“ Can there be a policy that only finished, proofread (though not necessarily validated) works should be on portal pages? That'd give someone tidying up a portal grounds for removing things. Levana Taylor (talk) 21:52, 26 August 2019 (UTC) Portals are too versatile for your second idea to work. Like Author pages, sometimes it is valuable to list all relevant works even if they are not all hosted here yet. It can also be valuable to list works that are in progress so that editors interested in the topic can contribute to the works they are interested in. ”

“ I also don't think it's much less impenetrable to only mark validated texts: if you don't know what validation means then exclusively marking validated works, which implies that only they are satisfactory, could be positively misleading. ”

“ The problem with Portals is that you can put anything in them (even barely started transcriptions and redlinks) . Although they have some organization to them, there's no curation, and they tend to be more-or-less random lists of works, many of which aren't even readable. There needs to be a place on Wikisource somewhere that you can go to find finished works to read. The closest we have to that currently is Category:Featured texts, but it only has 126 pages in it. ”

“ Unfortunately there is no ready means to move between proofreading status of a complete work from its index page. Of course we also have our completely crap Wikisource:Works. As an example of how we do ourselves no favours, poke your eyes listed in Wikisource:Works/2017 and Wikisource:Works/2018 and see the poor use of portals and categories. It seems we prefer to transcribe and replicate the work of a typographer rather than present books to the public. ”

“ I don't see how the ToC point can be criticised as a "deviation from the style manual" when where to put the table of contents is not in fact stated anywhere in the style guide; people cannot be slipping from a guideline that doesn't exist and if it is a technical issue then this needs to be made explicit. ”

“ Currently the date is being entered as "1861-1862," which prevents "xxxx work" from being created automatically. I have no problem with entering only 1862 for the volume’s own page, but it leaves me puzzled what to do on subpages. There should be a date on each subpage so that stories and articles are categorized by date. But, the ones that appeared in 1861 should probably be "1861 work." The problem is that when you enter the year parameter the year is displayed next to the title of the main work. What to do when you want to enter a year that is different from that of the volume? ”

“ It is not true that readers who open a book always expect title page to see first, not even with paper books. I as a reader expect it when I am choosing which book I want to open and read among a row of books, but Wikisource does not offer this feature anyway. After I have already chosen a book and decided to open it, I want to get to the contents as quickly as possible. --Jan Kameníček (talk) 18:29, 31 August 2019 (UTC) I agree with the above. ”

“ However, this link doesn't actually work. The "a" tag inside the list item seems to way over to the left and zero sized when I inspect it, but I can't immediately work out why that is. This means, since the mobile view is default for most visitors, and severely crippled in terms of menus, that there is no way a mobile viewer can actually access an ebook, unless they revert to desktop view and find it in the sidebar (which no visitor is going to do naturally) . ”

“ Manual curation does suck, though until we can autogenerate lists on a daily basis pulled from something like WD, we are stoinkered. Until users properly attach to WD each article in a biographical dictionary, a journal, and link to an author, and fill those gaps we are stoinkered. Until we can create books <-> editions, we are stoinkered. ”

“ Looters of the Public Domain front page as it was before (presented very consistent with the original published work, but with a note in the header indicating that there is a TOC to be found if one knows where to look.) Looters of the Public Domain front page as I just redid it, to conform more to what billinghurst has suggested -- making sure the TOC is on the main page. I do think option #2 is better, and it explains the change in the header, so it's not like readers will be in the dark about the variance. What do others think? ”

“ For any portal, if you think that it looks ugly, we encourage you to fix it, or make it workable. With regard to red links, there are some who revel in adding redlinks to our curated pages, and while I dislike it it isn't necessarily wrong. — billinghurst sDrewth 11:42, 27 August 2019 (UTC) on wiki search is so bad, i don’t use it. rather a google search is better. maybe a wikidata query by wikisource work with a proofread status, would be better. then you could have a proofread work page, with the wikidata query result. ”

“ We publish versions/editions of work and reproduce them as they were published. We are not restricted to one copy of a work, so if you have the time and inclination to work on a publication that is in the presentation from the publisher/edition that you prefer, then that power to you. — billinghurst sDrewth 22:56, 14 August 2019 (UTC) I'll leave the language in the current one in its UK form, and keep the option of adding a new source text in mind. ”

“ Perhaps promote our existence by explaining that we are related to Wikipedia. Do we have a category indicating completed main namespace volume titles? Is there a way to exclude incomplete Main namespace works not to be added to search engines?
P.S: Did a simple web search on two words, "Proofreading" and then "free book downloads" and the results are not very encouraging. — Ineuw (talk) 04:28, 30 August 2019 (UTC) The proofreading aspect should be moved further down and not be immediately visible. Yes! The best way to recruit new Wikisourcerors is to showcase what we have already achieved. ”

“ I would like to propose that we create a new category called Category:Validated texts which is prominently linked from the Main Page and subdivided into categories by topic and format. That way it will be easy to find high quality texts to read about whatever you're interested in without having to dig through hundreds of unfinished and unproofread texts in the process. Kaldari (talk) 17:56, 25 August 2019 (UTC)
Portal:Birds is supposed to be the to-go place for finding good quality works about birds. ”

