Wikisource:Scriptorium/Archives/2015-11

BOT approval requests

request for bot flag on account BD2412bot

• BD2412bot (talk · contribs · deleted contribs · logs · block user · block log · SUL)

Billinghurst has pointed out that I sometimes flood recent changes with AWB mass fixes of common scannos and formatting errors (for example, changing scannos of "Enghsh" to "English" throughout the project). I would therefore like to raise the bot flag over my bot account, User:BD2412bot, which I currently use on Wikipedia for disambiguation tasks. Cheers! BD2412 T 18:16, 19 September 2015 (UTC)

A couple of questions: as BD2412bot has been inactive here, and you have a sysop elevation request pending for your "normal" BD2412 user-id; would it make more sense for you to await confirmation of the latter (which would have the side-effect of granting BD2412 the flood flag which if used appropriately would not otherwise need you to relearn your habits either)? On the other hand are you introducing some new automated service best corralled under a separate user-id? In short are you being pushed into requesting an attribute you do not really need? AuFCL (talk) 21:51, 19 September 2015 (UTC)

To be clear, I would like to use AWB in bot mode under the BD2412bot account, as I do on Wikipedia. I would like to be able to create the list of fixes to be made, which may be in the thousands or tens of thousands, click "start", and leave AWB to do the work, rather than sitting and clicking on the mouse thousands of times. Whether I do this as BD2412 or BD2412bot is of little significance, but if I make bot edits under the bot account, it will immediately be apparent from the account editing that these are being done as automated edits. BD2412 T 22:06, 19 September 2015 (UTC)

What you might not realize is if you secure the admin bit, Wikisource allows you to turn the BOT "flood flag" on or off on that account as needed. It was decided this ability would be more useful as well more secure awhile ago primarily because it allows such bulk editing (as well as normal manual editing) to be "recorded" under a single account rather than splitting them across two accounts.

Unlike other projects, we are rather stingy when it comes to handing out the BOT flag -- we'd rather keep the number of fully flagged bots to a minimum in short. Why don't you see if toggling that bit under your normal (soon-to-be-sysop) account is viable approach before asking for "more" just because that's how its being managed elsewhere. -- George Orwell III (talk) 22:54, 19 September 2015 (UTC)

 Support—thank you for the clarification. So if this is any use... AuFCL (talk) 22:09, 19 September 2015 (UTC)

Comment: I am in general in favour of bot tasks, but they should try to concentrate changes per page to a reasonable level (i.e. not thousands of edits for a single change and then another run for another trivial change affecting the same bulk of pages and so on).— Mpaa (talk) 22:58, 19 September 2015 (UTC)

I do try to address groups of common issues. I have a script for Popular Science, for example, that addresses about 50 recurring errors that I have found there (for example, "wliere" for "where", "tvvo" for "two", "coUect" for "collect", "prcsently" for "presently", and "written bv the" for "written by the", and "they aiso" for "they also"). My philosophy on the matter is that it is best to sweep up as many of these as possible in a single run - but also that the ultimate goal is to get these pages fixed up. Even if an edit fixes only a single error on a particular page, it is better than leaving the error unfixed, and saves the next editor the time of making that particular fix. BD2412 T 01:14, 20 September 2015 (UTC)

I'm just fearful there will be a return to the now deprecated practice of Page: creation for the sake of bot run scan corrections afterward -- ultimately followed by weeks, months if not years of no action along the lines of actual proofreading taking place in the end. Is it safe to say you're going to focus on working the stuff that already exists on en.WS (or has a high level of timely proofreading participation taking place soon afterwards) and not go about creating stuff just so your bot has "something to correct" between your own personal proofreading interests of the moment? -- George Orwell III (talk) 03:00, 20 September 2015 (UTC)

I see no need for that at all. There are already countless pages that have been created on this project that benefit from such attention, some as part of works that span tens of thousands of pages. I would add, as a side note, that in the process of searching for these kinds of errors, I have occasionally found them even in works that were ostensibly already proofread and validated. BD2412 T 03:10, 20 September 2015 (UTC)

But isn't that precisely what you've been doing? I came back to Index:The Real Thing (New York & London, Macmillan & Co., 1893).djvu a few days ago to find all the pages had been created as raw OCR and then some of them hit with a series of bot run scan corrections. For example: [1]. I share George's concerns on this point. Are you saying that you will stop doing it? Hesperian 09:00, 20 September 2015 (UTC)

 Support OK then, my other concerns are minor compared to that one. I agree - there are plenty of existing works that fall into the same series of publications (CFR Title 3, Statutes at Large, etc.) that would benefit from "reoccurring", content specific scan corrections.

Plus I much'd rather see a library of AWB work-specific correction files duplicated/archived somewhere than the "singular" library for the script intensive mentioned below. I think there would be a higher chance of wider-use as well as greater refinements if the 'library of corrections' were built using changeable AWB files. -- George Orwell III (talk) 03:40, 20 September 2015 (UTC)

•  Support the ability to build a bot that replaces unambiguous spelling mistakes. The user has a history of successfully running a similar process for the bot xwiki. As Mpaa says we should be looking to consolidate scan <-> typo fixes into one edit, so I would see this as part of a "scan/typo library".

  Further the building of this library of typos leads us to building a better AWB genfixes library as AutoWikiBrowser looks to a more modular, per wiki, setup. [Well I am driving such a push <g>] I will also note that Pathoschild is pressing forward with updates to TemplateScript that should allow for the similar construction and application of typos, so the library will be a good thing. — billinghurst sDrewth 02:24, 20 September 2015 (UTC)

Re the comment about the local and temporary bot rights for the base account, I see that as a signficantly lesser position as we are talking about a bot tool specifically, that does not require other rights to undertake the tasks. If the roles are mixed it becomes significantly harder to identify the typos as they are rolled into the normal edits, compared with typos specifically managed by a bot. The local account pseudo-bot right was generated to allow for admin type actions to be taken (moves without redirect, edit through protections, etc.) without the need for the creation of a separate bot account where such a temporary allocation is needed. Here we are talking about 000s or 0000s of edits and it is more appropriate to have a specific bot account for such. — billinghurst sDrewth 02:24, 20 September 2015 (UTC)

Comment: I am divided between the attraction of this concept and concern that minor edit-wars could result from the bot "correcting" a human legitimately reproducing an effect observed in the corresponding scan (e.g. upside down "n"s and "u"s do crop up occasionally.) Both parties would be correct yet possibly blind to the considerations of the other. If this proposal be advanced can the bot be weighted to correct only unproofed pages and perhaps only raise notifications outside of Page: space or pages there with "Proofread" and above status?

And how do you anticipate the "pool of standard corrections" be managed: in particular who may contribute to it and how? AuFCL (talk) 02:52, 20 September 2015 (UTC)

Points well taken, Billinghurst. I'd love to see some sort of standard library of scan errors so that corrective bots or scripts can be run against works -- it makes complete and total sense to establish that. Yet readily sharing that ability so it trickles down to the non script fluent population from those who have been practicing such things for some time now has never been free flowing affair around here so I'm not inclined to see any net positive general benefit resulting from adding another to that divide [all things being equal that is]. -- George Orwell III (talk) 03:00, 20 September 2015 (UTC)

@AuFCL, There is a distinct difference between the quality of common typos (and even eye dialect spellings) and common scannos. No one intentionally types "coUect" when they mean to type "collect". I should also specify that my scripts are specific to the work. For example, I have gone through dozens of pages of works like Popular Science and the Federal Reporter to find common recurring scannos for those works (each of them being a collection of tens of thousands of pages). Consequently, I have a separate AWB file for each of them, with common errors unique to the set (for example, headnotes reading "FEDERAL BEPORTER"). I plan to continue exactly this practice, which minimizes the likelihood of running into false positives. It is vanishingly unlikely that a misspelling will appear as a scanno in the kind of work that is not usually given to fanciful usage, and appear as an intentional misuse elsewhere in the same work. BD2412 T 03:07, 20 September 2015 (UTC)

