Wikisource:Scriptorium

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Announcements

May 2026 Wikimedia Café meetups regarding the Wikimedia Foundation Annual Plan

Hello! There will be two Wikimedia Café discussion opportunities during the last weekend of May. Both sessions will focus on the the 2026-2027 Wikimedia Foundation Annual Plan. Participants may attend either or both sessions.

1. Saturday, 30 May 2026 at 15:00 UTC (timestamp converter), at a time friendly to the Americas, Africa, and Europe
2. Sunday, 31 May 2026 at 05:00 UTC (timestamp converter), at a time friendly to Asia and the Pacific

Café participants are highly encouraged to read in advance at least this summary of the plan. Optionally, Café participants are encouraged to read portions of the plan that interest them and ask questions or provide feedback on the Annual Plan talk page.

Please see the Café page for more information, including tables of timestamp conversions for both sessions, the agenda, and how to register!

↠Pine (✉) 19:45, 21 May 2026 (UTC)

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Repairs (and moves)

Designated for requests related to the repair of works (and scans of works) presented on Wikisource

See also Wikisource:Scan lab

Index:Explanatory Notes - Commonwealth Parliamentary Association and International Committee of the Red Cross (Status) Act 2025 (Extension) Act 2025 (UKPGA 2025-2 kp).pdf

Needs to be moved to Index:Explanatory Notes - Commonwealth Parliamentary Association and International Committee of the Red Cross (Status) Act 2025 (UKPGA 2025-2 kp).pdf after file on commons is moved. ToxicPea (talk) 18:18, 23 April 2026 (UTC)

Moved. MarkLSteadman (talk) 20:36, 22 May 2026 (UTC)

Cimarron

This work (including all subpages) needs to be moved to Cimarron (1930) to disambiguate it from the 1931 film of the same name, which is also in public domain now since it was initially registered for copyright in 1930. There is a public film of the film already on Commons. --EncycloPetey (talk) 15:12, 30 April 2026 (UTC)

As the one who mainly worked on it, I  Support this proposal. Nighfidelity (talk) 17:00, 30 April 2026 (UTC)

Doing… —Beleg Tâl (talk) 17:14, 30 April 2026 (UTC)

Done! —Beleg Tâl (talk) 17:21, 30 April 2026 (UTC)

Doesn't the wikidata entry need amending - the one for the novel points at this diambiguation page. Or should that wikidata entry not lonk to wikisource at all ? -- Beardo (talk) 20:13, 30 April 2026 (UTC)

I think that's my mistake. I must have marked the novel when I thought the page was distinguishing versions (book and film for the same story). But if it's a disambiguation page, then there is a separate data item. Which should we use: versions of the same story, or disambiguation? --EncycloPetey (talk) 20:58, 30 April 2026 (UTC)

I think we generally use {{disambig}} rather than {{versions}} when we're dealing with significant adaptations. I've updated the Wikidata item accordingly. But honestly I think a versions page wouldn't really be wrong here either. —Beleg Tâl (talk) 17:49, 1 May 2026 (UTC)

Purcell Papers

Could someone move it (and its subpages) to The Purcell Papers? Nighfidelity (talk) 14:33, 12 May 2026 (UTC)

I wonder whether that should actually be to something like "The Purcell Papers (Gutenberg)" to leave space for a scan-backed copy? -- Beardo (talk) 21:01, 13 May 2026 (UTC)

I'm currently working on scanbacking this, starting with The Purcell Papers/Volume 1/Memoir of Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu and The Purcell Papers/Volume 1/The Ghost and the Bone-Setter. Nighfidelity (talk) 21:04, 13 May 2026 (UTC)

Additionally, the Gutenburg copy doesn't include several stories according to the ToC. Nighfidelity (talk) 21:04, 13 May 2026 (UTC)

I don't see any reason to keep the subpages that aren't scanbacked. We should delete them. ToxicPea (talk) 21:07, 13 May 2026 (UTC)

I'm planning to match-and-split them so I can proofread them slightly easier. Nighfidelity (talk) 21:23, 13 May 2026 (UTC)

Index:Solomon Tshekisho Plaatje - Muhdi.pdf

Since I am only marginally literate, I entitled the file on Commons "Solomon Tshekisho Plaatje - Muhdi.pdf" instead of "Solomon Tshekisho Plaatje - Muhdi.pdf". Another user who is smarter than me moved the file and there is a redirect on Commons, but should the index and pages here be moved as well? If someone can do that with a bot, that would be helpful. Thanks/sorry. ―Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 02:40, 22 May 2026 (UTC)

Yes, could an admin please Move Index:Solomon Tshekisho Plaatje - Muhdi.pdf --> Index:Solomon Tshekisho Plaatje - Mhudi.pdf, including all Pages that have been created? --EncycloPetey (talk) 02:42, 22 May 2026 (UTC)

Done. MarkLSteadman (talk) 20:30, 22 May 2026 (UTC)

Other discussions

Using AI to edit Wikisource

Hi, FYI Seudo from the French WS has created a small Python program to edit WS with the help of Chat-GPT. It is quite impressive. The code is here and the discussion is here (in French, but you can use a translator). Best, Yann (talk) 11:49, 10 April 2026 (UTC)

Can you give us a quick preview? Is the goal to make a better OCR transcription? —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 12:01, 10 April 2026 (UTC)

Seudo shows some examples: simple proofreading, proofreading and complex formatting. Yann (talk) 13:35, 10 April 2026 (UTC)

Using AI for providing not just OCR but also formatting on top of it, or helping to automate repetitive tasks both under human supervision is one thing. Creating a full agent that say uploads from IA, proofreads and then transcludes the pages into mainspace fully automated is another. MarkLSteadman (talk) 12:51, 10 April 2026 (UTC)

Apparently, Chat-GPT is able to add formatting in addition to a good proofreading, and the process can be automated. So it does in a few seconds what a human would do in one hundred times more time. Yann (talk) 13:35, 10 April 2026 (UTC)

Yeah exactly, among other things it can build out relatively complex tables in wikitext or convert mathematical formulae into latex. MarkLSteadman (talk) 13:43, 10 April 2026 (UTC)

Another use case might be converting musical scores into lilypond. Another thing is it can help build out styles.css files for those less familiar with CSS. The point is that it broadens beyond just reducing the number of scanos in an OCR. MarkLSteadman (talk) 13:44, 10 April 2026 (UTC)

How well does it handle cases with archaic spelling? with poetic formatting? with French or German words embedded in the text? --EncycloPetey (talk) 13:53, 10 April 2026 (UTC)

None of those are necessarily intractable. It should be able with the proper instruction take stanzas and convert them into {{ppoem}} and follow instructions on keeping particular spelling idiosyncracies. They are also inherently multilingual. It's important to realize that they can be quite customized to our needs, we can tell them quite detailed how we want poems formatted or how to handle unusual spellings / other languages etc. MarkLSteadman (talk) 14:55, 10 April 2026 (UTC)

It sounds as though those things are as yet untested, then. I'm not in favor of untested methods. Nor would I be keen to have to teach the model about every archaic spelling, or how to distinguish archaic spellings from poetic spellings, from dialectical spellings, or recognizing misspellings. It looks like it is perhaps an adequate tool for doing the work of OCR, and seems to be able to cope with pages with bends in them, but with insufficient testing, I wouldn't rate it beyond the same as an OCR tool. --EncycloPetey (talk) 19:20, 10 April 2026 (UTC)

You want to give me a page and I can see what it can do? Or would you prefer for people to do all the testing and development in private? MarkLSteadman (talk) 23:03, 10 April 2026 (UTC)

