Wikisource:Scriptorium/Archives/2006-01

Authors who are still in copyright

Is there any reason for us to list authors whose works are in copyright, such as Asimov and Salinger? In the former its just links to WP and WQ. If there is a good reason maybe there should be a template added saying their writings are in copyright and should not be included until they cease to be. Apwoolrich 12:13, 1 January 2006 (UTC)

No. I think we would do well to get rid of those authors. Even if we add copyright info to those pages, people will still add their works, creating more work for us. I think it'd be best to scrap them until their works come out of copyright. (Which, at some point they will; WS might still be around for that :-). )—Zhaladshar ^(Talk) 15:49, 13 January 2006 (UTC)

Done. Apwoolrich 19:39, 13 January 2006 (UTC)

Indexing of books on WS

Is there a policy about book indexing? I have just added Men of Invention and Industry from Project Gutenberg. This version lacks the index pages, but they could be scanned and added, with links to the text. Alternatively is there a book-specific search tool? I know about the one that searches the whole site. Apwoolrich 12:27, 1 January 2006 (UTC)

Ugh, the mathematical tables debate.

I just read over the argument to delete all the Pi to X places, and the consensus seemed to be that we needed only one, the longest one we had, and this seems perfectly in keeping with point 4 of what we include. Yet some people went and deleted all of the pi pages, so now there's no place on here to look it up if I want it. This place was created so people had a place to find texts and data, and a python or c program to calculate it is just making it difficult -- not everyone has a compiler window open and ready to run just to look up a number. Is there really any objection to having one page that has a decimal expansion of Pi, as long as it doesn't turn into a bunch of redundant pages? Just like someone from wikipedia can come here and find the works of Edgar Allen Poe from his article, why shouldn't they be able to come here and find the digits of a number talked about over there? 69.120.246.213 17:11, 1 January 2006 (UTC)

This seems to have been deleted as long ago as last July, before the more recent decision about maths topics. Apwoolrich 20:07, 1 January 2006 (UTC)

Have you checked on the old wikisource? I imagine mathmatical data doen't have any Enlish test in it and it might not have been moved to a language domain.--BirgitteSB 17:17, 2 January 2006 (UTC)

Mathematics is back, including some Pi tables. Apwoolrich 18:44, 4 January 2006 (UTC)

Mathematics will need a re-working, since text of the Pi tables only refers to a decision to delete them in July 2005 and a requect they are not re-added. This has been superceded by more recent decisions as to what WS includes which lists mathematical tables. Apwoolrich 18:55, 4 January 2006 (UTC)

New WikiProject: Bible dictionaries

Hi. I'm new to Wikisource and primarily have started contributing here in order to add public domain Bible dictionaries (mainly because I want to reference them from Wikipedia articles). At the suggestions of a few Wikisorcerers, I've started a WikiProject to help coordinate doing so: Wikisource:WikiProject Bible dictionaries. I'm starting with Easton's Bible Dictionary and hopefully continuing from there. I'd appreciate anyone's help -- particularly if someone can write a bot to take care of most of the drudge work of copying and pasting. Cheers! --Tetraminoe 16:28, 2 January 2006 (UTC)

Adminship documentation

I've begun an initial document pertaining to adminship here. It was inspired by the need to have some guidelines spelled out for requesting administrator status, but I've expanded it to be an overview of the position as a whole. The work in progress page is here, and when it's all been decided upon, I'd like to move it to Wikisource:Adminship.

However, this document is incomplete, especially with respect to "obligations" and "inactive" sections. Also, some more discussion should be made concerning the "becoming an admin" section. Please comment/change/discuss.—Zhaladshar ^(Talk) 20:06, 3 January 2006 (UTC)

Page numbering template

I just added a page numbering template {{Page|x}}. With the following example:

{{Page|5}}

resulting in Page:5.

It's short, sweet, and easy to put into a document. It also adds an effective anchor in-page named Page_#, so one can link to a given page number by saying [[#Page_5]] (for example). To wit: try this link. -- ChristianEdwardGruber 05:07, 6 January 2006 (UTC)

Heh heh... the above example won't really usefully work on this page, because this note is already at the bottom of the page. If the page number reference were earlier, it would help. Right now I've only got one document using it, the Will and Testament of `Abdu'l-Bahá. An example would be like this: Will and Testament of `Abdu'l-Bahá#Page_13.

