“ The need to provide online copies of sources to maintain and improve Wikipedia is overwhelmingly more important than the luxury of scan backing. Requiring the creation of templates would be a crushing burden, because most people do not know how to create them. ”

“ Notably, I find "facadism" of a collective work much less annoying than, say, only having the preface to a novel. Collective works can have individually-useful things slotted in bit by bit, and if there's a framework around the work, it's even easy to do. ”

“ If an article, which is a selection from a larger work, is created without any infrastructure, it will be very difficult for other Wikisourcerors to complete the work which has been started, as they will have to find and upload a scan and set up the complicated not-article material without the aid of the person who created the first article. The new system will also make it easier for other contributors to work on smaller parts of a larger work, without worrying about demanding formatting concerns. ”

“ It takes quite some time time to seek out a the links (perhaps synthesising a complete list from Google Books, IA and Hathi and others) and present them. Moreover, that list, as a user-editable collection of links is entirely unique on the Internet (the only challenger AFAIK is OnlineBooks serials, which doesn't have entries for many periodicals, and can't be edited) , so it's a place WS can actually add value (certainly of more value, IMO, than the hundreds of copy-pasted PG texts) . ”

“ I personally don't see huge value in simply shunting just scan links to Portal and leaving them there: It eventually leads to having two parallel volume lists, one with links and one without, sometimes with divergence. It tends to end up with "scratchpad-level" content in Portal, which is supposed to be a nice presentation space. Portals are badly integrated and will probably not be noticed by casual users, or even many Wikisource editors. Especially as the Portal headers never seem to actually link to the mainspace works that exist, but we can fix that. ”

“ From a pure "only reproduced content in mainspace" angle, perhaps, but does that serve readers best? Inductiveload—talk/contribs @Inductiveload: Main namespace is content for the reader. There is nothing worse for a reader to go to a page and have to drill down multiple pages to find that there is no content just some dashed skeleton of hierarchy. Main namespace is not built to drive transcribers and transcriptions, that is our other content spaces. We can create a page there once we have content to display what we have to read, and point to the portal for what we have to transcribe. ”

“ I also wish to avoid the really ugly situation of people uploading a work, creating the front page, and then just leaving it for other people. That facadism of a work is just problematic, and we know that nothing happens to it. It is why we developed {{ext scan link}} and {{small scan link}} for use in the author namespace to do that role of managing that list build. So portal and author namespaces play that role and keep main namespace cleaner and more functional. ”

“ Not many non-existant novels have that. And, moreover, periodicals are also different in that single articles ("chapters" in the novel analogy) are complete works in themselves. Now, if we say the volume list should go in Portal space, that makes good sense. However, it has not been explained in all the verbiage above, at what point the Portal becomes a mainspace page, and when it does, what happens to the Portal, and whether we clone (and, unless something clever is done with LST or a template, inevitably diverge from) or delete the volume list. ”

“ I meant in accordance with Wikisource policy. As for "switching between images, making possible to present one book both ways": I am not technically very skilled so I do not know how to do it and I am afraid that only a tiny fraction of our readers could do it, so it would not help us at all. As for Commons guidelines, I do not know of any that would really forbid to do what we need. It is possible that they prefer png, but they have never deleted any non-photographic jpg file I uploaded there (and they were really many) , so you do not have to be afraid of that. ”

“ I am very happy with the approach of a project as that is where all coordination belongs for long term works per Wikisource:WikiProjects, and as I did at Wikisource:WikiProject Biographical dictionaries. I don't think that hard hard hard rules are the answer either, this is about a practice, and one that explains what we do and why we do it, which we did try to cover at help:namespaces. The issue is always that people just want to jump in and do their thing, they don't want to read pages and pages of help text. Which was why we set direction and guided newbies. ”

“ I disagree with Billinghurst's proposed softening, in particular regarding scans. We need to start getting a hard scan requirement (with the obvious exceptions) into policy, and partial works like this is where the requirement is most urgent as it is a de facto requirement for other contributors to be able to work effectively on completing the work. I am open to, and lean towards, removing the templates requirement. Templates are very hard for most people, and a somewhat tall order even for long-term Wikimedians, and I don't consider bespoke templates to be a critical factor. ”

“ In my opinion, it's more constructive to report such issues here and request research be done to isolate the exact edition and/or scans (or do it yourself if so inclined) , than to just delete the links from enWP. As a community, we are generally pretty amenable to making our works useful to enWP, but due to immense backlogs of unsourced junk in the mainspace (driven by the mismatch between how easy it is for a new user to drive-by with a dump and the effort and learning curves of doing it right ) , we simply can't fix everything up front. ”

“ For example, only a title page or single-paragraph "notice to subscribers" in a magazine is unlikely to be considered useful on its own. However, it would still be part of a full transcription of the rest of the parent unit (e.g. a magazine issue) . The work should be scan-backed. Main namespace pages should be created for the work at the top level and any intervening levels a suitable, logical subpage hierarchy developed (e.g. Volume and Issue/Number ranks should exist) . ”

