a <pagelist> that uses this numbering system? Is there possibly a way using concatenation or some fancy wiki-markup that I do not know about? GrammarPoliceOffical (diſcuſs ſ ſtuff I did ſ my uſer page) 01:45, 2 February 2025 (UTC)

As I see it:

The headers use 2-19, but that page is still page 19. Same as in most works the header will be something like

but it's still page 42. So, just put 42 in the pagelist. — Alien  3
3 3 07:35, 2 February 2025 (UTC)

We can use multiple pagelist commands. See Index:Tracts for the Times Vol 1.djvu for an example of where I used this technique. Beeswaxcandle (talk) 08:20, 2 February 2025 (UTC)

Download not working

Hello. I was trying to download https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Little_Bessie but it does not work. Thanks in advance for fixing. gmt@uniedi.com 82.192.128.110 10:07, 2 February 2025 (UTC)

What error are you meeting, precisely? (if it takes a while, that's pretty normal, it often happens. should be done in a few minutes) — Alien  3
3 3 14:54, 2 February 2025 (UTC)

It took a bit more than five minutes for me. — Alien  3
3 3 15:00, 2 February 2025 (UTC)

How to find works with the largest number of versions?

How do you find them? Is it possible with Wikisource API, PetScan, even SQL dumps, anything? I.e. Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (Rackham) has a note: For other versions of this work, see Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.. It links to Alice's Adventures in Wonderland which doesn't have a Source/Edit buttons, is it an automatic page?

Also, maybe it's possible to find all books where given work is published? I.e. Index page can have Contents linking to works, like this one: Index:Pain--Eliza.djvu. Making it theoretically possible to find all books where given work is published and at what page. And maybe even sort them by date of publication. How to do it? Podbrushkin (talk) 10:48, 5 February 2025 (UTC)

Alice's Adventures in Wonderland is a Versions page, similar to a Disambiguation page. It gives links to the various transcluded versions available, which is why it doesn't have source buttons. (You can edit the page, but it's more like editing a list article on Wikipedia; not transcluding a work on Wikisource.) These are not generated automatically, so they may be missing versions that are on Wikisource or that have yet to be brought into the project. Generally, they are arranged chronologically, though it would be possible to set them up with a sortable wikitable, but I can't think of an instance where I've seen that done here.

To find other publications of a work, you could try Worldcat (here's the entry for Eliza, for example). There is a lot of duplication and it doesn't mean there's a link to a publicly available scan, but it is a starting point. —Tcr25 (talk) 13:11, 5 February 2025 (UTC)

I can't edit worldcat, I can't even access it. I'm trying to get bibliographic data from Wikisource without interacting with HTML pages. Right now I'm trying to understand what's going on in Wikisource SQL dump. Podbrushkin (talk) 07:33, 10 February 2025 (UTC)

Template:UK Legislation link: Incorporation with Wikidata?

I recently found the useful template of {{UK Legislation link}}, which directs readers to the consolidated versions on legislation.gov.uk. As many British legislation are linked to corresponding Wikidata items, is it possible to modify the template such that it uses links given in Wikidata items? This could save a lot of effort in copy pasting links.

For example, in the text of Scotland Act 1998, one could type {{UK Legislation link|Q1427950}} (Q1427950 is the corresponding item) to call out the link to legislation.gov.uk廣九直通車 (talk) 11:47, 7 February 2025 (UTC)

Yes! I was able to get the template to work with no necessary input parameters by Wikisource users due to the internal links with Wikidata. If a user puts {{UK Legislation link}} in the header of UK legislation, it will automatically find linked Wikidata Q-id, and then pull the linked URL to legislation.gov.uk. This does require the information in Wikidata to be present, and the Wikisource work to be linked in Wikidata, so that information is included in the /doc. The Scotland Act 1998 has this working as of present, and we should be able to add this to all present UK legislation mainspace pages which are linked to an act on Wikidata. Penguin1737 (talk) 03:56, 10 February 2025 (UTC)

Thanks! I'll do this for the rest of other legislation.廣九直通車 (talk) 11:51, 10 February 2025 (UTC)

