“ As ABM says, Portals aren't used a whole lot, especially in Wikisources - and the idea of having a Portal:Napoleon Bonaparte in addition to a Portal:Duke of Wellington seems to strain the limits of my vision for Wikisource. Works about a person go on that person's author page (even when, like some of our authors, they wrote no works themselves) . To be honest, I'd be in favour of nixing "Portal" namespace altogether, and just adding "Index", and then we could have Index:Education and Index:Islam -- but that's probably a much larger decision than just en. can handle. ”

“ Today a large number of pages in Index:United States Statutes at Large Volume 1.djvu that are in fact validated (such as this one) , and which were showing up as green links last Friday, have reverted to the red “not-proofread” background on the index page (which, in the case of the above-cited example, means that the index is now more than a year behind the actual current page status) . Problems of this sort really need to be ironed out before, not after, the site launches a special campaign to get users involved in validating pages; it makes us look foolish otherwise. ”

“ Anyway, the theory of portals is that they are about user-friendly ways in. There seems to be some tension with the Wikisource: namespace and its function (s) . I'm really angling for some discussion of a way in which Microportal:Napoleon (say) could exist and perform more like an Author page, collecting various internal and other links, without having to be a page about an author, and could coexist with Microportal:Duke of Wellington and other such material. All without prejudice to anything anybody else would wish to have in Portal space. ”

“ Still I would prefer the simpler, Portal:Religion. "Texts" is somewhat of a redundancy, since the whole of Wikisource is about texts. When editors need to link to something they are probably happier when it can be expressed in one word. I'll see if I can start developing the idea at Wikisource:Portal. (Probably more intuitive to have this named "Portals" in the plural.) ”

“ We will have (if we don't already) users who see value in posting every single public domain version of the Bible. But I doubt we'll ever have users who are willing to waste their time posting and proofreading multiple versions of the same document, where the differences are trivial and entirely lacking in scholarly importance and interest. It is only in this last case that any problems arise. Why structure our work around the anticipation of a problem that has never happened and probably never will? ”

“ On re-reading, I see the problem. Section tags are used to demarcate an individual page into sections; it doesn't work across pages. What you want to transclude is: Just the chapter one part of page 1 all of page 2 all of page 3 all of page 4 just the chapter one part of page 5 In order to do the first of these, you need to define the chapter one part of page 1; to do that you wrap the chapter one part of page 1 in

and

. Then you do the same thing on page 5. That should get you what you want. ”

“ The more I look into some of this the more convoluted the problem appears. In part there seems to be a great unwillingness to clean out old ad hoc concepts that never got very far, and were effectively abandoned when their creators got bored with Wikisource. The detailed discussion required before these can be cleaned up discourages any serious efforts. Take Portal:Influential Books as an example. It may have been a good idea when it started but it doesn't contain a lot of material and hasn't had a substantive edit since January 2007. ”

“ That approach would result in the Wikisource: namespace being used for such things as policy development and operational issues. I was concerned that you could be referring to the management of wikiprojects such as those for DNB and EB. The management of wikiprojects could merit a portal in its own right. "Findability" and "flexibility" could be important features of a portal based systems. "Searchability" is primarily a machine function, and may be more related to software development than portals. ”

“ I 100% agree with you that the Wikisource: namespace should be for project management and other meta- issues, and we are misusing it by putting topic indices (i.e. the contents of Category:Wikisource index pages in there. I also agree that these are not portals. Methinks we need a Topic: namespace. Hesperian 11:37, 30 October 2009 (UTC) If we do. I would like to see whatever we do have a close link to other wikis so that there is an opportunity to x-wiki between Portals. That plays on the strength of wikis, and helps to align and drive traffic. ”

“ Both are valid approaches to organizing knowledge. Curently we have both author categories and author wikisource pages. The problem with the latter is its need for maintenance. Unless a person goes there to add a new author it doesn't happen. As a top-down scheme it could just as easily include red links to authors for whom we do not yet have pages. The Portal: namespace is indeed underutilized. In the short term it's use would be better restricted to major topic areas, but that could be expanded at a later stage. ”

“ Another view, stay flexible with 'naming rules' , but defer to the publisher's text; for example, abbreviating titles may be misleading. In billinghurst's example, someone searching for the "work" would find a single paragraph 'notice of'. I have to use exact match in searches when I'm looking for articles on the web, to sift out the similar titles, reviews, or citations.You may find a half title in the text, but otherwise put what you see and change it only if makes it more accessible. Users read pages, not urls, our title is insignificant unless it interferes with access. ”

“ Keeping the old functionality meant that it would still be possible to view old versions of pages that use the old version of the template. Thus we ended up with a template that does two different things; or rather, the same thing in two different ways. Meanwhile, I became irritated that Template:Indent required the indentation size to be the second parameter rather than the first; i.e. {indent|Blah blah blah|1em} I felt that {indent|1em|Blah blah blah} was much more intuitive, especially when wrapping large blocks of text ”

“ Displacing a leading "a" or "the" is a matter of established bibliographic conventions. Yes, there are exceptional cases where it would be important to retain the article in place, but not all searching should be electronic; we need to allow for browsing by humans. ”

“ Proposals New bot proposal Please see older thread at #Bot extraction of text already in DjVu file. I'd like to set up a pywikipedia bot to go through the nonexistent pages at Index:Dramatic_Moments_in_American_Diplomacy_ (1918) .djvu and fill them in using the djvutext.py script. This is the only task I plan for the bot for now. ”

“ That's the sort of page that should stay in the Wikisource namespace because it's about portals ... unless somebody can make a convincing argument that it belongs in the Help namespace. Eclecticology - the offended (talk) 17:41, 5 November 2009 (UTC) Bot extraction of text already in DjVu file I am having trouble finding an answer to this. There is a DjVu file Index:Dramatic Moments in American Diplomacy (1918) .djvu that already has OCR'd text in it, but it hasn't all been extracted and put into the "Pages" namespace yet. ”

“ A further benefit of having even the raw OCR text online is that it enables semi-automated proofing and correction of the OCR’ed text (as User:TarmstroBot is presently doing with the United States Statutes at Large) , leaving less work for human editors when they do eventually turn their attention to the page. Tarmstro99 (talk) 01:34, 5 November 2009 (UTC) After several runs of the bot, I'm feeling confident that it's doing what it's supposed to do. Could that account be given a bot flag, or is that still premature? ”

“ The solution can’t just be “make null edits to the pages to update the status,” because even that fails to make the new status “stick” in the index (and certainly new users would have no reason to know that they must check back in at random intervals to “re-validate” a page they had previously marked as validated) . Tarmstro99 (talk) 14:24, 9 November 2009 (UTC)
According to the Bug filed on Bugzilla, the problem is resolved. I would imagine in a couple days everything will go back to normal.—Zhaladshar (Talk) 15:07, 10 November 2009 (UTC) It hasn't stopped, and it is ... a waste of time. ”

“ As there is no further comment, I propose that all the works using the template get converted to {{text-indent}} and Template:Indent is sent to the great template retirement home in the sky. billinghurst (talk) 01:02, 4 November 2009 (UTC) I support this, but (in case he doesn't turn up to say so himself) I think JV does not. He has a point: once you delete a template, old revisions that use that template don't render properly any more. ”