“ We should significantly raise the bar in this area for mainspace pages, and anything that is not a (part of) an actual published work should be shunted to other namespaces. I acknowledge the downsides to that approach that Inductiveload brings up, but I think we should find other ways to ameliorate those. I also agree that the main purpose in setting a higher bar is to have a clear and predictable standard for contributors to aim for to enable keeping a work, with deletion being an admission of failure (i.e. deletion is a sometimes necessary, but never a desirable, outcome) . ”

“ I'll leave our standard welcome message on your talk page shortly, with some useful links to get started. The process in short is: upload the PDF to Commons; create an Index: page for it here; transcribe the text page by page in the Page: namespace; and then transclude it for presentation on a wikipage derived from the article's title. Feel free to ask for assistance: our tooling is specialised and not the most intuitive for people trying to use it for the first time. ”

“ A list of the known scans somewhere (90% of periodicals seem to do this in the mainspace, but that's evidently controversial) . It looks like Hathi has an incomplete list and the IA has another Google-fied copy of v.12, so in this case probably just what Hathi has. A lot of the time a mish-mash is needed to get a set of links. Uploading is strictly optional - obviously preferred, but we all know how much of a pain it is, and page-listing and checking periodicals is pretty masochistic, so it's absolutely not needed. ”

“ A header with a brief description including active dates, major editors, structure (e.g. series) and so on Redirects from alternative names (e.g. when a work has changed name or is referred to by other names) A listing of volume scans should be added, and it should be as complete as possible, based on availability of scans online. As always, creating Wikisources index pages is preferred, but external scans are acceptable. Creating sub-pages (volumes or issues) should follow the article inclusion criteria. This means a sub-page should not be created if there is no content. ”

“ Excuse me if I get frustrated with explaining it, but it is not up to me to write policy or have to do the documentation, it is not my skill set. Make your decisions, do you want quality product in main namespace, or do you dribbles of inconsistent content. — billinghurst sDrewth 23:15, 12 February 2021 (UTC)
I have to disagree with it's not up to me to write policy or have to do the documentation. As admins, it's is exactly our job to do this and facilitate other users to add to the collection. And if we don't, we can't blame people when they do it not to our liking. ”

“ While I would personally prefer we adopt a policy somewhat closer to enwp's COMMONNAME for person pages, Billinghurst is entirely correct that the enws policy is to use full names, and it has stably been so for over a decade following community discussions of the issue. If you believe there is a problem with the specific name being used for a particular person then do please feel free to bring up that issue for discussion, but railing at the policy and the person you disagree with is unlikely to persuade anyone of much of anything. ”

“ I am all for displaying good proofread work in a logical manner, and for pathways to proofreading. One shouldn't just give us shit or shit to tidy up, and not expect some kickback because they have had a "good" idea or a feeling. — billinghurst sDrewth 21:27, 29 January 2021 (UTC)
Idea: can we work on a very small periodical (only a few issues) and bring it up to "Wikisource standard", so that 1) we can all see what is "right" and 2) we have something to use as reference when discussing things? ”

“ Inductiveload—talk/contribs 09:12, 23 February 2021 (UTC) @Inductiveload: Consider any "normal" work that is set up this way - say, a novel - where the only content is a list of chapters, none of which has actually been added. Depending on the circumstances, we would either delete it as G1 No meaningful content or history, or we would retain it as a work in progress. In some cases, we might move it to User (not Portal) space. Generally our discussions have resulted in keep if an Index page is present, and delete otherwise. I don't see why we would treat Canadian Law Times differently. ”

“ Wikisources (like enWS) that have a lot of non-scan-backed works can choose to bot-add the category to all of them (I would argue against doing that, but the technical facility gives the community the choice) . For these works too I would like to differentiate so that one category turns on the download links in the sidebar and a different one turns on the download button, and with equivalent magic words for individual control. ”

“ And if we do want to ditch this proposal and be strict with Portals in this way, then 1) it needs to be documented that that's how it works (Wikisource:Portal guidelines and Help:Portals don't mention use of Portals for this purpose at all, they focus more on thematic curation) and 2) most existing periodicals need to be converted over: many people reasonably imitate of existing structures, we can't blame them for that. And do we allow redirection from a non-existent mainspace page to the portal so it can be found via "normal" linking until such time as there is content? ”

“ Ideally, the Portal would contain things like a thematic index, a by-author index and, like PSM, recurring section collections. That's the natural value-add that we should be aiming for, but which might (might) be better served by something like Listeria or some other data-driven process than relying on hundreds or thousands of manually-maintained portals. Inductiveload—talk/contribs 15:24, 25 February 2021 (UTC) Portal and Author names Is there a strict rule about the name of an Author entry? ”

“ Followed by Portal: and Category: namespaces which we sort of do.
What should happen? People should be bringing in works they are going to undertake in the index: and page: namespaces, and start undertaking them. People should not be dumping links to internet archive into main namespace that they think others should be working on, or might work on; and rinse and repeat that. We need transcribers, and people to do the work. We could dump tens of thousand pages into main ns with links to archive.org and that would look totally shit, and help no one find anything. ”