“ Of Periodicals and Pagelist I saw your comment on Phab, but I thought that this might be a better place for a discussion. I understand your concerns for the gnomes. They work tirelessly to make keep this place running. However, when it comes to pagelists, I think that the benefits of having the periodical scans on WS outways the downsides of a backlog. Realistically, if we are to upload all the volumes of the general interest periodicals that are in the PD, they would amount to several thousand volumes. No one user can or should have to create the pagelists for all of them. ”

“ The series does not import to the Index page and you have not set any title at all at Commons. So it imports nothing. We do not always place works in a series as subpages of the series, because "series" can be quite a nebulous concept and works within a "series" may well be full-on works in their own right (as opposed to volumes of a single work) . ”

“ We do not have the editor interest to maintain 2 separate lists of volumes per periodical and keep them in sync. A Portal is a supplement to a work, in my opinion, not a substitute (i.e. it should come after) . The Portal can be very valuable as a thematic index, list of contributors, referencing works, historical contextual works, etc, and, in fact, that's somewhere WS can add mind-blowing amounts of value-add (especially with decent WD support) . ”

“ There is still missing data. If you care so much about the volume title not having a dedicated field, you should raise the issue at commons:Template talk:Book (and get involved in fixing the issue, not just drive by with "um, this is not how I like it kthxbai") and not just abuse the description field (which is for "out of band" information like physical condition or whatever) and move on, leaving messed up stuff in your wake that someone else has to deal with. Thousands of books have a volume title there. ”

“ So before the whole matter drops from my frazzled mind, I thought I'd mention that I have on my plan doing some work on the stats code in phetools at some point in the not too distant future (maybe) . Prime mover is improving the graphs in various ways, and secondary is cleaning up the way the stats are persisted (it's currently dumping a stringified Python datastructure to a text file, and reading and exec () ing it on next run) . But once I go digging there may be opportunities for other improvements, such as anything the MC might need. ”

“ A way to generate a Special:Export package for all the pages in an index without having to use Special:PrefixIndex may also make sense (i.e. leverage the tools we already have) A dump of wikitext in one big file I can understand, because then you can use a text editor to do various fixes without needing to bot them in "live" (though you'll still need a bot to upload at the end) . ”

“ Once the images are added to the folder, the script could upload them without the user having to manually create the metadata. This would greatly speed up the adding of images. In the long run, a proper system for importing/exporting text would enable the creation of an offline proofreading interface similar to AWB. There are many cases in which users might have a slow connection or just loading images from PDF/DJVU is simply a slow process. Creating a way to download/upload Indexes and individual pages would greatly speed up the work. ”

“ Yeah, I just flubbed the template link above ({{header}} has a, uhm, slightly different function :) ) . Part of the goal here is to get away from things like {{heading}} and {{ts}} that put all the formatting inline in the template invocation, and move to a template that just expresses the semantics ("This is a chapter heading") and leaves the formatting to the newly supported per-work style sheets (you may have noticed a new "Style" tab on index pages) . Provided we can make it work well and be user friendly it's a much cleaner solution from a technical perspective. ”

“ We then explicitly reserve such class names for use in per-work CSS.
I suspect that on examination of existing uses of {{h}} and {{ch}} we will find a large proportion of the uses are actually "used on principle" or "used in ignorance" where they're used for the default styling of the respective template. In my experience with other such templates I also hold it likely that a large proportion of the rest will fall into a relatively small number of categories. I'm thinking these may be worthwhile to have predefined global classes for, but that needs careful consideration. ”

“ I don’t see a volume title in Book. I’m happy to revert if you fix your template to follow Commons guidelines, make sure that it can work on importing, and apply it to all the volumes. Otherwise, it seems to me that reverting the changes would just return us to a broken "Um", you have done the import already, so that's specious. Also there is zero exception that the Commons info needs to conform itself to whatever rudimentary heuristic the Wikisource helper script uses. If the script doesn't work, just deal with it and enter it manually. It only needs doing once anyway. ”

“ Well, they do say there are only two hard problems in computing: naming, cache invalidation, and off-by-one-errors. There is definitely a tendency for something in Lua to be sensitive to stale caches. It's not something I've been able to definitively nail down, but certainly updating a module can necessitate a purge to get template docs refreshed sometimes. If I ever get as far as a reproducible example, I'll file a bug on Scribunto. Inductiveload—talk/contribs 18:53, 17 August 2021 (UTC) With caches, it’s nearly impossible to have consistent examples. ”

“ Do we want to spend their time doing something that a bot can do or on something that a bot cannot? A bot can upload 95 volumes, but it cannot verify the completeness of a work. With such a bot, I can go to IA, find the best scan, set up the links on the Author page, press save, and the then do something else. In a day, the files will be there and I can proceed to set up the index pages. Languageseeker (talk) 14:55, 5 April 2021 (UTC) BTW, I’ve seen plenty of incomplete non-Google scans especially from the LOC. Hathi Trust has a feedback button that we can use to report missing pages. ”

“ Recently, I worked on replacing all 174 images in Index:The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884) .pdf because the existing images were cropped from the DJVU. The ability to export them with an accompanying XLS file would save a ton of time when it would come to reuploading them. As long as there is a reason column, there should be no technical barrier to using a script to override all 174. That is far faster than manually reuploading 174 files. It could also become possible to generate metadata for missing images. It would generate the metadata for all the missing images in an XLS file. ”