@Penguin1737: And for your information, I changed property P953 into P3343, which is the legislation.gov.uk ID as recorded. This improves the template, because not all legislation wikidata entries contains a proper link, and some legislation contains more than one link, but almost all will have P3343, which is related to the website.廣九直通車 (talk) 09:08, 11 February 2025 (UTC)

Sourcing two missing pages for Aristotle volume

Index:Works of Aristotle - vol. 1, ed. Ross - 1928 (djvu, worksofaristotle01arisuoft).djvu is missing a page between 51 and 52 (the paging convention is unconventional but the clear difference in both pages is that ch. 12 and 13 are missing). I've been unable to find another djvu copy for precisely volume 1 besides the one already uploaded (which is from IA, which also is missing the two pages), but I have access to a physical copy of this book through my university. Should another djvu/pdf of the pages prove difficult to find/source, I in theory could take pictures of the missing pages. Would this be the likely route? Overthrows (talk) 23:21, 10 February 2025 (UTC)

The pages appear to be here: https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=uc1.32106006348566&seq=52 . Typically we insert the missing pages and upload a revised djvu with an updated note about the sourcing. MarkLSteadman (talk) 01:12, 11 February 2025 (UTC)

Sweet! Thank you for finding it. Should I ask the Scan Lab to further work with adding the pages? Overthrows (talk) 01:21, 11 February 2025 (UTC)

Up to you with your comfort level working with djvu files. MarkLSteadman (talk) 01:27, 11 February 2025 (UTC)

Statutes of the Realm: page images not showing on macos

Most of the PDFs of the 'Statutes of the Realm' series uploaded to Wikisource are not displaying page images in the editor, on Firefox & Safari on MacOS. Nor does the automatic transcription work. It does work on Firefox on Linux. I haven't found this problem with any other item on wikisource.

For example: Index:The Statutes of the Realm Vol 8 (1702-7).pdf

(Volume 1 is showing properly, but not the others.) Technolalia (talk) 08:27, 11 February 2025 (UTC)

Can confirm the issue also occurs on Chrome and Firefox on Windows 11. Vol 8 is nearly 3GB, so possibly this is an issue with the file size in respect to the page editor, and it's just too much to handle? Occasionally clicking on a random page and waiting for a minute, the page image will load for me, but most of the time it doesn't. The auto transcription does not appear to be working regardless. Penguin1737 (talk) 05:22, 12 February 2025 (UTC)

This seems to a hitting a limit in the back-end. I would strongly suggest re-uploading smaller sized scans of the edition concerned.

(see https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/012297566 which is the same edition.) and the work undertaken on Volume 1 can also be migrated.

I've put the Index (bar Volume 1) for the monster sized scans at PD, to further this. ShakespeareFan00 (talk) 08:41, 12 February 2025 (UTC)

Underling across pages

How do I make an underline continue across pages. Maryland Chapter 336 - 2023RS for reference. ToxicPea (talk) 02:57, 12 February 2025 (UTC)

You could use {{hws}} and {{hwe}}. See the note at Template:Hyphenated word start#Formatting about how to do it. —Tcr25 (talk) 13:48, 12 February 2025 (UTC)

Can you show me how to do that. I can't seem to get it to work. ToxicPea (talk) 14:39, 12 February 2025 (UTC)

I was assuming this was for a hyphenated word. Is that correct? If so, on the first page you could use {{hws|{{u|begin}}|beginning}} and on the second page {{u|{{hwe|ning|beginning}}}} (the formatting is in the first element on the first page and the full element on the second page. If this is for running text, I'm not sure; you might be able to hack hws/hwe to do it but that would add a hyphen in the page space. —Tcr25 (talk) 15:09, 12 February 2025 (UTC)

This isn't for a hyphenated word. It's for an underlined sentence that continues across pages. ToxicPea (talk) 15:12, 12 February 2025 (UTC)

What about using {{peh}} with a non-breaking space? Something like this {{peh|{{u| }}}}.. —Tcr25 (talk) 15:29, 12 February 2025 (UTC)

That just added a hyphen in mainspace. ToxicPea (talk) 15:50, 12 February 2025 (UTC)

