Talk:Main Page/Archive1

Sanskrit

संस्कृत Actually the documents linked under sanskrit are in sanskrit as well as Hindi - both languages use the devanagari script but are quite different. Sanskrit is an ancient language rarely used while Hindi is used by millions all over the worlld today.

My suggestion - simplest change - would be just to change the main page to say sanskrit & hindi संस्कृत एवं हिन्दी rather than just sanskrit. The documents listed under that wikisource should also be marked to show which ones are sanskrit and which ones are hindi.

I would have made the main page change but it is protected. Also, I just added this at the top of the page so that it will receive attention - I am not sure of the protocol - where it needs to be posted. Please move if needed.

धन्यवाद, श्री User:shree

Hi Shree,

I mainly take care of Sanskrit documents here. I think that Sanskrit and Hindi should be taken separate. Many people can understand Hindi but they would not understand Sanskrit. And if you find Hindi documents marked as Sanskrit, please change the category. And your help is much welcome in this area. ;o) Yann 19:18, 23 September 2005 (UTC)

Project for a new main Page

• proposed layout: similar to http://wikipedia.org ThomasV 18:19, 26 August 2005 (UTC)

• proposed phrases:
  • "The Free Library"
  • "The Universal Library" : this is how we are refered to by other wikimedia projects in french

• I just uploaded
• it was made with gimp. It uses the Times font, size 26 pixels. the W comes from the original Wikipedia png. Unfortunately, the result is not so great; the interval between letters is smaller than in the Wikipedia original image. If anyone knows how to do better, please go for it! ThomasV 19:36, 26 August 2005 (UTC)

The "tag line"

Just a comment on using "The free library". It gives the impression that it's all books and is quite similar to the goal of Wikibooks. Perhaps "Texts as the author intended" or "The original texts"? Greg Robson 18:33, 26 August 2005 (UTC)

I would not define wikibooks as a "library", because it is books written by wikinauts. A "Library" is something more universal, with a larger scope. Actually, the names "wikibooks" and "Wikisource" are not very well chosen. A short statement like "The Free Library" helps better understand who is doing what. ThomasV 09:07, 27 August 2005 (UTC)

Comments

Wow, it looks really nice, Thomas! I say we keep it. The only problem I have is that NASTY logo. When Ec left, that vote just sort of died, and we were never able to change it. But anyway, good job!| 13:37, 27 August 2005 (UTC)

yeah, I know, the logo. maybe we would need a new vote... but I guess adopting a new logo might take some time, and I would like to replace the main page before that. ThomasV 13:52, 27 August 2005 (UTC)

ok, I exposed it to the general public... it is not perfect, but certainly better than what we had before. the old page is at Main Page/Old. ThomasV 14:55, 28 August 2005 (UTC)

Très belle page. Marc 15:05, 28 August 2005 (UTC)

Fantastic plus one small idea

First of all, this is fantastic. Congratulations!

An idea for one small functional addition: a single line with language codes in alphabetical order. It could be put, perhaps, under the "top ten" above or below the line, or at the bottom.

Something like this:

ar | da | de | el | en | es | fr | gl | he | it | la | nl | pl | pt | ro

This would be only for languages with subdomains. It purpose and function: to provide a link to each domain in Latin letters with the familiar codes in the familiar order. This is in addition to order of size, which is the already the central feature of the page, and is also useful.

Languages with local "Main Pages" at wikisource.org would still be listed as they are in the current list of languages written in multiple scripts.Dovi 07:55, 29 August 2005 (UTC)

thank for the support! yes, I think I will add a list of subdomains. but no time atm ThomasV 08:00, 29 August 2005 (UTC)

Latin

Can someone replace

Română
Biblioteca liberă
, with only 8 articles, by

Latina
Textuum thesaurus

Latin is important for old documents. Thanks. Karel Anthonissen 15:16, 7 September 2005 (UTC)

the main page shows the languages that have the highest number of articles. ro has more than 2000, although they are still waiting to be transfered to the subdomain. ThomasV 15:57, 7 September 2005 (UTC)

OK. Karel Anthonissen 08:35, 8 September 2005 (UTC)

the romanian counter still does not work. however, ja and zh counters are working, and well, it looks like we now have more pages in latin than japanese... ThomasV 14:54, 17 September 2005 (UTC)

