“ I think these pages are necessary to list index pages and external scans of multi-volume works (such as encyclopaedias and periodicals) especially if they are wholly or partly anonymous or have many authors or are simply large. I think it makes no difference whether such pages are in the mainspace, the portal space or the project space (except that it is harder to find pages outside the mainspace) . The point is that these works often have so many volumes (often dozens or hundreds) that they must have their own page, and cannot be merged into a larger portal or wikiproject. ”

“ And because the work is scan-backed, a reader can view any page side-by-side with the backing scan, if they wish to do so. When books publish images that are small, we do not "faithfully reproduce" tiny images. Rather, we make available the highest resolution scans that we can, even if that means a better quality image than the scan, and sometimes better than the printed page. ”

“ In a deletion discussion I would probably vote to delete all mainspace artifacts here. If anyone made the argument, I would entertain the notion that there is value in treating train tables like poems, and hosting a series of train tables like we do Dickinson's poems; but that would require a substantial number of them completed.
For everything above my stance is nuanced by a willingness to accept temporary exceptions for things that are actively being worked: active being operative, but with no particular deadline to complete the work. ”

“ Do we want:
Mainspace pages where this is a tiny bit of information like header notes, scan links and maybe detective work on the talk page (not in this case) . This provides a place for people to incrementally add content. Also gives "false positive" blue links, since there is actually no "real" content from the work itself, or Do not have a mainspace page until there's some content. Only host this in terms of scan links author/portal scan links, much like we do for something like a novel. Personally, I lean (gently) towards #2, but with a fairly low bar for how much content is needed. ”

“ I disagree with Xover's statement that a top-level page for a publication, with a link only to a single article within the publication, has "near-zero value." Such a page can serve an important function linking content together in ways that help the reader (and search engines) find the content they're looking for, or understand the context around it. For instance, A Critical Dictionary of English Literature is linked from the relevant Wikidata entry. The banner on the Wikisource page clearly tells a Wikisource reader that they won't find a full transcription here ”

“ It is fair to not wish to transcribe entire volumes of these work, it is fair to not want to import dozens of scans when you only wanted one, it is fair to only want an article or two, but it's not fair, IMO, to expect the first person who wants to add an article to have to do all the groundwork themselves, despite having been lured in with a blue link. That onus feels more like it should be on the person creating the top-level page in the first place. ”

“ The error message accuses the user of doing something the user did not do. The end user tried to take action to get a redundant page deleted; the error message scolds them "Error: Media utilising {{raw page scan}} should not be re-licensed for transfer to Wikimedia Commons." That scolding is utterly unrelated to what the user was attempting to do, and makes Wikisource look stupid. As for the workflow question, I think you're wrong and you'd definitely get more productive work out of me if you'd listen to feedback, but meh. Who cares, I have bigger battles to fight. ”

“ On some occasions, empty mainspace works do have value. I ended up creating the page The Roman Breviary, depsite containing no actual content, mostly because there are a lot of works that link to it, using many different titles, and if someone uploaded a copy of the work under one title then many of the links would remain red because they point to different titles of the work. This could be easily solved by creating redirects to a simple placeholder page, so I did. ”

“ If you allowed an exception, it would be verbose and tricky to capture the spirit without saying "unless, like, it's totally, like, hard, man". I am not dead against scan links in the mainspace at the top level, when such a top-level page exists. See my comments on Voltaire above. I am against them where they could sensibly be on an Author page and they are the only mainspace content. ”

“ But I want to mention a couple of things that I think are worth considering in this discussion. Most of the time, a mainspace "work" that is only a table of contents, but which has none of the actual content, and is not actively being worked on, can be (and should be) deleted as No meaningful content or history under our deletion policy. A mainspace work that has only a little bit of content, but that content is a work unto itself within the scope of Wikisourse, should be kept. Most periodicals are like this. ”

“ It seems to me the reader is always better served with a higher quality image. As long as there is transparency in the form of side-by-side proofreading view, a reader who is specifically interested in how it was originally published has the ability to learn about that; such readers will be consulting the page scans regardless. ”

“ If the community starts insisting on index pages, what will happen is the rapid upload of a large number of scans for the periodicals that already have their own page. Likewise if the community insists on transclusion. I also think it is reasonable to have a contents page in the mainspace, as it allows transclusion of articles. ”

“ We do need to figure out how to avoid a de-facto process of using WS:PD as an ill-tempered ad-hoc venue for "forcing" improvements on people who have somehow managed to generate works that are so in need of improvement that another user has nominated them for deletion. ”

“ The same general rules about Portal:/WikiProject and no external or Index:-space links apply. An exception would be for periodicals where new issues enter the public domain every year; and we should generally avoid including even redlinks for the non-PD issues here (but may allow them in a WikiProject page) . For non-periodical works in multiple volumes where some volumes were published after the PD cutoff, including listings for the non-PD volumes (but not links to scans; those are a copyvio issue) is ok. ”