@AuFCL: I would think that the vast amount of bot typo work is only on non-proofread works, and I would feel that such a limitation for typo-fixing by a bot is entirely preferable and consistent with our approach of "people proofread", not bots. It should not be a hard imposition to limit such bot edits with AWB to such pages, and have a human check on such edits on proofread and validated pages. Re upside-down n and similar characters, be wary as we have demonstrated that djvu production is known to change characters, including to invert an n (covered in this pages archives in 2008-9 somewhere) in some work by Hesperian and Cygnis; unexpected but true. — billinghurst sDrewth 06:56, 20 September 2015 (UTC)

@George Orwell III: building a library of changes and then how we may wish to implement such things are indeed different things, and I believe such an implementation is a different conversation. I commented more on the opportunity that is presented and when that reality comes closer, then it will be a good conversation to discuss risks versus benefits, and how we manage the former. One immediate benefit that I see now of a library of changes is that we have a greater opportunity to visually inspect know what is proposed and will be better able to manage as a community. Things in the open and known can be discussed, and that has to be beneficial. — billinghurst sDrewth 06:56, 20 September 2015 (UTC)

Newbie here; forgive my intrusion. Small study using "govemment". There are 51 articles, 81 occurrences. Author=1 (probably from a link with an article), validated=6, proofread=51 (20 in one article), to be proofread=6, portal type=4, independent (such as Executive Order, Obama letter, etc)=13. Restricting based on status may not be a good thing. Oh, also, "thc" for the word "the":183 articles; although there are a few with probable valid initials of THC meaning something. The smallest words seem to be problem children. Although the discussion is centred around thousands of any one incorrect word, there is definitely a group of lesser-occurring incorrect words that should not be forgotten. Humbug26 (talk) 19:07, 20 September 2015 (UTC)

@BD2412: I thought it was agreed to try to consolidate changes as much as possible, see [2], [3].— Mpaa (talk) 21:38, 26 October 2015 (UTC)

@Mpaa: That was, so far as I understand, for running AWB as a bot, not for running AWB manually. In this case, in particular, I didn't know that this change needed to be made universally until I was in the process of trying to make other changes for which this formatting inconsistency was a hindrance. The spacing around the em-dashes needed to be made uniform before other processing of em-dashes can be undertaken, and I'm still not sure how to carry out other processing that is needed because there are some places where em-dashes need to be overridden by the template used to display information about the quotes, and some places where they occur in the quotes themselves, and need to be left alone. In short, this formatting is a necessary preliminary step, but the next step still requires some work. BD2412 T 13:16, 27 October 2015 (UTC)

My comment would be the same, regardless of carrying out a given action with or without bot rights. The net result is exactly the same in both cases (except for a small b beside a change). My advice in such cases where an "all-changes-in-on-step" approach is tricky would be the following: a) download offline the whole work in a single file. b) use whatever editor with macros, or scripts in any language, etc to clean-up your file offline; c) when you are quite happy with the result, make a bulk upload. The final result would be the same, with less clutter and number of changes. Pywikibot has a lot of built-in tools that support this flow (or they can easily extended if you have some fluency in python). I am sure there are other frameworks in other languages that do the same.— Mpaa (talk) 18:26, 27 October 2015 (UTC)

I really don't see the point. No matter how satisfied I may be with the results of doing that, with work of hundreds and hundreds of pages, there will still be issues that occur over dozens of those pages that will not be discovered until editing is largely done. It is a far greater inconvenience from the editing point of view to go through the downloading and uploading process, particularly since I use AWB at the same time as a faster page-opener to make one-time page-specific edits that are not part of any script. BD2412 T 19:50, 27 October 2015 (UTC)

If you think changing a space at a time over thousand of pages is worthwhile and make sense, do as you wish ... I do not know what else can I say ...— Mpaa (talk) 20:14, 27 October 2015 (UTC)

What thousands of pages? That run of edits was about 150 pages, with other changes and adjustments being made as it went. It turned out that I also needed to make a change to the template, and to immediately adjust some uses of the template to make everything else intelligible. The changes are neither rote nor uniform. BD2412 T 20:54, 27 October 2015 (UTC)

Obviously I cannot get my point through, so I give up.— Mpaa (talk) 21:35, 27 October 2015 (UTC)

@Mpaa: I get your point, but it is not relevant to this discussion. I have already said that I do not intend to bot-edit in the same way that I manually edit. If you have a dispute about my manual editing practices, please refactor the above line of inquiry and take that up on my talk page. BD2412 T 13:20, 28 October 2015 (UTC)

• Oppose: the intended purpose is not clearly defined, or where it has been can already be done in a better way. And a more cautious one, I presumed that a scan was used to verify the edits, that is also unclear. Some concerns raised above do not seem to have been understood and addressed. The advice given by Mpaa is a more productive path, requiring much less time and edits, and doesn't require a bot. CYGNIS INSIGNIS 23:21, 27 October 2015 (UTC)
  • Your objection is noted, but please bear in mind that the way that I have proposed to use the bot is different from the way that I use AWB to edit manually, which is the methodology to which Mpaa has objected. However, I would also like to point out that having used AWB for the past decade for a wide variety of editing tasks, I have developed a number of techniques that yield very effective editing results. I would think that our most significant metric would be the completion of correctly edited works. That is what I accomplish, and that is why I would like additional tools. BD2412 T 00:22, 28 October 2015 (UTC)

Other discussions

m:Grants:PEG/WCUG Wikisource/Wikisource Conference 2015

Hi to all. I am not sure how many people subscribe to the mailing list Wikisource-L, where User:Aubrey and User:Micru have been put together a proposal for an internal Wikisource-specific conference. The proposal for the conference is located at m:Grants:PEG/WCUG Wikisource/Wikisource Conference 2015 and it would be great if you could spend a few minutes reading through its content. Aubrey and Micru have already successfully instituted a Wikisource Community User Group which the responsible part of WMF has agreed should be a permanent fixture of Wikimedia.

Anyway, the proposal exists, it is available to have your thoughts and endorsement if you so choose to give it. You might even wish to consider if it proceeds to seek some funding to attend from your local WMF chapter if it exists, or be part of your planning to see a part of Europe that you haven't seen before. — billinghurst sDrewth 14:22, 1 September 2015 (UTC)

Conference is a go; get your registration in [4] Slowking4♡ Richard Arthur Norton's revenge 03:26, 2 October 2015 (UTC)

Oxford Transcribe-a-thon, 12 October

As part of the Ada Lovelace Bicentennial, I'm leading for Wikimedia events at Oxford University in my capacity as Bodleian Libraries' Wikimedian In Residence. The first of these, on the afternoon of Monday 12th October (2pm onwards BST), is a Wikisource Transcribe-a-thon. I will be giving users an introduction to Wikisource, some of them being new to wikis and some having Wikipedia experience. We will be transcribing texts under the theme of Women In Science: probably works by and about Author:Mary Fairfax Somerville and Author:Florence Nightingale though I'm open to further suggestions. I'm announcing this to give advance notice to other users of the site: there will be a group of new accounts and tentative new users, but they will be supervised and we will clean up any mess. I will make a project page listing the involved users. MartinPoulter (talk) 13:02, 24 September 2015 (UTC)

Who holds Ada Lovelace's papers on logic and computability? ShakespeareFan00 (talk) 19:11, 24 September 2015 (UTC)

Fantastic news, and thanks for the advance notice.

• Confirming the time and that you will be operating in summer time! (it is late for BST).
• do we need to get works uploaded to Commons and prepared ahead of time for you, happy to do that. Though you could be showing all of that stuff with Tools like IA-upload.
• please do show them our export to .epub
• whatever feedback — positive and negative — and reflections on their expectations — met or not met — that you can get from new users would be brilliant to us rusted on dinosaurs.
• I see that you already have an accountcreator right, so that forestalls my recommending it.

