Wikisource talk:WikiProject 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica

Should B&W duplicates of colored symbols be created for the EB?

I just validated a page on the chemistry article (EB1911 - Volume 06.djvu/49), but have a question re. colored symbols. Dalton's chemical symbols were sometimes black, sometimes red. In the EB reproduction, they're all black. (AFAICT red was never contrastive on its own, but helped differentiate.) I created SVG's for the WP article, and used them again here, but some are red as Dalton intended (see fn 4). Does that matter? Should I create black duplicates for use on EB? Please ping, Kwamikagami (talk) 23:57, 8 January 2022 (UTC)

@Kwamikagami: The high-resolution color scan of that page — https://archive.org/details/encyclopaediabrit06chisrich/page/36/mode/1up — shows the symbols as all black. So I suggest that they should be changed to black on [[1]]. Also, thanks for your fixes in EB1911. DivermanAU (talk) 03:35, 23 January 2022 (UTC)

I should get around to that today. Kwamikagami (talk) 01:02, 24 January 2022 (UTC)

Also, on Volume 06.djvu/52, there's a table header "O = 16." It looks like it's actually "0 = 16.", though if so that's an obvious error. Is it okay for us to correct typos like that? Kwamikagami (talk) 22:26, 13 January 2022 (UTC)

The number 0 in the printed EB1911 looks quite round, so the O for Oxygen looks OK to me. But there are some printer's errors in EB1911. DivermanAU (talk) 10:26, 22 January 2022 (UTC)

Myself and others have made amendments to printer's errors like this: solidification (hover over the red underlined word to show the misspelled word 'solidfication' — from Page:EB1911 - Volume 01.djvu/750). DivermanAU (talk) 03:40, 23 January 2022 (UTC)

Good tip, thanks. I've been adding {{sic}}, but that doesn't work in the middle of <math>, e.g. in the algebra articles, which have a fair number of typos.

On Page:EB1911 - Volume 01.djvu/676, they have $p_{x}$ for what clearly should be $\rho _{x}$. I'd simply copied the typo, but now I've fixed it as $\rho _{x}$. Note however that the hover-over doesn't support even html subscripting, let alone math formatting, so I have it as "p-sub-x" rather than p_x.

But in a long stretch of math, it's not possible to use this remedy for just one wrong character. What should I do in such cases? In one case an error was improper alignment (a subscript on a superscript instead of a superscript on a superscript), so I just fixed it, but when the character is wrong, I don't want to fix in case I'm wrong. Since this is a historical doc, should readers just accept the typos?

There are some shorter examples on Page:EB1911 - Volume 01.djvu/678. At the end of line 2 in the right column, they have $\dots +\sigma _{2}$ for $\dots +\sigma _{\theta }$, and in the fraction at the end of the next para, there's an 'I' instead of a '1' in the denominator. How would you suggest handling these?

There were some typos in larger chunks of math, but I'll need to look for those when I'm more awake. (I was mostly leaving them for the validator rather than keeping track.) Kwamikagami (talk) 03:43, 23 January 2022 (UTC)

@Kwamikagami: I think for Page:EB1911 - Volume 01.djvu/678 the printer's typo you found should be amended (the intention was to use theta, not 2). Nice find, by the way. It is tricky when the typo is inside a "math" string, but I believe it's best to use the character intended (theta) — I've made the change on the page and added a comment in the page to that effect). DivermanAU (talk) 00:51, 24 January 2022 (UTC)

My concern is that sometimes when I think I've found an obvious error like that, I'm just wrong. With your original solution, with a hover-over, a reader might realize that and let us know, but that's less likely to happen with a hidden comment. True, in these particular cases it's completely obvious that they're fixes, but I've thought that when I was wrong too. Kwamikagami (talk) 01:00, 24 January 2022 (UTC)

Strange thumbnail image issue

Hi all, especially @EncycloPetey: and @ShakespeareFan00:, who may be able to shed some light - I'm a bit baffled by an issue where a few images are appearing as small thumbnails. See the Arachnida article; figures 20, 46 and 49 appear as very small thumbnails, whereas other images display as the expected size. The source page looks fine (i.e. the image shows as the expected size) e.g. Fig. 49 on Page:EB1911 - Volume 02.djvu/318. The issue occurs on multiple Windows PCs on Chrome and Edge (but not on Internet Explorer 11!). The problem also shows on a ChromeBook. The really weird thing is that I took a copy of the transcluded "Arachnida" article and pasted it into a sandbox: User:DivermanAU/sandbox2 and the images look normal-sized! Any advice/suggestions appreciated. DivermanAU (talk) 06:02, 23 February 2022 (UTC)

I tried a couple of ideas. I notice that the image itself is very small, only 199x222, though it was being displayed at 200px width. However, adjusting the display size to 199px did not resolve the issue. I am seeing the same issue you describe in Firefox, so I do not think it is a browser issue, but something about the way the wiki-software displays images and/or transcludes table content. I tried transcluding Page:EB1911 - Volume 02.djvu/309 in a new location, and the image initially was large, but then quickly shrank to its tiny size. I tried removing the "left" from the image display code, but this did not change anything. It may be caused by the interplay of several obscure coding issues. I do wonder why the content is on the wrong EB page though. The image in question is on the previous EB page in the scan. --EncycloPetey (talk) 17:35, 23 February 2022 (UTC)

@EncycloPetey: thanks for your reply and investigations. Your idea about the width of the images got me thinking. The issue seemed to be only on those images where the caption was on the right in the table. I tried forcing the width of the column (style="width:200px;") in the table (even though the image size was already specified in the "File:" statement). That fixed the issue! I still don't know why the issue only affected some images. I also moved Fig. 20 back to the page where it belongs. Thanks again for your assistance. DivermanAU (talk) 19:10, 23 February 2022 (UTC)

template:EB1911 contributor

Hi. I have been updating our author: ns templates through use of {{contributed to}} and have converted this template to adapt the form and at the same time I have built in use of small-caps so will it automatically apply. As people wander through author pages, feel welcome to remove that additional coding.

Ultimately I am looking to having a neater way for us to provide lists of works contributed to, rather than the big blocks of repetitive text, so this is stage one of getting things lined up. — billinghurst sDrewth 21:20, 28 February 2023 (UTC)