Wikisource:News/2013-11

One million pages!

On 29 October English Wikisource reached the point of one million content pages.

There is some disagreement about which page was the millionth: it was either Wilkinson, George Howard (DNB12) or Will, John Shiress (DNB12). Both were created by Charles Matthews and both are entries from the 1912 supplement to the Dictionary of National Biography. Wilkinson (1833–1907) was bishop of Truro and of St. Andrews. Will (1840–1910) was a legal writer

French Wikisource reached this point just over seventeen months ago on 10 May 2012. That subdomain now has over 1,426,000 content pages and may reach the next major milestone, 1.5 million, soon. The next subdomain behind English is German, which currently has almost 312,000 pages. There is an element of error in comparing subdomains as each can have different definitions of a content page.

Echo deployed

Echo logo

Notifications were deployed on Wikisource on 22 October, via a tool called Echo. Notifications have been active for a while on some our sister projects, such as Wikipedia and Wikivoyage; Wikisource was part of the most recent "phase 5" deployment. The final few sites will have notifications in place by the end of the year.

Echo is an engagement tool designed to improve and expand on the existing notification systems. The most obvious change to many users will be the talk page notification. When a message has been left on a user's talk page, they will no longer see the familiar orange bar across the top of the screen. Now the notification counter (between the userpage and talk link at the top right) will be incremented and a small message will sit next to it.

Other notifications range from thanking users for individual edits to information about the user's name being wikilinked anywhere on the project. The most likely notifications to be used are:

Talk page messages
Page links (made to pages the user created)
Mentions (wikilinked username)
Edit reverts (another user has undone the user's edit)
Thanks (another user has thanked the user for an edit)
Changes to user rights

New, improved search function

The experimental Cirrus Search extension, which implements ElasticSearch for MediaWiki, is now the default search function on English Wikisource.

The main difference Wikisourcers may notice is that the search function will now return hits in transcluded text. The old search function did not recognise transclusions from the Page namespace, meaning that 27% of the project's best work was inaccessible for searches, unless someone were to go out to Google, or another search engine, and search the site from there.

Several projects are now running with Cirrus Search as default, although English Wikisource and Catalan Wikipedia appear to be the largest such projects. Other Wikisources with the extension are Anglo-Saxon (Old English) and Haitian.

Wikidata deployment scheduled

Wikidata is scheduled to be able to support links to Wikisource pages on 13 January 2014. This will allow Wikidata to handle interwiki links between Wikisource's different language subdomains. As with previous deployments, the ability to access Wikidata properties from Wikisource will be added in a later, as yet unscheduled, Phase II. Currently Wikidata supports our sister projects Wikipedia and Wikivoyage.

Private data leak

On 1 October, the Wikimedia Foundation learned of a security issue in Wikimedia LabsDB that may have compromised thousands of users' private data, including passwords and e-mail addresses. The Foundation resolved the bug within 15 minutes of the report and there is no indication that any information was actually leaked but they recommend a change of password just to be sure.

This affects approximately 37,000 users across Wikimedia and the bug appears to have been in place from 29 May 2013 to 1 October 2013. Only users from thirty select projects were directly affected, mostly Wikivoyages, but as many users have global accounts across Wikimedia, many users from other projects may have beenaffected as well.

The projects affected were:

14 Wikivoyages (English, French, Dutch, German, Greek, Hebrew, Italian, Spanish, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Swedish & Ukranian)
3 Wikisources (Assamese, Belarusian & Gujurati)
3 Wikipedias (Lezghian, Minangkabau & Tuvinian)
2 Wikiversities (Korean & Slovene)
1 Wikiquote (Sanskrit)
1 Wiktionary (Venetian)
6 ancillary projects and databases (loginwiki, votewiki, Wikidata, Test Wikidata, Wikimania 2013 & Wikimania 2014)

October report for the Wikisource vision development and online survey

The original report is on the Wikimedia blog

With the grant period for the Wikisource strategic vision process reaching its conclusion, we would like to make two major announcements. We’re happy to introduce the open survey for Wikisource contributors and supporters (translated by volunteer community members into 11 languages). The survey is a great way for the community to voice its opinion regarding Wikisource and its future. We hope you will spend 10 minutes filling it out. It’s worth it.

