Help talk:Author pages

Should author pages really belong to wikisource?

(Discussion moved here from the Scriptorium) --18:15, 13 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Hello. I recently started to build indexes of french authors and books, using the automated indexation capabilities of wikimedia. My opinion is that automated indexing using categorization should be preferred to manual indexing, because it is less of a pain, it gives homogeneous results and it ensures nothing is forgotten. Some might disagree with that; indeed the site currently contains a lot of manual indexes. I am not trying to impose my views, both systems can obviously coexist in peace. So this post is NOT intended to start a debate over manual/automated indexing. My point is about something different but it is related to indexing: author pages.

I think it would be great to build indexes of authors, using categories: Ancient authors, French authors, authors of theater, authors of science-fiction, and so on. The same is true for books, of course; but a number of problems arise with author pages.

1 - Author pages are not localized, but they are written in the author's language. This is a problem, because when assigning categories, it will be necessary to assign categories in every language the author's texts are translated in. I guess the general answer to that problem is that author pages should be localized in the first place. For example, I should not need to be read in greek in order to find some text on Plato's page. This is somewhat related to the debate about localized subdomains.

2 - Author pages have prefixes like "Author:" or "Auteur:", that show up in the index. This makes the index look ugly.

3 - Author pages are redundant with the author pages that already exist in Wikipedia. This is the most important point. Some author pages in Wikisource even have a picture and a short bio. A user browsing an author in Wikipedia currently needs to go to the corresponding author page in Wikisource, before she can find the text she's looking for, which complicates the search: 2 clicks instead of possibly 1.

The solution I propose is to remove author pages from wikisource. Indeed, these pages gather information about authors, and it is the role of Wikipedia to gather information about famous people. The mission of Wikisource is to provide texts. I think this would solve points 1 and 2 (and 3, obviously):

1 - Author pages are localized in wikipedia, because wikipedia has language subdomains.

2 - Automated indexing of authors does already exist in wikipedia. Let us use it to index authors, instead of reinventing the wheel.

Instead of the current system, I propose the following: Author pages in wikipedia would link directly to wikisource when referring to a text. Pages in wikisource would link to their author's page in wikipedia, instead of the one in wikisource.

I know this is a big move. However I believe we should keep in mind what the mission of wikisource is, and that it is useless to redo some work that is already being done on wikipedia. The energy that is being spent here gathering information about authors would be better spent on wikipedia, where it would also receive more feedback.

--ThomasV 14:30, 12 Nov 2004 (UTC)

I completely agree with you on point 1. I am strongly opposed to the fact that I need to know another language other than English to be able to read non-English authors, especially such pages as the Greek one; I can figure out the Romance and Germanic ones easily, but I would still prefer that every author page be in every language instead of just the one that is that author's nationality. This is why I'm supportive of sub-domains here (although I know all the arguments for and against this proposal, and I'm not debating the issue here).

In regards to point two, there's a simple way to get around that. For example, we'll take Rousseau's page. Currently in the category, it shows up as Auteur:Jean-Jacques Rousseau. If you want to remove the "Auteur:" look at the wiki-fied link [[Auteur:Jean-Jacques Rousseau]] and at the end of "Rousseau" add a "|" so that it looks like this: [[Auteur:Jean-Jacques Rousseau|Jean-Jacques Rousseau]]. Doing that will make it just the author's name.

And in regards to having the author pages, Wikisource needs to have an index of each author's works, too. While Wikisource can be closely tied to Wikipedia, if people come across Wikisource from another source and are looking for a text from a certain author, there needs to be an author page for that person to locate so that person can see what works by that author we currently have. About the Wikipedia links linking to the author page and not a work, I would say that I think Wikipedia should do both. In talking about a work, there should be a link to that work, but there should also be links to the author page itself so people can see what other works there are.