You're missing the point. It's not a question of doing a single page "right". It's the question of whether it can reliably do the job, over and over, even when the choices change from one work to another. Some works have to-day and to-morrow consistently hyphenated, but others have them unhyphenated. Some works have dialectical conventions where spaces and apostrophes appear in nonstandard places, but others do not. Some works have French loanwords spelled with diacriticals that no longer appear over those words, such as régime and rôle, and in other works those do not appear. It's going to take a lot of testing training, across multiple works with different standards. But it must be trained not only to follow certain standards, but to adjust those standards to fit the specific text. That's not something that can be demonstrated by doing one page. That requires a large number of tests under multiple conditions. "Here, it managed one page" doesn't convince me. --EncycloPetey (talk) 00:00, 11 April 2026 (UTC)

Okay, so the answer will be what I said, people will develop these in private, come back in say a year, after they said I have been using this for 6 months with 10,000 edits and I am quite happy about it. But even then to answer your question, I don't do old texts or mixed language texts that frequently, I do less poetry. I know you proofread a lot more poetry. If I come back and say here it helped proofread 100 mathematical books / tables over thousands of edits that won't answer the questions you raised, does it handle poetry? MarkLSteadman (talk) 12:57, 11 April 2026 (UTC)

I would take more care around "hundred times more" ("existential" for three pages and code the editor in question did not even write?). OCR is already pretty high quality, and despite all one can say, AI still is not reliable to do something deterministically. Checking everything is right is already a consequent part of proofreading, and trading less time spent transcribing for more time checking unreliable (and unreliable in nondeterministic ways) output is not necessarily a plus.

I would also raise an objection to recommending volunteers to funnel money into this. — Alien  3
3 3 14:03, 10 April 2026 (UTC)

The point is that it isn't standard OCR but better, it can do some of the most time consuming tasks such as converting tables into properly organized style sheets and wikitext, scores to lilypond, or formulas to latex. I haven't seen anyone here claim that they can convert a score into lilipond with our current ocr tools. And many of these things can be a pain to work with, e.g. figuring out why your hand coded latex doesn't compile at all. MarkLSteadman (talk) 15:07, 10 April 2026 (UTC)

I agree. My problem with AI is unreliability, and, more specificly, unpredictable unreliability. Whenever I use AI for OCR (NOT on Wikipedia, do not worry), I manually proofreead the results with the fine-toothed comb (and keep finding errors here and there). So I'm totally against giving it free reign. -- Wesha (talk) 17:44, 10 April 2026 (UTC)

Like any tool, a final validation by a human is needed, but AI can probably do the proofreading alone. It would reduce manual work considerably. Now, the existential and commercial questions remain, but I think this is a debate worth having. I also proofread books because it is interesting and fun. So introducing a tool should not make it boring. Yann (talk) 09:16, 11 April 2026 (UTC)

I've tried AI for formatting, and it has problems. Look at this diff. It does an amazing job of adding formatting, but it also added italics not in the example I fed to it, just because they were what it should have looked like, not what the page looked like. It also took excessively long titles and truncated them with ..., again not as it was done, but as it arguably should be done.

That was probably a net win, but it also introduced some real problems. I can see an tool that can produce good math OCR opening up a lot of texts to being worked on. But so far it looks way too likely to make unneeded changes to be used any way but carefully controlled.--Prosfilaes (talk) 23:37, 10 April 2026 (UTC)

• I was wondering what was up with the Greek text on that page! When I went over it, I made it again from scratch, because it was wrong in very weird ways—unlike being copied from the Internet or from a mostly-accurate Greek-script OCR. Now I know. So, it seems like it’s mostly accurate, but wrong in seemingly random and hard-to-predict ways. I probably wouldn’t use it unless I would be going over the result comprehensively anyway, like when making a really large table. TE(æ)A,ea. (talk) 19:03, 11 April 2026 (UTC)

  Two things: 1. It may be possible to have the AI use a tool to do source text matching with say Perseus or gr Wikisource for longer citations and surface that instead (e.g. by parsing the citation to find the work --> finding the referenced work). 2. Some of this might be addressable based on the exact script design (e.g. controlling the temperature which might cause some of these errors, or having a reviewer agent to check the transcription precisely for divergences or even highlight areas of concern). E.g. we could have a gadget that just highlights text it thinks might need double checking (which might be helpful for say, Greek text, where it could leverage it's knowledge of grammar to find typos that might be obvious to someone familiar with the language but not someone just transcribing it letter by letter). MarkLSteadman (talk) 04:08, 14 April 2026 (UTC)

  Hi! Just stepping by from it.source, this thread covers two passions of mine: Greek and music.

  I can testify that our current Google and Tesseract OCR tool works very well with (neatly printed) ancient Greek, leaving to a human eye just a simple double check rather than a thorough scrutiny. On the other hand there is a large amount of poorly printed ancient Greek in Italian books from the 16th to the 18th century that require many tough human decisions.

  As for music, I tried to use both Gemini, ChatGPT and Claude, asking them to transcribe a the image of a page of piano music with lilypond, but the results were totally unusable. εΔω 07:22, 14 May 2026 (UTC)

Our policy is that we require two pairs of human eyes to proofread and validate. We can't prove that a bot tool of some kind wasn't one or both of those pairs of eyes and we ask the operators for honesty. Although I'm unlikely to be using an AI tool to create tables and scores—I actually enjoy doing those—if there are tools that assist a Wikisourcerer to do the bits they don't enjoy and the user is fully checking output before submitting as proofread, then I don't have a problem with the concept. However, I would have a problem if an AI tool was being used to validate a page—the worst would be one AI agent proofreading and another validating without a detailed human review. (Having been told recently by an AI agent that I am two different people and having it hallucinate on the projects I've actually been involved with here, I don't have a lot of trust of AI right now.) Beeswaxcandle (talk) 19:54, 11 April 2026 (UTC)

I agree 100%. I think it would be great to use AI tools to find and fix errors or set-up formatting, but only humans should be officially proofreading or officially validating. If you're clicking those buttons, it means you have used human eyes and human brains to review the text. Personally, I think it would most useful to have AI tools like this review texts that have already been validated and flag all the overlooked errors for a human to review and fix. Nosferattus (talk) 04:02, 13 April 2026 (UTC)

I think in the long-term I would be OK with having an AI validate pages that are already proofread, since we have such a backlog for validation. But certainly, validate with an asterisk—clarifying that it was AI-validated and in no way guaranteed.

Despite my own immense misgivings about AI, I do occasionally use Gemini to help with some tricky proofreading questions. But the way I use it is to engage it as a simulated "colleague" to help with paleography, interpreting a work's intended meaning, and as a time-saver versus doing that research by myself.

A great example I can think of is usefully transcribing the word "slot" on Page:Report of Senate Select Committee on the Invasion of Harper's Ferry.pdf/105. The word makes absolutely no sense in its context, and so I was wondering if the scan was bad, or if there was a mechanical difficulty in the physical printing, or if another edition of the text had corrected it, or what. Ultimately, after a lot of back-and-forth with Gemini, I determined what I think is the most likely scenario, that the word was supposed to be "lost," but that it was laid out wrong on the printing press. But that was after a lot of engagement about possible historical meanings of the word "slot" (it can mean 'to slay or kill,' but that would be weird in context!), and estimating the relative likelihood of the intended word being "shot", "slot", "slain", or "lost"; and also determining if the error occurred at the hand-transcription at the hearing itself, setting the printing press, printing the sheet, storing the book, scanning the book, me reading the scan, or some complex combination. All that to end up writing {{SIC|slot|lost}} on a page that few people will ever read.

Now granted, that's a kind of high-level interpretation (and ultimately, annotation) that I'm comfortable doing all by myself. But whereas I have to fully immerse myself into a historical context to be able to evaluate these sorts of things, an AI chatbot can get me up to speed on that stuff while still firmly staying in an advisory role. In short, it's a tool. I don't even trust AI stuff to adequately act as a literal OCR engine -- I'm very very far from treating one as a trusted wikisource editor. -- Mathmitch7 (talk) 22:49, 13 April 2026 (UTC)

I don't see much point in having AI validate pages. Validation is really an extra, and should mean that someone has carefully gone over the final page. That pages aren't validated is fine.

