Wikisource:Scriptorium/Archives/2024-11

Zyephyrus

Unfortunately, bad news arrived: Zyephyrus, our long-term contributor and admin, passed away last September 8th. -- Jan Kameníček (talk) 16:57, 2 November 2024 (UTC)

More in French Wikisource. --Jan Kameníček (talk) 19:04, 2 November 2024 (UTC)

Very sorry to hear this. I remember them being kind and encouraging when I joined Wikisource (as well as having a wonderful username!). Rest in peace Zyephyrus. --Yodin^T 13:26, 3 November 2024 (UTC)

Tech News: 2024-45

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

Updates for editors

• Stewards can now make global account blocks cause global autoblocks. This will assist stewards in preventing abuse from users who have been globally blocked. This includes preventing globally blocked temporary accounts from exiting their session or switching browsers to make subsequent edits for 24 hours. Previously, temporary accounts could exit their current session or switch browsers to continue editing. This is an anti-abuse tool improvement for the Temporary Accounts project. You can read more about the progress on key features for temporary accounts. [1]
• Wikis that have the CampaignEvents extension enabled can now use the Collaboration List feature. This list provides a new, easy way for contributors to learn about WikiProjects on their wikis. Thanks to the Campaign team for this work that is part of the 2024/25 annual plan. If you are interested in bringing the CampaignEvents extension to your wiki, you can follow these steps or you can reach out to User:Udehb-WMF for help.
• The text color for red links will be slightly changed later this week to improve their contrast in light mode. [2]
• View all 32 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, on multilingual wikis, users can now hide translations from the WhatLinksHere special page.

Updates for technical contributors

• XML data dumps have been temporarily paused whilst a bug is investigated. [3]

In depth

• Temporary Accounts have been deployed to six wikis; thanks to the Trust and Safety Product team for this work, you can read about the deployment plans. Beginning next week, Temporary Accounts will also be enabled on seven other projects. If you are active on these wikis and need help migrating your tools, please reach out to User:Udehb-WMF for assistance.
• The latest quarterly Language and Internationalization newsletter is available. It includes: New languages supported in translatewiki or in MediaWiki; New keyboard input methods for some languages; details about recent and upcoming meetings, and more.

Meetings and events

• MediaWiki Users and Developers Conference Fall 2024 is happening in Vienna, Austria and online from 4 to 6 November 2024. The conference will feature discussions around the usage of MediaWiki software by and within companies in different industries and will inspire and onboard new users.

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

MediaWiki message delivery 20:50, 4 November 2024 (UTC)

Translations

After I do a few translations am I supposed to create an author page for myself and list the entries I translated? RAN (talk) 01:11, 7 November 2024 (UTC)

As far as I know, they should just be marked as translated by Wikisource.

I think you should use {{translation header}}, that does this automatically. — Alien  3
3 3 06:06, 7 November 2024 (UTC)

Exactly. Wikisource translations are created in a similar way as Wikipedia articles, anyone can later edit them and change/improve the translation, so the translations are marked just as translated "by Wikisource". BTW: Before starting such translations, take a close look at WS:T#Wikisource original translations, especially the part stating that "A scan supported original language work must be present on the appropriate language wiki, where the original language version is complete at least as far as the English translation." --Jan Kameníček (talk) 17:27, 7 November 2024 (UTC)

• I don't think that creating an original translation is the same as editing an original translation, at least from a legal and copyright perspective, otherwise Stephen King would have to share a copyright credit with all the editors at Simon & Schuster that changed a word here and there. When I use the translation header it gives credit to the original translator then it adds "and Wikisource". At Wikipedia the entire biography may be rewritten many times over years so nothing remains of the original text, but a translation would only have a few words changed over the years, if at all. --RAN (talk) 19:57, 9 November 2024 (UTC)

Tech News: 2024-46

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

Updates for editors

• On wikis with the Translate extension enabled, users will notice that the FuzzyBot will now automatically create translated versions of categories used on translated pages. [4]
• View all 29 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, the submitted task to use the SecurePoll extension for English Wikipedia's special administrator election was resolved on time. [5]

Updates for technical contributors

• In 1.44.0-wmf-2, the logic of Wikibase function getAllStatements changed to behave like getBestStatements. Invoking the function now returns a copy of values which are immutable. [6]
• Wikimedia REST API users, such as bot operators and tool maintainers, may be affected by ongoing upgrades. The API will be rerouting some page content endpoints from RESTbase to the newer MediaWiki REST API endpoints. The impacted endpoints include getting page/revision metadata and rendered HTML content. These changes will be available on testwiki later this week, with other projects to follow. This change should not affect existing functionality, but active users of the impacted endpoints should verify behavior on testwiki, and raise any concerns on the related Phabricator ticket.

In depth

• Admins and users of the Wikimedia projects where Automoderator is enabled can now monitor and evaluate important metrics related to Automoderator's actions. This Superset dashboard calculates and aggregates metrics about Automoderator's behaviour on the projects in which it is deployed. Thanks to the Moderator Tools team for this Dashboard; you can visit the documentation page for more information about this work. [7]

Meetings and events

• 21 November 2024 (8:00 UTC & 16:00 UTC) - Community call with Wikimedia Commons volunteers and stakeholders to help prioritize support efforts for 2025-2026 Fiscal Year. The theme of this call is how content should be organised on Wikimedia Commons.

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

MediaWiki message delivery 00:07, 12 November 2024 (UTC)

Template:Image frame

I have a use case for Wikipedia:Template:Image frame on Wikisource. It would let me center a caption under two figures with their own sub-captions. Is this reasonable? Is there a better way? Would there be any objections to having that template here? HLHJ (talk) 01:59, 12 November 2024 (UTC)

How about

{|
|-
|
{{class figure
 |num= 36
 |image= Spectacles and eyeglasses- their forms, mounting, and proper adjustment 1895 (2nd edition) Fig. 36.jpg
 |alt=A circular lens with a vertical T centered behind, placed so the crossbar of the T is just tangent to the top of the circle. The image of the T seen through the lens is not displaced.
}}
|
{{class figure
 |num= 37
 |image= Spectacles and eyeglasses- their forms, mounting, and proper adjustment 1895 (2nd edition) Fig. 37.jpg
 |alt=A circular lens with a vertical T centered behind, placed so the crossbar of the T is just tangent to the top of the circle. The image of the vertical of the T, seen through the lens, is displaced to the side.
}}
|-
| colspan="2" | {{c|{{sc|Method of Finding the Apex of a Prism.}} (''After Maddox.'')}}
|}

that gives

Fig. 36.	Fig. 37.
Method of Finding the Apex of a Prism. (After Maddox.)

— Alien  3
3 3 09:19, 12 November 2024 (UTC)

Thank you. That worked perfectly. I got stuck thinking on semantics of nested captions. It should read decently with a screenreader, too. HLHJ (talk) 00:41, 13 November 2024 (UTC)

IA Upload Status?