I have to disagree to your proposal to only have Wikisource link to the Wikipedia author and Wikipedia link straight to a Wikisource text. We do that now, in the biography section. We link right to that author's biography ON Wikipedia, and any user can go to any available biography because we link to every available translation on Wikipedia. In regards to typed biographies here, there really shouldn't be any, unless there is no information available on Wikipedia. Remember, Wikisource is also a stand-alone project, like Wikipedia, and so needs to have a sort of interface for people to use when they access this site. Doing away with author pages seems to me that it would make Wikisource only a "text-dump" and not a full-fledged project (although currently it seems that it is a text dump because there is very little that I see which differentiates us from Gutenberg).

I am very glad that you are doing so much work with the categories. Those have a potential to be very useful and important here, but as of right now are under-used. I'm glad that you've started working with them to index French authors. I will hopefully start doing that with German, English, etc. authors so that we can start grouping authors together under certain similar traits, which I believe will set us apart from Gutenberg; we have much more potential to categorize authors than they do.

Zhaladshar 17:18, 12 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Hmmmmm...After doing some research of my own, ThomasV is correct about the fact that in the Categories, there is "Author:", "Auteur:", etc., prefixed to the name of the actual author. And I thought this could be fixed by editing the category itself and and adding [[Auteur:Jean-Jacques Rousseau|Jean-Jacques Roussea]], but that is not possible. Is there a way to get around this issue? Because he's right: it is pretty ugly to look at. Zhaladshar 18:14, 12 Nov 2004 (UTC)

I think that Zhaladshar has adequately dealt with two of the issues about author pages. I would add that a link from Wikipedia will not show different colours to indicate whether we in fact have that text. Some of our auther pages, Author:Arthur Conan Doyle for example, can become an important bibliographical reference page with details that go beyond what we can expect to have on Wikipedia. The Author:George W. Bush page contains links to regular Saturday addresses that we could not possibly justify on Wikipedia in any language. To the extent that an author page contains biographical information other than links, that falls into very limited kinds of information, mostly years of birth and death and name variations.

The language of an author page is a more tricky issue. While I really don't object to the idea of having every author page in every language, that solution has serious co-ordination problems that are far more significant than any issues of disk space. Having a single author page for a person helps to insure that all the information is managed in a centralized way. It lets us know if we have the original version of the work, as well as what translations we do have in our database. The intent of putting these pages in the author's own language was to reduce the domination of English; in practical terms it does not require that anyone know much about the author's language. The only terms that are constant on these pages are the words for "author", "biography" and "works". Redirects can be created in any language to the actual page. If the Plate page (or that of a more obscure Greek author) has only Greek material, it suggest that we don't have any translations available. That just lets us know that there is work to be done.

Whether automated indexing is less of a pain is a matter of opinion. I suppose that to be successful it requires a set of very clearly defined categories, and that leaves a lot of room for debate. I don't do much with putting authors into genre or time based categories, but I don't object to it either. If I don't pigeon-hole an article into categories I'm sure someone else will come along to do it later. There are no restrictions about the number of categories that can be applied to a given article. I don't see where assigning categories in every language for which we have a translation would be a problem. Eclecticology 19:05, 12 Nov 2004 (UTC)

On Zhaladshar's most recent point the problem arises from the fact that the pipe trick works differently in categories than in other namespaces. In most situations it operates to show a substiutute title, but in categories it is used to put the category list in alphabetical order. Some kind of double pipe that does both could be a solution, but that may require a developer's help. Eclecticology 19:19, 12 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Err ... what do you mean "Zhaladshar has adequately dealt with two of the issues"? He agrees with me on points 1 and 2. But agreeing with me on those points does not solve the problem at all. Concerning point 2, I understand that you recommend me to ask developpers to implement a new syntax, to pray that someone will be willing to do so, to wait for the next software release, and then to wait until the wikisource software has been upgraded... IMHO that problem would be better fixed by a change in namespace, because it results from a bad naming convention (and I guess that would be a developer's opinion too).