Best of luck. — billinghurst sDrewth 01:04, 25 September 2015 (UTC)

Yeah, this sounds brilliant! :-) If there's a list of works to process from IA or COmmons or wherever, I'd be happy to help too. — Sam Wilson ( Talk • Contribs ) … 02:47, 25 September 2015 (UTC)

Thanks for the positive feedback. User:ShakespeareFan00: her translation & notes on the analytical engine (including the program for computing Bernoulli numbers) are already transcribed here on WS. I've been told there is already a project to transcribe all her mathematical correspondence which is held here at Oxford. user:billinghurst and User:Samwilson: I'll doing the loading from IA and Commons myself in advance to make it easy for newcomers on the day, so no help needed but thanks for the offers. I will tell them about the whole process, including the IA-upload tool. It is towards the end of BST, but still within it. Probably the first half hour will be spent exploring the texts already offered by WS and what can be done with them, including exporting to ebook formats. I'll use an evaluation form to get feedback on my work, but also on impressions of Wikisource itself- that's a good tip. Cheers, MartinPoulter (talk) 10:30, 25 September 2015 (UTC)

Thanks. Although transcribing handwritten material (which correspondence would be) isn't easy. ShakespeareFan00 (talk) 10:49, 25 September 2015 (UTC)

This is a great idea. If you're looking for other women scientist suggestions, I'd love to see some of Hildegard of Bingen's works on botany and alternative medicine, if any freely-licensed or public domain English translations exist. —Beleg Tâl (talk) 15:27, 25 September 2015 (UTC)

Author:Wrexie Louise Leonard; Author:Margaret Cavendish ? Slowking4♡ Richard Arthur Norton's revenge 12:59, 6 October 2015 (UTC)

All above comments and suggestions are appreciated: thanks. Having said I don't need help, I realise there is one query I need help with. I want to transcribe Mary Somerville's "On the Magnetizing Power of the More Refrangible Solar Rays" which is a paper in volume 116 of Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London. I don't have a source for (or personal interest in) transcribing the rest of that volume. Where should I put the finished text in the main namespace? Does it have to go under Philosophical_Transactions/Volume_116 ? MartinPoulter (talk) 17:30, 7 October 2015 (UTC)

It should go at Philosophical Transactions/Volume 116/On the Magnetizing Power of the More Refrangible Solar Ray, but you can also put a redirect in from On the Magnetizing Power of the More Refrangible Solar Ray and then use that to link to it from wherever. There's some explanation of this at Wikisource:Periodical guidelines#Page structure. — Sam Wilson ( Talk • Contribs ) … 23:48, 7 October 2015 (UTC)

I knew it!!!!

Post was Moved to Wikisource:Scriptorium/Help#Advance_editor_toolbar_disappears_occasionally.— Ineuw talk 22:55, 2 October 2015 (UTC)

New project Wikisource:WikiProject Biographical dictionaries

I am starting to put together a new project for biographical dictionaries, where I am hoping to set up each dictionary set as its own sub-project. We have lots of these works around the place that have very similar configuration and formatting, and having some overarching guidance for them, and to leverage what Charles Matthews and I set up with others for the DNB project. The ability to advertise these individual dictionary components, I see as an advantage, especially as we can drop in and do partial pages, etc; and they link well to the Wikidata "Described by source" property. I am also looking at putting it as the Community Collaboration for a while, and setit to rotate through the various dictionaries available to have some dynamic action in the Collaboration rather than our current static and moribund NARA project.

To do this I am also using Wikisource-bot to strip and apply the data layers (making for a noisy RC with bot layers), as these biographical components, even unproofread, are readily findable in local and google search.

So please feel free to add these collective biographical works that you have to the list, and add your thoughts to the project or its talk page. None of these ideas are on the project pages yet as I am still in the scraping phase. All feedback is welcome as there is so much we can do to make this a schmick sexy project. — billinghurst sDrewth 05:18, 1 October 2015 (UTC)

Some items are listed in Portal:India#Biographical works and at the end of Portal:Bengal#Notable people, although I don't know whether they fit in with your scheme. You can add them if you like. Hrishikes (talk) 12:03, 1 October 2015 (UTC)

moribund NARA? should i remonstrate with user:Dominic? we will be at his place in a week. Slowking4♡ Richard Arthur Norton's revenge 03:24, 2 October 2015 (UTC)

If you want, I can help with bot work to migrate data from a dictionary to wikidata (I guess something like this? q:Q19884468) or some other scripting work.— Mpaa (talk) 20:52, 2 October 2015 (UTC)

Did you mean d:Q19884468? AuFCL (talk) 21:26, 2 October 2015 (UTC)

Yes, thanks :-)— Mpaa (talk) 09:56, 3 October 2015 (UTC)

Author I.D Request

Index:Moll Flanders (1906 edition).djvu Who is E.A Baker that wrote the introduction, so it can be correctly attributed?ShakespeareFan00 (talk) 08:58, 1 October 2015 (UTC)

Not conclusive but I would hazard Ernest Albert Baker (VIAF entry)? Active right time period; right genre and publishers. AuFCL (talk) 11:04, 1 October 2015 (UTC)

Fully agree with AuFCL's assessment, seems to be very much of the type of work that EAB appears to be publishing at that time, and later.[5] — billinghurst sDrewth 15:47, 2 October 2015 (UTC)

"About" page on epub

Hello,

There is a problem with the About page add on each epubs. This following part is not clear and could be seen as copyfraud:

We distribute our books for free, starting from works not copyrighted or published under a free license. You are free to use our e-books for any purpose (including commercial exploitation), under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported license or, at your choice, those of the GNU FDL.

There is the same problem in the French version. We are working on it (MediaWiki:Wsexport about). And the English version is here: MediaWiki:Wsexport about.

Pyb (talk) 16:12, 1 October 2015 (UTC)

Huh? I don't see a particular issue or that we claim the copyright on the works. — billinghurst sDrewth 15:50, 2 October 2015 (UTC)

The second sentences doesn't mention public domain. We are clearly claiming copyright ownership on public domain material. Pyb (talk) 18:35, 2 October 2015 (UTC)

Beside that specific trouble to public domain, if a work derive from a "work under a free license" but not CC we have no right to try to enforce CC, I'm unsure if this case exists on wikisource. — Phe 18:56, 2 October 2015 (UTC)

Given that Wikimedia puts the CCSA license at the bottom of every page here, all we are doing with that license in the "about" is replicating that. I would not be happy to change the "about" to take it out of alignment with the license under which the text is made available online. While the content retains the free license, the presentation of the content is CC. Such presentation includes that provided in an ePub generated through the Wsexport process. If someone wishes to use the content without acknowledging us as the source, they are welcome to do so. But if they are using the presentation that we have provided, then they should acknowledge us using the appropriate license.

I endeavour to make sure that the presentation of the works that I proofread/validate is suitable for desktop, mobile and ereader viewing. As such, I am adding value (I hope) to the text. Under the agreement I have with Wikimedia as a contributor, all my contributions to the text are licensed under CCSA.

Beeswaxcandle (talk) 22:04, 2 October 2015 (UTC)

Ok, I see, good point, but that imply we can use only public domain, or CC-BY-SA resource to feed wikisource. If the content is not public domain nor CC-BY-SA we have no right to change its license or we need a way to specify the original license of the contents. — Phe 13:09, 3 October 2015 (UTC)

Please differentiate between "our books" and the "original works". Our publications are licenced as they are, and people can use them as they please. The original works are not relicenced, and users are able to use those as they so choose, that is the text within our works, and we appropriately licence the individual works. Under your proposal anyone can come and take our books and utilise all our componentry and declare it as their own, and not acknowledge the work that we have done. WHICH makes a good point about those who just copy over Gutenberg works to our wikis. — billinghurst sDrewth 03:21, 4 October 2015 (UTC)

Re licence, we do, it is clear and upfront on the front page of each work. The About is the collective about the publication itself.