Ok, I just tried using {{upe}} (unspaced page end). I put a non-breaking space within your underline at the of the last word and then used {{upe}}. There is probably cleaner way to handle it, but that seems to have done it. —Tcr25 (talk) 16:03, 12 February 2025 (UTC)

Feels like a stupid question, but how about we just do {{underline|end of page}} on the first page, and {{underline|start of page}} on the second? We can add a   if the problem is the space not being underlined. — Alien  3
3 3 16:20, 12 February 2025 (UTC)

Just tried that and it doesn't work. It just adds a new underlined space instead of underlining the existing space. ToxicPea (talk) 17:48, 12 February 2025 (UTC)

@ToxicPea: the test index is at Index:Sandbox.djvu. Do what @Tcr25 says, with {{upe}} (that prevents the addition of the non-underlined space). I was basically repeating the same thing.

See here for working test. — Alien  3
3 3 17:49, 12 February 2025 (UTC)

How to deal with newspaper articles without a title?

The title explains it all. I'm currently working on Issue 45 of the The Appari News, recently finishing page 2 of that issue. Although I want to transclude that page to the mainspace, it doesn't have a title. How should I deal with it? Norbillian (talk) 16:33, 14 February 2025 (UTC)

I might do the same thing we do with title-less poems and use part of the first line as a substitute title. --EncycloPetey (talk) 17:23, 14 February 2025 (UTC)

Thanks for the idea! Norbillian (talk) 17:47, 14 February 2025 (UTC)

I believe we talked about that not too long ago. (rummages through archives) Ah, There. Reached the same conclusion there too, first words. — Alien  3
3 3 18:10, 14 February 2025 (UTC)

Request for assistance in transcribing Mythology among the Hebrews and its historical development

I am a newcomer to English Wikisource and is working on Mythology among the Hebrews and its historical development. Though I had some experience transcribing texts on the Chinese Wikisource (孔乙己 and 兩地書 Chapter 2), I am new to working on English texts and cover pages. I am not sure if I had done the following right:

1. The Internet Archive said something like "not 100% sure, but 99% public domain." Is that considered enough?
2. I saw some works (e.g. the King James Bible) that use sophisticated syntax to represent the cover page. In reference to them, I tried to transcribe one of the cover pages. Have I done it right?
3. How should I structure my main namespace pages? Should I arrange them in Chapters (e.g. Mythology among the Hebrews and its historical development/Chapter 1? How about the index and appendixes?

Please tell me if I can improve my transcription. I will be online again at around 09:30 UTC. 1F616EMO (talk) 23:51, 18 February 2025 (UTC)

1F616EMO: Thank you for contributing! It’s always nice to see more people working on projects here. As for your questions: (1) The Internet Archive has a generic message because they don’t want to state for certain a fact which they have not verified. I myself can tell you that your file is definitely in the public domain. (2) Your title page looks great! You really have a good grasp of which templates to use. (3) The normal chapter structure (/Chapter 1–/Chapter 10) is fine, followed by Excursus, Appendix 1, Appendix 2, and Index. TE(æ)A,ea. (talk) 02:55, 21 February 2025 (UTC)

Thank you for helping me. FYI, the content page is here: Mythology among the Hebrews and its historical development, and I've transcribed the Translator's Preface and part of Appendix 2: The Legend of Samson. Please check and see if there are any flaws. 1F616EMO (talk) 13:01, 21 February 2025 (UTC)

@TE(æ)A,ea.: And more on the Translator's Preface: I can't find the letter "d" with a short underline (like a dot diacritic but longer), so I used a normal underscore for that and added a transcription note on this. Is this appropriate? 1F616EMO (talk) 13:03, 21 February 2025 (UTC)

• 1F616EMO: A few notes: (1) The gap at the beginning of paragraphs is considered to be a publisher’s addition, and thus is not replicated (that is, there should be no {{gap}} before paragraphs). (2) The section titles should be included on the transcluded chapters; thus the “TRANSLATOR’S PREFACE.” and custom rule here should be included. (3) The references at the bottom of the page are set in smaller text, so the {{smallrefs}} template is appropriate to use. (4) When depicting foreign-language text, you can use specialized template for better display. For example, {{Arabic}} for Arabic text, {{Hebrew}} for Hebrew text, and {{polytonic}} for Ancient Greek text. (You can also use these template to help display medial, initial, &c. forms of characters.) As for the d character, I would recommend ḏ, which is a d with a combining macron below. While d also works, ḏ looks a bit prettier in my opinion. TE(æ)A,ea. (talk) 16:51, 21 February 2025 (UTC)

