Wikisource talk:WikiProject 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Style Manual

Formatting difficulties

Having proofread and validated several dozen pages in Page space, I have a few questions I'd like to get discussed and then included in the style manual if we can reach agreement. These comments particularly apply to the process leading from an OCR'd initial creation to a validated page. I've made subsections to help with commenting. DavidBrooks (talk) 01:03, 29 December 2014 (UTC)

Apostrophe

I’ve been consistent in changing the ASCII apostrophe ' to right-quote ’ (not ’), except of course in the odd cases where it’s actually a left-quote or a (rare) breathing marker. Unicode, surprisingly to my mind, accepts that apostrophe and right-quote are the same character although they are semantically distinct. Does anyone have a problem with requiring the proper quotes in the Style Manual? It is a little extra effort, but there are several ways of getting a single right-quote, including selecting ‘’ from the palette and deleting the ’.

The general policy is to use straight quote marks rather than curly ones. See WS:MOS. Beeswaxcandle (talk) 09:47, 29 December 2014 (UTC)

Understood, although the recent discussion also says that specialists in a particular work can agree on something else (for EB1911, that would be PBS, Bob Burkhardt, and Slowking4 - not that I've brought it up with them yet). I think the issues with data entry are overblown, as there are several ways of entering the character, although the toolbar palette does require deleting the superfluous open-quote. Finally, can we distinguish apostrophe from single quotes? Since this style manual specifically calls out “curly doubles” for quotations instead of ``...'', and OCR usually gets those right, can we match the occasional embedded quotation and specify curly singles for them, as in: Smith writes, “Jones says ‘yes’.”?—unsigned comment by DavidBrooks (talk) 18:06, 29 December 2014 (UTC).

David Brooks does bring up a point, that there is inconsistency between this project's EB1911 MOS which advises use of curly apostrophes, vs. general WS:MOS which advocates straight quotes. Probably the former should be amended: straight quotes seems the obvious pragmatic choice, given that in Wikipedia (which uses straight quotes), numerous articles have been created, and will probably continue to be create as copy-and-paste jobs straight from wikisource. --Kiyoweap (talk) 09:37, 28 January 2015 (UTC)

I think the days of copy-pasting into Wikipedia are over: there was a strenuous effort some years ago and the main focus is expanding the citation templates such as adding title parameters to parameterless {{EB1911}} instances. Anyway, we do have a lot of inconsistency now in Page space and Article space; in my most recent Page verifications I have been using the straight quote because of the general WS:MOS and also because it's a little less effort. But I haven't fixed the many proofread pages in Page space that have the curly apostrophe. I honestly don't much care, except to note that we do consistently use curly “double quotes”, primarily I think because that's what the OCR generates. DavidBrooks (talk) 21:00, 30 January 2015 (UTC)

I do not think that we should use straight double quotes for the reasons given before. We can easily have a bot run over the whole encyclopaedia at a later date converting them without any checking needed. If we go the other way then it would be much more difficult. So I am against changing the local MOS. As for single quotes, unlike the DNB this encyclopaedia does not seem to use them much for quotations (if at all). I am in favour of using simple standard ascii single quote ' in place of other types of single quotes usage like apostrophes. -- PBS (talk) 20:53, 1 October 2017 (UTC)

@PBS, @DavidBrooks, @Bob Burkhardt, @Slowking4, @Kiyoweap: Regarding apostrophes and single quotes, I believe curly ones ’ should be used (which aligns with using curly double quotes). Curly apostrophes/quotes are also needed to distinguish them from the reversed comma ʽ (sometimes known as “rough breathing diacritic”, which is NOT a left curly single quote ‘) used by EB1911 for some Arabic words. e.g. El-ʽAsi, which is pronounced differently from El-’Asi. If straight apostrophes are used e.g. El-'Asi, it’s ambiguous regarding pronunciation. We should maintain the distinction shown in the printed version of EB1911. – DivermanAU (talk) 04:23, 9 October 2020 (UTC)

@DivermanAU: In Wikipedia, as per al-Qazwini's book title ʿAjā'ib al-makhlūqāt wa gharā'ib al-mawjūdāt (which I can never commit to memory) a different glyph ʿ (described under ayin) seems to be preferred over the rough breathing mark. --Kiyoweap (talk) 19:57, 22 October 2020 (UTC)

Agree that the "modifier letter left half ring" is recommended, as you say, for modern text. But the "reversed comma" is a more accurate representation of the character used in EB1911. The EB1911 Wikisource project is trying to create an on-line version of the Encyclopædia as it was printed with punctuation and spelling current in 1911. The reversed comma is "even considered equivalent in practice" as stated in Wikipedia anyway. — DivermanAU (talk) 15:41, 23 October 2020 (UTC)