Concerning point 3, I agree with you that it can be useful to have a page listing all the works by a given author that are available on Wikisource (although such a listing could be generated automatically, by using a category). So I understand why this "author page" needs to be distinct from the one on wikipedia. However, in that case, I strongly support the idea of having localized pages. Indeed I do not read chinese. Second, I think that when a document in the database contains a link to his author, the average reader would be primarily interested in seeing the wikipedia entry about the author when following the link, rather than a list of his other works in the database. --ThomasV 22:22, 12 Nov 2004 (UTC)

I don't know how sure I can be of that last statement. And I'm only talking from my own experience here. When I go to Bartelby or Gutenberg to find something to read, I look for works by author, seeing as I don't know everything my favorite authors have known. So I like the fact that there are "author" pages of a sort that show me everything there is to read by that author. I'm not really too concerned about the life of the author when I go searching for his works, which seems to be what you are implying here--that people would be concerned about a biography when all they want is an essay or poem. We also cannot expect every work on Wikisource to have a link on Wikipedia; some things like George Bush's radio addresses or Conan Doyle's works or Kipling's poetry are too numerous to be all linked over at Wikipedia. Like any encyclopedia, Wikipedia will probably only ever give a bibliography of an author's most major works. Wikisource can offer far more than that. And in regards to the fact that a person who reads a work here will want to know that author's biography, we do link to the exact biography on Wikipedia. All it takes is an extra two-second click to get to the author's main page and then to his biography. Zhaladshar 23:22, 12 Nov 2004 (UTC)

all right, I buy that. But my points 1 and 2 remain. I wish I was there when it came to voting about subdomains. --ThomasV 23:36, 12 Nov 2004 (UTC)

End of moved material

Biography lists

(Discussion moved here from the Scriptorium) --18:15, 13 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Would anyone be opposed to changing the biography lists on the author pages from this:

to something like this:

By columns

Bahasa Melayu
Bahasa Indonesia
Cymraeg
Dansk

Deutsch
Eesti
English
Español
Esperanto

Français
Gaeilge
עברית
Nederlands

日本語
Norsk
Polski
Português

Simple English
Suomi
Svenska
中文(简体)
中文(繁体)

This is shorter and doesn't require as much screen real estate. —Mike 06:54, 13 Nov 2004 (UTC)

I see your point. The single column form looked much neater at the beginning, but some have gotten quite long. Would a multicolumn system be workable. See the translation sections in en:wiktionary:lead. Language names alone are short enough that we could accomodate several columns. Eclecticology 00:01, 14 Nov 2004 (UTC)

After looking at en:wiktionary:lead's content, I think I like the multi-column system. What we currently use now I think if fine for authors who only have about 10 or less biographies on Wikipedia. Any more than that and a user is assaulted with an inordinate amount of white space. I like Mike's idea, too, but I think his method would really only work for some authors like Aristotle who have an enormous number of Wikipedia bios. Otherwise, the bio section would be very cramped and small, in my personal opinion. But I think the multi-columns would be our best bet since we maximize the amount space used in any given author's biographical section. Since I am not active on Wiktionary, I do not know how easy it is to add new languages to those columns, but from what it looks like to me it would be an arduous task to reorganize each column every time a new language is added. If we adopt it here, my only concern is that it would keep people from updating author pages just for the fact that it takes much more time to reorganize a column than to simply copy and paste a link to a very straightforward list like what we have now. (Not to mention, actually making tables using Wiki mark-up is an arduous task if you aren't familiar with it). Zhaladshar 00:57, 14 Nov 2004 (UTC)

I'll experiment with it. Five columns should do it. In the listing above "Bahasa Indonesia" is the longest item, so it can give a reference length. Reading by columns (rather than rows) should allow the changes to be more easily. Adding a new language shouldn't be a problem. The columns could easily put out of sync, but someone more familiar with the method can fix that quite easily later. Eclecticology 03:00, 15 Nov 2004 (UTC)

The five column example is above. Colours are optional, but for this experiment they make the columns stand out. If people like this model I can still tinker with it to make it a little more usable. Eclecticology 03:40, 15 Nov 2004 (UTC)

It works for me. —Mike 10:00, 15 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Looks great to me, too. Go for it. Zhaladshar 12:53, 15 Nov 2004 (UTC)

I've copied the column format to the Author:George W. Bush page and added the languages that weren't there when that article was set up. How does it look in context? Eclecticology 10:53, 16 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Oh, I like it. It's far more compact than having a straight up and down list. It'll take me some time to get used to seeing the new format since I am very used to the old one. Tell me, how long did it take for you to make those tables? And are we going to turn every page into this new format? I can't see why not, but just thought I'd ask anyway, since some authors only have three or four languages in their biography section.