I've just checked on a couple of ePubs that I downloaded some time ago. They have the license from the Main page on them, so we're not assigning a new license to the text. Beeswaxcandle (talk) 04:07, 4 October 2015 (UTC)

the point is well taken that we should not encumber derivatives of the public domain. you are drifting towards a sweat of the brow, National Portrait Gallery argument. otoh, CC is tantamount to public domain since reusers widely ignore the attribution and SA. Slowking4♡ Richard Arthur Norton's revenge 04:17, 5 October 2015 (UTC)

Index:DOJ Report on Shooting of Michael Brown.djvu

Anyone want to add the ToC for this? ShakespeareFan00 (talk) 10:38, 4 October 2015 (UTC)

Tech News: 2015-41

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Recent changes

• The link editor in the visual editor now shows results below the search box. This improves the usability on desktop and mobile. [6]
• The description at Special:ChangeEmail now clearly explains that the page can also be used to remove your email. [7]

Changes this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from October 6. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from October 7. It will be on all Wikipedias from October 8 (calendar).
• UploadWizard will remind users to add a category. [8]
• UploadWizard's category selectors will be easier to use. [9]
• A new Cite error will be shown if a named reference is defined more than once in the same article. [10]

Meetings

• You can join the next meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs are the most important. The meeting will be on 6 October at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

• Wikidata requests your input on how to improve the editing of Wikidata's data in other locations, such as Wikipedias.

Tech news prepared by tech ambassadors and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

18:32, 5 October 2015 (UTC)

comment

The named ref repetition is something that we should look at when the release occurs. I doubt that we will have many. I'll see if there is info for the message and any categorisation. — billinghurst sDrewth 15:04, 6 October 2015 (UTC)

Authors that are more than individual

What are our policy/agreement about authors that are comprised of more than one individual? I have collected a few in Category:Collective authors. Should all of them be turned into portals? Cheers, Captain Nemo (talk) 03:05, 6 October 2015 (UTC).

This reference is a bit cryptic Wikisource:Scriptorium/Archives/2013-02#Non-persons_as_authors but is the earliest "official" discussion I can find of the issue (activity logs imply people had fixed ideas a full year earlier but no obvious recorded discussion I can find.) I recommend you treat Portal:Stratemeyer Syndicate as a model. Also Wikisource:Scriptorium/Archives/2013-02#How_to_use_Portal_instead_of_Author_in_header.3F might be useful. AuFCL (talk) 04:03, 6 October 2015 (UTC)

Thanks, @AuFCL:! I am aware of these examples. Partially, my question was in response to the current version of Help:Author pages. Let me restate it: do we have an implicit agreement here that a non-individual author (be that an organization, syndicated pseudonym, husband-and-wife, brothers, whatever) gets a portal page instead of an author page? And what's the rationale for this? Cheers, Captain Nemo (talk) 05:30, 6 October 2015 (UTC).

GENERALLY: People who write get author pages, entities get portals. We have legacy issues. We have some exceptions, eg. writers for Strathmeyer. Some pages could be split, but for example, Brothers Grimm, that seems pointless. — billinghurst sDrewth 07:17, 6 October 2015 (UTC)

How does blood or marital status negate the simple fact a work is the result of a collaboration of (or just attributed to) two or more individuals? Sorry, my view is each individual gets their own Author: page, each page has a section titled Collaborations with [any # of individual collaborators - minus the one who's page we're on] followed by a listing of the exact same body of works under each section. Even that husband and wife who translated Tolstoy wouldn't meet my threshold for a single Author: page. The exception would be, again, something like the Brothers Grimm. -- George Orwell III (talk) 10:13, 6 October 2015 (UTC)

Why is Brothers Grimm different? Is it so hard to list them the way we do everyone else, as at Snow White? Would it not make just as much sense to have pages like Author:Gilbert and Sullivan for all collaborating partnerships?—Beleg Tâl (talk) 12:54, 6 October 2015 (UTC)

Personally, I'm of like mind but that wasn't the majority view when it came to so-called works/authors of literary/historical note and so we have left 'room' for such such exceptions. Did Gilbert & Sullivan always collaborate on everything or did they ever author works independent of each other? -- George Orwell III (talk) 13:07, 6 October 2015 (UTC)

If people wish to separate both brothers Grimm then replicate each works component, then go for it, I will say no more, I wasn't going to reopen an old debate, and I care not much, though ask that you search the archives for that discussion and read it. Re G&S, we know that one wrote the music and the other wrote the lyrics. They have works apart, though we know they collaborated on other works. We have significant biographical data that separates these people. Brothers Grimm less so. Author pages allow for us to place copyright tags based on the people, and know we are dealing with people with birth dates, death dates, may have images, and so on. — billinghurst sDrewth 14:08, 6 October 2015 (UTC)

Interestingly, Jacob Grimm wrote a significant linguistic text, German Grammar, without his brother. I'd be willing to take on splitting them and the other members of Category:Collective authors; I would have done it already except I wasn't sure what the consensus was.—Beleg Tâl (talk) 14:16, 6 October 2015 (UTC)

Other than Deutsche Grammatik, Jacob Grimm also wrote w:Deutsche Mythologie and Geschichte der deutschen Sprache and propounded his famous w:Grimm's law. So he had a literary career quite distinct from his brother's, despite a few intersections. Hrishikes (talk) 14:38, 6 October 2015 (UTC)

The pseudonyms used by the Stratemeyer Syndicate all have their own Author: page (e.g. Author:Laura Lee Hope). The portal is not intended to be an Author page, but a listing of the works written by the entity. Beeswaxcandle (talk) 06:33, 7 October 2015 (UTC)

Thank you, @Beleg Tâl: and @Hrishikes: in re brother grimm. I was very much amused by statements about their inseparability. If any group in the category:Collective authors is to be separated it must be them. Otherwise, we must also have Author:Marx and Engels for that ghost (specter) story of historical note:) @Beeswaxcandle: and @Billinghurst:, you both employ author/entity dichotomy. That is exactly something that I don't comprehend, could you please elaborate. My rough idea was: if author is one human, then it is author template, if it is anything else it is portal. And my rationale was exactly what billinghurst mentions: Author pages allow for us to place copyright tags based on the people, and know we are dealing with people with birth dates, death dates, may have images, and so on. If we have as an author anything that not an individual human, what's the meaning of gender, lifespan dates, etc? Cheers, Captain Nemo (talk) 08:41, 7 October 2015 (UTC).