I'm hoping to have a nice page-number-index, sort of like an alternate TOC, since page numbers are sort of orthogonal to topic, if you're looking up references by page number. Unfortunately, the whole lack of a good solid for loop rather prevents it. The foreach stuff and the loop2 templates and such are nice, but are limited to 150 pages, and so there's no easy way to specify a {{Page Index|1|245}} template. It's more work than it's worth to setup such a page-number-table by hand, just to save someone from using ctrl-f on the browser to find "p. 176". Sigh... I'll keep digging, maybe there's a way. -- ChristianEdwardGruber 05:15, 6 January 2006 (UTC)

If this could be worked on it would be a really useful addition to WS, IMHO, since it would make possible the inclusion of proper indexes to non-fiction texts. Project Gutenberg seems to ignore index pages, but they would be easy enough to scan and add in on WS. Apwoolrich 08:43, 6 January 2006 (UTC)

This could be a help to WS! Especially if we are scanning in encyclopedias, dictionaries, etc., or any work that has an index. This allows us to actually make those indices meaningful. And best yet, these templates aren't conspicuous, so you can still read the work and not be distracted by the page templates.—Zhaladshar ^(Talk) 17:43, 6 January 2006 (UTC)

Yeah, that's what I thought too. The problem is with arbitrary ranges in loop structures in the MediaWiki software. First-class support in media wiki for the quivalent to the old-school:

 for (pageno=$start, pageno < $end, increment($pageno)) { [[#Page_{{$pageno}}|{{$pageno}}]] ) 

or something like that would be sweet. It would allow for very very simple indexes to be expressed simply, but more complex ones could be built for documents that had ranges of different kinds of pages (i-iv,1-245,A.1-B.5 for example).

As it stands currently, I think that static, pre-fab large indexes will be necessary to get this effect. -- ChristianEdwardGruber 19:21, 6 January 2006 (UTC)

You could always file a bug report if you want it that feature to be added to the software. That would give you the feature you wanted. I'm afraid I don't know much about scripting, so I couldn't even begin to comment on whether it's feasible or not, but Brion or another developer would know.—Zhaladshar ^(Talk) 19:32, 6 January 2006 (UTC)

I urge that Brion is approached. If it can be done it would be well worth it. There are a number of biographical texts I wish to get on Wikisource that would be greatly enhanced by such a feature. Apwoolrich 19:55, 6 January 2006 (UTC)

w:User:AzaToth has a really nice codebase under consultation at MetaWiki. It doesn't have loop structures, but it does have properly formulated conditionals and comparators. This is half of the situation, but it's a mediawiki software patch. I think the above loop structures would need to be implemented in the php files, or it would drag out performance. I added the wikipedia Template:Foreach (and related), and created Template:Page index as an example. The problem with that approach is that it lists pages up to 1000, but any given document may not have that many pages. Proper comparators and conditionals would very much help, since each call to Template:Page_link could made conditional in a wrapper template. Ultimately, first-tier support for loop flow-control stuff would be much better, and probably be less of a drag on the server. -- ChristianEdwardGruber 21:35, 6 January 2006 (UTC)

Color Scheme

Please check out Wikisource talk:Template messages for a disscusion of what sort of livery we should use to keep templates appearing on the same page looking consistant. I thought we should hash out there as a guide to future template authors as opposed to getting buried in the archive here.--BirgitteSB 22:07, 6 January 2006 (UTC)

Programming language names

Should I move Conversion of a Gregorian date to an International Fixed Calendar date to 'Conversion of a Gregorian date to an International Fixed Calendar date (Java)'? The source code is written in Java.

Lee Svoboda 00:53, 7 January 2006 (UTC)

Do we have this in anything other than Java, if not then we could probably keep it as is. AllanHainey 12:51, 13 January 2006 (UTC)

I know nothing about source code, but I would say that we should keep it as it is to allow users to add different languages to that page which would do the same thing as the Java code would.—Zhaladshar ^(Talk) 15:51, 13 January 2006 (UTC)

Text Categorisation

I swear I've spent fifteen minutes looking for how to properly categorise various texts, and I've had this problem in the past, so anybody who could categorise Office of Special Counsel Press Release 10.18.2001 for me, it would be much appreciated. Sherurcij 08:51, 7 January 2006 (UTC)

Page integrity

I recently thought again about our whole discussion of protecting "finished" pages. We have mentioned a number of tools for doing this, not all of them classic "page protection." Here is a list of the ones I remember:

• Protect the page. This tool has admins "lock" the page to editing from all non-admins. The tool was originally developed to stop edit wars and vandalism of the main page on Wikipedia. It has obvious advantages, but the main disadvantage is that the vast majority of users can no longer make improvements when directly when they spot the need. Plus you need an admin for it.
• Partial protection. This new Wikipedia tool allows an admin to "partially protect" a finished page so that anons cannot edit it, plus the newest 1% of new users cannot edit it (for a few days). This is good defense against basic vandalism. But it also requires an admin.
• Text templates. In the past I suggested this one: Putting the "actual" text into a template may have advantages not related to the problem at hand, but it may also discourage vandalism by making it a less direct option. Plus, if need be an admin can lock the text in the template without locking the actual page. But it requires extra work to do this.
• Stable version. This is supposed to go live in the software soon, supposedly in the next few months but almost certainly this year. It is meant to assure the validity of Wikipedia articles (so that somebody doesn't call up a recently vandalized article, but instead its "stable" unvandalized version). This could be an even greater Godsend to us than to Wikipedia. Imagine: When an article looks OK, it is declared "stable." The stable version will be the default viewed by users, but corrections can still be made to the "live" version. Wow! This is similar but much better than previous discussions we had regarding "parallel" versions with corrections done manually.
• Rated pages. This software feature is also due soon, and once again it may prove even more valuable to use than to Wikipedia. We can "rate" a page for completeness and errors.

Since there are so many complementary tools, I suggest we stop refering to our policy in this area as Wikisource:Protection policy, but create a new page called Wikisource:Text integrity or something like that, since protection policy is really a subset of the problem, not the whole thing. The page would explain all current and future tools and options for dealing with the problem. Dovi 22:50, 7 January 2006 (UTC)

On second thought, maybe my above comments should just be modified for Wikisource:Text integrity as a list of available tools and policies. That page will of course link to the more specific Wikisource:Protection policy, which will itself have a link to the entire collection of tools. Let me know what you think! Dovi 09:06, 8 January 2006 (UTC)

This seems appropriate to me. Perhaps Wikisource:Protection policy should redirect to that section of Wikisource:Text integrity. —Theo [[User talk:TheoClarke|(Talk) 11:26, 8 January 2006 (UTC)

Finished it up. No, I don't think Wikisource:Protection policy can or should be a redirect, because it deals with much more than just finished pages of texts. Dovi 10:58, 8 January 2006 (UTC)

I'm not sure if anyone is familiar with this, but ThomasV wrote a script that allows admins to place "<protect>" brackets around a text. Anything between these tags are protected from anyone other than sysops editing it. This will keep us from relying on templates while still allowing people to format the page. (I believe the script is now in CVS.) If this catches on (which I personally think is the best idea of any), then we might want to consider rewriting the section on protecting text pages for integrity reasons to this new method.—Zhaladshar ^(Talk) 03:13, 13 January 2006 (UTC)

How does the "stable version" work - Does an admin need to change a live version to default before it will show up for other users. If so wouldn't that mean that dozens of users could spot the same mistake on the default version, go in to fix it & find that its already been fixed?

I am not keen on each page having a template containing the actual text, I think this would just be more hassle than its worth and would also make it almost impossible to find actual (little used) templates in the list of templates. AllanHainey 12:57, 13 January 2006 (UTC)

That sounds like a fascinating tool. The best thing would be if someone could write up a description of it. The idea of Wikisource:Text integrity is that all available tools should be described on it, so a description should be there too.Dovi 16:52, 14 January 2006 (UTC)

Authors and the Go button

Currently, when you type "William Shakespeare" and click "Go", you are told that "No page with that title exists" and invited to create it. Only by looking below at the search results do you see Author:William Shakespeare. What can we do to Go directly to author pages without typing "Author:" before every search?

Options:

1. Create redirects for every author, so that William Shakespeare would redirect to Author:William Shakespeare.

2. Drop the "Author:" prefix, so that Author:William Shakespeare would instead be at William Shakespeare. Category:Authors would still serve to identify authors.

3. Hope that if and when the developers empower us to convert Author: from a pseudo-namespace to a real namespace, we could configure the Go button to check it, so that "William Shakespeare" would match Author:William Shakespeare.

Thoughts? Tim Smith 13:18, 8 January 2006 (UTC)

Here are my comments.

1. The problem with this is that there are numerous, numerous works by authors with titles of authors (either because such works are biographies, analyses of the works of the author, etc.) which would complicate things a bit.

2. There has been much discussion about the "Author:" prefix, and the consensus is that we keep it, partly in reason because of my first point. It's not a bad idea, but probably won't happen.