I don't know what you mean by "AI stuff". In the most general sense of AI, anything that can do OCR is AI. In the modern neural network meaning, most modern OCR is AI, including the normal mode of Tesseract, the OCR that we usually use.--Prosfilaes (talk) 00:53, 14 April 2026 (UTC)

I think it might make sense to help identify things that people might have missed.An example would be helping to find things like modern vs. modem, 0 vs. O, Is vs. 1s etc. by building up good lists of such errors since it would have both the context and the scan to compare to. Another thing, is it could provide far more pointed guidance around lint errors, think of adding an "AI review" button next to "show preview" at it will give a short list of things to check. MarkLSteadman (talk) 04:15, 14 April 2026 (UTC)

E.g.

1. You used block template {{c}} inside a span template {{larger}}: suggestion instead of {{larger}} use {{larger block}}.

2. You have fostered content: suggestion add {{nopt}} to the table

3. On row 5 of the table you have Is: likely 1s because it is referring to one shilling as a price given the row above and below say 6d

MarkLSteadman (talk) 04:21, 14 April 2026 (UTC)

I wonder if anybody has actually tried my tool, or did you use other AI techniques?

Since running a Python command-line tool is not for everybody, I produced an executable with a graphical interface (not published yet, but I could publish it on Github if it is useful). Making a graphical interface, which used to take a week of professional programmer's work, can be done today in a few hours with AI programming tools...

For real-world examples, I ran the tool on 24 pages with complex formatting, sections and template calls, such as here (see the wikicode). The prompt I used is there and you can see, even if you can't read French, that's it's not very long and could be written by any Wikisource user.

However this is mostly useful when you need special formatting and/or you have complex OCR needs (AI works great on ancient Greek). For standard, 19-century novels, this would probably be a waste of time and AI tokens. Seudo (talk) 07:52, 16 April 2026 (UTC)

While AI is a better tool than OCR for English text transcription and formatting, it can introduce errors in table formatting and non-English text. For my case in Index:Dictionary of the Foochow Dialect.pdf, it can forget to introduce the whole column, switching data first with the second row, or switching data between the first with the last row, or totally forget to introduce a row every 30 to 50 transcriptions. Cerevisae (talk) 02:28, 22 April 2026 (UTC)

I also noticed that AI sometimes "forgets" an entire paragraph in the text, with no apparent reason. A solution might be to ask a second AI to check that the main AI has transcribed everything... The second AI may use a less intelligent (and less expensive) model than the first one. Seudo (talk) 08:04, 23 April 2026 (UTC)

I have used Chat-GPT to format this page. Yann (talk) 08:40, 23 April 2026 (UTC)

New York Daily News/1928/03/09/Freeport Legion Lists War Heroes

At New York Daily News/1928/03/09/Freeport Legion Lists War Heroes can the wikidata link to one of the people mentioned in the article be restored? I know some people do not like them, but this has been debated multiple times. RAN (talk) 18:05, 15 April 2026 (UTC)

• There was no objection, so I restored the link, but it has been removed again with the comment: "if Ensko is linked, then what about everyone else? I don't see why only he should." So, what is the rule? In this case Ensko is linked because he has a Wikidata entry. The other people are not linked, because they do not have Wikidata entries. I have no objection to giving each of the people mentioned their own Wikidata entry if someone wants to create them. With the link removed now the news article loses the context provided at the Wikidata entry. --RAN (talk) 22:48, 28 April 2026 (UTC)
• Again there was no objection here, so I restored it again. I am not aware of any rule demanding that all names have to be linked, or none get linked. I don't want to edit war over it. I only transcribed the news article because it had that person's name in it. --RAN (talk) 03:00, 4 May 2026 (UTC)

  Why not just link to Portal:William Edward Ensko instead? I feel like this would be less objectionable. ToxicPea (talk) 12:52, 4 May 2026 (UTC)

Advertising validated texts

Hi, Is there a place for advertising validated texts? I can't find one. I think it would encourage people to validate more texts, if the result is proeminently displayed somewhere (e.g. on the main page on French WS: fr:Wikisource:Accueil). Yann (talk) 20:06, 16 April 2026 (UTC)

We advertise Proofread texts. Validated texts of note can be nominated as possible Featured Texts, but that does not always succeed because validation sometimes leaves many errors in the text. We have a former Featured text currently under review because it is full of transcription errors. The situation on French Wikisource may be better, but we often have new editors contribute to validation without understanding what that actually means. How does French Wikisource manage this issue? --EncycloPetey (talk) 21:19, 16 April 2026 (UTC)

There is no particuler process. AFAIK, new users mostly want to proofread new texts. Yann (talk) 19:25, 17 April 2026 (UTC)

@Yann: At least twice,[1][2] it has been proposed to put a validated texts search box on the Main Page. Both Kaldari and Xover created working mock-ups for it (e.g. [3]). But it seems to have been forgotten about despite apparent support. I would definitely support having such a feature on the Main Page and it's kind of ridiculous that we don't have any way for visitors to discover our validated texts. Nosferattus (talk) 20:40, 17 April 2026 (UTC)

Reading through the old discussions, it seems the only problem was that many of our validated texts weren't actually in Category:Validated texts at the time. Back then we only had ~2500 texts in the category, but now there are 4,350, which seems like a decent number. Kaldari, Xover: Is this something we could move forward with? Nosferattus (talk) 21:11, 17 April 2026 (UTC)

Per Portal:Proofreading milestones, still missing much. (Maybe a situation like this.) — Alien  3
3 3 21:26, 17 April 2026 (UTC)

It looks like a lot of the validated indexes in Category:Index Validated are transcriptions of single images rather than texts per se, for example Index:"GIVE^ United War Work Campaign." - NARA - 512697.tif and Index:! Explosive objects in War in Ukraine, 2022 (01).jpg. This seems to explain some of the discrepancy. Nosferattus (talk) 16:01, 19 April 2026 (UTC)

@Kaldari, @Xover: Could we implement this? Yann (talk) 16:21, 12 May 2026 (UTC)

Also, keep in mind that validated texts aren't necessarily transcluded into Mainspace. We'd need to also check that the work is fully transcluded, and that the primary page of the work includes contents so that a download will work. Validation alone refers merely to the status of the individual pages. --EncycloPetey (talk) 16:26, 12 May 2026 (UTC)

Yes, of course this status is for whole books. And yes, they should be properly transcluded to be advertised. Yann (talk) 09:42, 13 May 2026 (UTC)

@EncycloPetey, @Yann: The mockup that Xover created only pulls from Category:Validated texts, not Category:Index Validated. So it's restricted to mainspace transcluded works that have Wikidata items. I would love to see this implemented. What would it take to make this happen? Do we need to do an RFC or could we just try it out (based on the previous discussions)? Nosferattus (talk) 18:04, 28 May 2026 (UTC)

We could use fr:Modèle:Validations as a framework. Yann (talk) 19:33, 28 May 2026 (UTC)

Wikinews

Closed down, can I write news here? BigKrow (talk) 15:02, 1 May 2026 (UTC)

no, see Wikisource:What Wikisource includes for what wikisource includes. ltbdl (talk) 15:10, 1 May 2026 (UTC)

No, no news or original content here. — Alien  3
3 3 15:24, 1 May 2026 (UTC)

looking for a scan of The Torquemada Puzzle Book

this is definitely an extremely long shot, but does anyone own a copy or scan of The Torquemada Puzzle Book (published 1934 in the uk), which contains Cain's Jawbone? it should be in the public domain, as its copyright was not renewed in the united states, and the author died in 1939. i've tried searching for a scan and came up with nothing. ltbdl (talk) 17:20, 1 May 2026 (UTC)