  Thank you for correcting. I've fixed all occurrences. And thank you for finding the "ḏ" for me. 1F616EMO (talk) 22:47, 21 February 2025 (UTC)

  However, I am not sure if I should remove the {{gap}} in "London: January 1877." 1F616EMO (talk) 22:53, 21 February 2025 (UTC)

  • That is more of a personal choice; I usually do so if there are two lines. Similarly, the right-justified signature of the translator on that page could be offset from the right edge, but that is not technically necessary. The name should not be bolded, I think; that appears to be the same font weight as other capital letters. You’ve picked a somewhat complicated work, owing to the diacritics. The ones in the list with equals signs are right, but ǎěǒ should be ăĕŏ, and chȃṭȇph should be châṭêph. Even if you’re still asking about changes, feel free to mark the pages as proofread. TE(æ)A,ea. (talk) 23:22, 21 February 2025 (UTC)

    Thank you for pointing out the errors. I've chosen this work because I am working on Chinese Wikipedia's draft of Samson, and was fed up with Internet Archive's reader and somewhat poor automatic OCR. I've marked the last page of the Translator's Preface proofread, and I will proofread the other pages when I have spare time. 1F616EMO (talk) 02:14, 22 February 2025 (UTC)

@TE(æ)A,ea.: Oh god, I found a duplication: Index:Mythology Among the Hebrews.djvu. How should I merge the two? 1F616EMO (talk) 02:19, 22 February 2025 (UTC)

Request the pages to be moved at Wikisource:Scriptorium#Repairs_(and_moves) and then an admin can move the pages with history between the two for you., MarkLSteadman (talk) 12:20, 22 February 2025 (UTC)

@MarkLSteadman: Could you help me to make the request? I may not have time in these two days (UTC +8). Also, I am not sure which source file should be used. 1F616EMO (talk) 12:31, 22 February 2025 (UTC)

Creating a section with the name in the title "===Index:Mythology among the Hebrews and its historical development.djvu===" and say something along the lines of "Merge Index:Mythology among the Hebrews and its historical development.djvu into the existing index file Index:Mythology Among the Hebrews.djvu." MarkLSteadman (talk) 12:38, 22 February 2025 (UTC)

acceptable source?

is this an acceptable source for Remembrance of Things Past? ltbdl (talk) 14:28, 23 February 2025 (UTC)

• ltbdl: No, that is a later edition which is copyright (second page) 2016 by the company which made the new edition. We would need an earlier edition without a copyright on the modern editing. TE(æ)A,ea. (talk) 16:50, 23 February 2025 (UTC)

Formatting help for Page:JFK Assassination File 104-10105-10271.pdf/2

I am needing some formatting help with Page:JFK Assassination File 104-10105-10271.pdf/2, specifically:

• Justification for "A" and "B" on the page.
• How to correctly justify and add the cursive writing for "1" and "2", with respect to the rest of the text of "1" and "2".

I plan to do a lot of JFK assassination files (WP:JFKFiles), and a lot have various weird justifications as well as written-in cursive writing prior to their public release. I want to learn the best on how to do that. So, if someone would not mind helping fix those and explain what they exactly did for each of those, it would be much appreciated. That way, I can duplicate it in the future for all the other JFK documents...cough–the very next page in that document–cough.

Thank you! WeatherWriter (talk) 19:31, 23 February 2025 (UTC)

@WeatherWriter

For the justification of "A" and "B", I think your best option is Template:Hanging indent, which I have included in the example you provided (you can also obtain the same result with Template:Dent). Note that you will have to adjust the indent amount on a case by case basis though. I also used {{em}} for the spaces near "A" and "B" because hanging indent will automatically justify the text, and will mess with these spaces if they are just conventional "presses of the spacebar". You can use an alternative fixed, non-breaking space if you prefer. You will also want to use Template:Phantom if you are using this hanging indent approach (included in example).