Tracked in PhabricatorTask T379402

Since internet archive has come back this seems to not be working, with no recent uploads and it apparently not able to find the metadata from Internet Archive, even though it seems to be available (e.g.[8] is returns a JSON response). MarkLSteadman (talk) 14:39, 7 November 2024 (UTC)

@MarkLSteadman: Yep the IA is mostly back now it looks like (even uploads are working again), but it looks like they're blocking the Toolforge IP address and so IA Upload is unable to fetch any items. I emailed the IA about it yesterday, so will see if they have any ideas. I'm assuming they're tightening up their systems for blocking single IPs that use lots of resources, and I can imagine that ours looks a bit odd on the surface. Sam Wilson 01:46, 12 November 2024 (UTC)

Thanks for mentioning this, I ran across it myself and I'm glad of an update. HLHJ (talk) 03:42, 14 November 2024 (UTC)

Need help with index

At New York Post the calendar style index does not work, but at The New York Times it works, can anyone fix New York Post calendar style index? RAN (talk) 00:12, 13 November 2024 (UTC)

You need to create the linked pages with a template; see the source of New York Post/1849, which I created, and which is therefore now autolinked from the index. HLHJ (talk) 04:42, 13 November 2024 (UTC)

• @HLHJ: Thanks! I like the calendar indexes, and I also like the automatically generated flat lists. We should always have both. I not so much a fan of the hand curated lists like we have at Jersey Journal. At one time a found a dozen ways that indexes were formatted, I think we are down to just 6 now. Do you have any suggestions of how we can have Jersey Journal (hand curated and always incomplete) versus Des Moines Tribune (autolinked). We have several choices, both can exist on the same page like at New York Tribune, or we create Periodical:Jersey Journal for hand curated, and have Jersey Journal for the autolinked lists. Commons has both types: Commons:Abraham Lincoln (hand curated) and Commons:Category:Abraham Lincoln (autolinked). What do you think? --RAN (talk) 19:00, 13 November 2024 (UTC)

  I did not know that calendar indexes existed before looking into the problem you described here, so I would be the wrong one to ask! More forms of index generally sounds like a good idea, though. We are not about to run out of space for our card catalogue. HLHJ (talk) 03:30, 14 November 2024 (UTC)

Crediting across editions

Template:copied is good for crediting copying between individual pages, but I'm involved in two projects with multiple editions with substantial overlap. I just copied the css stylesheet from one edition to another wholesale, as the text has changed but the formatting conventions seem identical. I credited in the edit summary, but I'm liable to be copying bits of formatting in one case, and music scores in another, extensively. Is there a more general (work-level, not page-level) way to say that the contributors of work X indirectly contributed to work Y? HLHJ (talk) 03:28, 12 November 2024 (UTC)

The Wikipedia version allows multiple from fields Wikipedia:Template:Copied#Examples; the version copied (with acknowledgement of the irony) to Wikisource by MJL seems not to. Neither seems to allow multiple "to" fields, but one could use {{FULLPAGENAME}}. This is a bit of a kludge, harder to write and read than a work-level copied template, but it would do it. Or should I make a works-level template? HLHJ (talk) 15:45, 18 November 2024 (UTC)

Tech News: 2024-47

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

Updates for editors

• Users of Wikimedia sites will now be warned when they create a redirect to a page that doesn't exist. This will reduce the number of broken redirects to red links in our projects. [9]
• View all 42 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, Pywikibot, which automates work on MediaWiki sites, was upgraded to 9.5.0 on Toolforge. [10]

Updates for technical contributors

• On wikis that use the FlaggedRevs extension, pages created or moved by users with the appropriate permissions are marked as flagged automatically. This feature has not been working recently, and changes fixing it should be deployed this week. Thanks to Daniel and Wargo for working on this. [11][12]

In depth

• There is a new Diff post about Temporary Accounts, available in more than 15 languages. Read it to learn about what Temporary Accounts are, their impact on different groups of users, and the plan to introduce the change on all wikis.

Meetings and events

• Technical volunteers can now register for the 2025 Wikimedia Hackathon, which will take place in Istanbul, Turkey. Application for travel and accommodation scholarships is open from November 12 to December 10 2024. The registration for the event will close in mid-April 2025. The Wikimedia Hackathon is an annual gathering that unites the global technical community to collaborate on existing projects and explore new ideas.
• Join the Wikimedia Commons community calls this week to help prioritize support for Commons which will be planned for 2025–2026. The theme will be how content should be organised on Wikimedia Commons. This is an opportunity for volunteers who work on different things to come together and talk about what matters for the future of the project. The calls will take place November 21, 2024, 8:00 UTC and 16:00 UTC.
• A Language community meeting will take place November 29, 16:00 UTC to discuss updates and technical problem-solving.

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

MediaWiki message delivery 02:00, 19 November 2024 (UTC)

What's gone wrong?

https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Colorimetry

Indexstyles are not being applied. WHY? ShakespeareFan00 (talk) 14:48, 20 November 2024 (UTC)

@ShakespeareFan00: {{Nop}} missing end of page 2? — M-le-mot-dit (talk) 15:33, 20 November 2024 (UTC)

Sign up for the language community meeting on November 29th, 16:00 UTC

Hello everyone,

The next language community meeting is coming up next week, on November 29th, at 16:00 UTC (Zonestamp! For your timezone <https://zonestamp.toolforge.org/1732896000>). If you're interested in joining, you can sign up on this wiki page: <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Language_and_Product_Localization/Community_meetings#29_November_2024>.

This participant-driven meeting will be organized by the Wikimedia Foundation’s Language Product Localization team and the Language Diversity Hub. There will be presentations on topics like developing language keyboards, the creation of the Moore Wikipedia, and the language support track at Wiki Indaba. We will also have members from the Wayuunaiki community joining us to share their experiences with the Incubator and as a new community within our movement. This meeting will have a Spanish interpretation.

Looking forward to seeing you at the language community meeting! Cheers, Srishti 19:54, 21 November 2024 (UTC)

Digital-native article

I'm thinking I might add a digital-native article[13] to Wikisource. Last time I helped someone with that it was extremely tedious. Are there any semi-automated ways to scrape articles off PMC and upload their images? The article diagrams are also monochrome line drawings, for which their jpg encoding is rather unsuitable. Would, say, an svg version, especially if it is the author's original, be a suitable replacement? HLHJ (talk) 03:36, 14 November 2024 (UTC)

I can't answer to the first question about semi-automated methods. However, using an svg instead of a jpg for the diagrams is absolutely fine. Beeswaxcandle (talk) 02:38, 24 November 2024 (UTC)

Please remove redlink

MediaWiki:Gadget-interwiki-transclusion. Alternately, insert a useful link (maybe to mw:?). Thanks. —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 19:37, 25 November 2024 (UTC)

After some digging around, there isn't a page anywhere describing it. (We should have one). Closest that comes to that is Template:Iwpage/doc. Note: this probably should've gone to WS:AN, as only admins can solve this. Also, this section is supposed to be for Scan "repairs and moves", so this if it stays at WS:S should be all the way down. — Alien  3
3 3 19:53, 25 November 2024 (UTC)

Moved. Thanks. —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 20:08, 25 November 2024 (UTC)

Tech News: 2024-48

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

Updates for editors

• A new version of the standard wikitext editor-mode syntax highlighter will be available as a beta feature later this week. This brings many new features and bug fixes, including right-to-left support, template folding, autocompletion, and an improved search panel. You can learn more on the help page.
• The 2010 wikitext editor now supports common keyboard shortcuts such Ctrl+B for bold and Ctrl+I for italics. A full list of all six shortcuts is available. Thanks to SD0001 for this improvement. [14]
• Starting November 28, Flow/Structured Discussions pages will be automatically archived and set to read-only at the following wikis: bswiki, elwiki, euwiki, fawiki, fiwiki, frwikiquote, frwikisource, frwikiversity, frwikivoyage, idwiki, lvwiki, plwiki, ptwiki, urwiki, viwikisource, zhwikisource. This is done as part of StructuredDiscussions deprecation work. If you need any assistance to archive your page in advance, please contact Trizek (WMF).
• View all 25 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, a user creating a new AbuseFilter can now only set the filter to "protected" if it includes a protected variable.