You may want to also post at Wikisource:Requested texts. Good luck, hope you find it! —Beleg Tâl (talk) 17:37, 1 May 2026 (UTC)

will do so! ltbdl (talk) 17:43, 1 May 2026 (UTC)

Though - was it published in the US originally ? Or does it get caught by URAA as still being in copyright in the UK in 1996 ? -- Beardo (talk) 01:29, 2 May 2026 (UTC)

Reference within reference

Hi, I am not sure what is the best way to add a reference within reference, e.g. Page:The works of John Ruskin (IA worksofjohnruski17rusk).pdf/157. Thanks, Yann (talk) 23:52, 1 May 2026 (UTC)

Here is one approach: Page:The Works of John Locke - 1823 - vol 01.djvu/139 MarkLSteadman (talk) 00:19, 2 May 2026 (UTC)

See also w:WP:NFN. Essentially just for the inner references use {{#tag:ref|arguments}}. — Alien  3
3 3 01:58, 2 May 2026 (UTC)

See Help:Nested footnotes on how to do this here. Beeswaxcandle (talk) 05:10, 2 May 2026 (UTC)

{{*!/s}} lists

Is there a way to make these lists without the dots after the numbers? Also is there is way to make the numbers left aligned instead of right aligned? Also how do I make the list items have a hanging indent? ToxicPea (talk) 23:53, 1 May 2026 (UTC)

• That template system just replicates the MediaWiki # function, which in turn is an implementation of basic HTML. For your case, I would recommend tables and {{ts}}. TE(æ)A,ea. (talk) 00:17, 2 May 2026 (UTC)

  Is there not some way to this with lists? I need this style for a lot of pages and lists are easier to copy and paste. ToxicPea (talk) 00:38, 2 May 2026 (UTC)

  You may be able to do some of these things via CSS. 00:54, 2 May 2026 (UTC) MarkLSteadman (talk) 00:54, 2 May 2026 (UTC)

  How do I apply CSS styles to a list without effecting the marker? ToxicPea (talk) 01:49, 2 May 2026 (UTC)

  I found this class in {{*/styles.css}} called __idx_hi1 which I think is supposed to apply a hanging indent to the list items but it doesn't work right. Does anyone know how to fix this? ToxicPea (talk) 02:18, 2 May 2026 (UTC)

  I believe that {{Ordered list}} is able to do what you need. Beeswaxcandle (talk) 05:17, 2 May 2026 (UTC)

Monthly Challenge categories?

I noticed at Index:The house without a key, by Earl Derr Biggins (1925).djvu that it was included in categories for the monthly challenge from 2022, yet I don't see newer indexes included in the recent monthly challenges. Is there a reason why? Nighfidelity (talk) 19:20, 4 May 2026 (UTC)

@Nighfidelity Short answer: too much effort to add the categories. Details: I don't believe the process of adding categories has been automated (based on a previous discussion from a similar question), and the MC typically includes more indices these days than when it was starting out. Regards, TeysaKarlov (talk) 20:55, 4 May 2026 (UTC)

Tech News: 2026-19

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Weekly highlight

• The Article guidance team invites experienced editors of pilot Wikipedias—Arabic, Bangla, Japanese, Portuguese, Persian, Turkish, Simple English, Spanish, and French—to help translate and adapt sample outlines. These outlines will guide editors in creating clear, well-structured, and policy-compliant articles when using the feature once it is launched in May 2026. Simple instructions on how to translate and adapt the outlines are available.

Updates for editors

• The Product and Technology Advisory Council has published draft recommendations on a model that affiliates can follow when contributing to the technical space. Community members are invited to provide feedback on the recommendation until May 8th on the talk page.
• The number of available thumbnail size preferences in MediaWiki is being reduced to three standardized options—Small (180px), Regular (250px), and Large (400px), as part of ongoing efforts to improve performance and reduce strain on thumbnail services. As a result, existing preferences will be mapped to the nearest new size (for example, smaller selections like 120px or 150px will render at 180px, while larger ones like 300px or 360px will render at 400px). The preferences interface will soon be updated to reflect these changes, and users who wish to opt out or provide feedback can do so. [4]
• From now on, even when a permission expires automatically, users will receive an Echo notification similar to the standard notification for permission changes. There is a difference between this and Global reminder bot in that the latter reminds users a week before the rights are due to expire, so that they can renew the rights.
• View all 32 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, the problem where the ULS language selector in Special:Translate would scroll vertically when it shouldn't, has been resolved. Previously, when users opened the "Translate to English" dropdown and typed certain inputs, the dialog would scroll vertically by a few pixels even when there was enough space to display all results. The dropdown no longer shifts unnecessarily when filtering languages. [5]
• The Global Watchlist, which lets you view your watchlists from multiple wikis on a single page, continues to improve. For example, watchlists for Wikibase sites such as Wikidata now support EntitySchema elements for better tracking. The Live Updates mode now refreshes the special page every 60 seconds to comply with the updated global API rate limits for improved real-time responsiveness. Additionally, a directionality bug that displayed links as "changes 3" instead of "3 changes" in mixed-direction lists has been fixed. [6][7][8]

Updates for technical contributors

• The second phase of global API rate limits has been rolled out to reduce the impact of AI crawlers and ensure fair, sustainable access to Wikimedia resources, prioritising human and mission-aligned traffic. Limits have been shifted from per-hour to per-minute, producing smoother traffic patterns and more predictable API load. Community users are not expected to be affected, and no action is required. Early indications show some User-Agent-based requestors are adjusting behaviour, and around 64% of automated API traffic has been identified. Monitoring continues, and Wikimedia Enterprise remains available for commercial support.
• Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki

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MediaWiki message delivery 20:43, 4 May 2026 (UTC)

Other versions of Provisional Constitution and Ordinances for the People of the United States

I found another copy of this work at Senate Select Committee Report on the Harper's Ferry Invasion/Journal Appendix 3 so a versions page needs to be created so the original version can be disambiguated with that. ToxicPea (talk) 02:32, 5 May 2026 (UTC)

French

Hi, Shouldn't we have a template for French language, like we have for other languages? Yann (talk) 12:18, 6 May 2026 (UTC)

Wouldn't you use {{lang}} with the fr ISO code? With the exception of Latin, all those templates are marking a different script as well as language.—Tcr25 (talk) 13:26, 6 May 2026 (UTC)

Ah yes. I added a note in the category above. Yann (talk) 16:28, 6 May 2026 (UTC)

Tech News: 2026-20

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Weekly highlight

• Community Tech has published new guidance explaining how wishes on Community Wishlist are triaged and prioritized. The documentation is intended to help contributors write stronger proposals by clarifying the factors that influence prioritization decisions. Beyond vote counts, the guidance highlights considerations such as potential impact on the community when determining which wishes move forward.