I think Author:Brothers Grimm here was created as an extension from the corresponding Wikipedia article. In Wikipedia, articles can be given any types of names. There is no problem creating an article called Jacob Grimm and his dog, provided the dog was notable. But for an author page here, the subject needs to be a person. Collective authors, whether two persons or an organisation, are impersonal, i.e., they are entities and don't deserve author pages, IMO. Hrishikes (talk) 10:33, 7 October 2015 (UTC)

The reality with our approach is that NOW we have Wikidata, whereas before we didn't. So following from this discussion I would believe that we should propose that author ns: be individuals. In such a situation for the collaborative pages, we have a choice to either move them to Portal: ns, or maybe turn them into disambiguation pages. Thinking here that occasional visitors will still coming looking for things like "Brothers Grimm" not knowing them individually, and we need to have a ready means to have them found and directed. — billinghurst sDrewth 00:49, 8 October 2015 (UTC)

(e/c)To elaborate on the Stratemeyer Syndicate. They were a group of anonymous authors who produced books in an assembly line mode. One would write the plot outline, a second would write the text and a third would do the editing, then the illustrations would be done and the product sent off to a publisher under a pseudonym. Different publishers were used for the different seriesAll the people involved in the process were paid a flat rate and there were no royalties returned to the actual authors. For many of the books, and indeed whole series, we don't know who the actual authors were. The pseudonyms have no dates of birth or death and some apparently wrote over many decades. This means that the Syndicate is not an author, but rather an entity that produced books. This is not the same thing as the co-authorship of Charles and Mary Lamb, the Brontë sisters or the Brothers Grimm. We know who they are and we have their demographic data available. Beeswaxcandle (talk) 06:17, 8 October 2015 (UTC)

The 'author' Brothers Grimm is stated on the title page and used by other authors to refer to their works. This author concept is not a novel synthesis or subject, it should not be a portal. I went to count the dozens of times I have linked to this page from other authors texts at 'what links here', but it had already been moved. I have done a lot of work linking texts to other texts objectively, where an author unambiguously refers to them collectively or individually, and my significant investment in that has once again been disrupted by the 'fixing of things that were not broken'. CYGNIS INSIGNIS 05:42, 8 October 2015 (UTC)

@Cygnis insignis: please have a look at your own two edits: on this page and this page. In both cases the author of the text "unambiguously refers" to brothers individually, Nicolo is not even mentioned the first time. But you have created Author:Zeno brothers page that bundles two authors together even though there are NO WORKS written jointly by them (and they also have a third brother to boot!) This is a clear example of a thing that is broken. But the point of my question here was not about the relative significance of editor's investments. I am looking for clearer guidelines for what is an author page. Cheers, Captain Nemo (talk) 03:21, 9 October 2015 (UTC)

@Billinghurst: and @Beeswaxcandle: WD might actually be quite helpful here. We need not necessarily have distinction b/w authors and entities (whatever them are, I am still not clear:) here, instead author template checks the content of the field "instance of" in WD. If it is "human" it does one thing, if it is "pseudonym" it does different thing, if "corporation" the third, etc. In other words we can use one author template to rule them all for everything, without resorting to using portals for non-individual authors. Cheers, Captain Nemo (talk) 03:21, 9 October 2015 (UTC)

The question should not be the purity or otherwise of an author page or the author namespace, as that is our construct. What is trying to be achieved here? The clarity of publishers and organisations as authors has us pushing those works to Portal: namespace was our decision several years back. I think that the standard position is that we prefer individual author pages, and for anything out of that then let us have a discussion. Where there are existing collaborative pages, we should not be rushing to make a change for an existing page. For those we have a gentle discussion, involve all those to have an opinion and try to reach a consensus on a solution that demonstrates that we have a better solution than exists. If it is a new author, the reverse bias applies.

Wikidata reflects what we have as our notable articles, and will equate both ways, and we also have the ability for arbitary access. [remember "act in haste, regret at leisure"].

So why not let us agree on what we agree on, and implement, then work through differences; the reverse is butt ugly and argumentative. — billinghurst sDrewth 04:18, 9 October 2015 (UTC)

In the above spirit it seems to me there are two distinct cases with opposite agreed outcomes (individual author with potential biographies live in Author: space; long-standing group entities with known potential for the group membership to change—e.g. Publishers and Syndicates live in Portal: space.) However this leaves a near continuity of cases between which need to be expanded and considered. I shall make a start here but of necessity this survey is quite incomplete:

• Pseudonyms: may vary from partner's writing in their spouse's name (fairly stable: biographies typically hard to pin down especially if overshadowed by a more "famous" yet less productive partner) to names picked up and continued beyond the original artist's productive period by another individual.
• Partnerships: not always even split of effort.
• Syndications: "pulp" pools and the like. Stratemeyer obviously.
• Artworks, illustrations etc.: sometimes form the bulk in terms of page area covered of a work yet credit is most likely assigned to the producer of prose component only.
• Editors, collators, other support roles: Some works carefully credit the collator/series editor and almost forget to mention the individual article authors.
• Introductions, prefaces, forewords etc.: often no credit is given beyond initials, on the understanding readers of the time would have well known who a given publishers "tame expert" would have been at the time.

I am sure this list can be expanded and dissected almost without end. AuFCL (talk) 05:09, 9 October 2015 (UTC)

I think that the simple rule of (one person = Author, more than one person = Portal) is best. An "Author" page represents a single person, and data like lifespan are relevant. It could be a historical person (Jacob Grimm), a person whose historical existence is dubious (Adam), a person known by a pseudonym (Mark Twain) or whose real identity is unknown (Pearl Poet), whether they are the creator of the prose content or artwork or introductions or whatever, so long as they are a single individual person. Any grouping of several people: parterships, syndications, corporations, governments, etc. should be a Portal. Thus the only shade of grey would be authors such that it is not known whether they were a single person or group of people.

The question of whether individual persons who are editors, publishers, etc. but have no known direct authorship is probably a different question. —Beleg Tâl (talk) 06:32, 9 October 2015 (UTC)

This is what I was trying to delineate as the fringe case of "Support roles". Russell & Whitehead were a partnership, true: but in all likelihood Russell did nearly all the work (as the student of supervising Whitehead) and the quantity of independent output supports that. Who is taking bets Granville wrote all of his Calculus? Clearly he collated the efforts of unrecognised many. Todhunter wrote too much deep technical stuff not to have fronted a huge support team (unacknowledged.) How do you even unfold author:Mrs. William Makim Thomas? Single known book, 1911 so fl. 1911 No name, no VIAF, nothing to go by? AuFCL (talk) 06:51, 9 October 2015 (UTC)

I don't think we need to worry too much about those. Russell & Whitehead are two individuals, and get two Author pages; if their partnership is notable then it can also get a Portal page. The relative weight of work can be ignored, or noted, or left to Wikipedia: it doesn't matter to the namespace of their pages. Granville is an individual person, and not himself a team; if his work was a collaborative effort then his teammates can be credited in the work itself where known, and ignored or listed as Anonymous where unknown. Ditto for Todhunter. Thomas again is a single person, or at least presented as such, so even though nothing is known about her she would get a page exactly like the one she currently has. —Beleg Tâl (talk) 07:44, 9 October 2015 (UTC)

ALERT: Tables and terminating row markers

I have come across a situation where a series of Page: ns pages set for a continuing table, where each had a terminating row marker followed by {{nop}} to restart the next page. When these pages were transcluded the page marker links were fouled (don't point to Page: ns, instead to main page). For those who use terminating row marker as their style, can you please review current and past works for this issue. (details on GO3's user talk page). It would be good if you could report here whether it seen elsewhere so we can better determine the cause. Thx — billinghurst sDrewth 07:08, 6 October 2015 (UTC)

I have seen this behaviour before almost always in association with formatting structures which cross more than two transcluded pages (tables are favourite but I have also seen it with nested block templates e.g. {{hii}}. I am not aware of any examples except the one discussed recently as I have addressed all of those I have encountered (not with skill: I always have to relearn the same silly lessons!)