3. This has the most merit. It won't take more than a second to have a developer turn "Author:" and "Author talk:" into real namespaces. I think, though, that if we just write up Wikisource:Searching, we could help with the fact that people might not understand the naming convention of our author pages. This would give them a resource to figure it out. When I get time (which is about to decrease when school starts up again), I'll work on writing it up.—Zhaladshar ^(Talk) 03:10, 13 January 2006 (UTC)

Removing the "author:" prefix can be done very easy with a robot. I did it for the french subdomain, and I can do it here if requested. so the fact that titles are numerous should not be an obstacle. Please also note that in fr we replaced the tab title "article" with "author" on all author pages, and with "text" on other pages. ThomasV 12:47, 13 January 2006 (UTC)

I think it'd be a bad idea to remove the author: prefix as it identifies instantly what type of page it should be & what the content should be. Without it, for example, we would get confusion & conflicts between Author:Winston Churchill and Winston Churchill. I think an easier solution might to be to put a wee note above the search bar saying "if you want to search for an author write author:". Alternatively it might be possible for the software folk to put a new button on so that if you click it the search bar automatically adds author: and searches.

I am not sure what the distinction is between author: as a 'real namespace' and what we have at the moment, can anyone enlighten me? what functionality would we gain when we get real namespaces?

AllanHainey 13:02, 13 January 2006 (UTC)

Not ever having created new namespaces (or worked extensively on a project that has), the biggest feature I think would be allowing the software to search that namespace. On the "advanced search" feature here, you can select what namespaces you want the software to search for a particular word(s). Since "Author:" is a pseudo-namespace, it's still ultimately in the main article namespace. Giving it its own namespace means we can restrict a search only to any page with the "Author:" prefix, which, as this project grows, might become very beneficial.—Zhaladshar ^(Talk) 15:57, 13 January 2006 (UTC)

Users should not have to read instructions, type a prefix, or click on a special button to conduct a basic search. Typing "William Shakespeare" and pressing Enter should load his author page, not "No page with that title exists". The question is how to make it happen.

For details on namespaces and the forthcoming "namespace manager", see here. Namespaces can be searched by default, but can they work with the Go button as in Option 3 above? If not, we'd have to redirect to them as in Option 1.

For perspective, the French, Spanish, Romanian, and German Wikisources have dropped author prefixes. ThomasV, how does your bot work? Would it move Winston Churchill before renaming Author:Winston Churchill? Tim Smith 05:16, 14 January 2006 (UTC)

my bot removed the Author: prefix from all pages. author pages were moved manually (there were about 300 of them). but I guess it would be possible to perform the 'move' operation automatically as well. pages were moved before the bot was launched, so that no link got broken in the meantime. ThomasV 07:44, 14 January 2006 (UTC)

When it comes to search, you have to be realistic and remember that the search button is probably not the best way to search wikisource. It is slow, often disabled due to servers crackdown, and when it doesn't work there is a message that tells you to use Google instead. This is no coincidence. Google is the search engine that rules the internet. And back in the good old days when there was a single site for all languages, one of the reasons I argued in favor of subdomains was that it would allow us to get rid of these nasty author prefixes. My claim was that doing so would increase the Google ranking of author pages. I believe I was right at that time.

Please visit this link and compare how en.wikisource.org and fr.wikisource.org are ranked. Depending on where you are located, you will see different results. But the overall picture does not change much: fr.wikisource.org is ranked #1 or #2, while #en.wikisource.org is on the 2nd page (I asked people based in us and canada to do the same test).

For this demonstration, I picked an example that was particularly unfair to me: Conan Doyle is an English writer, and he has much more pages on the English Wikisource than on the french site. Therefore, his English author page should have been ranked higher than the French one.

Google ranking depends on many things, but the most important factor is how a page is linked by other pages. This is well known by the people who organize so-called Google-bombs. Google-bombing is a very intellectually-enriching activity, that consists in adding links that look like <a href="your-favorite-ennemy.com">"asshole"</a> to as many pages as you can, so that when a user types "asshole" in Google, the website of your ennemy is likely to show up.

my point is the following: if we remove author prefixe, then wikisource will show up more often in Google, and its traffic will increase. To ignore Google is not reasonable, if you want this site to grow.