Updates for editors

• The Reader Growth team is launching an experiment to test a new Share Card feature that allows readers to create visually engaging cards from Wikipedia articles or selected article sections and share them online, with each card linking back to the original article to help expand readership and article discovery. The mobile-only A/B test will be available to a portion of readers on Arabic, Chinese, French, Vietnamese, and English Wikipedia to better understand reading and sharing habits, and is scheduled to begin the week of May 18 and run for four weeks.
• The Android and iOS Wikipedia apps recently released the 25-day reading challenge into Beta, as part of efforts to drive reader engagement by encouraging users to complete reading milestones. To track their reading streak during the challenge, App users can add a widget featuring Baby Globe to their home screen. The challenge officially begins May 11.
• View all 17 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, an issue where the global preference for enabling syntax highlighting in wikitext could unexpectedly disable itself after being turned on, has now been fixed. [9]

Updates for technical contributors

• The ResourceLoader module mediawiki.ui.input, deprecated since September 2023, will be removed this week. There is a guide for migrating from MediaWiki UI to Codex for any tools that use it. [10]
• Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki

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MediaWiki message delivery 19:20, 11 May 2026 (UTC)

Index:The Periplus of the Erythræan Sea.djvu

There, Harshyadavji and KumarGovindam1 about one year ago went around marking raw OCR as proofread (for the first) and then replacing that with some other raw OCR (for the second). End result is pages marked as prooofread of discutable qualities. I'd argue we should just delete these pages so actual transcription can happen, but I'm not sure. At least we ought to do something. Thoughts? — Alien  3
3 3 20:18, 13 May 2026 (UTC)

I've gone through their changes and reverted everthing. The first user clicked proofread/validated on around 71 pages, without making any serious proofreading effort. And then a month later the second user replaced 43 pages with worse OCR, (and in around ten instances replacing properly proofread text with raw OCR). Pasicles (talk) 00:22, 23 May 2026 (UTC)

Thanks! — Alien  3
3 3 09:38, 23 May 2026 (UTC)

Failed to initialize OpenSeadragon (again)

I am getting the same error: "Failed to initialize OpenSeadragon" as before. Example: Pages in Index:Pepita Jimenez (1886).pdf. --EncycloPetey (talk) 22:13, 13 May 2026 (UTC)

This thing doesn't happen on every index, and this is a 0x0 pdf, which I think we don't have a fix for. Typically in a week or two it will go away. — Alien  3
3 3 08:53, 14 May 2026 (UTC)

Some code change was done, so now purging works on Commons (I have tested it on dozens of files). I reported this on Phabricator. Yann (talk) 09:16, 14 May 2026 (UTC)

It depends on the files. Purging works for all djvu files, and most pdf files, but some pdf files just don't fix themselves when purged. I purged the file on commons, locally and the index before replying. If this one fixed itself in less than a day we're lucky, but purging was not the fix (likelier it just fixed itself in the meantime). Also, it is better practice, when creating a phab task, to link it for editors' convenience. — Alien  3
3 3 09:20, 14 May 2026 (UTC)

Yes, sorry: phab:T420341. Yann (talk) 17:19, 14 May 2026 (UTC)

It's one reason I've started setting up new Index pages for the MC during the middle of the previous month, always hoping that any issue will resolve in the two weeks until the next MC begins. --EncycloPetey (talk) 21:46, 14 May 2026 (UTC)

Quirky changes to editing

I've noticed two odd recent changes while editing:

1) I can no longer drag in an edit window to select if I drag from the end to the top, but only when I multiple click near the top and drag down. It is possible this is a result of recent updates to Firefox, so I'd like to know if people are experiencing the issue in other browsers. There are times where it is much more useful to drag upwards than downwards.

2) I no longer get autocompletion when editing a Module, even though I have autocomplete turned on.

--EncycloPetey (talk) 22:47, 15 May 2026 (UTC)

I'm having neither of these issues. Firefox on linux but I haven't updated in a while I think (146.0.1). — Alien  3
3 3 11:01, 16 May 2026 (UTC)

Vandalism

Too many bad contributions by ~2026-29436-50. • M-le-mot-dit (talk) 21:36, 16 May 2026 (UTC)

I have blocked that user for three days. Perhaps it should be for longer. -- Beardo (talk) 21:44, 16 May 2026 (UTC)

Three days is good for a first vandalism block. (Also, do remember to put in a reason in the form while blocking.) — Alien  3
3 3 22:04, 16 May 2026 (UTC)

is All Words Interacted Hmm Ha in scope?

or should i put it in multilingual wikisource instead?

info on the book here: https://sona.pona.la/wiki/nimi_ali_pu_n_a

scan here: https://tylerperyea.github.io/public/pdfs/nimialipuna_scan_202601190914.pdf ltbdl (talk) 07:24, 18 May 2026 (UTC)

• I don’t think so; isn’t it self-published? TE(æ)A,ea. (talk) 11:33, 18 May 2026 (UTC)

  bah. ltbdl (talk) 16:04, 18 May 2026 (UTC)

Tech News: 2026-21

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Weekly highlight

• The Abstract Wikipedia team has identified five potential pilot wikis to assess their interest in adopting abstract articles on their wikis. The pilots are Malayalam, Bengali, Dagbani, Arabic, and Indonesian Wikipedia. The feedback period will be open until May 22. If your community is interested in becoming a pilot, let us know on Meta.

Updates for editors

• An experiment to show Reading Lists to logged-out readers on mobile web will launch on May 18 across German, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Polish, Dutch, Turkish, and Urdu Wikipedias, and will run for one month. The effort supports broader goals of helping readers save and organize articles for later reading, while encouraging habits that could lead to future Wikipedia contributions.
• To support a bookmark button in the Reading List beta feature, the "Tools > Action" menu has been updated to display icons, including the watch star indicator that helps editors identify temporarily watched articles. The icons now also match those used on mobile, improving consistency across platforms. The change is currently limited to the actions menu and mainly affects editors with privileged user rights. [11]
• Suggestion Mode was released as an A/B test for newcomer editors on the mobile website at ~15 Wikipedias. The experiment will measure the impact that Suggestion Mode has on the proportion of newcomer mobile web edit sessions that result in constructive (un-reverted) article edits. The experiment will also evaluate the feature's impact on editor retention, and monitor changes in revert and block rates.
• View all 27 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, an issue in the Wikipedia Android app where images could sometimes fail to load after opening a recommended reading list notification, has now been fixed. [12]

Updates for technical contributors

• The Wikidata Platform team has published its backend replacement recommendation and accompanying technical architecture for the migration of the Wikidata Query Service (WDQS) away from Blazegraph. Feedback is invited until May 25th 2026, especially on potential gaps and impacts on advanced use cases. Wikidata community members and WDQS users are also encouraged to help identify high-impact tools and workflows that may need attention on this page. Feedback can be shared on the Migration talk page or during the next office hour. See the WDP team newsletter for more details.
• Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki

In depth

• On English, French, Japanese, and a few other Wikipedias, there was a trial of hCaptcha, a third-party bot detection service. The trial showed that hCaptcha effectively detects and deters some bad-faith automated activity, on its own and by giving checkusers and stewards signals to look into. Because the results were positive, hCaptcha will be rolled out across all wikis over the next few weeks. See the hCaptcha project page for technical information about the implementation and privacy protections. Learn more.
• The latest Community Tech update is now available, with progress across several Community Wishlist initiatives, including Reading Lists expansion from the mobile app to the website, new language support for "Who Wrote That" and the Personal Dashboard, improvements to 3D rendering and Charts, and upcoming work on talk page sorting, audio playback, and editing workflows. The update also shares current priorities, wishlist status trends, and opportunities for community feedback on future focus areas and the Wikimedia Foundation’s 2026–2027 Annual Plan. Read the full newsletter for details.