I'm setting up something at Wikisource:Bio-template to be used for other tables based on this model. It didn't take me very long to do it because I was already familiar with the model at Wiktionary. As to when to use it, I would encourage it with ten or more languages, treat it as optional with five to nine, and not bother with four or fewer. Eclecticology 17:17, 16 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Of course, this problem would not arise if author pages were localized... btw, do you really want to give a link to a chinese biography of an author if we have no chinese translation of his works? --ThomasV 20:08, 14 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Yes, at least for the principal author page for that person. Eclecticology 03:00, 15 Nov 2004 (UTC)

I've been working on an idea for sort order of the languages. It doesn't make much sense to "alphabetize" the languages that don't even use the same writing system. So I took the list of languages that have more than 1000 encyclopedia pages and started trying to sort them logically. This is what I came up with for sorting interlanguage links on english author pages. I sorted the latin languages "alphabetically", then sorted by the two-letter language code in each writing system. A second alternative is to put all the non-latin languages into one group at the end and sort them all together by the two-letter language code.--The Jacobin 20:36, 28 Feb 2005 (UTC)

Afrikaans
Asturianu
Bahasa Indonesia
Bahasa Melayu
Bosanski
Català
Česká
Cymraeg
Dansk
Deutsch
Eesti

English
Español
Esperanto
Euskara
Français
Frysk
Gàidhlig
Galego
Hrvatski
Ido
Interlingua

Íslenska
Italiano
Kurdî / كوردی
Latina
Lietuvių
Lëtzebuergesch
Magyar
Nederlands
Norsk (bokmål)
Norsk (nynorsk)
Plattdüütsch

Polski
Português
Română
Simple English
Slovenčina
Slovenščina
Suomi
Svenska
Tatarça
Türkçe
Walon

Arabic writing

العربية
فارسی

Brahmic writing

हिन्दी
संस्कृतम्

Cyrillic writing

Беларуская
Български
Русский
Српски
Українська

Greek writing

Ελληνικά

Han writing

日本語
한국어
中文

Hebrew writing

עברית

End of moved material

More on author pages

(Discussion moved here from the Scriptorium) -- 18:15, 13 Mar 2005 (UTC)

I moved this discussion from ThomasV's talk page because I think it merits enough import to be put in a more open discussion, and because I have some things to respond to also, which would be better to post here for everyone to read and be a part of:

I've been carefully watching the progress on the author pages to see what develops, and a couple of concerns have already appeared that have me more strongly favouring a formal author namespace. We already have two separate entries for the French and English pages in the list of "A" authors. The possible problem there is that these index pages will grow much faster than they probably should. With Karl Marx if I go to the German page, take the link to the Wikisource:Authors-M page then try to link back to Marx from there, I end up at the English page.

I would still like to find some sort of relatively language neutral way of expressing "Author:" Eclecticology 19:43, 20 Dec 2004 (UTC)

sorry if I did not work very much on author pages after our discussion in the scriptorium... Zhaladshar and I thought it would worth waiting for more opinions to be expressed before changing everything, and I spent most of my time on the php extension. so I guess the current state should still be viewed as experimental...

Maybe a localized author page could link to two lists of authors: one that contains author pages written in the same language (like the Category:Fr:Auteurs for french), and one that is comprehensive, ie the full authors index. However, one issue will be how to organize this full index, especially when chinese/greek authors are in there. my opinion is that it will not be possible to mix different alphabets in this index, so it will have to be somehow localized. but I won't complain if it is in english, because monolingual french users will still have access to a french index.

concerning the namespace, I still believe the most neutral way of expressing "Author:Karl Marx" is to drop the prefix for the 'main' author page, just calling it Karl Marx. I think this will make things easier for editors of other wikipedia projects. Another possibility, which would fit well with the extension I'm working on, is to call it "Category:Karl Marx".