ThomasV 09:03, 14 January 2006 (UTC)

I am not too concerned about wikisource's google ratings as I think regardless of the author name searched for the nature of google means that wikipedia pages are going to be higher up the ranking than wikisource. As mostly when people search an author name they are looking for information about that author I think that's fine, especially as a lot of wikipedia pages have automatic links to the authorpage in wikisource. What I am more concerned about is the searchbar on wikisource which could lead someone to think that we don't have any works by William Shakespeare, etc (resulting in them either discounting wikisource as useless or adding works we already have). Is it possible to raise a bug report (sorry I don't know how to do this) to get the search function to always put the author page at the top of the list of found pages & to shoe the author page if there are no other matches. This seems an easier solution than deleting the author:prefix (even if it is currently a de facto prefix rather than a proper namespace). Incidentally is there any concrete ETA on when we're expected to get the new namespaces. AllanHainey 08:23, 16 January 2006 (UTC)

I tried that Google search and numerous pages that resulted were pages deleted after the move. That's the first problem I'd try to get rid of as this will seem that WS no longer has those (people might not realize that they were moved). Doing that same search with "site:en.wikisource.org" put Arthur Conan Doyle's author page right at the very top, which is exactly what we want, no?

Allan, I just tried searches for author names (minus the prefix). I did "arthur conan doyle," "william shakespeare," and "thomas jefferson." All three of them brought up the author page as the first listing. So, if the search bar can't be configured to go to the author page if no other page with the exact title exists, at least the author page is first on top.

About the namespaces. They can happen whenever the community says turn them on. I know in a little while, MediaWiki will have a namespace manager which will allow us to control them ourselves without having to go to Bugzilla to get them turned on. But, again, we can have it happen whenever we want.—Zhaladshar ^(Talk) 18:48, 17 January 2006 (UTC)

I've written a script to find collisions between author pages and pages named after authors. There are 20:

• Alfred Tennyson (author page)
• Andrei Lubensky (author page)
• Bram Stoker (author page)
• Charles Sumner (author page)
• Elizabeth Bishop (author page)
• Euripides (author page)
• Francis Whiting Halsey (author page)
• Fujiwara no Teika (author page)
• Henri Bergson (author page)
• Leonardo da Vinci (author page)
• Lily Loat (author page)
• Peter Kropotkin (author page)
• Ralph Waldo Emerson (author page)
• Robert Baden-Powell (author page)
• Robert Browning (author page)
• Robert Burns (author page)
• Thomas Francis Meagher (author page)
• Virgil (author page)
• William Caxton (author page)
• Winston Churchill (author page)

Of these, all but five—Charles Sumner, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Robert Browning, Robert Burns, and Winston Churchill—are just redirects to author pages. So to drop author prefixes, we would first address the above cases (by deleting the redirects and moving, for example, Robert Browning to Robert Browning (biography)), and then run ThomasV's bot. On the other hand, if we want to create redirects to every author page, 15 out of 742 are already done!

If I've navigated the CVS tree correctly, the Go button calls goResult() here, and then calls getNearMatch() here. Looks like it won't work with namespaces as in Option 3 above. If you're ready to reveal your e-mail address to the world, you can file a bug report and request a new namespace property, "Go by default", analogous to the existing "Search by default", to make the Go button prepend namespace prefixes to search terms. There's a 1455-bug backlog, though—how should we proceed in the meantime? Tim Smith 02:09, 21 January 2006 (UTC)

Update: I've filed a bug report here. The change is apparently pending. Tim Smith 20:41, 23 January 2006 (UTC)

Internal Document Referencing

This note is sort of a continuation of the previous Page Numbering template.

I recently created the {{Tag}} and {{Tag link}} templates, and re-worked the Page and Paragraph templates to use Tag as their underlying implementation. I also create Category:Sectional Referencing Templates to put them in. I moved {{Ref}} and {{Note}} into this category as they really are about the same thing. I'm not sure how well used ref and note are, but they could conceivably be re-implemented using Tag and Tag_link. For now I've left them as-is.

Regardless, this is evolving into a generic referencing template - especially since the tag_link template allows one to add a "basepage" parameter, so one can reference internal page numbers, paragraph numbers, heck bible chapter/verse references on both the same page and other pages. This could allow for seperate index pages, whatever.

An example of current use, using both Page, Paragraph, and Tag is Kitáb-i-Aqdas, which is in progress. It includes four kinds of anchors/references, but doesn't yet use any linking. A big problem is getting nice looking indexes that don't mess about with all the templates. Currently that page has substantial issues with being overrun by templates, and I'm looking for an overall solution. But the internal references are there, and can be seen in the source code. Also the Tag_link template's talk page has instructions now.