Going out on a limb as I cannot pretend to understand the code; but I am concerned with the block within MediaWiki:PageNumbers.js which refers to mw.config.get( "wgArticlePath" ) which it then further slices and dices before inserting into the displayed page as the destination of the page link. Presumably main-page is the default if the result is unusably mangled but this is as far as I can push the thought at this stage. AuFCL (talk) 08:23, 6 October 2015 (UTC)

I can't even begin to list all the "things" in MediaWiki:PageNumbers.js that need attention as they relate to the Proofreading extension itself but the first and foremost thing to do [imho] would be to make the "default" rendering of the embedded backlinks to the Page: namespace inline rather than off in the left margin(s) so it can be more easily adapted to at least render that way in mobile view as well. The ability to toggle between 'off-to-left margin(s) or inline', 'hide or show links' and 'highlighter when hovered' should be a default, site wide enabled gadget(s) or script(s) for Desktop view only. -- George Orwell III (talk) 09:19, 6 October 2015 (UTC)

GO3, I like that proposal, though wonder of the regular need to wikilink through to page namespace on a mobile device from the mobile view. Might we better to show the page number inline but not wikilink? — billinghurst sDrewth 00:45, 8 October 2015 (UTC)

That makes sense since its hard to envision any proofreading taking place in the Page: namespace under true Mobile view anytime soon anyway. I'd be happy with the ability to toggle on/off just the display of the corresponding inline page numbers without them being a wikilink back to the Page: namespace for mobile viewers. Of course this complicates the entire scheme a bit because right now there is no way to just display the associated page number without it also being a link back to the Page: namespace. Like I said there is much to be reviewed and refined in the current approach for both "views". -- George Orwell III (talk) 03:21, 8 October 2015 (UTC)

Can we just have a toggle to put the page numbers (unlinked) inline, for all namespaces, and have it ON for mobile and OFF for standard. Then have a page numbering linked for the side for standard, and not available for mobile? — billinghurst sDrewth 13:22, 8 October 2015 (UTC)

May I have some clarification on the last? I do not understand the "all namespaces" point as only surely ones who actually transclude multiple Pages: ought to be eligible for script treatment (main obviously but what others are desired? Doing this in Index: might even be counter-productive for example as this is a "transcription development space" and not really intended for "public display.")

And if the proposed toggle is flipped from the default then both inline and side page numbers are to appear in desktop viewing? Is that what was intended? Presumably the hover-shading complexity may be scrapped altogether if this alternative be entertained?

Finally to what extent is the associated development envisioned to be local, and to what extent can developer support be presumed available. It may be reasonable to tailor planned expectations to fit within the skill sets available: i.e. trade off a simple tweak well understood and supported locally vs more ambitious plans which may never be commenced at all. AuFCL (talk) 14:36, 8 October 2015 (UTC)

To the best of my knowledge page numbering display is a local issue. My above thoughts were two independent toggles for standard, which conflates to zero toggles for mobile. I just don't what it means for epub/pdf-type exports. — billinghurst sDrewth 21:23, 8 October 2015 (UTC)

Everything the both of you have mentioned seems possible imho regardless of the agreed upon set of options and/or the default state per view mode in the end; the problem preventing any such reality lies with the overall approach in place. Too many functions are being handled by the bits found in MediaWiki:PageNumbers.js while other bits are posing as messages in the MediaWiki namespace when they should be normal Templates or Modules -- the biggest problem being Dynamic Layouts itself.

Since past experience with even the slightest of tinkering made to any of those key files has disrupted normal operation here more often than not, so the first step in attempting any "changes" would be to mirror our current setup on test2wiki:wikipedia.org, secure admin status on test2 for anybody seriously involved in testing alternatives and go step by step with a redesign over there instead.

@Billinghurst: any idea how to get those admin bits so we can begin to mirror/experiment with the current scheme to this? -- George Orwell III (talk) 22:35, 10 October 2015 (UTC)

Just a matter of asking the right person with the right reason. Done — billinghurst sDrewth 14:55, 11 October 2015 (UTC)

Addendum. If we need to import pages from here, we are going to need get a phabricator request in for test2 to enable us to transwiki import directly. If you do it, please add me to ticket, if I need to do it, please let me know. — billinghurst sDrewth 14:58, 11 October 2015 (UTC)

Well that was easier than I thought. TYVM :)

I don't believe we need the ability to transwiki files (at least I don't); I had hoped to tinker with any possible alternatives to the current approach or approaches at first anyway. Nevertheless, if others feel the ability to transwiki makes life easier moving forward, by all means open a Phab ticket requesting it.

I've setup a short 9 page transclusion for experimental use at test2wiki:Solar wind. So far - without the benefit of calling the "usual scripts" either from mul.wikisource or en.wikisource through mw.load... in common.js -- the default embedded page numbering (based on the assignments made via the pagelist tag of corresponding Index: page there) are indeed rendering inline and un-linked by default at the moment. What would be nice is if there was a "space" separating the Nums from running into the content after each appearance.

Will start "playing around" as my free time allows. -- George Orwell III (talk) 21:24, 13 October 2015 (UTC)

Index:Verne - Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, Parke, 1911.djvu

This is volume 5 of a set.. Anyone want to upload the other volumes so we have a complete set? ShakespeareFan00 (talk) 21:13, 6 October 2015 (UTC)

You can put them in commons:Category:Works of Jules Verne (1911). There are many at archive.org —Beleg Tâl (talk) 21:42, 6 October 2015 (UTC)

All except volume 4 -(which seemed to be absent, from this set of scans), now at Commons, If someone can find volume 4:) ShakespeareFan00 (talk) 10:52, 7 October 2015 (UTC)

Rename request for Volume 5 made at Commons, under FNC#4, I may need an admin to do the required rename here. ShakespeareFan00 (talk) 11:16, 7 October 2015 (UTC)

Moved here.— Mpaa (talk) 19:33, 7 October 2015 (UTC)

File moved at Commons, can we also rename locally? Thanks :) ShakespeareFan00 (talk) 14:34, 7 October 2015 (UTC)

And who told you that vol 4 is not available? Only a patient searching is called for. Get it at https://archive.org/details/worksofjulesvern00vernuoft Hrishikes (talk) 16:33, 7 October 2015 (UTC)

Hshrikes can you do some file patching?, I've found some missing pages in the intial pagelist creation. Thanks.ShakespeareFan00 (talk) 21:55, 7 October 2015 (UTC)

For the time being, I have given the patch-up links in the concerned index files. I'll do the patch-up today evening (Indian time). Hrishikes (talk) 05:49, 8 October 2015 (UTC)

@ShakespeareFan00: Patched up vols 1, 10, 12 and 13. I did not touch vol 3, don't think it's required. Hrishikes (talk) 14:56, 8 October 2015 (UTC)

Vol 3 had 2 duipliacte pages, hardly a prioirty but...ShakespeareFan00 (talk) 17:27, 8 October 2015 (UTC)

Away until mid-October.

I will be away until mid-October. Please try to have this project completed by the time I return. Cheers! BD2412 T 15:28, 7 October 2015 (UTC)

What project would that be?—Beleg Tâl (talk) 16:21, 7 October 2015 (UTC)

English Wikisource. We can do it by mid-October! Just need to allow for some regex 2\d{3} and ready the fall back excuse of the "Of course I did it Miss, but I left it sitting on the table so that it wouldn't get crushed and the dog ate it. Truth!" — billinghurst sDrewth 22:01, 7 October 2015 (UTC)

Yeah, no worries! But we'd better leave a just a little bit of proofreading so that BD2412 doesn't miss out yes? Just 1,065,979 pages or so? ;) — Sam Wilson ( Talk • Contribs ) … 23:58, 7 October 2015 (UTC)

Reference check "Alumni Dublinenses" p.764 required

Google says and shows me that on p.764 of "Alumni Dublinenses" there is information on Author:Constantine Joseph Smyth. I am wondering whether anyone is able to see a full text version at Google Books or HathiTrust and transcribe that author's section on the author's talk page. TIA. — billinghurst sDrewth 22:10, 7 October 2015 (UTC)

Been done. Big thanks to BT! for the result and showing me a new set of resources Trinity College  :-) Though they have the worst level of discovery, smallest portal for treasures behind, no evident browse. If you want to look, do an empty search. — billinghurst sDrewth 23:05, 7 October 2015 (UTC)

Delete UP

Please moderator: remove my UP so the one at Meta appears? Thank you very much in advance, KlaasZ4usV (talk) 06:14, 8 October 2015 (UTC)

@KlaasZ4usV: someone has done it. I would suggest some judicious use of <noinclude> and/or review your links. — billinghurst sDrewth 13:18, 8 October 2015 (UTC)