--ThomasV 10:47, 21 Dec 2004 (UTC)

In regards to Eclecticology's first point (about the Karl Marx example), the only thing I can say is that those links will have to be changed manually. It's completely muddled up right now, but I think that once we come up with a naming convention for author pages, it won't be hard at all--it will just take some time. I think it would be best, though, to establish what this new convention would be very quickly, because like he said, author pages will keep coming, and the more we delay this the more we will have to change later on.

In regards to finding some way to neutrally denote a "main" author page, I think it would be nice to use something like "Scriptor:". It would parallel the name of our Scriptorium, and I can't see any language bias in using that--Latin is not a spoken language. And, Latin also has a long history of use, so that would also be a plus. I know ThomasV is a fan of just having the author's name ("Karl Marx", for example) as the main author page. I think this would be fine if we made them redirect pages and sent them to something like "Scriptor:Karl Marx," and use a disambiguation page if necessary (such as if "Karl Marx" were also a title of a work).

I do not have a problem with what ThomasV proposes, about localized author pages linking to both the localized author index and the comprehensive one. In fact, I think that would probably be best. As we've discussed about the new way author pages would be constructed, localized author pages would only contain works in that language (i.e. a French localized author page would only have French works, an English author page only English works, etc.), but we should still offer links back to a comprehensive author index which contains everything. ThomasV does bring up an interesting point about Chinese/Greek languages. On this master index, we would be (probably miserably) mixing numerous alphabets together. For this, I propose we use something like the Pinyin of a Chinese name (and similar Romanization of other languages) or use the Latin version of such names (such as Greek) in order to alphabetize the names. It's not ideal, I know, but for the master index, I can't see any way of doing it without having to make small concessions in favor of one language over another. Zhaladshar 16:15, 22 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Hi,

I did not say that author pages should only link to works in one language. if the listed author did not write in the language of the page, it might be interesting to link to the original version of the text as well, which means 2 languages. What I think should be avoided is a list of lists, where for each listed work we would give a comprehensive list of translations. lists of lists tend to be long and difficult to read.

concerning the 'main' author page, I do not like the 'scriptor' option. I do not understand why we need a prefix in the first place. Ec seems to believe it will facilitate searches, but I do not understand why somebody would want to type "Author" in the search box. it is much simpler to look in the index. or did I miss something?

--ThomasV 17:03, 22 Dec 2004 (UTC)

The "Scriptor" solution would satisfy my concern about not favoring any modern language. From the way that I understand ThomasV's point his concern is less between "scriptor" and "author" than it is about having a prefix at all. It's almost as if we are looking at the same book, but while I'm trying to find out what's in the book by looking at the Table of Contents he's trying to do it by looking at the Index. Both ways are useful, but they need to complement each other.

A number of localized author pages have appeared in the last few days in several languages. That's fine. The problem is that none of these new additions have a built in capacity to scale in such a way as to give a comprehensive view of the author, his works and whatever else may be available in the various Wiki projects. A suitable prefix enables that. I have considered the option of just having the author name without a prefix, and indicating the various localizations by using "/en" or "/fr" as the case may be, and putting a biographer's or other name in parentheses when the reference was to something about the author. That has its problems too. Authors' names themselves vary from one language to another. Also, if a personal name is used for the master author page the technique does not readily distinguish between an author and some other person who may never have written anything.

The concern for authors in other scripts remains, and perhaps I have not given it as much attention as I should. But I suspect that the transition to dealing withe that problem will be relatively easy once we have consensus over the Roman scripted languages. Standard romanizations can be used such as pinyin, and that still doesn't stop the localizations from following the standards of the language involved. Quite some time ago the question was raised about the "extra" letters in Danish, and it was not that big of a problem.