Updates for technical contributors

• The CodeEditor, which can be used in JavaScript, CSS, JSON, and Lua pages, now offers live autocompletion. Thanks to SD0001 for this improvement. The feature can be temporarily disabled on a page by pressing Ctrl+, and un-selecting "Live Autocompletion".
• Tool-maintainers who use the Graphite system for tracking metrics, need to migrate to the newer Prometheus system. They can check this dashboard and the list in the Description of the task T350592 to see if their tools are listed, and they should claim metrics and dashboards connected to their tools. They can then disable or migrate all existing metrics by following the instructions in the task. The Graphite service will become read-only in April. [15]
• The New PreProcessor parser performance report has been fixed to give an accurate count for the number of Wikibase entities accessed. It had previously been resetting after 400 entities. [16]

Meetings and events

• A Language community meeting will take place November 29 at 16:00 UTC. There will be presentations on topics like developing language keyboards, the creation of the Mooré Wikipedia, the language support track at Wiki Indaba, and a report from the Wayuunaiki community on their experiences with the Incubator and as a new community over the last 3 years. This meeting will be in English and will also have Spanish interpretation.

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

MediaWiki message delivery 22:42, 25 November 2024 (UTC)

Switching to the Vector 2022 skin: the final date

A two minute-long video about Vector 2022

Hello everyone, I'm reaching out on behalf of the Wikimedia Foundation Web team responsible for the MediaWiki skins. I'd like to revisit the topic of making Vector 2022 the default here on English Wikisource. I did post a message about this in March, but we didn't finalize it back then.

What happened in the meantime? We built dark mode and different options for font sizes, and made Vector 2022 the default on most wikis, including all other Wikisources. With the not-so-new V22 skin being the default, existing and coming features, like dark mode and temporary accounts respectively, will become available for logged-out users here.

If you're curious about the details on why we need to deploy the skin soon, here's more information

• Due to releases of new features only available in the Vector 2022 skin, our technical ability to support both skins as the default is coming to an end. Keeping more than one skin as the default across different wikis indefinitely is impossible. This is about the architecture of our skins. As the Foundation or the movement in general, we don't have the capability to develop and maintain software working with different skins as default. This means that the longer we keep multiple skins as the default, the higher the likelihood of bugs, regressions, and other things breaking that we do not have the resources to support or fix.  
• Vector 2022 has been the default on almost all wikis for more than a year. In this time, the skin was proven to provide improvements to readers while also evolving. After we built and deployed on most wikis, we added new features, such as the Appearance menu with the dark mode functionality. We will keep working on this skin, and deployment doesn't mean that existing issues will not be addressed. For example, as part of our work on the Accessibility for Reading project, we built out dark mode, changed the width of the main page back to full (T357706), and solved issues of wide tables overlapping the right-column menus (T330527).
• Vector legacy's code is not compatible with some of the existing, coming, or future software. Keeping this skin as the default would exclude most users from these improvements. Important examples of features not supported by Vector legacy are: the enriched table of contents on talk pages, dark mode, and also temporary account holder experience which, due to legal reasons, we will have to enable. In other words, the only skin supporting features for temporary account holders (like banners informing "hey, you're using a temp account") is Vector 2022. If you are curious about temporary accounts, read our latest blog post.

So, we will deploy Vector 2022 here in three weeks, in the week of November 25. If you think there are any remaining significant technical issues, let us know. We will talk and may make some changes, most likely after the deployment. Thank you! SGrabarczuk (WMF) (talk) 15:46, 6 November 2024 (UTC)

To any admins passing by: Could someone take a look at MediaWiki talk:Gadget-Preload Page Images.js? (with V10, since the last codex change, the green border's broken so the arrow shifts down but it's still a noticeable change, whereas in V22 it will be plain undistinguishable, so it'd be nice to fix it.)

@SGrabarczuk (WMF): Why would dark mode and temporary accounts need V22? I already use dark mode on V10, and if we have a banner for IPs editing I don't see why we couldn't have a banner for temp editing.

I can only think of one significant technical issue, and that is paragraph spacing, also mentioned in March without an answer.

On one hand, why? what is the supposed advantage of spacing paragraphs further from each other?

On the other hand, here at ws we often need to make text fit into fixed boxes, and making the height of text that different across skins is a bad idea. Out of my hat, the most common issue I can think of is {{overfloat image}}s that make some kind of border around multiline text that does not already override paragraph spacing, e.g. Page:Salomé- a tragedy in one act.djvu/7, Page:Poems Tree.djvu/9, Page:Poems Jackson.djvu/7, &c. — Alien  3
3 3 18:49, 6 November 2024 (UTC)

• As someone who has seen Vector 2022 in action, I don’t know how you can say this. The use of Vector 2022 is not possible here; it makes Wikipedia much worse at it is, and at Wikisource it is completely untenable. There is no reason to make potential contributors make an account and change their setting configurations to be able to edit here without great difficulty. We have a lot of highly specialized formatting here, and if recent “fixes” are anything to go by, whoever makes technical changes thinks of Wikisource last in making them. Our site was rendered practically unusable because of an “accessibility” change recently, and it took days to get that patched—and it was only partially patched, at that. You mention “new features” for your shiny new toy, but I’m not sure why they’re necessary (or even not harmful here on Wikisource); the big push towards “dark mode” mirrors the tech industry’s general push towards AI, in that it is being done without consideration of the actual userbase (who, of course, has no need for such a feature). Your list of “[i]mportant … features” showcases the lack of connection to our community (despite your evident desire to force this unwanted and harmful change upon us): tables of contents are usually produced manually here, with templates; dark mode is a fad, and in any case would clash with any of the many texts here with images; and “temporary accounts” are a terrible idea that I can’t even imagine a justification for. I’ve only heard of them now, but I do remember the suggestion from a few years back; this change will make vandalism significantly worse without any demonstrable benefits whatsoever. Luckily, we don’t have much vandalism here, (and we have good administrators to deal with it,) but it seems (to me, at least) obvious that changes should not be made which will encourage and facilitate vandalism while making the prevention of vandalism harder (and in many cases fruitless). Of course, you’ve saved the best for last: changes will happen “most likely after the deployment.” You people, who do no good to Wikisource, Wikipedia, or any other project that actually drives traffic (beyond the moral good of writing articles, transcribing texts, &c.) see fit to make changes—without our consent—to the detriment of our work, and when problems inevitably arise force their solutions on the people you so ungraciously “helped” in the first place. I shouldn’t have bothered writing this, but your attitude in “suggesting” this change was enough to encourage me to write this quick statement down. TE(æ)A,ea. (talk) 22:51, 6 November 2024 (UTC)

• Just to be clear SGrabarczuk: If you think there are any remaining significant technical issues, let us know. We will talk and may make some changes, most likely after the deployment. – are you saying that you're planning to deploy to a live production website with over half a million views per day, without having addressed any of the issues that prevented you from deploying in April, without carrying out any user testing, and with plans only to possibly fix any breaking changes after carrying this out? What on earth is your deployment process (please link if you have one)? And what is the WMF policy about pushing changes on some communities that have serious unaddressed concerns, but not others (such as de.Wikipedia) – again, please link this. Very concerned that you're rushing this through without realising that it will greatly impact the website. --Yodin^T 11:25, 7 November 2024 (UTC)

• @SGrabarczuk (WMF): Absolutely agree with everything written above, Vector 2022 was not designed with Wikisource in mind and so should not be deployed here. --Jan Kameníček (talk) 13:13, 7 November 2024 (UTC)

  @SGrabarczuk (WMF): Does not seem that you take our concerns seriously. --Jan Kameníček (talk) 13:58, 9 November 2024 (UTC)

• yeah, while the skin is better than flat sidebar gadget, it is not better than timeless skin, so count me out until that breaks. i guess we will have to advise newbies to first change their skin preferences. --Slowking4 ‽ digitaleffie's ghost 00:49, 10 November 2024 (UTC)

@Alien333, @Jan.Kamenicek, @Slowking4, @TE(æ)A,ea., @Yodin - thank you for taking the time to share your concerns and apologies for the late reply. Many of the team working on this were traveling for a work event this week. My name is Olga and I’m the product manager for the Web team (the team that build the skin). Hopefully I can help answer some of your questions.