I would like you to give looks on both projects and put back Japanese version again. Most of Latin pages are indeces with a bunch of red links. On the other hand, most of Japanese pages are genuine articles. Rough comparison only focusing number of pages isn't a good base of decision in my opinion. I don't care if Latin remains or not but I would like to see Japanese version on Main Page again. Or we need more objective standard like "projects with over 500 pages" (and someday over 1000 ...). Otherwise, I find no reason to replace Japanese version with Latin. --Aphaia 18:23, 17 September 2005 (UTC)

Japanese is still on the page, in the 'other languages' list. The list on the top of the page shows the 10 subdomains that have the highest number of articles. I am sorry but I cannot decide of the quality of these articles, because I neither read latin nor japanese. ThomasV 18:51, 17 September 2005 (UTC)

Your description can be applied to Latin too. It could be in "other languages" part. And it seems to me that it is not a good way to decide unilaterally, specially in case you can't hardly decide those contents. So if you are not happy to have more project on the main page, I expect you don't oppose replace Latin and Japanese again. I don't say it personally but some Japanese editors complained it and very reluctant there was no discussion before your change, I don't say I am speaking now on the behalf of the community, but I would like to say Japanese community fells very unhappy on this editing without concensus. --Aphaia 20:35, 17 September 2005 (UTC)

I decided to make a short list of the 10 projects that have the higher number of articles, in order to facilitate searches (the previous main page was a mess), to improve aesthetics, and to foster addition of new material to wikisource (from your reaction, I suppose the third goal is attained). The feedback that I have received when I did this was highly positive (see comments here, on my talk page, and on the archive of the scriptorium).

I first placed japanese in the top 10 because I overestimated the number of articles in that language (for some reason, I thought there was more japanese than chinese pages on the site). At that point, the japanese community did not express concerns that ranking projects with their number of articles would be unfair.

Please note that ranking projects with their number of articles is common practice; I simply followed the procedure used to design the Wikipedia main page, at http://www.wikipedia.org. Please also note that the japanese wikipedia is ranked number 4 on the Wikipedia main page, because of its sheer number of articles, and not because of the quality of its articles (which are without doubt excellent).

However, if you believe that some other criterion than the number of articles should be taken into account in order to rank projects, I suggest that you propose some objective criterion, and that we wait for more people to express their point of view.

ThomasV 21:18, 17 September 2005 (UTC)

I am sorry you misunderstand situations and use wrong wordings. perhaps 1000 could be overestimated but 400 is not the right number of articles because of MediaWiki restrictions. As of yet Ja has around 100 or more pages without links and the sum would reach around 600 or more. Simply no one had exact statistics assumedly and it isn't a attitude on a good faith to described it "unfair". ThomasV, if you withdraw your word, I would be happy again with talk you again. In addition, it is not a fair attitude to force someone to speak in language they are not competitive, even if inevitable because of limitation of linguistic resources, and it is a fact there are many Japanese who don't want to argue in foreign language(s), so I am not surprised no one complained here in English. --Aphaia 11:35, 20 September 2005 (UTC)

why don't you add backlinks to those 100 orphaned pages? they will be counted by mediawiki, and it will also be useful for users of the japanese wiki. ThomasV 12:56, 20 September 2005 (UTC)

Why did you think I or other didn't? You seems to criticize us based on full of misunderstanding and lack of knowledge. --Aphaia 19:11, 21 September 2005 (UTC)

This logo is bad

I think we should change this logo. Pfv2 17:00, 23 September 2005 (UTC)

I like it. But do draw your own and suggest it, and see how people react. 15:44, 28 October 2005 (UTC)

I also highly dislike the logo. It should be somewhat consistent with other Wikimedia logos, with straight lines and simple colors. On the other hand, I have zero artistic proclivity, so I cannot offer more productive services. --Inarius 17:18, 28 October 2005 (UTC)

I don't exactly dislike the logo, but I don't understand the significance of the iceberg to Wikisource. --Angr/_Talk 19:15, 28 October 2005 (UTC)

The concept is depth. A saying regarding iceburgs is that the majority of their substance lies "beneath the surface." Though the saying is cute (and completely pointless), like many Wikimedia project logos, the image is not. Most Wikimedia logos breach the language/age/class/location barrier. This one is too obscure for many people and does a poor job of representing the site. --Inarius 23:06, 13 January 2006 (UTC)