“ Inductiveload—talk/contribs 13:39, 19 August 2021 (UTC) NOTHING can be losslessly encoded as gif! That is just jargony crap! The choice of format should be based on the purpose of the image. What job is the image going to perform. Where does it display and why. And having an ebook maker that turns hogs into light weight niceties for small devices is really a good thing because image format is not a politic, even though, apparently it is being used that way. PNG, SVG, JPG are not team sports. ”

“ Inductiveload—talk/contribs 19:37, 10 March 2021 (UTC) Mainly that as a user-facing interface ("config file") , Lua datastructure syntax is fragile: forget a comma, or any one of a billion other obscure technical details, and you start throwing big red error messages and break the whole system (an error in one leaf breaks the whole tree) . Compare the old version: each entry is an individual template, where a mistake is usually immediately obvious, and, crucially, cannot break other entries. ”

“ Furthermore, DHR is an explicit "this div makes blank space" structural element with a class that allows targetting of CSS (which is how the EPUB exporter does that) . Bare P tags have no such intention marker. Because the P tags and the page-break DIV (which is what actually causes a page break on export) are disconnected siblings, you end up with free-floating P tags on each side of the break on export. This is currently true of {{ppb}} too, but... The implementation of {{ppb}} certainly is was lacking, an DHR-PB-DHR is the wrong solution for it (even if it is brutally functional) . ”

“ My point is you can fix that in a few seconds with ImageMagick: mogrify -rotate 90 *.png, or even do it in the same command as the format-shift to PNG. Generally, I'd say don't use any processing software that comes with a scanner, because it's pretty universally junk. Scanners are for getting the images onto a computer where you can handle them with real tools. You do not need to process these particular images at all to feed them into Tesseract - that's only needed if the default binarisation fails. tesseract image.png - -l eng works just fine. ”

“ There are times when you want to be able to do it all client-side (e.g. when slinging strings about which don't come from an API query) , there are times when you just want the server to hand you the Right Thing (TM) in the first place and there are times when you're in a template or module and you need it to be done at render time. Inductiveload—talk/contribs 11:38, 20 December 2021 (UTC) I have absolutely no interest in joining another proprietary chat platform, especially one which requires me to register with my phone number and doesn't allow a secondary account like Telegram. ”

“ Inductiveload—talk/contribs 22:52, 26 April 2021 (UTC) nil-checking datavalue is probably enough here, yeah (cf. below) .
You're right that the whole structure isn't user-editable, but you can easily run into logical inconsistencies like a qualifier value for a property with unknown value. My main point is that in dealing with Wikidata we need to armorplate and program defensively as a rule, much more than with any other semi-structured data source. ”

“ If you're already using scripts, you should just hit that API yourself and then you get more control anyway. Most of what you're asking is already possible, and if you're already using a custom script, the normal API is much more reliable, available, tested and stable than any Toolforge tool would ever be. It still sounds to me like you are coming up with solutions to problems before you've actually worked out a workflow that has the problems. Inductiveload—talk/contribs 21:58, 10 November 2021 (UTC) Wow, I did not realize how amazing the API was. ”

“ Inductiveload—talk/contribs 11:39, 24 March 2021 (UTC) On a completely unrelated note... Does the 4em right margin need to be on the stanza (vs. the lines) ? It seems to be the main culprit in making centered stuff fail to align sensibly (by pushing all the contained lines too far left relative to centered stuff outside the ppoem) . The left margin for the hanging indent that the right margin is, I think, compensating for is attached to the lines, so my immediate assumption would be that the right margin should be too. ”

“ But then, the way WD is set up is fundamentally incompatible with the way my brain is wired, so maybe that's just me. :) --Xover (talk) 09:02, 27 April 2021 (UTC) @Xover: I can probably figure most of it out, it's mostly a question of "what we actually want it to do" (other than bling-bling which is of course a noble aspiration) . The biggest issue for me is that WD is actually not always as good as you would think/hope at the kind of bibliographic metadata we actually would want on an index page - particularly for things like volume (and that that's before we get to periodicals) . ”

“ I am working on a WS -> WD item creator (working title: Wikidata Creata :-D) , but it's not done (or half done) yet because writing gadgets is such a huge PITA with the tools we are given. So I'm considering doing it all in a separate web-app on Toolforge. Inductiveload—talk/contribs 11:52, 27 April 2021 (UTC) the setting up of a journal I checked the tables of contents. Ingoldsby goes to VOLUME 17! Honestly, I was just twiddling thumbs with Rackham. Bentley's is more like interrupting thumb twiddling by playing with a hangnail. I don't like my computer being hacked. ”

“ Inductiveload—talk/contribs 13:30, 5 April 2021 (UTC) I’m not advocating on going on a uploading spree, but making uploading faster and easier is something that can benefit users. On one hand, IA and Hathi Trust have many duplicates that we don’t need. Also, nobody needs to proofread a reprint that has no illustrations, author input, or scholarly value. We’re a curated collection not donations in a box. Curation takes time. However, every user has a limited amount of time. ”