In the short term, we’re reviewing the more explicit requests we’ve received from Wikisource wikis to see which, if any, we can address prior to deployment. We’ll try to let you know next week on which fixes (if any) we’re planning on making and what the timeline for those fixes is. It’s possible that some of them might come after the deployment itself.

More generally, I want to reassure you that we do read through the requests and questions here, and also underline that the deployment of Vector 2022 won’t be the end of the conversation here. We’ll continue working with you as people begin using the skin - answering questions, filing tickets, fixing bugs, and improving the skin based on your feedback. Our plan is not to deploy and then leave immediately. I can’t promise that we’ll fix or work on every request - that depends on what specific issues Wikisource users have, how large they are, and how many people are exposed to those issues - but we will try to at the least reply to everything and give a status update (we specifically want to look into and continue discussing the accessibility concerns you’ve raised above) .

In general, we understand that Wikisource has unique needs. This is why we’ve introduced some Wikisource-specific customizations (such as the full width for the main namespace) in the first place. In addition - while each Wikisource community is different, there are oftentimes almost if not perfectly identical in terms of design. Almost every other Wikisource community has been using Vector 2022 for quite some time now (years for some) and we haven’t seen major issues flagged there by communities in terms of the usability of the site. Hopefully that can help ease worries around bringing the skin to a production Wikisource - it’s already live on most of them.

More specifically I wanted to address:

• Dark mode: the dark mode gadget available in Vector legacy relies on an invert method, unlike the feature-level dark mode in Vector 2022. This means that it’s easy to break or represent information inaccurately, especially in the cases of graphics, templates, or any manual color selections. This could potentially lead to common issues like content being displayed as white text on a white background, disappearing images, inaccurate graphs and data visualizations, etc. Either way, dark mode is an optional feature - we are not turning on dark mode for anyone, even if they have their browsers set to use dark mode (although for those interested that is an option that can be turned on using the setting called “automatic” in the dark mode menu)
• Temporary accounts: While we are not representing the temporary accounts team, we can connect you to folks on that team that can provide a lot more detail on why the change is important, especially as it concerns the safety and privacy of editors and communities
• Timing: As we mentioned above, this announcement is in part due to the technical burden in supporting two different default skins for logged-out users from a maintenance perspective. We are accelerating the timeline for the remaining wikis because we are no longer able to provide this support across wikis for logged-out users (logged-in users, who do not use cached pages can continue to access any skin as before)

Thanks again for sharing your thoughts - hope some of this was helpful! OVasileva (WMF) (talk) 15:46, 15 November 2024 (UTC)

And what about the breaking technical issues mentioned? Specifically, the paragraph spacing? — Alien  3
3 3 16:43, 15 November 2024 (UTC)

@OVasileva (WMF), @SGrabarczuk (WMF):: That is what I am really interested in too: The spacing problems which break our pages were mentioned as early as in March, why has it not been still solved until now, i.e. more than 7 months later? Why did you not answer this concern in March and avoid answering it now again? Why is the skin which we did not ask for planned to be deployed without solving this issue? If your team was not able to pay any attention to this until now, could you rectify it and solve the issue now before the deployment, or postpone the deployment until you solve it? --Jan Kameníček (talk) 14:27, 16 November 2024 (UTC)

@OVasileva (WMF), @SGrabarczuk (WMF):: And what is most frightening is the statement that "...I can’t promise that we’ll fix or work on every request ... but we will try to at the least reply..." Sounds like you are making just fun of us, and your answers above are in fact the embodiment of this approach: instead of solving our concerns you just "try to reply" to calm people down without any real action taken. It is not the first time I have met with this approach here, and I could see too often that it drives various zealous contributors out of WMF projects. --Jan Kameníček (talk) 14:40, 16 November 2024 (UTC)

Hello, thank you for your continued comments here and messages to us as we move towards getting everything ready for the deploy.

First, we decided to deploy next week instead. This is to give everyone some space to continue to make adjustments and keep this conversation going.

We fully recognize that the spacing issues have not yet been resolved, we didn't communicate about it earlier, and we apologize for the inconvenience this has caused.

We believe that the long-term solution would not be further adjusting the skin itself, though, but rather decreasing dependence on absolute values when making editing decisions. Yes, this means that together with you, we will need to spend more time changing the existing and new code. But there's good news - the skin is not a static product, and we plan on continuing to improve the desktop experience over time. We want to ensure that the platform evolves in a way that allows for continuous improvements.

Bearing this in mind, we wanted to say that assuming absolute values can lead to breakages as we move forward because it makes things more difficult to change across wikis. We encourage you to review Wikisource practices around expecting absolute values in the code in general.

Also, our engineers have read the conversation #Deployment of Vector 2022 and they recommend replacing .mw-body p { margin: 0.5em 0 1em 0; } with .mw-body p { margin: 0.5em 0; }. We may introduce some tweaks, but we strongly discourage from hiding the font size menu outright, too.

In terms of not being able to work on every request - we commit to working on breaking issues and significant usability improvements. However, we often get requests that do not align with the needs of most readers and editors. Some are simply technically impossible - these might be for new features, or workarounds that are catered to the needs of an individual user. Without knowing what the requests will be ahead of time, how many people they will help on Wikisource, or how difficult or technically possible they will be, we can't promise that we'll work on them. We thought this was important to point out so that we're not making empty promises.

How does this sound to you? We are curious if you have more questions, particularly about the technical side. On a side note, we can recommend the Vector (2022) and Related thread on Discord where community members discuss technical tweaks to the skin. This is a useful space for coordination in addition to the conversation we're having here.

Thanks! OVasileva (WMF) and SGrabarczuk (WMF) (talk) 22:44, 25 November 2024 (UTC)

From my perspective this sounds good, and would be good to continue to discuss in more detail 👍 --Yodin^T 06:50, 26 November 2024 (UTC)

(That css line has already been changed to that.

Oh, and that discord link you provided, at least for me, is broken.)

Thanks for delaying the deployment.

It is mostly concerning images that paragraph spacing and text size cause problems. We are aware that absolute widths are bad, but with images (except for SVGs, but a great majority of our images can't be easily SVG-converted) we can not scale them by a factor 1.4 (ratio between V22's "Small" and "Large" text) without their getting, in most cases, horribly pixelated. All the uploaded illustrations will not magically have their resolution augmented until they're 1.4 times larger than they are now. And this is not doable either, because the diversity of scan sources prevents automation (and some don't even have higher-res versions). Thus, making the images scale with the text is here not an option.

Regarding the needs of most readers and editors: it is true, that Wikisource is small, and minor, especially when compared to the Wikipedias. It is thus understandable for V22 to be thought mostly for them, and for it not to fit our needs.

But it is equally understandable that we should protest its deployment, or at least customise it through site CSS to fit our needs.

You (meaning those who made V22 in general), at least according to this page, wanted to standardise things (and btw this is rather bad communication, as it comes across as disdainful of the people who prefer V10 (which there are a great many of) and of their way of doing), specifically standardise the interface, and expressly not [...] the content (emphasis mine).

You modified paragraph spacing and set up ways to make the text larger, as that was, for WP, not part of the content.

For purely interface changes (e.g. what's in a dropdown menu or not), I mostly agree with the view that it's not necessarily worse, and people'll get used to it.

However, at WS, paragraph spacing and text size is part of the content, and V22 does as a side effect break the content.