“ Each article in the journal can be individually considered for a stand-alone work exception; but for the collection I would want to see at minimum a full issue finished to justify having the mainspace structure, and preferably multiple issues (in a deletion discussion I might insist on multiple issues) . ”

“ For a credible claim to exception to exist it would need to be a complete framework for the work as a whole, and significantly more than a single entry must be complete. I would probably also want to see ongoing work, unless a substantial percentage of the entries were complete. The single finished entry is eligible to claim a standalone work exception, but I think it probably would not meet my bar for that (I might be wrong; and the rest of the community might judge it differently) . ”

“ Abstract Wikipedia intends to look and feel like a Wikipedia, but build on the powerful, language-independent conceptual models of Wikidata, with the goal of letting volunteers create and maintain Wikipedia articles across our polyglot Wikimedia world. ”

“ The major ones that come to mind are: 1) massive never-completed projects like EB1911 or the New York Times (EB because it's big; NYT because new PD issues are added every year) ; 2) compilations or collections of stand-alone works with plausible claim to independent notability.
For encyclopedias and encyclopedia-like things, we have to accept some subsets due to sheer scale of work. But when that is the grounds for exception, there needs to be some minimum level of completion. ”

“ I have no qualms about saying we don't want to allow something that someone wants to do if that is needed, but my starting position is always to see if there is anything we can do to eliminate annoyances. ”

“ Index: and Page:-space artefacts can, of course, stay. A Portal: might make sense for selections from the journal, of articles that meet the standalone work exception. A WikiProject to coordinate work and track links to scans etc. might be a decent fit here, if someone wanted that. As it currently stands I would probably vote delete for the mainspace artefacts (with option to move whatever content has reuse value to a non-mainspace page for preservation; and undeleting if someone wants to work on something is a low bar) . ”

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“ This is our first new project in over seven years. Abstract Wikipedia was submitted as a project proposal by Denny Vrandečić in May 2020 [1] after years of preparation and research, leading to a detailed plan and lively discussions in the Wikimedia communities. We know that the energy and the creativity of the community often runs up against language barriers, and information that is available in one language may not make it to other language Wikipedias. ”

“ But since the book discusses art, the reader is better served by faithfully presenting the works of art being discussed, rather than faithfully presenting the scan or faithfully reproducing limitations present because of the method of publication. ”

“ The Columhia s log-book certainly does not betray The OdunibialB log-book certainly does not betray In this case, you might figure that "Columhia" is closer to a real word and choose that (correcting it is optional) . I think that while you certainly might be able to get some benefit out of this, the need for multiple scans that can be page-matched and line-matched (often one OCR breaks lines or interleaves columns, which will be awkward) makes it a bit unwieldy in the general case. ”

“ Either way, I'm confronted with the error message I quoted above, and the edit fails to go through. It sounds from what Billinghurst is saying that the cause is an Abuse Filter setting. IMO that setting should be changed, because it's preventing constructive editing; but I don't know much about how Abuse Filter works, so that's as far as my suggestion goes. In addition, Billinghurst and I have different ways we like to process files like this, which have been uploaded to Wikisource, but (we agree) should really live at Commons. ”

“ May I suggest setting up an Index: page (maybe use e.g. Index:Winston Churchill to Franklin D. Roosevelt - NARA - 194822.jpg as a guide?) and then transfer the transcription you have already made to Page: space and link the result into the new Index: page? Only then do you have a framework for collaborative proofreading; where the strengths of the system and review mechanism work for you and not against. Please, please, please use the tools. Not every chisel appreciates being used as a screwdriver! ”

“ See #Re-purpose_WikiProject_OCR_to_WikiProject_Scans above, which proposed to reboot Wikiproject OCR as a scan-backing Wikiproject. Inductiveload—talk/contribs 14:40, 6 July 2020 (UTC) The policy says "When an entire work is available as a djvu file on commons and an Index page is created here, works are considered in process not excerpts." A literal reading of that policy is that no scan-backed work is an excerpt (it is expected to be completed eventually) . Further the policy refers to "Random or selected sections of a larger work". ”

“ Once these steps are undertaken the image can be moved to Wikimedia Commons with the appropriate use and completion of the {{information}} template. The improved file can then be uploaded to Wikimedia Commons with an appropriate license tag allowable by that wiki.
This error message, however, is not helpful even when it does display at the intended time. Commons has a number of tools that make it better suited than Wikisource to adjusting descriptions, file names, etc., in many cases. And users may have their own reasons to prefer to do that work on Commons rather than Wikisource. ”

“ This section was archived on a request by: — billinghurst sDrewth 05:01, 28 August 2020 (UTC) Policy on substantially empty works [This is imported from WS:PD, where it applies to multiple current proposals, and several other works] .
We have quite a few cases of works that are "collective" or "encyclopaedic" in that they comprise many standalone articles of individual value, which are basically just "shell pages", with no substantial content of any sort, not even imported scans or Index pages. ”