Another interesting point that was raised at some point is the demarcation between what belongs here and what belongs on Wikipedia. My view is that a certain amount of overlap is desirable. At this stage it seems better to be open ended on this while it gets resolved. If at some point in the future we decide that we have included a lot of material that properly belongs exclusively in Wikipedia deleting it will be very easy. I think that for now, none of us would have the stomach to include long biographical sketches about the authors. A few elementary details plus links to Wikipedia are adequate for our purposes; anything more could land us into the NPOV squabbles that are so frequent there. We are still able to consider Karl Marx as an author without having to debate the validity of Marxism. Eclecticology 20:36, 22 Dec 2004 (UTC)

err... I'm not sure to understand what you mean by "looking at the toc" vs "looking at the index". I also have difficulties to understand "to scale in such a way as to give a comprehensive view of the author"...

but since you agreed on writing localized author pages, my main concern has now disappeared. I consider naming conventions as something less important, and I do not want to impose my views on how to name 'main' author pages, also because I am not sure if these 'main' author pages are really needed. Maybe you could start building a few of those, so that we see what exactly you have in mind, how they are linked to other pages, how useful they are, etc. that way, we will be talking about something more concrete. --ThomasV 21:23, 22 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Perhaps it's better if I don't expand my analogy. At this point that might just cause more confusion than it merits. :-)

I agree that something concrete would help. I'll work on a few with the "Scriptor:" prefix over the next few days -- (except when my wife wants me to spend sociable time away from the computer for Christmas!) - Best of the season to you all. Eclecticology 22:07, 22 Dec 2004 (UTC)

If we're getting into localised prefixes and localised indexes, wouldn't it make sense to just go multilingual in the same way as Wikipedia, Wiktionary and Wikinews? If we keep dealing with this in this ad hoc manner, its just going to get messier the larger, and the more multilingual, we get. Ambivalenthysteria 22:46, 22 Dec 2004 (UTC)

I was supporting language subdomains in the first place. however it seems that a majority expressed itself against this idea, so I guess we should move on. for more information on recent developments, check "Wikisource:Scriptorium/Language domain proposal" and "Wikisource:Scriptorium/Language domain requests" pages. --ThomasV 11:14, 23 Dec 2004 (UTC)

I think this is an abundantly stupid stance, and one that is going to cause serious problems down the track, but it doesn't affect what I'm trying to do at the moment, I'll drop it - for now. Ambivalenthysteria 12:43, 23 Dec 2004 (UTC)

what do you mean by 'stupid stance'? --ThomasV 13:47, 23 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Ambi: This was perhaps the most heated debate from the time you were away. What you see in this section is some of the more detailed issues in a compromise. We were able to do this without help from the ArbCom. This proves that the wiki is working when enough people on both sides of the debate want it to work. At this point there are people on both sides of the issue committed to make it work, while respecting the concerns of the others. Ultimately it would also be nice to see multilingual representations of the UN resolutions, but I don't think anybody is in a hurry for that. Eclecticology 18:55, 23 Dec 2004 (UTC)

End of moved material

Author Pages Revisit

(Discussion moved here from the Scriptorium) -- 18:15, 13 Mar 2005 (UTC)

I was getting down to some routine cleanup duties when I ran into Novecento, a fairly clear copyvio of the contemporary Italian Autore:Alessandro Baricco. I considered deleting the author page as well, since we are not likely to legitimately include any of his work in the forseeable future, but then after a little more reflection decided against that based on the vision of Wikisource also being a bibliographic resource. To be able to work with it I had to restore a previous version. This would seem to violate an understanding about the author pages, but so far I have no plans to do this with any other page.

The problem with ThomasV's system is in that it is template rich, and the process is not very well documented. And if I, a person with nearly three years of experience in this family of projects, am having difficulty in navigating this, I can't imagine that it's going to be any easier for a non-technical newbie. I really would like to see our compromises work, but it seems that before that can happen we need to doucment how to write up these author pages and how to edit them in a way that will be clear and simple to everybody. Eclecticology 20:33, 13 Jan 2005 (UTC)

I agree that templates might be too difficult for some. I do not mean to enforce template use in any way. I just see it as an option. templates have the advantage that if you know how to use them, it reduces the amount of work. if you don't know how to use them, you should still have the right to participate. now regarding how the process is (or is not) documented, it seems to me that we have not decided yet how 'main' author pages should look like, and I remember that you proposed to write a few examples which we could then discuss... --ThomasV 14:41, 15 Jan 2005 (UTC)