As such, these changes break the content, and to me the best solution to that is to locally override V22 (including reverting paragraph spacing, nullifying the effect of the font-size changing, and, yes removing that select). — Alien  3
3 3 12:04, 26 November 2024 (UTC)

I think their engineers are supporting your idea of locally overriding the paragraph spacing. If the default font size was changed from "standard" to "small" on Vector 22, this would make the content exactly the same as it currently is. Would definitely be good to discuss separately and get a community consensus on how to handle {{overfloat image}}, whether to allow font resizing (I think this is worth considering, as it is basically a shortcut to see how the texts would display on different screen sizes etc.), and also how to handle dark mode, as @MarkLSteadman pointed out on Meta. [I'd also say that I am very frustrated by the way all of this was handled as well, but as they've been allocated time to implement the community consensus we should take them up on that and make sure the outcome is as good as possible for readers and editors]. --Yodin^T 14:31, 26 November 2024 (UTC)

We are going to want to support people who need larger font sizes for accessibility reasons. I also suspect that we will need to find some solution for people who read WS on a phone, where the narrower width does mean the paragraph spacing becomes important because you can no longer rely on the sentence ending mid-line as a visual cue. It's that it is difficult enough to produce high-quality transcriptions and we do want to get towards some standardized solutions to these issues rather than having individual contributors invent their own one-off solutions when they see things broken and try to fix it or become frustrated when if they log out and now their hard work looks bad. MarkLSteadman (talk) 16:13, 26 November 2024 (UTC)

News articles with no titles

We can use descriptive names like New York Tribune editorial on the Dred Scott case or my preferred would be New York Tribune/1857/It is Impossible to Exaggerate to use the first few words of the article. In the 1800s the front page of most papers were hundreds of small articles with no titles. RAN (talk) 18:12, 17 November 2024 (UTC)

I agree with your preference as it matches with the way the more famous editorials are referenced (e.g. "Yes, Virgina, there is a Santa Claus"). The category system will deal with the topic. Beeswaxcandle (talk) 02:41, 24 November 2024 (UTC)

Probably influenced by my poetry work, where it's preferred, but I think that the first words are better too. — Alien  3
3 3 11:13, 24 November 2024 (UTC)

• It will affect all the entries in Category:Dred Scott v. Sandford, should we delete the old names, or keep as redirects? --RAN (talk) 21:14, 24 November 2024 (UTC)

  Change to dated soft redirects. These stay in place for a few months before being deleted. This allows any external links to be amended prior to deletion. Beeswaxcandle (talk) 04:32, 25 November 2024 (UTC)

• We should also discuss other harmonization issues, there was a lot of experimenting with titles at the start, now we have entries like The Times/1882/News/Funeral of Charles Darwin and The Times/1882/Editorial/Burial of Charles Darwin. Do we still want to distinguish "news" from "editorials"? I can see only using this if we have an identically named article and an identically named editorial, but that would be rare. --RAN (talk) 21:58, 24 November 2024 (UTC)

  No, we don't want to separate out "news" from "editorial" like this. If we ended up with an identically named article and editorial, we would disambiguate in a different way. Beeswaxcandle (talk) 04:34, 25 November 2024 (UTC)

• I agree, if we encounter identical titled editorials and news articles, I would add something at the end of the title, not the beginning like there. As I said there was a lot of experimenting at the start of the project. I identified 6 different ways that newspaper articles were transcribed and there were 12 different ways that they were indexed, now down to about 6 types of indexes. --RAN (talk) 00:50, 27 November 2024 (UTC)

Are categories moved automatically like at Commons?

See Category:Editorial being migrated to a new category name. RAN (talk) 22:54, 24 November 2024 (UTC)

I'm a notoriously not-smart person, so pardon me if I'm just being a dummy again, but can you elaborate on what you mean? —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 23:01, 24 November 2024 (UTC)

The contents of Category:Editorial are being moved to Category:Magazine editorials, will a bot do the move, like at Commons? Previously we had Category:Editorial and Category:Editorials as dupe categories. --RAN (talk) 21:36, 25 November 2024 (UTC)

I am pretty sure no, since categories are not as integral or widespread here as at Commons. Moving things from one category to another is pretty trivial with HotCat, which you can add here: Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-gadgets. —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 21:41, 25 November 2024 (UTC)

• Catalot at Commons is intuitive, I can't figure out HotCat. --RAN (talk) 00:46, 27 November 2024 (UTC)

Purging/updating Index pages?

How does a user update/refresh/purge the cache of index pages beyond purge, hard purge, and null edit? I ask since I and another user have cleared all cases of a tracked error usage (Obsolete Font tags) on 73 Index pages a few weeks ago, but Wikisource is still reporting these errors as existing in the Special:LintErrors reports. Wondering if it is something we don't understand about how the page is built, or if something isn't working/updating correctly, and needs a phab ticket. Anyone have any insight? Thanks. Zinnober9 (talk) 03:58, 29 November 2024 (UTC)

That list implies that the "issue" (it's not an error) is coming through a template. Have you verified that the template and attendant module and css are not contributing? Beeswaxcandle (talk) 04:34, 29 November 2024 (UTC)

Yes, the Template and CSS are clean. The indication sometimes means it's in the template used, in other cases, it's within the template's usage on the page in question. An example of the latter would be that of en:Wikipedia:User:Gwillhickers/Current (report). It claims the errors are through Template:Navbox, but that is a clean template, and the errors are on the user's page in the template usage (the two fonts in title and list1, and the unclosed bold after Ulysses S. Grant).

For the Index pages here, each Index page claimed one Font tag usage before and after edits like this clearing one Font tag. I feel like that should have cleared it, but it didn't, so started asking questions. Another editor who I've talked with about this issue did two tests at Index:Love Songs.djvu and found that a test blanking of Table of Contents section didn't update the error claim, and in a second test, that it did not create a reported error by the addition of a selfclosing tag error. Edits display the changed text, but doesn't seem to update the metadata reports. Zinnober9 (talk) 06:57, 29 November 2024 (UTC)

How to handle repeated footnote calls? (two footnote 1's)

How do I handle a source with repeat footnote calls? e.g., on page one uses footnote 1, then on page three uses another footnote 1, then on page four a footnote 2, then it continues consecutively. If I just use <ref> then the numbers will all be one off. Thanks! Apt-ark (talk) 05:02, 27 November 2024 (UTC)

You can use the name attribute. See [17] MarkLSteadman (talk) 16:44, 27 November 2024 (UTC)

Do the two footnote 1s have the same text? — Alien  3
3 3 17:13, 27 November 2024 (UTC)

• What if they are separate? I have a work where it goes 1, 2, 3, 2, 4, 5, where the 2s are different. TE(æ)A,ea. (talk) 16:36, 30 November 2024 (UTC)

This isn't something that is practicable to reproduce exactly. We have other works where the footnotes restart on every page, & others that use symbols or letters. Just use ref markers as normal—which is our "house style." Beeswaxcandle (talk) 17:45, 30 November 2024 (UTC)

Deployment of Vector 2022

Following the above discussion #Switching to the Vector 2022 skin: the final date where the WMF employees did not seem to pay much attention to our concerns, Yodin was so kind to write a request for postponing the deployment to Wikimedia Foundation Board noticeboard at meta. Feel free to make there any comments too. -- Jan Kameníček (talk) 15:58, 22 November 2024 (UTC)

Erm, it looked strangely empty, so I looked at the history and saw this, with edit summary: (moving section to talk page to respond, as the NoticeBoard is for announcements). I think we should move our post to the talk page too. (@Yodin)

Also noting that, regarding the WMF personnel not answering our concerns, I emailed the two involved, hoping that they will actually answer the questions, as I believe that they are not any more in bad faith than we are, and that they aren't just ignoring us. — Alien  3
3 3 18:49, 22 November 2024 (UTC)

Good point @Alien333, and apologies to everyone if I've rushed in here and gone about this the wrong way! Good idea to nudge the web team, and to assume good faith; I'm a bit reluctant to move the message at this stage though, in case for example any of the trustees have emailed links to the discussion (the WMF staff looking after the page also seem to have left it where it is for now), but will do so if you all think this should be done.