The second announcement is that Aubrey and Micru, will continue our volunteering efforts to kick-start the Wikisource User Group for one more month. Except for the final name (pending approval from the Wikimedia Foundation legal team), all necessary steps have been taken to assure that all Wikisourcerors can use this association to find and shape development priorities, and as a way to have international coordination.

We attended Wikimania and Google Summer of Code projects. The Wikimania days were as hectic as they were productive. Aubrey participated in the Open Access panel, and presented Wikisource as a positive tool for the scientific community, provided that Wikisource users possess a desire to support digital-born documents. Micru participated in several discussions about how Wikidata can support bibliographic information and how it can all come together with external organizations.

With regards to the Google Summer of Code projects, you can read the final reports from the grantees that worked hard during the summer months on projects that can be used for Wikisource:

David Cuenca (User:Micru)
Andrea Zanni (User:Aubrey)

Featured text for November 2013

"The Laws of Hammurabi, King of Babylonia" (1903) by H. Otto Sommer, translating the ancient Akkadian work of Hammurabi, sixth king of Babylonia.

This is the first translation of the Hammurabi's code made into English, and only the third to be made following the its discovery by modern archaeologists. Prior to Sommer's translation it only existed in French and German among modern languages. The Laws of Hammurabi were written circa 1772 BC, in the Middle Bronze Age. They are one of the oldest deciphered writings of significant length in the world and the longest from the Old Babylonian period. The entire legal code is made up of 282 enumerated laws, here rendered into legal terminology by attorney William Earl Ambrose, almost half of which concerns contract law and a third concerns family law. It contains very early examples of familiar legal concepts, such as the presumption of innocence and both parties presenting evidence. This translation is accompanied by detailed photographs of the entire original Akkadian text of the laws for those who can read cuneiform.

The ruins of Susa now being excavated by the distinguished explorer M. de Morgan have already yielded important results. He was led to undertake the excavation of ancient Susa from inscriptions found in the ruins of Babylon, from which he learned that many of the most important monuments of the Babylonian kings had been carried, as trophies of war by the Elamite kings, to their capital, Susa. When he left Egypt in 1888 it was for the purpose of recovering from the ruins of Susa these monuments. He had not been long at work in Susa before he found the stele of Narâm-Sin c. 3,800 B.C., which showed a high state of art in the Tigro-Euphrates valley nearly 6,000 years ago. This discovery was rapidly followed by others. The most important of which is the stele of Hammurabi, upon which was engraved his code of laws, c. 2,250 B.C.

Two translations of this code have been made, one into French by Scheil, the assyriologist of the French Expedition to Persia, of which M. de Morgan is the director, and the other into German by Dr. Hugo Winckler. The following translation is from the latter by Dr. H. Otto Sommer and construed into legal phraseology by William Earl Ambrose, Esq.

This code is the oldest collection of public laws that has yet been discovered. It is a reflection of the social conditions existing in Babylonia 4,000 years ago. The jurist of to-day will recognize in it most of the fundamental principles on which our social legislation is based.

Collaborations for November 2013

For Proofread of the Month, November is validation month. Instead of the normal collaborative transcribing of selected works, this month will involve users checking and confirming transcriptions that already exist, completing the proofreading process.

The Maintenance of the Month task for November 2013 is Undated works. The aim is to fill in the year = parameter of the {{header}} template of every Wikisource work.

Administrator confirmations

An administrator was confirmed in October 2013:

Cirt (talk | contributions)

5 administrators will have their confirmation discussion in November 2013:

Htonl, who has universal support to date, needs nine more votes before he is granted CheckUser responsibilities. Wikisource currently has only two active users with this power.

Milestones

In addition to English Wikisource's one million text units: On 21 October, the Slovak Wikisource reached the size of 1,000 total pages, while four days later on 25 October, the Dutch Wikisource reached 10,000 total pages. Earlier in the month, on 9 October, Romanian Wikisource recorded its 10,000th Wikisourcer.