I will acknowledge that the use of templates on author pages might be tedious for many users here, especially those who are new to Wikisource or her sister projects and so would not be accustomed to the mark-up. Using templates might cause many people to drop the project--or at least refrain from making author pages--due to a seemingly complicated method of creating author pages. But, like ThomasV said, the templates are not meant to be the exclusive "right way" method of creating author pages; for those who do know how to use them, it simply cuts down on the time it takes to create them. It should also be noted that using these templates on author pages was designed to go with translating author pages into various other languages. Hence, the templates are language-specific. We never really talked about using them for the "Main" author page, though, and I would not like to see them used there (or at least the way the templates are currently laid out). But this is assuming that we will still translate author pages into various languages. If we do not, then the templates are most likely not even needed.

In terms of documenting the templates, I would like to get a hold of how we are going to tackle author pages now before I go to documenting. Maybe we will decide that templates are not the way to go and so documentation would not be needed for templates. But I think it would be beneficial for the community to have a couple other options than just templates, too, so that might be something we might want to do, also: get a couple other proposals before we begin writing up a documentation. Zhaladshar 15:02, 15 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Fair enough comments, including the criticism that I should have done more about setting up something about the "main" author page. I've put up Scriptor:Karl Marx which starts from the author page as it was before the templates were introduced. I continue to see the "scriptor" page as broadly based, and including everything that we might want to include about the author in any language. Any localized pages should be able to be composed as a subset of the scriptor page.

For many authors, particularly those that are not likely to have much of their material translated, an author page that follows existing practice may be enough. U. S. presidents John Tyler and Rutherford Hayes are not likely to have a great demand for their translated speeches. Eclecticology 04:53, 16 Jan 2005 (UTC)

End of moved material

Yet more on author pages

Latest comment: 19 years ago4 comments2 people in discussion

I've put some thoughts on author page design on my user page, User:Quuxplusone. Please discuss. In particular, I'd like to support the merging of multilingual content ("Scriptor" style); I think Wikisource ought to get rid of unsynchronized localized content altogether. For example, Scriptor:Karl Marx was missing a link to the Polish version of the Communist Manifesto because the Polish wiki-writer and the English one hadn't communicated. If everything is redirected to one central multilingual page, things will be a lot more cohesive and nice-looking.

BTW, note that "Scriptor" is currently in use by the Latin Wikisource. So it's not quite the language-neutral solution it appears. Personally, I favor "Author" as the most language-agnostic word we're likely to find. --Quuxplusone 00:55, 28 May 2005 (UTC)Reply

As we are going to implement language subdomains relatively soon, I wouldn't put too much work into centralizing/merging the author pages at precent. When the requested subdomains have been created and the relevant content has been moved there, then we could start centralizing the author pages in the remaining languages (those without their own subdomain) if the community here reaches a consensus to do so.

I'm not sure what you're saying here; I can see how en.wikisource.org/wiki/Author:Foo and it.wikisource.org/wiki/Autore:Foo might be a minor improvement over having wikisource.org/wiki/Author:Foo and wikisource.org/wiki/Autore:Foo in the same "domain", but surely it can't be a good thing to have actually different content on each author page in different languages! How do "language subdomains" address the problem that the Polish author page lists different works from the English author page? And if it doesn't address that problem, then I think it makes sense to start working on a real centralization of author pages as soon as possible. --Quuxplusone 19:35, 29 May 2005 (UTC)Reply

Also, pretty much unrelated, if anyone can tell me how to put an image on a page from Wikimedia Commons or from the English Wikipedia, I'd be grateful. --Quuxplusone 00:55, 28 May 2005 (UTC)Reply

About the images: It is quite easy to use images from commons, you just find the name of the image at commons and then insert the image as you would insert a lokal image. Simply write [[Image:Flag of Denmark.svg]] (an image at commons) and it appears here like this:

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If you write in a non-English wiki, you just replace "Image" with the word used for "Image" in that language, and it should still work (remember that it is the wiki language that matters regardless of whether you have chosen another interface language in your preferences).--Christian S 04:27, 28 May 2005 (UTC)Reply