Anyway, looking at the Tag and Tag_link, do people have any thoughts about this? Any problem with the direction? Any suggestions? Obviously a small commonly-used concrete implementations of Tag (such as page, paragraph, maybe QnA, Chapter:Verse, Surah:Ayah, etc.) can be adopted and collected here, and then for one-offs, Tag can be used directly. -- ChristianEdwardGruber 17:45, 8 January 2006 (UTC)

This is very promising indeed, and in due course we will need a detailed Help page on how they are used, probably a re-working of Help:Footnotes and endnotes.I am just now working through Men of Invention and Industry coding the references and notes. The next stage after we have all the templates we need codified is packaging them in a manner that editors can readily find them and use them. Apwoolrich 21:08, 8 January 2006 (UTC)

Verse with formatting

It seems that it is not possible to use wikiformatting in verse that use <div class="verse"><pre>. That is probably because we don't want the new line wikisyntax to work. But my question is which is the best way to format verse that has some italic and bold text? --82.212.68.237 09:52, 13 January 2006 (UTC)

You're not going to be able to use the div class. You'll have to do all the spacing manually (either using the indenting colons or use &nbsp;). Until the developers (if ever), allow for that kind of formatting in the <pre> tags, we have to take the uglier looking approach.—Zhaladshar ^(Talk) 16:00, 13 January 2006 (UTC)

Questions on wiki code

Hello, Can someone help me with how I would write the code for a few changes I'm contemplating for the speeches portal. What I've got in mind is:

1. A link which works like Special:Random but will only randomly display pages which are in Category:Speeches or its sub-categories.
2. A way to display thumbnail pictures (possibly with a link below them) so that if you click on the picture (or the link) it will take you to a particular page (Wikisource:Speeches by United States Presidents &Wikisource:Speeches by British Prime Ministers with thumbnails of a member of each of those groups of worthies).

Thanks AllanHainey 13:10, 13 January 2006 (UTC)

• 1: I guess you'll need to write an extensino for that.
• 2: Not sure to understand what you want, so my answer might be offtopic. If you click on a picture it takes you on the image page, in the Image: namespace. however you can write a redirect in that page. this is the case here: .

ThomasV 13:43, 13 January 2006 (UTC)

I'm also not quite sure about the second point, but you can also write a caption which links to the author page (that way we don't make a redirect of the "Image:" page, if you would rather have people see the actual image information). The first point I think you'll have to write something that does it (or ask someone to do it). Maybe a bug which would allow people to customize the use of the Random page feature (such as a link to [[Special:Randompage/Category:Speeches]] would produce a random page from Category:Speeches).—Zhaladshar ^(Talk) 16:04, 13 January 2006 (UTC)

Thanks, On point 2 I was looking to link the image itself to a particular page, I'll look into the image redirects but I may just go for a link underneath the picture.

On point 1 I thought that Zhaladshar's link worked as it took me to Thomas Jeffersons Inaugural speech, but it was just coincidence as my 2nd & 3rd attempts just went to random random pages. AllanHainey 16:45, 13 January 2006 (UTC)

Haha! I didn't even notice that it made a blue link (or that it actually worked). But that would be a suggestion. I've added <nowiki> tags to it to keep it from turning into a real link.—Zhaladshar ^(Talk) 17:13, 13 January 2006 (UTC)

Patrolled edits

From Meta:

A new feature in MediaWiki 1.4 is Patrolled edits. After clicking 'diff' on a change in Special:Recentchanges, you may see a link at the bottom, similar to the one below.

[ Mark this article as patrolled ]

Patrolling edits is a way to verify that it is a good edit, and to collaborate on filtering spam and vandalism. If you're combing through the recent changes list, and you look at an article that is good, you can mark it as "patrolled" so that other users know that it is good.

Policies may vary among projects whether an article can be marked as patrolled if it is not obvious vandalism, or only when the correctness has been verified.