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MediaWiki message delivery 20:21, 18 May 2026 (UTC)

Chapters delete

I was going though creating pages for the chapters of The Flame Tree and Other Folk-Lore Stories from Uganda, and I was just struck by how short the chapters — and also the whole book — is. I think there really isn't need for separate chapters for each. Like the opposite of {{split}}. Can I get some weight-in on this? Eievie (talk) 02:17, 19 May 2026 (UTC)

It would be too much to have the whole on one page, and I think it would be ungainly to arbitrarily combine chapters. I think it best to have the chapters separate, even if some are fairly short. -- Beardo (talk) 04:16, 19 May 2026 (UTC)

Do you mean "too much" subjectively, or in some harder sense? It's definitely not so long that the transclusion display glitches. It's only like 100 pages, which doesn't feel so long to me. I've seen chapter pages that long before. To you, does a 100+ page chapter feel different because there's no option of splitting, while something of the same length that has segments that could be split but haven't been feel different? Eievie (talk) 05:44, 19 May 2026 (UTC)

Keep the chapters separate. The tales are separate entities and should be treated that way. It's about authorial intent rather than an arbitrary length cut-off. Beeswaxcandle (talk) 07:56, 19 May 2026 (UTC)

Subpages aren't there just for size. If a subdivision in parts was present in the original work we should have subpages. (And these aren't even especially short. Cf alumni oxionenses, &c.) — Alien  3
3 3 08:38, 19 May 2026 (UTC)

I know what you mean, but keeping separate chapter pages would also help ereaders show correct chapter sections if exporting as an ebook. --Yodin^T 12:12, 19 May 2026 (UTC)

Ok, chapterization complete Done Eievie (talk) 16:38, 19 May 2026 (UTC)

Different uses of capitals on a page and use of CSS transform template

On a page such as Page:Margaret Ayer Barnes - Years of Grace.pdf/17, there are multiple lines of text that are capitalized. Should some of these instances use {{uc}} ({{uppercase}}) to transform it and some of them use the direct uppercase characters? If so, how do we determine when to use which? Some related discussions:

• Wikisource:Scriptorium/Help/Archives/2015#When_to_use_'uc'_template_to_transform_text_to_uppercase
• Wikisource:Bot_requests/Archives/2014#{{uc}}
• Wikisource:Scriptorium/Archives/2011-11#sc_or_smaller? (a little tangential, but mentions all-caps)

@EncycloPetey:, who may have a perspective. ―Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 23:16, 19 May 2026 (UTC)

For the record, Here is the most recent time the same issue was discussed (Aug 2025). I agree with Xover's comments. --EncycloPetey (talk) 23:42, 19 May 2026 (UTC)

How does that comment by Xover explain when to use the template and when to not use it? The comment says to not use it at all, yet the page that this thread is about uses it selectively. ―Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 23:49, 19 May 2026 (UTC)

See the reply I posted on your Talk page, and which is linked below, that answers this question. --EncycloPetey (talk) 23:51, 19 May 2026 (UTC)

And here is the discussion I've already posted on this specific instance. --EncycloPetey (talk) 23:44, 19 May 2026 (UTC)

I personally think that TYPING IN ALL CAPS provides a more faithful transcription than {{uc}} in almost all circumstances, but so long as usage is consistent within a work I really don't think it matters —Beleg Tâl (talk) 00:19, 20 May 2026 (UTC)

Agree, consistency is key. Like for curly/straight quotes: if a work uses one thing, keep it, and that's it, with no special reason to revert someone's else work. (For the record, I prefer all-caps too, but the case definitely isn't settled.) — Alien  3
3 3 11:53, 20 May 2026 (UTC)

1. There is a consensus that it isn't covered by policy one way or the other.

2. I am pretty sure opinions will vary, we don't typically l e t t e r s p a c e text with spaces so that on copy you get spaces for example. And especially for Part and Chapter headings (as opposed to title pages generally) there is conflicting info: the ToC might say Part I: Foo, Chapter 3: Bar vs. PART I: FOO, Chapter 3: Bar for example, is that relevant? How about if PART I is in title caps but CHAPTER 3 is in all small caps, do we want to maintain a distinction on copy between the two? The typesetter made a choice to set the two differently, should that be preserved? And for example we generally refrain from going heavily into serif vs. sans-serif for example even though the typesetter choose to mix-and-match. MarkLSteadman (talk) 12:49, 20 May 2026 (UTC)

That is issue here; the 1930 typesetter made different choices in different contexts regarding the titles of the four "Parts".

In the ToC for this work, "PART I / André", and in the running headers throughout that section "André", but on the half-title page for the part is André, and on the first page of the part is André. So the original work is inconsistent about the font-variant for the title of the part, sometimes in small-caps and sometimes in all-caps. Hence, I used "André" in the base text in all four locations for consistency, and transformed that text either with small-caps or with upper-case depending on what the book has in a particular location.

But I did not apply it to the label "PART I" or "CHAPTER I" because in the original text, those labels are always all-caps, so there is no reason to apply a transforming template. --EncycloPetey (talk) 13:51, 20 May 2026 (UTC)

I don't really think there will be a clear this principle --> do this that is agreed upon by everyone, so I would generally defer to the style of the text by whoever set it up, like we do for curly / straight quotes. MarkLSteadman (talk) 17:56, 20 May 2026 (UTC)

I agree with this—providing that I can work out what that style is. The best way to document that is on the Index talk page when setting up. If I can't quickly determine then, if text is printed in all caps, I will type it that way without a template regardless of theoretical semantics. Beeswaxcandle (talk) 18:13, 20 May 2026 (UTC)

This then becomes a checklist of documenting every possible variant style on every Talk page: "curly vs. straight"; "CAPS vs. upper-case"; "ppoem vs. poem tags"; "center header vs. pseudo-heading"; "drop initial vs. float image". The list is fairly extensive at this point of potential points of contention concerning style. Is it necessary to explicitly document all options on every work, or can style be inferred if the complete set of front matter and / or starter pages were all completed by the same person in the same style?

But considering this particular work, the consensus is that my original style using ALL CAPS and with no use of {{uc}} should be followed universally throughout the work, and later additions of the template should be reverted / removed? Please note my comment below about consistency versus universality, as that is a factor here, yet doesn't apply for the issue regarding style of quotes. --EncycloPetey (talk) 18:21, 20 May 2026 (UTC)

Considering that this work was nominated for a collaborative project and barely started I don't think there is clear consensus. If you are asking other people to work on a work then you have to be open for them to change things to their preference. It's not I import a djvu and lay down the law, it's whether say 5% or 50% of the work has been done, and then being polite and understanding about it: are they planning to do the work to get the right to set it to their preference or are you? 12:35, 22 May 2026 (UTC) MarkLSteadman (talk) 12:35, 22 May 2026 (UTC)

They've announced they want nothing more to do with it. I'm continuing to transcribe, and plan to continue doing so.

But your questions are relevant to another instance just started. I requested an upload of Mhudi by Solomon T. Plaatje. It was uploaded at Commons, but the uploader quickly produced an Index, transcribed all the front matter and first 10 pages, then announced they will not be doing any further work on that transcription. I had requested this work for the June MC. So, based on what you've said, would someone participating in the MC transcription of Mhudi be bound by the style set by the initial transcription, if that person has declared they will no longer be working on it? And if someone has requested a scan in order to transcribe it, can another person pre-emptively decide what style must use on the file that someone else requested? Please note that these questions may or may not affect me in regards to this particular transcription, as I am already busy with another work, and have additional volumes coming that I plan to work on first, so someone else might take on this book in that time, and I might not be transcribing Mhudi myself at all. But these questions could be relevant for the person who does work on that book, and could be relevant in similar situations in future. --EncycloPetey (talk) 13:03, 22 May 2026 (UTC)

• The most important thing, as mentioned, is consistency within a work. Personally, I use {{uc}} almost exclusively for capitalized text. The use of uppercase is generally for emphasis, and thus, it is a mere typographical variation like any other. When copying text directly, the fact of its being italicized is not saved; italics are used for emphasis; the same applies to capital text used for emphasis. It also makes proofreading much easier, and makes the page prettier and easier to understand. I can’t think of a case where you would want to use {{uc}} for some text in a header, but not other text. TE(æ)A,ea. (talk) 13:49, 20 May 2026 (UTC)

  An issue with {{uc}} is we're then making an assumption about was the "original" case should be, the one you get when copypasting the text, &c. Should something that appears as TO MY SISTER be {{uc|To My Sister}}, or {{uc|To my sister}}, other variations, and so on? — Alien  3
  3 3 14:05, 20 May 2026 (UTC)