For the justification of "1" and "2", I am not sure where this sits on the style guide. Indentation at the start of a paragraph is rarely reproduced, and I am not sure if this would count as a reasonable exception to maintain these indents. If it were okay, the simplest way would just be to use, e.g. {{em|2}} although you could also use Template:Dent if you were determined to use a template.

For the cursive font, I am not sure what is best. Maybe just Template:Overscript, and just italicize the overscripted text. That should at least keep the cursive near the text where it was written in the original. The other option might be sidenotes, although I realize all the cursive is not necessarily on the side of the documents.

Also, as a final note, to get font sizes larger than "larger", there are additional "xx-" versions of the template. These are preferred, rather than just nesting "larger" multiple times. I have replaced this for the title, but it would be good to do the same in the footer.

Hope this helps, TeysaKarlov (talk) 20:13, 23 February 2025 (UTC)

Someone else made an edit and the way it looks now seems fine to me. Note that we don't have to have a perfectly photographic reproduction of the page, but we should definitely include all semantically-meaningful markup and generally try to match a lot of the style if we can. —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 20:13, 23 February 2025 (UTC)

A good example of something that would be more photographic than typographic would be the change I just made to remove some line breaks that were only on the original page because of the size of the paper itself, not because there was some meaningful reason to make a line break there. Just like how in the subsequent paragraphs, you shouldn't introduce line breaks for all the places where text just wraps around due to the physical dimensions of the medium. Figuring out what is non-meaningful or what is cosmetic and can be reproduced is by nature a value judgement, so there will inevitably be some disagreement. —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 20:20, 23 February 2025 (UTC)

Thank you all! I really appreciated the comments and things I can now research and learn about using! WeatherWriter (talk) 03:40, 24 February 2025 (UTC)

Can we post partially-recovered books?

Hello, I found that the late w:John Tranter published a novel under the CC-BY license entitled Black Gold. I have recovered a third of the book from the Internet Archive and posted it in my userspace. Is there a way to find the remaining chapters? Joofjoof (talk) 23:53, 25 February 2025 (UTC)

You would need to make a case for hosting it here, and get the community to agree. The novel you describe is self-published and is digital-original. That combination of features usually means it would not be hosted on Wikisource (See our policy WS:WWI). --EncycloPetey (talk) 23:59, 25 February 2025 (UTC)

Formatting help with rule and block right

Can someone help me format the page Page:Memo regarding Dismissal Without Prejudice of Prosecution of Mayor Eric Adams.pdf/1. Specifically, I need to get the top bit to be aligned properly and have the rule go across the whole page. So far I've only been able to get one of those to occur at a time. ToxicPea (talk) 00:51, 26 February 2025 (UTC)

I'd also appreciate it if someone could get me a blue doj logo. ToxicPea (talk) 00:53, 26 February 2025 (UTC)

Since the rule is inside the right block, the rule will never clear the image. You would need to either split the right block, or use a format that puts the image into a table, for example. --EncycloPetey (talk) 01:22, 26 February 2025 (UTC)

Is there any way I can split the right block and still have the text aligned properly? I've tried and I can't figure it out. ToxicPea (talk) 01:24, 26 February 2025 (UTC)

Not sure. I also tried splitting the template, but did not find a simple solution. I think you might need to use a table. --EncycloPetey (talk) 02:38, 26 February 2025 (UTC)

Any chance someone would be able to make a template for a rule that could be placed in an alignment block? Or maybe an an alignment block with a rule in it? ToxicPea (talk) 04:09, 26 February 2025 (UTC)

The rule would still be confined to the dimensions of the block, and that's the issue you're facing here. The block's dimensions are being determined by the width required to display the text. The rule then extends to fill that space, and only that space as determined by the text. To give the rule more width, it can't be contained inside that block. --EncycloPetey (talk) 04:39, 26 February 2025 (UTC)

I think I figured out it out. I just put a {{phantom|Office of the Deputy Attorney General}} inside the second block. Now I just need the blue doj logo. ToxicPea (talk) 04:55, 26 February 2025 (UTC)