In the Recent Changes, an unpatrolled edit looks like this:

• (diff) (hist) . . ! Help:Patrolled edit; 23:28 . . Astronouth7303 (Talk)

While a patrolled one would be like this:

• (diff) (hist) . . Help:Patrolled edit; 23:28 . . Astronouth7303 (Talk)

I propose that we enable this feature as that way those of us who check Recent Changes will not keep checking the same articles. I was wondering if anyone had any objections to implementing it and who else would be interested in taking part in the patrol? I believe this can be implemented for everyone or just administrators, however we chose. I don't know if a log is kept of who marks an edit as patrolled, which could be an issue if a vandal could "patrol" their own edit. So if anyone has used this in another project, please share your experience.--BirgitteSB 00:25, 14 January 2006 (UTC)

Sounds good, but what's to stop someone from sock-puppetting their own article as "patrolled"? -- Christian Edward Gruber 02:38, 14 January 2006 (UTC)

If there is a partroled edits log (and I don't know) checking that out for any new "patrollers" could easily be done. Especially as few edits as there are currently. Otherwise patrolling could be limited to users with adminstrator privilages. That is one reason I was wondering who would be interested in patroling. It may only be those are admins anyway.--12.216.251.5 15:43, 14 January 2006 (UTC)This was me I keep for getting I am not at home--BirgitteSB 17:03, 14 January 2006 (UTC)

Is there any against us implementing this? Or anyone who like to use it that doesn't have admin privilages as I can't find out if there is a log or not.--BirgitteSB 22:04, 16 January 2006 (UTC)

I would prefer at first that patrolling be limited to administrators (maybe later extend it to other trusted users). But I'm all for implementing this feature here.—Zhaladshar ^(Talk) 18:28, 17 January 2006 (UTC)

New special character feature

Has anyone tried the new special character editing feature on Wikipedia? Instead of one edit bar for all diacritics, there is a drop-down menu for different languages. There is also one for Tex, and another with some common templates. It seems to load much faster than the old one.I strongly urge we adopt this on WS. When we have our editing templates sorted out maybe we could have an edit bar for them added to the menu. Apwoolrich 16:05, 15 January 2006 (UTC)

That's a very nice feature! I strongly urge we implement this on WS. That way, the symbols won't be so small because not all will be displayed at once. And WS can customize it for a general list of templates, as well. Thanks for pointing this out.—Zhaladshar ^(Talk) 19:52, 15 January 2006 (UTC)

I agree this is very nice we should implement it --BirgitteSB 22:43, 15 January 2006 (UTC)

How is it done? Who does it? I will contact the Mediawiki folk and ask if they can add some of the extra characters we have like ⅓ ⅔ ; ⅛ ⅜ ⅝ ⅞ ; ∑ etc. Once its done I will rewrite the various Help: pages. Apwoolrich 21:05, 15 January 2006 (UTC)

Vulgar fractions etc have been added to the Text/maths menu by the Mediawiki folk. There is quite a bit of discussion going on there about features and problems, so I suggest we wait for the system to become stable before we do anything about implementing it. Apwoolrich 08:58, 16 January 2006 (UTC)

Agreed, though I really do like it so far. What would be really nice is to be able to have your own custom menu added as an option, in case you use a particular set of characters, to avoid having to flip between them. For example, I do Baha'i texts and articles, and we use a particular transliteration scheme which includes á and í from latin, but also includes ḍ from indo-european. It's not a common combo, and there's very few words transliterated and only one that uses the ḍ, but the flexibility would be very nice. -- Christian Edward Gruber 21:20, 16 January 2006 (UTC)

Apwoolrich: you do not want to ask the mediawiki folks to do that for you (unless you know too well what a polite answer is). All you need is to edit Mediawiki:Edittools. Look here for an example ThomasV 21:42, 16 January 2006 (UTC)

What are the problems with the system? Or where can I go to read up on it?—Zhaladshar ^(Talk) 18:34, 17 January 2006 (UTC)

Here [1]Apwoolrich 00:01, 18 January 2006 (UTC)

New vote

please see here: oldwikisource:Wikisource:Vote on enabling the ProtectSection extension

Babel

The Babel resources seem to be just getting off the ground here (previous link merely directs people to Wikipedia, for example). I've done some work in this area. Please see Wikisource talk:Babel and discuss there. Thanks. - dcljr 03:31, 17 January 2006 (UTC)

Articles, project pages, and United Nations resolutions

I am somewhat confused of whether the index page of the United Nations Security Council Resolutions should be an "article" not prefixing "Wikisource:" or a "project page" prefixing "Wikisource:". I would like to get some answers so I can prepare to add an index page for the United Nations General Assembly Resolutions not only here but also at French and Chinese Wikisource in a uniform page nature.