“ I, 1818.djvu is part of a 4-index set that contains 2 works (although, admittedly, if that was being proofread these days it'd probably all go under a single mainspace top-level page) . I've tried sometimes to scrap things by following the links in the title field of an index, but it feels imperfect. —Sam Wilson 00:40, 30 August 2019 (UTC) Comparing Gutenberg with Wikisource is not fair to Wikisource. People go to Gutenberg to read and not proofread. We advertise ourselves as "the free library that anyone can improve". ”

“ They do not "compete" because one aids use of the other, and is not an alternative to it. {{unsigned2}} is used, without issue, on en.Wikipedia, seventeen other Wikipedias, Wikidata, Wikinews, Wikiquote, Wikiversity, Wiktionary, Meta-wiki, and Commons. Providing templates to make contributing to Wikisource easier - and less RSI-inducing - for volunteers is not "template gumph", nor "bloat". ”

“ What is supposed to be done with the 3 author pages without any works in Wikisource? Ditto, what is needed to be done to the displayed images? Some enlightenment is much appreciated. — Ineuw (talk) 03:33, 30 August 2019 (UTC)
@Ineuw: Based on a quick look, it appears that template has not been updated since 2014. I question why we even have that on the main page. And, no, I don't understand what "Work index revision" is supposed to be in practical terms either. --Xover (talk) 10:02, 1 September 2019 (UTC) Time to kill it from the main page, at least while it is not actively curated. ”

“ Would it be feasible to have these icons automatically display as badges on a work based on the status of the underlying Index? Would it be feasible to make a template similar to {{scan}} which automatically shows the relevant icon based on the work's status? —Beleg Tâl (talk) 13:28, 28 August 2019 (UTC) Are you meaning on the work, or in a built list? We usually just need to ask, and @Mike Peel: has been able to work with developers at Commons to get components together. Still the biggest issue is that we simply don't have enough people putting their works into Wikidata, let alone the badges. ”

“ Available for those interested in the particulars, though not imposed upon people interested in the work. Doesn't work for serials as they have too many subpages, so subsidiary/detailed ToC on subpages, with a coarse ToC at top. They were most useful when we had scans to transclude them to the Index: pages Tools WSexport tool came along and it requires the navigation to subpages from the root page, which compounded the need for a ToC to exist on root page where ToCs are required for the work. ”

“ The same applies if you "think" a transcription is perfect. Therefore this question misses the mark. Everyone should admit that they make mistakes and, when seeking perfection, always need someone else to check their work. Admitting that, we then ask ourselves what sensible steps we can take to improve the quality of our work so we make fewer mistakes. BethNaught (talk) 22:38, 18 August 2019 (UTC) yeah, i find the philosophizing over degrees of doubt unproductive: it is essentialism used to justify conduct. as at PRP on commons, the misuse of doubt tends to undermine its evocation. ”

“ Imo, apart from this, the other main problem is the abstruse and poorly maintained portal and category hierarchy which limits text discoverability. There are also issues which can't be sorted out through decisions here: lack of serious integration with Wikipedia is probably another major issue for attracting traffic. —Nizolan (talk) 09:53, 30 August 2019 (UTC) +1. I think Xover's framing is good strategic prioritization. And Kaldari's suggestion is a good ingredient that sets the stage for further efforts to improve the way we present Wikisource to a broad audience. ”

“ Only a limited number of accounts can be created from one IP address. An IP address can be whitelisted so that it can create as many accounts as needed. This is useful at events where many new persons learn to edit. ”

“ Every bit of complexity is something that someone doesn't or won't do. — billinghurst sDrewth 22:37, 28 August 2019 (UTC)
Which to me means that you do not think we should update all the textquality templates as I suggested, but to do something pretty much entirely different. That's fine. —Beleg Tâl (talk) 23:10, 28 August 2019 (UTC) @Beleg Tâl: I like your proposed icons above. I also agree with billinghurst that there's not much point to highlighting texts that aren't proofread or validated. If we adopted the icons you propose, I bet I could get the badges at Wikidata changed to match. ”

“ By subject -> Category:Nature -> Category:Biology -> Category:Zoology -> Category:Animals -> Category:Vertebrates -> not a single thing about birds. FAIL Main Page -> EXPLORE WIKISOURCE: By subject -> Category:Science -> Category:Physical sciences -> Category:Biology -> Category:Zoology -> Category:Animals -> Category:Vertebrates, same as above. FAIL Main Page -> Site index -> Portals -> Science -> Zoology -> scroll down a couple pages to Birds which gives me: links to 24 general works about birds, almost all of which are magazine articles from Popular Science Monthly. ”

“ The alternative approach, and the one which would be considerably more benefical to contributor sanity in the long-term is to finally STOP trying to shorehorn sidenotes and sidetitles in as "inline" content in the first place. ”

“ Beleg Tâl (talk) 02:07, 6 August 2019 (UTC) It's worth noting that despite the disagreement on this point, I agree that it is undesirable to have general notes regarding the work repeated on every subpage, and of course hard title links on subpages are a bad practice and should be fixed when seen (and I mean specifically [ [Title] ] and not [ [../|Title] ] , the latter of which is excellent practice) . ”