  That definitely should be {{uc|To mY sIsTeR}} /silly —Beleg Tâl (talk) 14:13, 20 May 2026 (UTC)

  • Alien: That depends on the context, of course; a letter, as in an epistolary novel, would be To mY sIsTeR, while a poem of that name would be To MY SIsTeR. I disagree with Xover (and, by extension, you) in that I don’t believe that it is difficult to determine the meaning or original form of emphasis. Even if there is some case where it could be difficult to determine the original intent, I don’t think that such a rare case should stand as an independent objection. TE(æ)A,ea. (talk) 17:20, 20 May 2026 (UTC)

  If {{uc}} is being applied to chapter titles on the first page of each chapter, does than mean that section titles must also have that template? What about titles of poems within that chapter? What about text appearing on the Colophon? Does consistency require universality, or is it sufficient to maintain consistency within the context that the template is being used? That's the question relevant to the specific case raised. --EncycloPetey (talk) 17:20, 20 May 2026 (UTC)

  • As I said, “I can’t think of a case where you would want to use {{uc}} for some text in a header, but not other text.” Perhaps there is some quite unusual circumstance in which it would make sense to have some capitalized text use the template, and other text not use the template; but none of the examples you have given, nor the example in this case, seems to me to be that unusual circumstance. I would not require universality, but I would like some justification for its use in some cases and not others. TE(æ)A,ea. (talk) 17:30, 20 May 2026 (UTC)

    Such as situations where the same header/label appears in all-caps at some places in the book, but in small-caps at other places? You would apply the {{uc}} only to the all-caps instances, but not to the small-caps instances? --EncycloPetey (talk) 17:38, 20 May 2026 (UTC)

Category:Translated indexes

Should the subcategories listed in this category appear in Subject categorization? I can understand having these as maintenance categories, and have them listed in the parent category. But should Category:Indexes translated from Spanish also be listed in Category:Works originally in Spanish, which is a category for Mainspace texts we host? --EncycloPetey (talk) 17:13, 20 May 2026 (UTC)

No. Keep Indexes out of the Mainspace categories. This prevents a work appearing twice in a category and also keeps the inner workings of enWS at a consistent distance. Beeswaxcandle (talk) 17:55, 20 May 2026 (UTC)

Deletions

The book Bayou Folk is being moved from unsourced to a transcluded version. These pages need to be cleared as part of that. There's a proper version Bayou Folk/A No-Account Creole now, these are just leftover from an old copy-paste version in 2006.

• Bayou Folk/A No-Account Creole/I
• Bayou Folk/A No-Account Creole/II
• Bayou Folk/A No-Account Creole/III
• Bayou Folk/A No-Account Creole/IV
• Bayou Folk/A No-Account Creole/IX
• Bayou Folk/A No-Account Creole/V
• Bayou Folk/A No-Account Creole/VI
• Bayou Folk/A No-Account Creole/VII
• Bayou Folk/A No-Account Creole/VIII

Eievie (talk) 22:05, 20 May 2026 (UTC)

For deletion, tag with either {{delete}} (if it merits discussion, e.g. a different edition) or {{speedy delete}} giving redundant / G4 as a reason for cases where the original is unsourced and it is redundant. 00:55, 21 May 2026 (UTC) MarkLSteadman (talk) 00:55, 21 May 2026 (UTC)

I have tagged them with {{delete}} as speedy was declined and opened up the discussion at Wikisource:Proposed_deletions#Bayou_Folk/A_No-Account_Creole_unsourced_subpages MarkLSteadman (talk) 01:07, 21 May 2026 (UTC)

@Eievie: then that's what you should have said in the {{sdelete}}. You only talked about how small the subpages was, which is not a criteria for speedy deletion, whereas WS:CSD#G4 is. — Alien  3
3 3 07:00, 21 May 2026 (UTC)

These are now deleted after going through WS:PD. 21:50, 29 May 2026 (UTC) MarkLSteadman (talk) 21:50, 29 May 2026 (UTC)

Bel Ami

Hi, I have several questions about formatting of this work. 1) First should the title be Bel Ami or Bel Ami, or the History of a Scoundrel? Or Bel-Ami, with a hyphen like in French, and in the headers? 2) Then the — are surrounded with spaces, again like in French, but shouldn't the spaces be removed? 3) Mme. (Mrs) includes a dot, which looks weird. Thanks for your help, Yann (talk) 23:12, 23 May 2026 (UTC)

• (1) It should be that given on the title-page: so Bel Ami. (It’s usual practice to not give the subtitle.) (2) I exclusively use an em dash without spaces, but an en dash with spaces is also allowed. Neither of these really follows the French form (em dash with spaces), though. (3) “Mrs.” should have a dot (it’s a word being shortened), so it makes sense that “Mme.” also has a dot. TE(æ)A,ea. (talk) 23:30, 23 May 2026 (UTC)

In French, it is Mme, not Mme., i.e. no dot. Yann (talk) 10:30, 24 May 2026 (UTC)

Are you asking about the title listed on a page, or the Pagename for the work, or something else? The answer may be different in each case. On a page, WS:MOS advocates for no flanking spaces around an em-dash. But for Pagenames, the convention is also to avoid characters that can't be typed easily, so we don't include en-dashes or em-dashes in the Pagenames for Authors disambiguated by dates (we instead use hyphens), and use straight quotes in Pagenames even if the work is transcribed with curly ones. So what is the context for your question? Are you asking about Page: namespace transcription, a listing somewhere, or the Pagename for the work itself? --EncycloPetey (talk) 00:29, 24 May 2026 (UTC)

My question is about Page: namespace transcription, and I have seen WS:MOS, that's why I am asking. I mean, should I follow WS:MOS or should I follow the scan? Yann (talk) 10:32, 24 May 2026 (UTC)

@Yann:
1) whatever's on the title page
2) re emdashes, they aren't spaced in the source, or at least not more than regular letters, as far as I can see, which renders the issue moot. The MOS was created back when proofreadpage didn't exist and following formatting wasn't something that was given much thought to. That provision probably came from ENWP. Most provisions (arabic numerals in page names, not replicating paragraph indents, and so on) still make sense in today's context, but the em dashes always struck me as a tad too prescriptive. I have yet to find an english-language scan that has seriously spaced emdashes, but this'll cause us some trouble someday
3) on the dot for Mme., it's a translation into. It's normal for it to not respect French conventions. So if the scan puts a dot, keep it. — Alien  3
3 3 13:10, 24 May 2026 (UTC)

Re: flanking spaces around em-dashes: No, that's a deliberate decision circa September 2016.We previously had a template with flanking hair-spaces [13] that failed WS:PD. --EncycloPetey (talk) 14:46, 24 May 2026 (UTC)

Hmm, thanks for the info (could you give a link?). I understand and agree about not doing hairspaces. I've in practice never yet seen a book using actual full spaces — as in this spaced — for emdashes. If we found one, I'd say there's no specific reason to not reproduce some full spaces because they're next to emdashes. — Alien  3
3 3 16:06, 24 May 2026 (UTC)

Subtitles

Hi, There is no subtitle field in indexes, so how do I add it for this work? On French WS, we have subtitles in indexes. Thanks, Yann (talk) 20:44, 25 May 2026 (UTC)

We usually do it the way it currently is; that is in the title field after the link to the main page. If you want we could add a subtitle param but I don't think it's really needed. — Alien  3
3 3 21:11, 25 May 2026 (UTC)

Yes, I think a subtitle field would be better, specially here, where the subtitle is very long. Yann (talk) 10:06, 26 May 2026 (UTC)

Tech News: 2026-22

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Weekly highlight

• Following a successful account creation experiment, an improved logged-out edit warning message will be deployed to all Wikimedia wikis in the first week of June. The change will only affect logged-out users on mobile web who open an editing session. The updated experience is designed to encourage account creation more clearly, while still allowing users to edit with temporary accounts. Results from the experiment showed a significant increase in account creation, with a 27% relative lift among users shown the updated message. As expected, as more people funnel into account creation, temporary accounts decreased by a relative 16%. The experiment did not show any significant changes in constructive edit rates or other monitored contributor metrics. [14]

Updates for editors

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Missing DjVu pages in The Dialogues of Plato (Jowett)/Cratylus

Cratylus is supposed to consist of DjVu pages 362 to 428, but the pages Page:The Dialogues of Plato v. 1.djvu/384 up to and including Page:The Dialogues of Plato v. 1.djvu/423 are missing.  --Lambiam 11:42, 26 May 2026 (UTC)

This work is incomplete; it needs some intrepid volunteer to proofread the remaining pages. You can do it yourself, if you like. —Beleg Tâl (talk) 13:41, 26 May 2026 (UTC)

If you need help repairing the scan, the Wikisource:Scan Lab is the best place to make that request. --EncycloPetey (talk) 15:01, 26 May 2026 (UTC)

Author:George James Dance - self published or no?