In addition, would you prefer "UN General Assembly Resolution" or "United Nations General Assembly Resolution"? As the words "UN Security Council Resolution" are widely used, it is probably too late to move more than a thousand pages without taking excessive time.--Jusjih 08:25, 17 January 2006 (UTC)

My opinion is that since the index page lists the entire collection of UN resolutions (very similar to our Portal:Speeches page which lists our collection of speeches) that we leave it as a "Wikisource:" page (maybe create a redirect for UN Security Council Resolutions to Wikisource:UN Security Council Resolutions). I don't care one way or the other about the titles for the General Assembly resolutions; "UN" or "United Nations" is equally fine (so long as every page uses it). We can always change the names using Wolfbot (or another user's bot) if we need to later on, so we don't need to worry about it being to late to change the titles.—Zhaladshar ^(Talk) 18:18, 17 January 2006 (UTC)

I feel that if the index is a copy of an index published by the UN then it should be an article in regular namespace. If it is a list compiled by editors at WS it needs to be in the Wikisource namespace.--BirgitteSB 21:56, 17 January 2006 (UTC)

Thank you for your comments. The page here is first complied by editors here. I have tried to incorporate the index published by the UN. The UN web site sometimes indexes its resolutions by listing latest ones on the top. At French and Chinese Wikisource, I have added the UN indexes and modified them so the earliest ones are always on top and internal links are added. Does changing the order make the page a project page instead of an article?--Jusjih 10:37, 18 January 2006 (UTC)

I don't think just changing the format would be copyrightable so if otherwise matches the published UN index it should be in the article space with the correct copuyright tag. After looking at the index, I noticed there are editorial comments about what the resolution concerns. If those are not in the UN's published index we should keep it in the Wikisource space. --BirgitteSB 12:53, 18 January 2006 (UTC)

At this time, Wikisource:UN Security Council Resolutions should stay as project page. After I incorporate the UN web site info, I will reconsider a page move then. The French and Chinese pages that I have prepared are now articles, no longer project pages.--Jusjih 23:23, 18 January 2006 (UTC)

I just found commons:Category:Resolutions of the United Nations with 2 images of UN General Assembly resolutions dated almost 60 years ago with a claim that these images are ineligible for copyright and therefore in the public domain, because it consists entirely of information that is common property and contains no original authorship. I wonder if that claim is truly valid.--Jusjih 11:01, 22 January 2006 (UTC)

bilingual extension

The DoubleWiki extension was just enabled by Brion! click on the ⇔ symbols near interlanguage links in order to see it.

Many thanks to all those who helped me getting this through!

ThomasV 20:23, 17 January 2006 (UTC)

Thanks a bunch for writing this, Thomas! But how do we get the double arrow symbol to show up?—Zhaladshar ^(Talk) 20:27, 17 January 2006 (UTC)

it does show up near interlanguage links in all pages of the main namespace. if it doesn't, click reload. it is possible to decide more finely which pages should have it, of course. ThomasV 20:35, 17 January 2006 (UTC)

Oh, haha! That was stupid of me. Got it to work.—Zhaladshar ^(Talk) 20:39, 17 January 2006 (UTC)

texts are matched based on their paragraph structure. of course, this will require some adaptation, and some coordination between subdomains. Here is an example where both texts match perfectly: http://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/Criton?match=el ThomasV 20:49, 17 January 2006 (UTC)

Why is it that pages don't automatically load with the double arrow feature? Even after clearing my cache on The Prince and going to the page again, I had to hit a refresh for the arrows to show. Is this supposed to be how it works, or is it a small bug?—Zhaladshar ^(Talk) 22:19, 17 January 2006 (UTC)

there are two caches: yours and the cache of wikisource. yours is cleared with reload. the other one might need to be cleared with "?action=purge". ThomasV 22:22, 17 January 2006 (UTC)

Ah. I keep forgetting about that one. Thanks.—Zhaladshar ^(Talk) 22:24, 17 January 2006 (UTC)

I thought I new how to purge the cache, but it seems I'm wrong. I thought all you had to do was go to [2] to do it, but nothing is still happening.—Zhaladshar ^(Talk) 22:27, 17 January 2006 (UTC)

I do see arrows with The Prince. and I did see them already when you posted your previous message. if you do not see them, well, there must be a problem with your browser. ThomasV 23:21, 17 January 2006 (UTC)

Hm, switching to FireFox lets them show up right away. I wonder what IE's problem is...—Zhaladshar ^(Talk) 03:06, 18 January 2006 (UTC)

I added some brief explanations on how to use it: oldwikisource:Wikisource:DoubleWiki Extension. ThomasV 11:05, 18 January 2006 (UTC)