Wikisource talk:Style guide

This is a style guide for Wikisource. Or it will be, eventually. Right now, it is mainly a collection of discussions about relevant issues of style and consistency. The discussions should be moved to Talk: as relevant guidelines are extracted from them.

Interlang links

Which style do u guys like? this one(top and btm) or this one(btm)? keep the languages' names original ones or using translation names?(see the difference between top and btm here) (oh, my poor English!) then we can write it in Guide to layout and style --Samuel 02:00, 11 Feb 2004 (UTC)

I think that what you have on the Chinese language page is the more attractive format. Use the original language names to attract people who know that language. Don't worry about poor English; what matters for you here is being able to edit the Chinese. Eclecticology 05:43, 11 Feb 2004 (UTC)

maybe we should discuss the layout and meet an agreement now? oh, BTW, we should make sure that we have the right categories for all kinds of texts, or we will have a lot of work to do with the headers when it becomes a fixed style and the categories happens to have be changed unfortunately.. :P --Samuel 02:31, 13 Feb 2004 (UTC)~

Wait a few... this can be done server side (ie: by the software), but it needs to be discussed first with the developers first. [1] --Maio 05:11, 13 Feb 2004 (UTC)

I'm in no rush. There are some layouts that are taking shape, but they may still need a bit of refining. The real test is whether people use them. The categories too need to develop over time. That was why I kept the number down in my own scheme. There would always be a place for new ones when they became needed or when the "None of the above" became too full. Keeping the number of categories down at this time will help us to avoid massive changes in the future.

I worked on Author:Dante Alighieri when I found an orphaned German version of the Divine Comedy. Mav had previously suggested the link format wikipedia:en:Dante Alighieri, which works. Unfortunately, using the same format does not work for the other languages. Some agreed format should be decided for these kind of links. I would also like some views about how we are going to handle namspaces for other languages. We already have an instance of Usator:... for user:... being tried for Interlingua. Eclecticology 07:35, 13 Feb 2004 (UTC)

According to Brion, that should be fixed now, cf. http://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2004-February/008456.html. Yann 16:38, 16 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Long pages

Is there a current consensus or argument for/against breaking up "large" works? I notice that this has been unevenly done: some long works have chapters divided into separate articles, others have everything in one single article (my initial preference). -- Jehanne 22:44, 18 Feb 2004 (UTC)

And speaking of breaking up pages... what about separating individual (even short) poems onto their own pages, rather than "Poems of" a particular author? -- Jehanne 02:43, 19 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Long texts SHOULD be provided in both schemes, broken and as a full text. Not everyone browses the web with fast connections, having all sources as full text would be detrimental for the project. Check for example Manifesto of the Communist Party (broken) and Manifesto of the Communist Party (full text). They both link to each other.

About poems: hmm, where is that? Poems should be located on its own page, see On Lucy, Countess of Bedford for an example.

Thanks for expressing your concerns Jehanne! :) --Maio 03:02, 19 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Honestly, I'm a bit hesitant about this, too. Although we *could* be all things to all people, is it really beneficial? I'd rather add new content rather than multiplying forms of existing content... so I guess I'll leave that up to you, Maio :). As for multiple poems by one author on the same page, see Bilac's poems and Poetry of Emily Brontë. -- Jehanne 03:29, 19 Feb 2004 (UTC)

I'm having hardware problems, so my I answers may be irregular in the next couple days while I sort this out. Big texts should be broken up. Putting all of the Divine Comedy into one 710kb file was bound to create difficulties on some browsers. Choosing how to break that up into three parts was easy. Currently, at about 540kb the Huck Finn file is the biggest one in Wikisource; that's much too big. We perhaps need to determine a maximum file size after which breaking it up would be essential. For Wikipedia I would consider breaking a file up after after 30kb, but here I think we can handle a bigger number maybe up to 100kb. In determining short term priorities we can begin with the biggest ones and bring the maximum size down when we have the time. Some, like π to 100,000 places, may defy all logical treatment.

The other extreme on some web sites is having each printed page as a separate file, even if it means breaking up a sentence. To a user that's just annoying. Breaking up a book of poems into its separate but distinct components is a reasonable approach, but it's often going to be a judgement call where we can be flexible in dealing with it on a case by case basis.

I don't think that having both a full text and a divided text serves a very useful purpose as with the Communist Manifesto, but If someone feels that both should be there I'm not going to argue about it.