Canadian poet George Dance has submitted several of his translations of poems to enWS. These poems have been prevously published, in Doggerel, and other doggerel (Toronto: Principled Press / Baltimore, MD: Lulu Press, 2015), and in Logos, and other logoi (Toronto: Principled Press / Baltimore, MD: Lulu Press, 2021). However, looking at these more closely, it seems to me that these might be self-publication platforms; which means we can only host these translations in Translations space, and then only if they meet the criteria at WS:T.

Courtesy ping @EncycloPetey and @George Dance —Beleg Tâl (talk) 13:36, 26 May 2026 (UTC)

 Comment I concur with keeping only the Translations, and in Translations: space, provided the requirements are met. --EncycloPetey (talk) 14:59, 26 May 2026 (UTC)

Srikanta (Part 1)

I cannot figure out what the "(Part 1)" in Srikanta (Part 1) refers to. It's not on the book's titlepage; there's no second volume "Part 2" file that I can find. I think it's most likely just a mistake. However, before I go ahead with that assumption and rename it, I wanted to check if anyone else can figure out what "Part 1" refers to. @Hrishikes, you named it that. I know it was over a decade ago, but do you remember what you meant by Part 1? Eievie (talk) 18:47, 26 May 2026 (UTC)

The introduction states "The second and third parts of Srikanta have been published. The present volume is only the first part." The wikipedia article says that there were four parts in all. -- Beardo (talk) 19:09, 26 May 2026 (UTC)

Thanks, I didn't see that. I'm looking for the titles of the other parts now. Eievie (talk) 19:17, 26 May 2026 (UTC)

Perhaps they weren't translated into English until much later. Wikipedia mentions a 1944 translation which may well still be in copyright. -- Beardo (talk) 19:39, 26 May 2026 (UTC)

Vote now in the 2026 U4C election

Eligible voters are asked to participate in the 2026 Universal Code of Conduct Coordinating Committee election. More information–including an eligibility check, voting process information, candidate information, and a link to the vote–are available on Meta at the 2026 Election information page. The vote closes on 2 June 2026 at 00:00 UTC.

Please vote if your account is eligible. Results will be available by 14 June 2026. -- In cooperation with the U4C,

Keegan (WMF) (talk) 17:15, 27 May 2026 (UTC)

{{WD author}}

Is there a way to disable or fix the template? See The Octopus Cycle for an example of the Lua errors it seem to create. Nighfidelity (talk) 12:54, 28 May 2026 (UTC)

Pinging @RaboKarbakian: since they developed this template.—Tcr25 (talk) 16:02, 28 May 2026 (UTC)

It seems to maybe be a mistake in the redirects? It probably shouldn't be redirecting to the User page version (which maybe was for testing something). MarkLSteadman (talk) 17:50, 28 May 2026 (UTC)

Removing the redirect gives a different error - Template loop detected. And whilst editing, there appears this message - "Please note: there is already a template data block on the related page "Template:WD_author/doc"." And the entry on The Octupus Cycle disappears completely ! -- Beardo (talk) 19:12, 28 May 2026 (UTC)

It wasn't working right. I left a message about that at the module. I waited a weekend and a couple of business days and redirected them, a little more broken, to where they originated and wait for the module writers to show up. I did not have time to see who broke them and the reason they were broken. I am keeping an eye on them by having them redirect to my user directory. For sure, a module writer or such capable wiki technician will show up, and I will be able to show them how it was broken.

To get rid of the LUA errors, (well, most of them) end it with a space. {{WD author}}.

I am not going to beg for help for this; if I need to, I will look to see who broke them.--RaboKarbakian (talk) 14:33, 29 May 2026 (UTC)

A suggestion regarding Serialized Works in Periodicals

I know I know, this was a long and contentious subject that finally got resolved (see here and here), and I apologize in advance for kicking the hornet's nest.

That said ... I think it's really weird (like, upsettingly counterintuitively weird) that these pages are set up in mainspace directly, even though the entire edition exists under a different, unrelated mainspace page; as if they were two different unrelated publications.

There was a suggestion, in that original proposal, to place them as "Auxilliary subpage with an AuxToC", but this was decided against because of a very reasonable objection by @TE(æ)A,ea., that "This is improper because there isn’t a whole work within the Review by that title; the only thing within the Review (at the first level, which is where this is) are volumes".

However, I realized that we have another standard whereby we use auxilliary subpages; and that is WS:Annotations. In this case, the main text goes at Work/Section and the annotated text goes at Work/Annotated/Section.

So, I am suggesting, as an option that was not among the suggestions in the original proposal, that we use a parallel construction and implement a standard subpage tree for these serialized works: Periodical/Serialized/Work (instead of just Work, as is done currently; and instead of Periodical/Work, as was initially proposed)

This would reunite the serialized works with the periodicals they are serialized in, without implying that the serialized work is a direct subdivision of the periodical, and while taking advantage of a structural practice that is already in use. —Beleg Tâl (talk) 14:41, 29 May 2026 (UTC)

• Annotations are a separate matter; after all, annotations don’t exist in the original work, while Serialized does exist (if only as a concept, and not in any unique published form). The nearest analogy for me is for encyclopedias and some multi-volume novels, where there are both Work/Volume and Work/Article or Work/Chapter. This makes sense because the volumes exist only for the sake of the publisher’s convenience; there is no real difference if the article on “Arkansas” is at the end of the first volume or the start of the second volume. This is not the case for periodicals, because each issue is a separately published unit. Something like “The Atlantic Monthly/Random Poem” is significantly less useful because it removes the context of the publication of “Random Poem” from the hierarchy. On the other hand, for an article about that poem, the time of publication is inherent in the direct higher-level item of the encyclopedia; the volume is merely storage/reference information, and doesn’t provide unique publication information. Coming back to annotations, it is the equivalent of Annotation:Work and Annotation:Work/Section, but made possible within the limits of (Main):. I could understand how it could weird if (Main): was limited to only published works, but it’s not: we have many disambiguation pages for works so small that they are not separately published (like poems and short stories). Given this, the current system is perfectly natural. “Work” represents the entire work, and the component parts are just incidentally sub-pages of some third work. (In my opinion, “Periodical/Serialized/Work” implies “that the serialized work is a direct subdivision of the periodical”.) TE(æ)A,ea. (talk) 15:31, 29 May 2026 (UTC)

  Your last point, is why I brought up WS:ANN—"Periodical/Serialized/Work" should no more imply that the serialized work is a direct subdivision of the periodical, any more than "Periodical/Annotated/Work" implies that the annotated work is a direct subdivision of the periodical. —Beleg Tâl (talk) 15:47, 29 May 2026 (UTC)