WikiHiero Extension

I’m not sure who to go to for this, but would it be possible to install mw:Extension:WikiHiero on WS? It is necessary for pages such as this one. Thanks Abjiklɐm (tɐlk) 13:59, 9 October 2015 (UTC)

I think you will find it has been here all along: <hiero>A1</hiero> produces

. Isn't this what you expect? AuFCL (talk) 21:50, 9 October 2015 (UTC)

My bad, guess I made a typo when testing! Abjiklɐm (tɐlk) 23:35, 9 October 2015 (UTC)

Place to check is Special:Version — billinghurst sDrewth 10:46, 10 October 2015 (UTC)

Index:Works of Jules Verne - Parke - Vol 5.djvu

20,000 Leauges - Proofread. - Any takers for the next work? ShakespeareFan00 (talk) 00:08, 11 October 2015 (UTC)

We all wish for our works to be validated, and we put them onto Wikisource:Proofread of the Month/validation works, or we pick them out of Category:Index Proofread, or even just pick a work added to Template:New texts. We don't seem to ping the whole community through Scriptorium. — billinghurst sDrewth 15:02, 11 October 2015 (UTC)

if SF wants to fill up the archives with requests, it’s not paper to me. beats the backlog begging that goes on elsewhere. Slowking4♡ Richard Arthur Norton's revenge 03:58, 13 October 2015 (UTC)

Tech News: 2015-42

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Recent changes

• The database size lists have been updated. These control special page update frequency and which wikis use global abuse filters. [11]

Changes this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from October 13. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from October 14. It will be on all Wikipedias from October 15 (calendar).
• You will be able to upload images to Wikimedia Commons using the visual editor. When the image is uploaded it will be added to the article you're editing. [12]
• Pages that show citation error messages will automatically be placed in a hidden category. [13]

Meetings

• You can join the next meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 13 October at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Tech news prepared by tech ambassadors and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

16:28, 12 October 2015 (UTC)

Comment

Re the citation error messages, I believe that it will show at Category:cite-tracking-category-cite-error if this gerrit edit flows through. — billinghurst sDrewth 23:44, 12 October 2015 (UTC)

Images and captions

If a page has an image with a caption, what should the text version of the page contain? Rich Farmbrough, 21:40 12 October 2015 (GMT)

@Rich Farmbrough: Umm, err, not exactly sure that I understand. I will try to answer, though if the answer is not what you are wishing can you please rephrase the question?

When I reproduce a page I will set the image and the text caption separately though bound by formatting, then add the caption as alt=… tag. I would not generally use the caption tag as that pushes it inside a generic class styling. — billinghurst sDrewth 23:53, 12 October 2015 (UTC)

Assuming that by "the text version", you mean what you get if you copy-paste the page into a text editor, in my opinion the text version should contain the caption only. Hesperian 01:43, 13 October 2015 (UTC)

Splitting some hairs

This author currently sorts under "O" in Category:Ancient authors. That would happen to any "Foo of Boo" author when in author template "firstname = Foo" and "lastname = of Boo". So I looked at other authors who have names of this sort, trying to figure out what the "standard" practice is. Turns out both variants are used: 1) "firstname = Foo of Boo" and "lastname = (empty)" and 2) "firstname = (empty)" and "lastname = Foo of Boo". Seems the second one is more popular, though it might be selection bias, I haven't looked at all such authors. In either case authors sort correctly.
So, a question. Does it matter how such authors are recorded in author template? Do we need to agree on any weak "standard" practice or leave it at the discretion of an editor? Cheers, Captain Nemo (talk) 08:25, 13 October 2015 (UTC)

For my money you have uncovered a blatant bug in the default author categorisation code. I expect it is somewhere in the interaction between {{author/year}} and {{what era is}}. Surely there ought to be a DEFAULTSORT preferentially acting upon the value of last_initial? (I just manually applied the defaultsort parameter to check it is effective (it is. Remove if it interferes with investigation.) AuFCL (talk) 09:44, 13 October 2015 (UTC)

This (mis-)behaviour could affect any Author: name containing "the" "y" "da" "du" "von" "van der" etc. In most cases I have examined so far the issue is neatly avoided by putting the modifier at the end of the person's given name (essentially jumping through hoops to ensure last_initial matches the initial letters of the surname. I think it is probably good practice for defaultsort to be explicitly set in all "doubtful" instances. Counter-arguments please? AuFCL (talk) 11:22, 13 October 2015 (UTC)

@AuFCL: plus à Beckett versus a'Beckett

I remember I addressed this issue trying to have a uniform approach and using the 'defaultsort' param. I checked a couple of examples and I noticed that @Billinghurst: has stripped the parameter away when removing sister links example here. I do not know if this was intentional. Otherwise I would go for it.— Mpaa (talk) 17:49, 13 October 2015 (UTC)

"Defaultsort" parameter exists for exactly the example that were reasoned. Re the removal, there was not a "straight stripping" of defaultsort, so I will need to review what has happened in that situation. We had many issues where defaultsort was set empty, which was just as problematic.

Re the initial issue, and I do not see that there is no issue with the code, instead I see it as implementation for what is an arbitrary matter. Our guidance just needs to cover how to apply sort in non-standard cases 1) when people didn't have surnames, 2) when surname naming patterns don't match our arbitrary system, eg. family name first, or the prepend nomenclature, double-barrelled surnames, and 3) married names. This is part of why we have a liberal redirect policy of author pages and have utilised categorisation and defaultsort in redirects.

This is all previously held conversation and is in our archives of this page, and clearly we haven't done a good job (again) of capturing those discussions into lucid guidance. I don't think that it is our problem alone. — billinghurst sDrewth 23:42, 13 October 2015 (UTC)

Trying to summarize (with an eye of making it "into lucid guidance":) 1) use defaultsort to match last_initial, for example when author's last name starts with "da" "du" "von" "van der" and such. 2) for one-named authors (without surnames) (Greek philosophers, Kings, Popes and such) leave first_name empty and record name into last_name, no need to use defaultsort then. To be continued. Captain Nemo (talk) 03:23, 14 October 2015 (UTC)

In stating there is a bug in the code I was probably over-egging the situation. What I meant was that I was surprised that there was no attempt to try to harmonise the Author-Index link (as influenced by last_initial with other generic categorisations (shouldn't invert_names come into this as well? It does not appear to be referenced in the categorisation code.) I agree entirely the logical "gap" which remains should be bridged by adequate policy instructions. Right at present there appear to be relatively few Author: records which have problems and the remedy has been (rehashed?) here anyway. AuFCL (talk) 07:22, 14 October 2015 (UTC)

{{scan}} question

I assumed that the use of {{scan}} on an author page was for the purpose of pointing users to an Index, and that when an index is completed, the scan link is removed and just the blue-linked title remains. Have I assumed incorrectly? Thanks, Londonjackbooks (talk) 23:56, 17 October 2015 (UTC)

That's my understanding as well. Beeswaxcandle (talk) 00:31, 18 October 2015 (UTC)

I've used it on one or two author pages to show which works are scan-backed and which ones still need scans to be added, but I may have done so incorrectly. —Beleg Tâl (talk) 01:48, 18 October 2015 (UTC)

The icon links the consumer to the 'Index: namespace', which seems inappropriate if the purpose of the 'Author: namespace' is that of a library's author index. The reader is better served by having transcription projects, items uncooked or otherwise not on the menu, separated out to a different section or facilitated using the talk page. Perhaps denoting texts as scan-backed has merit, though so does identifying which are copypasta annotata and other concoctions. CYGNIS INSIGNIS 15:38, 18 October 2015 (UTC)

I think it's worth linking to scans when possible — I always assume that unless something is backed by scans then it is copypasta and thus mostly to be avoided. I never remove the {{scan}} template, and have even added it after a work has been fully validated. Until the day when we only allow works with scans, it'll be necessary to distinguish these. — Sam Wilson ( Talk • Contribs ) … 23:01, 18 October 2015 (UTC)