"Regarding apostrophes and single quotes, I believe curly ones ’ should be used (which aligns with using curly double quotes)" I don't (sic) agree for use with English text although I can see the advantage of using whatever character is appropriate it it carries additional information with foreign names or other such text. This version not meant to be a facsimile of the original text and fonts but a version that displays standard web browsers. In the long run it will probably be better to use the ascii double quote as well, but for the time being I think it better not to do so for the reason given above. -- PBS (talk) 18:45, 25 November 2020 (UTC)

en dash in ranges

As in Wikipedia, the dash in date ranges (1911–2014) should be an en-dash; I hope that's agreed. OCR originally delivers the basic ASCII hyphen, which should be changed. I understand the consensus is to represent it literally and not as 1911–2014 or 1911&2013;2014 (how confusing is that?). The problem now is that it's hard to distinguish visually, and impossible in the editor, so the proofreader and validator can't tell easily if their predecessor got it right. So we have to take the extra time to do a possibly null edit and see if it shows up as a change. Just an observation; I'm not proposing changing the guidance. Am I missing something?

em dash spacing

I'm not clear whether the long dash in article texts should be surrounded by a hair-space (e.g. with {{—}}, as we have been putting in page headings. I've been using {{—}} as a matter of routine, although I really can't see the difference—but it is useful as a marker that, again, distinguishes it from hyphen in the editor. Spacing does seem pretty tight in the printed original. Is there a formal rule about spacing the dashes?

We're in the middle of discussing the deprecation of {{—}} at WS:DEL#Template:—. It looks likely to go. At the main Style Manual there is guidance which says not to use space around an em-dash. Beeswaxcandle (talk) 09:45, 29 December 2014 (UTC)

Polytonic

As discussed above, EB1911 Greek uses polytonic diacritics. Although the Greek toolbar palette provides all of them, I've been wrapping them in the {{Polytonic}} template as well simply because it produces a more authentic-looking script (on Windows, at any rate). The template on Wikipedia (but not Wikisource) is deprecated but its suggested replacement, {{lang|gr} does not make the font change. I don't know the history here, but I've put it in the Style Manual as a "some editors" (i.e. me) suggestion. Should it be stronger?

Please continue to use either the {{Polytonic}} or its derivate {{Greek}} templates for Greek text. It looks better and the diacritics show up better in that set of fonts than in the basic font. Beeswaxcandle (talk) 09:50, 29 December 2014 (UTC)

Use the {{Polytonic}} template, this ensure diacritics with serifs display correctly (i.e. as shown in EB1911); the {{Greek}} template may or may not show them correctly depending on which fonts you have installed on your computer. See Template_talk:Greek. DivermanAU (talk) 20:58, 5 July 2017 (UTC)

Note that the {{Greek}} template was changed in 2021 to alter font-handling and {{Polytonic}} was changed to be a redirect to {{Greek}}. So use {{Greek}} now. DivermanAU (talk) 21:27, 22 December 2023 (UTC)

Table styles and writing sideways

The page Page:EB1911 - Volume 28.djvu/409 is a page of the article 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Water Supply. In it it has a table with cells containing sideways writing. I asked at Wikisource:Scriptorium‎ about how it is done and there does not seem to be a standard way. So I have written up how it can be done in the sub-page of the EB1911 Manual of Style: "/Table examples" PBS (talk) 09:01, 3 April 2021 (UTC)

Floating tables and images

I have added collapse boxes to the style manual describing how to float {{missing table}} and {{missing image}} to the left or the right of the page, because I think that this will help make a page that is missing tables or images look more like a fully proofread page with tables or images or both. -- PBS (talk) 09:00, 3 April 2021 (UTC)

Mathematics

I would like to add a new section header "Mathematics" just above Fractions sections and indent them by one putting at the top:

See also: Help:Fractions and functions

Has any one any thoughts on this? -- PBS (talk) 06:50, 3 April 2021 (UTC)

Be bold! DavidBrooks (talk) 13:57, 3 April 2021 (UTC)

Typos

I've come across a quotation that includes an opening quotation mark but no closing mark. This error is present in the original. Should this be corrected or not? Zacwill (talk) 00:28, 31 October 2024 (UTC)

I've seen many cases where a double quotation starts a paragraph and there's no closing double quote. I put it down to the style used by the author or printer. In those cases I haven't added a closing quote. DivermanAU (talk) 04:10, 11 November 2024 (UTC)