One very important thing when a work is broken up, is to make sure that all the parts work together, and that has been going well so far. The contributors who have been entering Kropotkin's Conquest of Bread in Greek, ant The Book of Mormon in Interlingua seem to understand this. Eclecticology 18:33, 19 Feb 2004 (UTC)

I think that's quite reasonable. We don't need multiple copies of the same documents -- that poses problems for those who need to correct typos and the like. 100kb max divisions sounds good to me. What adopt something like the "series" infoboxes from Wikipedia to link the various sections of a single work? -- Jehanne 20:32, 19 Feb 2004 (UTC)

I broke the nearly-600k Huck Finn file into six parts, all smaller than 100k. Any thoughts? -- Jehanne 21:07, 19 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Looks fine. I understand that how we break such things up is arbitrary, but I don't think that there is any way around that. Eclecticology 21:23, 19 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Less, less! should be splitted into a "by chapter" version! >_< a good start tho! ^_^ --Maio 01:19, 20 Feb 2004 (UTC)

I still want to emphasize that one of the advantage of having source material on a Wiki (over an semi-static archive like Project Gutenberg) is that it allows for easy correction of typos and errors in the transcribed text. Generating multiple copies of the same content (e.g. broken by chapters and full text) does not forward these ends. I propose that we settle on a single standard one way or the other. I'd prefer full-text all the way, but Eclect has already pointed out the drawback of that. The two basic alternatives are 100k (or other arbitrary-size) chunks, or by "chapter" or smallest natural subdivision. -- Jehanne 02:11, 20 Feb 2004 (UTC)

By chapter & full text: try to submit a 100K article on a 56K modem then come back and tell me how much you hated it. I don't understand what's the disadvantage of the by chapter version... in order to edit the full text you just need to copy/paste the chapter that you edited into the sub-section of the full-text version. *shrug* --Maio 05:30, 20 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Certainly there are strong valid arguments for files that are much smaller than 100K, and I don't mind if you have the energy to divide the files up that way. Neither Jehanne nor I should feel obliged to do the work of making that breakdown. Also, if you want to add the full text versions feel free to do so. Your cut-and-paste solution may seem straight-forward but the guy with the 56K modem who was having trouble downloading a 100K file, is not going to be inclined to download a 500K file three times (the normal and edit versions plus the normal version again when he saves his changes) just to co-ordinate a typo correction. The two version scheme will rapidly get out of sync. Eclecticology 08:41, 20 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Yeah, I thought about the problem of synchronization also. The software could handle that too, but it is much more complicated and would require more time to code, test and debug. I'm not saying that you are obligued to submit it that way, that is why I used the word 'should'... as in, we should provide but schemes. This is a wiki and we can't restrict how things are submitted, but if you want to submit it both ways and have the time to do so, then you should submit it in both formats. --Maio 14:06, 20 Feb 2004 (UTC)

I'm starting to form the opinion that we should break up texts into their smallest constitutent units only (i.e. chapters, scenes, etc.). This poses two challenges, though, right off the top... 1) facilitating browsing once someone reaches the bottom of the page -- perhaps a navigation footer/box like those being implemented on Wp is also in order, although I cringe at the possiblity of adding more markup, because that increases maintenance time. 2) creating potentially dozens of pages for a single work artifically inflates the "document count" on the main page. I mean, we don't current have 600+ documents; I'd guess we have on the order of 100; but some take up dozens. The Christian bible has only 1000 chapters (which is the logical way to break it up here), but is one "document." I'm not sure how to deal with that difficulty. -- Jehanne 15:45, 20 Feb 2004 (UTC)

I don't think there is any one solution to this. Often the work itself will dictate the best way. I've broken one of the Shakespeare plays As You Like It into acts, and don't see much value at this time to breaking it down further into scenes. The 100K that I suggested before is an arbitrary amount, above which almost anything should be broken down. Our Interlingua version of the Book of Mormon is being divided into chapters, and we'll soon see how that turns out. The effect on document count is certainly accurate, but I see that as much less important than document navigation. Eclecticology 18:12, 23 Feb 2004 (UTC)

I realise I am very new to this project (not one usefull contribution yet), but as a user, I would prefer full text only when downloading the text. Normally, a chapter breakup is much easier. If you make sure there is always a page with all the files listed, someone can always download the entire article by using DAP, GetRight or something alike. That might be a good temporary solution before someone can actually code a synching system into the source. -- User:Kasperl:Kasperl 16:31, 5 Jun 2004 (UTC)

I'm not familiar with the software packages that you mention, but I accept what you say about their apparent usefulness. I am also intrigued by your offer to provide a synching system. I also look forward to your becoming a registered user who is making contributions. Meanwhile, your reader-only perspective is helpful because it gives a focus on issues that is too easily lost when a person becomes a contributor. I support breaking up lengthy works, but there is a bit of an art in breaking up those works, which don't always have obvious subdivisions like chapters. Thanks for giving your comments and welcome to Wikisource. Eclecticology 17:26, 5 Jun 2004 (UTC)

Woops, thought I logged in before posting that.... I'll edit out my IP into my name.

Getright and DAP are download managers, enabling someone to automaticly download a list of links to one file. I am not offering to make a synching system, I am suggesting one. The easiest hack would seem to be to make a page showing the contents of the pages used. One would need to acces the raw texts of the chapters, and use something like a php include to simply throw them all into one page. Makeup would be retained, if you do the collecting before the normal parsing. How to do this is way behond me, since I never learned PHP behond the include command, and have no knowledge whatsoever on wiki code. Editing the full text would perhaps be harder to make, but isn't the main goal. No one would be willing to edit a 740kb file in one run, if you ask me. I do try to contribute to Wikipedia and Wikibooks, and I would try to help Wikisource as well, but my time is limited. -- Kasperl 17:36, 5 Jun 2004 (UTC)