We don't need it on mainspace pages because the source tab does that for us. For the same reason I'm not convinced it's needed on Author: pages because the links should be to the Mainspace rather than to the Index: namespace when there's nothing to do at the Index. Beeswaxcandle (talk) 09:16, 19 October 2015 (UTC)

Is it worth looking at the other way around then, and perhaps mark those links on Author pages to mainspace works that don't have scans? They should, over time, tend to be the minority. — Sam Wilson ( Talk • Contribs ) … 12:33, 19 October 2015 (UTC)

We also have {{small scan link}}, which is perhaps less 'bulky', indicating a project is in progress. But to keep such templates around until proofread or fully validated? As long as use is uniform on any given author page, I suppose template choice/use will remain user-defined... Addressing the 'bulkiness' of the {{scan}} template, what I have issue with is the image of the book coming before the title. I think text titles should all be in alignment on the author page. Perhaps placing the image at the end of the link might make it less offensive to the eye? Londonjackbooks (talk) 14:01, 19 October 2015 (UTC)

I've added an "end" parameter to {{scan}} to allow the image to display at the end of the line. —Beleg Tâl (talk) 14:53, 19 October 2015 (UTC)

The "scan" template needs to be taken in context. It was imported from frWS as they used it there, and someone wanted to use it here. In my opinion it has its usefulness in certain circumstances, eg. for WikiProjects. I don't particularly like it in Author ns: and prefer "small scan link". I see no reason for its use in main ns. So I think that if there can be a demonstrated purposeful need for its use to expose the Index: ns, then that is okay, but if it is just illustrative of where else to find the work, and has no added value, then maybe we should not have it. — billinghurst sDrewth 06:37, 20 October 2015 (UTC)

I also use the small scan link template but only until a main ns is created, than I delete it, whether incomplete or not. I never liked the small book icon as it isn't very clear what it is, especially for new users. Jpez (talk) 09:34, 20 October 2015 (UTC)

Tech News: 2015-43

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Recent changes

• Tech News is trying to make reading the newsletter easier. The icon means the item is in the newsletter every week, but with new dates. The icon means the item is mainly relevant for readers with technical knowledge. You can leave feedback on this change.
• Timestamps in the protection log will now be in the user's timezone. Previously they would show Coordinated Universal Time (UTC). [14]

Problems

• A problem with MediaWiki made some pages show no content on October 14. This has now been fixed. [15]
• Some templates were misplaced in the Flow description bar. This could make it impossible to click on links. This will be fixed this week. [16]
• The deployment of the new MediaWiki version was stopped on October 14. No new code was deployed for the rest of week. This meant planned changes did not happen. [17]

Changes this week

• Changes that were planned to happen last week will happen this week. [18]
• Wikispecies, Meta and MediaWiki.org will be able to use Wikidata for sitelinks. [19][20][21][22]

Meetings

• You can join the next meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 20 October at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Tech news prepared by tech ambassadors and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

16:02, 19 October 2015 (UTC)

Refs

Could I have some advice on the best way to deal with the references here? Cheers, Zoeannl (talk) 10:00, 21 October 2015 (UTC)

I have applied a method I am aware of to the page. Londonjackbooks (talk) 10:10, 21 October 2015 (UTC)

P.S. It is good practice to be removing end-of-line breaks as per WSs Help:Beginner's guide to typography. Londonjackbooks (talk) 10:38, 21 October 2015 (UTC)

Ah, but not according to Distributed Proofreaders guidelines-it in a matter I contend with. If WS wants more proofreaders, it may help to be more proofreader friendly. Neat solution to the refs. Did I miss it in Help? Cheers, Zoeannl (talk) 02:35, 22 October 2015 (UTC)

Having the single (line-breaking) returns is often useful when converting ocr of print to cleaner text, and sometimes while proofreading, I think they should kept when 'not-proofread'. Once the text is marked up and proofread they are inconvenient, or problematic, one problem being a lot of empty space in the edit box that the final proofreader has to scroll through. CYGNIS INSIGNIS 04:37, 22 October 2015 (UTC)

@Zoeannl: Please see our guidance at Help:Footnotes and endnotes. The difference between DP and here is due to the tools in use, their markup versus wikitext. At WS when we transclude pages, we need to convert a reference from a page footnote to a chapter endnote, the methodology that DP uses would not work here as they would basically show at the end of each page. Really happy to take any feedback about how we can improve our help pages, and in fact, feel free to make the edits that you believe that will make the help pages better. — billinghurst sDrewth 07:29, 22 October 2015 (UTC)

I was referring to proofreading (validation in WS sense) being much easier/more accurate to compare proofread text with the original if line-breaks are retained. This is why DP has this policy—they being very accuracy focused. A lot of links as in Contents or Index pages makes proofreading challenging but I don’t see any way around that.

I know what they do, but I don't understand how refs work which is why I’m so dependent on Help. I swear I spent 1/2 an hour looking at Help and Scriptorium for an answer or example before asking. Doesn’t mean the answer wasn’t there though…

I used the technique on an earlier work; searched for "multiple reference same footnote"—or something like that, and found a solution on a Scriptorium archive page pointing to a WP help page. Its use is mentioned at Wikisource:WikiProject 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Style Manual, but not on any actual WS Footnote/endnote help page or style guide. Probably should be. Londonjackbooks (talk) 10:08, 22 October 2015 (UTC)

We could leave the lines unchanged, though does that mean end of line hyphenation too? adding extra formatting where hard returns break some? what about tables? page columns? It all becomes slavishly beholden to a page set out of a compositor and added complexity for little benefit. We are primarily aiming at a browser audience, then after that epub, mobile, and pdf, being limited by the original book seems unwise. — billinghurst sDrewth 03:08, 25 October 2015 (UTC)

Would it work to have exemplars, examples, links to relevant Scriptorium topics, and clever solutions on the Discussion, or a separate (Reference?), page/tab for each Template? I’m working on understanding templates and examples really help. Beeswaxcandle showed me how to open the list of templates used at the bottom of the Edit page. Progress!— Zoeannl (talk) 08:12, 22 October 2015 (UTC)

We can do whatever is warranted. We have tried to show examples of template use, and I see no issue showing similar for references. — billinghurst sDrewth 03:08, 25 October 2015 (UTC)

Adding page scans for a text already on WikiSource

There are several works by Author:Anselm_of_Canterbury that could be supported with page scans from the Internet Archive. Is there a process in place for making this migration? (And does it have to be done manually, or are there any tools that can assist with this?) AndrewNJ (talk) 15:39, 26 October 2015 (UTC)

A starting point is Help:Beginner's_guide_to_adding_texts. There are tools for direct transfer from IA to Commons (IA import tool, uploaded by commons:User:IaUploadBot)— Mpaa (talk) 17:38, 26 October 2015 (UTC)

yes, keep in mind, the cut and paste such as Proslogium_and_Monologium/Monologium/Preface, can be supplemented with links to your new page views after upload to commons. we’ve done a couple like this at EB1911 i.e. 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Andronicus of Rhodes [23]. Slowking4♡Richard Arthur Norton's revenge 23:08, 26 October 2015 (UTC)

Tech News: 2015-44

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Changes this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from October 27. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from October 28. It will be on all Wikipedias from October 29 (calendar).
• The first time you use the visual editor, pop-ups will explain why and when you should use the citation and link tools. [24]
• You will be able to upload images to Wikimedia Commons from inside the wikitext editor by clicking "Upload" in the "Insert file" dialog. You will also be able to drag and drop them into an article when using the visual editor. [25][26]
• When you edit a code block in visual editor, you will have the syntax highlighted. [27][28]
• Index and Page namespaces on Wikisource will be defined as content namespaces in $wgContentNamespaces. [29]

Tech news prepared by tech ambassadors and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

18:04, 26 October 2015 (UTC)