I did also follow up the message by posting to the talk pages of each of the community appointed trustees, and there have been encouraging replies from three so far (Mike Peel, Victoria Doronina, and Rosie Stephenson-Goodknight). Mike Peel mentioned the Conversation with Trustees next Wednesday (27 Nov); not sure I want to attend as I'm already well outside my comfort zone, don't want to tread on any more toes here than I already have, and know that there are many admins and other editors who would be better at representing the community than me! That said, I'd be prepared to if no-one does. He also suggested starting a Phab ticket to track all issues relating to deployment of Vector 2022, which could be a good way to regain a bit of momentum on this? --Yodin^T 01:41, 23 November 2024 (UTC)

TL;DR:

• I was pointed to justification that more paragraph spacing would be more readable
• WMF has not taken into account the technical side
• We can override it with site css
• Are there other issues?

 

I did get an answer as to why they decided to space the paragraphs.

I was directed to [18], which notably contains: Increase the space between blocks of text to create better signposts for scanning

And ultimately points only, besides unjustified opinions, to the WCAG's [19], which regarding this says:

• Line height (line spacing) to at least 1.5 times the font size;
• Spacing following paragraphs to at least 2 times the font size;

[1] also contains: any change to the Wikimedia wikis' typography might have a temporary negative impact on readability for community members and frequent readers, even if it improves readability for the billions of others whom this work is intended to benefit. The good news is that negative transfer effects do not last for long. Effects like this suggest that allowing readers to customize their reading experience could improve readability for more people.

What I find alarming is that they appear to have wholly not taken into account the technical side of it.

 

On the brighter side, we are not wholly powerless if they just force that on us.

I, for one, though this might be an unpopular opinion, do not think that's V22's general layout is problematic, and I now use it, though I had to do some css customisation to revert the technically problematic stuff.

We always have MediaWiki:Gadget-Site.css. Nothing prevents us from adding: (keeping this code up to date)

.mw-body p { margin: 0.5em 0; }
.vector-body { font-size:0.875em; }
#skin-client-prefs-vector-feature-custom-font-size { display: none; }

Are there other actually breaking issues (as opposed to merely less practical)? Can we solve them all with MediaWiki:Gadget-Site.css? — Alien  3
3 3 08:54, 23 November 2024 (UTC)

Unfortunately, I am not very techy, so: do I understand it right that we can locally adjust both spacing following paragraphs and line height to preserve the current state? --Jan Kameníček (talk) 10:16, 23 November 2024 (UTC)

Yes you do, it's only a css rule. We shouldn't have to hack through stuff forced on us, but we can. Actually, .mw-body p { margin: 0.5em 0; } would be much better.

Oh, and for line spacing, V22 didn't change that, as far as I know. — Alien  3
3 3 10:34, 23 November 2024 (UTC)

That doesn't seem to be enough to fix the {{Overfloat image}} problems; not sure how much CSS is causing those problems. A couple of other (non-breaking) issues I've found so far:

• Spacing of the progress bar (green/yellow/red), backlinks for subpages, and placement of the featured text icon and download ebook button at top of mainspace pages
• The previous, next and up arrow links at the top of each Page:

@Alien333 you mentioned "I had to do some css customisation to revert the technically problematic stuff" – how much custom CSS are you having to use at the moment? --Yodin^T 13:43, 23 November 2024 (UTC)

Did you use the first rule I gave (the one with !important) or the other one? The other one does work. Also, need to be careful and test without V22's spacing for {{overfloat image}} stories, as many calls to it are broken even without. Can you point me to a page that works without V22 and without .mw-body p { margin: 0.5em 0; }, but that doesn't work with V22 and with .mw-body p { margin: 0.5em 0; }?

Regarding the quantity of css, not that much, currently only this (related to V22). I also have one other rule because the invert dark mode (which tbh is better than the "feature-level" dark mode) does a weird thing with table backgrounds. — Alien  3
3 3 14:54, 23 November 2024 (UTC)

Yep, using the second one, and seeing issues with pretty much all uses of {{overfloat image}}. I think it's when Text size is set to Standard in the Appearance menu (which is the default for logged out users). When it's set to Small (i.e. the normal font from Vector 2010) it seems to be ok. When it's set to Large, it becomes completely broken. --Yodin^T 15:05, 23 November 2024 (UTC)

Oh, indeed, hadn't thought of that. We'd have to add .vector-body { font-size:0.875em; } too. — Alien  3
3 3 15:12, 23 November 2024 (UTC)

Which I guess would override the Appearance font size options entirely? As you said above, we could introduce hacky fixes like this, but really these are issues the Web Team should be addressing. --Yodin^T 15:23, 23 November 2024 (UTC)

If we're overriding it, might as well hide it (added above). — Alien  3
3 3 16:11, 23 November 2024 (UTC)

I think there's a standard way to disable those options without hiding them (like on the Watchlist for example). Maybe a MediaWiki: namespace editable option? The page layouts also seem to override the Width section of the Appearance menu too (or at least I haven't come across a mainspace page that is affected by changing from Standard to Wide mode)? --Yodin^T 17:15, 23 November 2024 (UTC)

I think that's because they did take some trouble to vaguely try and make it wikisource-compatible. I know that for Page:space it's always wide for that reason, it's probably the same for Main. — Alien  3
3 3 17:17, 23 November 2024 (UTC)

Ah, probably shouldn't be a selectable option in those namespaces then? Seems to work as expected here in the Wikisource namespace, and probably all talk pages. --Yodin^T 17:31, 23 November 2024 (UTC)

For these non-breaking issues, I'm unsure how you would prefer it to be. If you mean some things that were above the title going beneath, I don't think it's that problematic. — Alien  3
3 3 15:05, 23 November 2024 (UTC)

As I said, they don't break any pages, but I think we should list all the visual glitches that the Vector 2022 introduces. For the download button at the top of each mainspace page, it introduces a lot of whitespace above the header; this could be solved by putting it (and any featured text icons, etc.) on the same line as the proofread progress bar, and links from subpages. This is one example, and one I wouldn't be certain of the best practice way to fix, in a way that only applies to Vector 2022, but keeps Vector 2010 as it is. --Yodin^T 15:19, 23 November 2024 (UTC)

"The designer-oriented discourse on web typography available from sites like Smashing Magazine and Medium is not very relevant to the task of improving readability of Wikipedia. Most of the articles assume that designers want to optimize an in-depth editorial reading experience of long-form text articles, rather than the quick, task-oriented, contextualized skimming behaviours Wikipedia's readers are most likely to employ" From the link. That is the heart of it for me: 1. Only mention of Wikipedia and 2. What do they expect people to be doing here. have a quick skim over, say, a novel or actually read it on our site? MarkLSteadman (talk) 13:57, 23 November 2024 (UTC)

• Alien, Jan Kameníček: On my end, it’s been forced through. Could we have this reversed? While we’re at it, can we have SGrabarczuk (WMF) and such ilk banned? They are clearly not here to contribute to the project and have already disrupted it to a make a point, both of which are bannable offenses on Wikipedia (the only place they seem to care about). TE(æ)A,ea. (talk) 00:46, 4 December 2024 (UTC)

  @Jan.Kamenicek Would definitely be good to discuss this to get an overall consensus. @TE(æ)A,ea. in the meantime, you can switch back to Vector 2010 by going to Preferences > Appearance selecting Vector legacy (2010) then Save. --Yodin^T 01:38, 4 December 2024 (UTC)

"(partial list)" on author pages

If you search for "partial list" in the Author namespace, you will find there are a handful of author pages that say the word "(partial list)" before listing out the works. But there are many issues with this:

• That phrase was usually added to those pages over a decade ago, and it's easy for editors to keep the word "partial list" there despite the fact that the list had probably been significantly updated since then.
• The whole point of a wiki is to collaboratively improve content over time. So, in a sense, any page is always supposed to be assumed under some kind of construction, meaning the list is in a sense inherently partial.
• This is especially true for author pages, since because of lack of easy access to many periodicals and newspapers, and other obscure publications that are sometimes overlooked or not scanned, it's extremely difficult to claim a comprehensive list of all works published by a particular author.

