Wikisource talk:WikiProject Newspapers

Case of article titles/headlines?

Newspaper article titles are in varying case styles: all upper, "start case", sentence case, etc. and I'm wondering whether it's worth normalising these when they're used in the page name for Newspaper Name/YYYY/MM/DD/Article Name pages. Certainly, it seems that all uppercase headlines should be changed, so the page titles look nicer; but I'd like to know what other people think about this, before doing too much. Thanks! — Sam Wilson ( Talk • Contribs ) … 06:38, 10 August 2011 (UTC)

Practically speaking, if this becomes a fully functioning project the best you can do is guidance, as others are going to do what they think best, and we hardly want to be in the position of realigning any page that does not comply when it is not necessarily wrong, maybe the exception is ALL CAPITALS as you identified. My gut feel and preference is sentence case, followed by capitalised nouns, and that is because of how it looks in a search engine result. That said, I think that we have a bigger deal with a hierarchical approach and the locational approach in general.

I feel that we need to design a hierarchy based on the assumptions of 1) we are going to get a series of the whole work; 2) what do we do with eclectic citing of works from large works, eg. The Times; 3) management of single or occasional articles from local newspapers. Similarly the interaction between and relevant usage of main namespace listing versus Portal namespace, eg. The Times vs. Portal:The Times. — billinghurst sDrewth 16:36, 10 August 2011 (UTC)

Yes, it was the all-caps that prompted me to bring this up. I'm going to normalise (to capitalization of all words, except for closed-class words) and give no more thought to the pros and cons. I'm starting a little project helping the local history collection here in Fremantle, and so I just need to be consistent. I think you're right: others will do what they want.

Do you not think the hierarchical pages are the right way to do things? I think it's pretty good; perhaps not perfect, but generally one does reference things in newspapers by date, primarily. Which is where the Portals come in, I think: the mainspace is the date index; the portal is the topical index.  :-) 165.228.162.178 00:27, 11 August 2011 (UTC) (oops, I got logged out!) — Sam Wilson ( Talk • Contribs ) … 00:32, 11 August 2011 (UTC)

Re hierarchy. If we had a hope of getting a whole edition of a paper, ie. scans, then I would say yes, however, I do not have that hope for the vast bulk of newspapers. After that I think that it is getting a very deep hierarchy when we are hardly going to have stuff, and that leads to redlinks, etc. Further as I started doing bits for The Times (years ago now), I basically put them into just a few categories ... Special:PrefixIndex/The Times. Similar example would be something like a local Victorian (place not time) where we want an obituary, it may be the only article to ever exist. Re listing man vs name, I would agree If we have scans, and can build the hierarchy, then let us do so in the main ns; and random articles can be linked from author pages and portals. — billinghurst sDrewth 12:22, 11 August 2011 (UTC)

Scope of the Project

There doesn’t seem to be much interaction on this Wikiproject. I believe that is because there is no stated scope here. Are we attempting to compile all known newspapers or is there some notability requirement that is going to be adhered to? I also believe this applies to Portal:Newspapers too. --EthanRobertLee (talk) 17:48, 18 December 2018 (UTC)

@EthanRobertLee: Hi, thanks for bringing this up. I have questions like you, but no answers. I think anything that's public domain or freely licensed is fair game, but of course, that means we end up with a pretty piecemeal collection. Personally, I've been adding newspaper articles from time to time when they seem interesting, especially if they make good source materials for Wikipedia articles I'm working on, or other projects of mine. As far as I know that's a perfectly fine approach, but it's certainly not one that's likely to lead to a coherent collection in the foreseeable future.

If you're not aware, there is a highly active initiative with U.S. newspapers on English Wikipedia, en:WikiProject Newspapers, and there's also Wikidata:WikiProject Periodicals on Wikidata, and the WikiCite initiative. I'm heavily involved in the former, and somewhat in the others. It'd be nice to build some connective tissue among WikiProjects like these. -Pete (talk) 23:21, 21 December 2018 (UTC)