I know that icebergs symbolize hidden depths, but what's that got to do with a free library? Our depths here aren't "hidden beneath the surface": they're right here, ready for anyone to read. What we need is a nice logo that will put people from any culture in mind of a library (without making one that's too much like the Wikibooks logo). --Angr/Talk 21:02, 29 January 2006 (UTC)

I got the reference that these are the depths below the wikipedia which people see at first. I like the logo. -- 169.158.84.254 06:49, 22 March 2006 (UTC)

I think it's terrible. It just looks ugly, and not illustrative and clean like wikipedia. -69.69.251.7 02:14, 20 December 2005 (UTC)

Other languages

Languages those are listed around logo are also listed at other languages section. :/ --DBL2010 20:50, 5 October 2005 (UTC)

Main Page:Gaeilge

Could an admin please add Gaeilge to the list of languages at the bottom? Thanks! --Angr 19:41, 19 October 2005 (UTC)

Done. Yann 20:29, 19 October 2005 (UTC)

Update Main Page

• LATINA: The Free Library -> Fontes liberae

• Español (4400+) > Română (2600+) > Deutsch (2200+)

• संस्कृत (1500+) > Polski (1400+)

Thanks --Accurimbono 09:25, 21 October 2005 (UTC)

Latina over 1000 articles!

I propose to translate for Latina articles in articuli:

Latina
Fontes liberae

and update the order of wikis:

English
The Free Library

Français
La bibliothèque libre

Español
La biblioteca libre

Română
Biblioteca liberă

Deutsch
Die freie Bibliothek

संस्कृत
The Free Library

Polski
Otwarta biblioteka

Latina
Fontes liberae

中文
自由的图书馆 / 自由的圖書館

Русский
Свободная библиотека

---

--Accurimbono 08:20, 27 October 2005 (UTC)

• Done, --LadyInGrey 16:08, 28 October 2005 (UTC)

• • Thanks! --Accurimbono 16:23, 28 October 2005 (UTC)

interwiki-links

I suppose it's no use bitching about it now, but I never understood why wikisource was split into language subdomains. The move broke tons of interwiki-links, and I don't really know how to fix it.

• How do you link to a specific wikisource page via interwiki-link? ws: doesn't do the trick anymore, how do you specify the subdomain?
• Where do you upload multilingual texts now? If languages were just specified via categories, it would be effortless to slap several categories on a text. But say I have a glossary, or a text translated into several languages, where will I put it?
• How will we implement directories by topic, listing, say, all bible translations, seeing they are scattered over several subdomains? It would be just as important to make the main page a topical index as it is to link to the individual languages. Is there a topical directory in the works somewhere?

62.202.73.130 15:39, 28 October 2005 (UTC)

To get to a sub-domain, use "[[s:xx]]" where "xx" is the language code (e.g., en, fr, es). What do you mean by "multilingual texts"? Isn't there a predominant language to the text which would help you decide what language it is? Or at least the nationality of the author would help. And you could always ask where the best place to put a multilingual text, as well. I'm not too sure what you mean by a "topical directory," but I doubt something like that is in the works.| 20:40, 29 October 2005 (UTC)

Another option for multilingual texts is to post them at each of the languages in question. If you have something in French and English, post it both at fr: and at en:. Linking to the language-specific Wikisources isn't a problem; take a look at Template:Pater noster, for example, which links to all the versions of the Lord's Prayer available both here and at the language-specific Wikisources. --Angr/_Talk 18:08, 30 October 2005 (UTC)

Ido

I just created a front page for Ido Main Page:Ido. I noticed that Interlingua doesn't have its own domain; does that mean that we will stay on the main one as well? Good to know because I see breaking everything off into subdomains caused a few problems. mithridates

Still waiting. Have no sysops seen the request? mithridates

Done, --LadyInGrey 01:24, 31 October 2005 (UTC)

Thanks! mithridates

Put this tag on the MP please

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Illpublish.png

It may be appropriate for Wikisource to make an ethical stand on that issue, as many of our English speaking members are from the UK. Thanks. -Stevertigo 20:28, 28 November 2005 (UTC)

this is an issue that has to be settled at the Foundation level. ThomasV 22:43, 28 November 2005 (UTC)

Italian enter in the top10

Italian over 900 articoli and Latina over 1100 articuli --Accurimbono 14:39, 1 December 2005 (UTC)