Can we just remove all instances of this?

(There are other similar issues with author pages by the way, for example the claim made on some author pages that they're static lists based on someone's bibliography or another, rather than dynamic lists that can be improved or changed over time.) SnowyCinema (talk) 11:52, 30 November 2024 (UTC)

I think we should remove them, just like we removed {{incomplete list}} in July, for the same reasons. — Alien  3
3 3 12:25, 30 November 2024 (UTC)

I agree. Bibliographies like that are often not perfect and could discourage editors from including any additional works that they missed. Seems like it might be trying to use a Wikipedia style approach of requiring secondary sources, which I don't think is needed on author pages, and wouldn't be possible for most obscure authors. --Yodin^T 20:25, 30 November 2024 (UTC)

Done SnowyCinema (talk) 23:43, 4 December 2024 (UTC)

Portals in headers

The portals were traditionally listed in the portal parameter and divided by slashes. Now CalendulaAsteraceae started replacing this with individual portal1, portal2... parameters, see e. g. here, and plans to stop splitting portals at the slashes in the long run completely. As this is going to influence a really large number of pages, I think it should be discussed first, and so I am posting it here. Jan Kameníček (talk) 12:01, 3 November 2024 (UTC)

Very long run; I don't actually want to take that project on anytime soon because (as you mention) it would be a lot of work. —CalendulaAsteraceae (talk • contribs) 12:04, 3 November 2024 (UTC)

Well, you have already taken some steps, and the discussion should have preceded them.
As for the replacement itself, in my opinion it is not only unnecessary, but also unnecessarily more complicated for contributors. Slashes work well and are easy and quick to write. --Jan Kameníček (talk) 12:07, 3 November 2024 (UTC)

• The new way makes it difficult to change the order, you have to swap entries, not just move a single name to change the order. What is the advantage of the new way? Do we gain anything useful? --RAN (talk) 13:27, 5 November 2024 (UTC)

  I think the new way is overall more difficult or lengthy to type. --Jan Kameníček (talk) 15:38, 5 November 2024 (UTC)

A possible advantage of this would be to allow for the about a thousand portals that include slashes in their names to be used, though I don't know if that's a major loss. (After all, at this point there are probably more pages that use / to include multiple portals than portals that are incompatible with that.) In case anyone else is interested by the technical side of it, it's with this edit at module:plain sister. — Alien  3
3 3 14:08, 5 November 2024 (UTC)

True. It is definitely not necessary to deprecate it, it can stay optional, but should not replace the older way. And unless there is a reason in specific cases, like this one, it should not be being replaced massively by a bot. --Jan Kameníček (talk) 15:38, 5 November 2024 (UTC)

Many of the "portals with slashes in their names" are subpages that should not be linked to directly. Many others are experiemntal, or old, and are not being maintained. Another approach might be to start cleanup of those Portals that should not have a slash in their name. --EncycloPetey (talk) 03:39, 5 December 2024 (UTC)

• @Jan.Kamenicek, @CalendulaAsteraceae: While on the subject of portal space, can we drop the period (.) at the end of the list of portals. It isn't a sentence and we end up with portals for people named "Jr." and "Sr." getting a double period. --RAN (talk) 20:13, 6 November 2024 (UTC)

  That sounds good to me, and would be easy to implement without requiring any changes to how the template is invoked. I'll wait a bit in case there are any objections, but barring that, I'm happy to go ahead and make the change. —CalendulaAsteraceae (talk • contribs) 03:58, 9 November 2024 (UTC)

  Good point. BTW, if the period is dropped out from portal, it should be also dropped out from related_author for the sake of consistency, as they are displayed one above the other and it would look weird if one was finished with the period while the other was not. --Jan Kameníček (talk) 12:47, 9 November 2024 (UTC)

  (They use the same code of Module:Plain sister anyways, so if we remove that period for one of them it'd also remove it for the rest) — Alien  3
  3 3 12:49, 9 November 2024 (UTC)

  So I guess that it would affect {{Plain sister}} and other templates using it as well. Imo, it should not be a problem in any of them. --Jan Kameníček (talk) 13:00, 9 November 2024 (UTC)

  Done! —CalendulaAsteraceae (talk • contribs) 16:01, 11 November 2024 (UTC)

Surname categories

Is there anything preventing us from having surname categories like "Category:Smith (surname)" for portals to match Commons? It would make it much easier to find news articles and portals for someone where we know their last name but they may appear as James Smith or Jack Smith, once you see them in the list you will figure out the correct person. RAN (talk) 20:14, 9 November 2024 (UTC)

• They can also link to Wikidata at "Wikisource=Category:Smith (surname)" at the surname entry in Wikidata. --RAN (talk) 18:16, 12 November 2024 (UTC)

We have Category:People in portal namespace, with a total of 39 portals about people. Few of the people who have listed portals have any surname at all. Therefore, I do not believe that instituting a categorization by surname is warranted for these portals. --EncycloPetey (talk) 03:47, 5 December 2024 (UTC)

No redirects from Portals to Author

I was always told there are to be no redirects from Portals to Author, but why? I don't see any valid reason. I only see the value of knowing that someone is an author and not the subject of works. RAN (talk) 23:48, 13 November 2024 (UTC)

Wikisource:Deletion_policy#Miscellaneous would include "unneeded redirects". Yet redirects from Portals to Author as crossing the namespaces do not automatically fall into them. Need wider talks on this.--Jusjih (talk) 04:11, 17 November 2024 (UTC)

I can imagine that a redirect from the Author NS to Portal NS can be useful. E. g. an author does not have any works eligible to be hosted in English Wikisource and so works about the author are gathered in a portal. However, some people might be searching for the author in the Author NS, because that is the place where we usually have pages on authors, and so a redirect can be helpful. For example we used to have the page Author:Socrates redirecting to Portal:Socrates, until it was deleted a few years ago as redundant, which was imo not necessary. However, the other way, i. e. redirect from Portal NS to Author NS does not really seem useful to me. --Jan Kameníček (talk) 10:22, 17 November 2024 (UTC)

I see two reasons that this might exist:

• Subject portals about particular authors. Like you want to subclass "Russian Literature" into Portals for Tolstoy, Gogol and Pushkin, or "Biology" into Mendel, Darwin, Aristotle, etc. What is the need for creating these subportals as opposed to just listing the author? And if you wanted a sub portal for separation, (e.g."U.S. Presidential Administrations" --> "Obama Administration" separate from works Obama authored) then you are trying to make a distinction that a redirect is wrong, (e.g. a memo from one official to another) And subclassing these portals with an Author creates problems anyways (is "Aristotle" a subportal of Biology, Ethics, Political Science...).
• Non-human authors, e.g. pseudonyms. I can see some situations where this might be appropriate (e.g. a letter from a fictitious company) but this seems extremely narrow.

MarkLSteadman (talk) 19:10, 17 November 2024 (UTC)

The general feeling in the past has been that works by an Author should be listed on that Author's page. Listing them again in Portal space is duplication both of function and of content, doubling the work to maintain them both. --EncycloPetey (talk) 03:50, 5 December 2024 (UTC)

• I work in news articles about people, mostly obits, so almost everyone has a portal as the subject of a news article, but occasionally someone will have written an editorial or a got a letter published in a newspaper, I would like to have the portal redirect to the author page when this occurs. Normally if someone just wrote an editorial, I would keep them as a portal, but several times others have moved them into author space. --RAN (talk) 04:31, 19 November 2024 (UTC)

When an author is the subject of a work, then the section "Works about" should be created on the Author page. Portals are for topics and there can be a link from a portal to an author. Cross-namespace redirects are not required. Beeswaxcandle (talk) 07:41, 21 November 2024 (UTC)

Yes, but we have to distinguish between book authors who may write many books, and an author of a single editorial in a newspaper. And we have to distinguish between "not required" and "banned". I have had the redirects deleted as if banned. --RAN (talk) 15:23, 21 November 2024 (UTC)

I don't understand why a distinction is needed for how much an author wrote. If a work (regardless of length) is in scope for hosting here, then the author of that work needs an Author page. Cross-namespace redirect is a speedy deletion criterion, hence their deletions. A "not required" redirect is within the same namespace from an unlikely search title or to a non-existent page that is unlikely to be created in the short-term. Beeswaxcandle (talk) 02:23, 23 November 2024 (UTC)

• I and Jan Kameníček seems to think they are "useful" and should not be deleted. The best example of no redirect is Author:Socrates and Portal:Socrates as pointed out by Jan Kameníček. I think we should keep them, and we should hear what others think as to their utility. Sometimes we have rules and forget why we created them and follow them blindly. This appears to be a hard rule that doesn't actually solve a problem, it is just a rule we follow blindly. --RAN (talk) 19:05, 23 November 2024 (UTC)

The Socrates example is the opposite to what you are asking for in this thread and Author:Socrates was not a redirect, so it's not relevant to this discussion. What is the actual problem you want to solve by creating a page in the Portal: namespace that is a redirect to the Author: namespace? What's a use case for such a redirect? Note, I'm not saying "no", I just don't have a reason to say "support" yet. Beeswaxcandle (talk) 02:36, 24 November 2024 (UTC)

• I want to be able to have non-mandatory redirects in both directions when someone is an author (author space) and the subject (portal space). The problem starts when someone is moved from Portal space to Author space, or the other way around, and it is no longer clear where they are now located. It seems like we have a hard rule that is in search of a problem. I see absolutely no problem with redirects in both directions. All other projects use redirects liberally, and we should too. Can you give me some good reasons that we do not allow them? As per Jusjih, the rule appears to be someone's interpretation of "unneeded redirects", now policed regularly. I argue that they are needed to ease finding people, without knowing if the are the subject of a news article or the author of a news article. --RAN (talk) 20:26, 24 November 2024 (UTC)

  I don't know why we forbid them, but if someone doesn't know any information but name, typing the name in the search box already brings up both portals and authors, so redirects wouldn't bring much. — Alien  3
  3 3 20:49, 24 November 2024 (UTC)

  To prevent that confusion is exactly why they shouldn't be redirects in the first point. If we are just going just going to redirect and treat Portal:Foo and Author:Foo as equivalent why even have Author:Foo? Is the idea here to always create both, then why not just have portals?

  And as I mentioned above, the problem here is that works about Foo from a subject perspective should ideally be grouped in an appropriate subject category, e.g. biographies of Tolstoy under biographies, literary criticism of Tolstoy under literary criticism, anarchists talking about Tolstoy under Anarchism, etc. If we are just going to redirect biographies of Tolstoy to Author:Tolstoy/Biographies, anarchism to Author:Tolstoy/Anarchism and recreate a parallel subject structure under Authors what is the point of portals anyway if they are just going to be collections of links to authors, why not just use Author categories?

  If we don't think the current distinction is useful, merge the two, don't create a conflicting mess where we just plop things down haphazardly between the two and then just say redirect, it doesn't really matter. MarkLSteadman (talk) 21:25, 24 November 2024 (UTC)

  I am not asking for duplicate entries, just a redirect from Portal space when someone is moved to Author space. I also agree that we do not need to have both spaces to distinguish an author from a subject, but have it historically. Every Author could have just been a Portal. We also do not "always [have to] create both"., just allow it when someone is moved. --RAN (talk) 21:35, 24 November 2024 (UTC)

  What are you linking to what that is moving? What is being moved where? Which subject area on this list Portal:Portals is the portal under that is being moved? How often are we doing things like building out a portal for Austeniana, Dickensiana, Shakespeariana under British Literature (PR) and then deciding to move them to their author pages, and need a redirect rather than just listing them under the appropriate subject area? MarkLSteadman (talk) 22:28, 24 November 2024 (UTC)

  The situation is occurring when a portal is created for a person who is the subject of a news article. It is then found that the person is an author, at which point they are moved to the Author: namespace. However, there are various links that are left pointing to the Portal. AFAIK we don't have a mechanism to automatically update those links, and thus RAN would like to retain the redirect so that the page remains within the Portal: namespace, thus allowing other news articles to also link within that namespace. I am yet to look at how these non-author person portals are being parented within the Portal structure, so that they link up to Portal:Portals, but that's a side issue to the topic of this thread. Beeswaxcandle (talk) 04:48, 25 November 2024 (UTC)

  If you think that a listing of works about a person has value, it should have value whether that person is an author or not. If we create portals (or just list works on the main portal) "Historical Works about Augustus" , "Historical Works about Julius Caesar" "Historical Works about Nero" etc. under Roman History (or biography, with "Biographies" instead of "Historical Works"), why does it matter which ones have extant authored works and which ones don't? The reason that the portal structure matters is that is why a redirect is inappropriate. If these are under "Newspapers" --> "News Articles about Foo" why does it matter whether Foo wrote a poem while for "News Articles about Bar" Bar didn't? MarkLSteadman (talk) 05:36, 25 November 2024 (UTC)

  Parenting is required per policy. Per Help:Portals#Necessary_parts "all portals on Wikisource must have: 2. A classification (or call number)." Also relevant: "Portal space is structured into a five layer hierarchy. The top layer contains only the one, main portal, Portal:Portals." Per Help:Portal classification "An adapted version of the Library of Congress Classifiaction system (LCCS) is used to classify all portals on Wikisource." And then if they grew large enough they can be split again.

  These likely should be {{Portal subpage}} instead: "Used for subpages of named items in the Portal: namespace, eg. People," Lets say you are collecting documents about people on Jan 6th: indictments, proceedings, news articles, etc. You might create a main portal "Jan 6 Prosecution" and then create portal subpages for each, linked by name, date, whatever (for previous / next). Or do something similar for "Settlers of Foo." But I wouldn't then go start moving them out into Authors and breaking the subpage structure as it is found that this person was a journalist with articles, that settler wrote a poem etc. MarkLSteadman (talk) 07:23, 28 November 2024 (UTC)

Did the site's CSS just change again?

I was just editing Constitution of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts (1780) and the colors of the header template became all faded and pale, similar to what happened several weeks back on index pages. What is going on? —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 14:21, 22 November 2024 (UTC)

It's probably @CanonNi's editing Template:Header/styles.css about one hour ago. To CanonNi:

• Are you aware that the variables you used do not correspond to the old colors?
• If yes, why did you do it?
• Did you discuss it somewhere?
• Do you mind if I revert? — Alien  3
  3 3 14:47, 22 November 2024 (UTC)

 Comment I reverted it for now, on the grounds that it is the highest-used template on the site and was causing a styling issue. So headers should be back to normal, and will await CanonNi's response here. SnowyCinema (talk) 15:50, 22 November 2024 (UTC)

My apologies. I was tweaking the colors so that they look more natural in dark mode, and the variables are copied from the Chinese Wikisource. Thanks for reverting the edits. '''[[User:CanonNi]]''' (talk • contribs) 07:47, 25 November 2024 (UTC)

@CanonNi: The new changes are not problematic. Still, I'm wondering, is there a specific reason why you are changing the styles? — Alien  3
3 3 18:13, 5 December 2024 (UTC)

Well, I'm using the official-ish dark mode, and the original styles were way too bright when the background is dark, so I made a couple of tweaks per the recommendations. '''[[User:CanonNi]]''' (talk • contribs) 01:58, 6 December 2024 (UTC)