Wikisource:Scriptorium

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Proposals

Proposal: Add option for Wikidata item in Index namespace

In some wikisources, basic data about a work in Index namespace comes from Wikidata, compare here. This new trend is implemented by inserting the option in MediaWiki:Proofreadpage index template and MediaWiki:Proofreadpage index data config.json. This makes the data centralised, and also readable by search engines that rely on Wikidata. I am proposing the addition here. This will be open to choice of individual editors, so that editors may fill up the Index page data as per current style or opt for importing from Wikidata. Hrishikes (talk) 13:58, 30 January 2026 (UTC)

 Comment Since a lot of editors here are linking scans and Index pages into data items for the work instead of the data item for the edition, I foresee a lot of mismatched information using this approach. On smaller Wikisources, this is less of an issue, but for a large project like en.WS, there will be a lot more potential for mismatched information. At the very least, we would need to agree on what values to use in certain locations: For example, Wikidata tracks editions and not always separate print runs, but here we will often make a distinction between impressions of the same edition issued in different years. --EncycloPetey (talk) 20:18, 30 January 2026 (UTC)

The edition versus print issue is a problem, but that has been sorted out by treating prints as editions. The item linked in my proposal is a reprint treated as edition in Wikidata. Every index requires a separate Wikidata item for this scheme to work, be it edition or print. Currently, index page data can be fetched from the Commons file; those who wish can do so. This Wikidata scheme will just create another option, to fetch data from Wikidata, like what is done in Author pages. Hrishikes (talk) 04:29, 31 January 2026 (UTC)

I wonder if this change might actually make it easier to automatically track and fix Wikidata items that aren't modelling works properly? Certainly, I think if we were to proceed with this, it would be wise to start small and iron out any issues before making it a regular practice. —Beleg Tâl (talk) 22:03, 31 January 2026 (UTC)

@Beleg Tâl: — Yes, of course. But I believe adding just an extra option is starting small. Big things are not now proposed. This option will motivate proper Wikidata entries at edition level (as opposed to work). Later, it will be possible to make appropriate queries using Wikidata tools to find various patterns and statistics. It will be possible to make entries in Author pages using a bot, instead of manually (the system exists elsewhere; in this set-up no vandalism is possible because the bot will correct those during next update). With proper Wikidata entries, works can be made available in the Wikisource android app (made available in PlayStore) for ease of readers. A work recently completed by me, Some Notes on Indian Artistic Anatomy, is available in the app. But I fully agree that we should start small. Hrishikes (talk) 16:57, 1 February 2026 (UTC)

Bot approval requests

• See Wikisource:Bots for information about applying for a bot status
• See Wikisource:Bot requests if you require an existing bot to undertake a task

Repairs (and moves)

Designated for requests related to the repair of works (and scans of works) presented on Wikisource

See also Wikisource:Scan lab

Index:File:When Peoples Meet.pdf

wrong title, should be Index:When Peoples Meet.pdf Duckmather (talk) 02:51, 26 January 2026 (UTC)

Moved. -- Beardo (talk) 05:26, 26 January 2026 (UTC)

 This section is considered resolved, for the purposes of archiving. If you disagree, replace this template with your comment. ToxicPea (talk) 01:00, 31 January 2026 (UTC)

Index:When knighthood was in flower bor, The love story of Charles Brandon and Mary Tudor, the king's sister, and happening in the reign of...Henry VIII; (IA cu31924022498913).pdf

Should be moved to Index:When knighthood was in flower or, The love story of Charles Brandon and Mary Tudor, the king's sister, and happening in the reign of...Henry VIII; (IA cu31924022498913).pdf (i.e. to change "bor" to "or"). However, I had already started proofreading it a long while ago, so this'll need an admin Duckmather (talk) 02:53, 26 January 2026 (UTC)

I think it is best to get the file on Commons moved first. -- Beardo (talk) 01:08, 4 February 2026 (UTC)

@Beardo: just requested the move on Commons! Duckmather (talk) 05:06, 4 February 2026 (UTC)

@Beardo: move is done on Commons, you can do the move here now Duckmather (talk) 19:50, 4 February 2026 (UTC)

Page:An Etymological Dictionary of the Norn Language in Shetland Part I.pdf/127

Something happened (I think a while ago) that broke many of the tooltips I have set up for abbreviations that contain superscripts and are throwing up errors, as can be seen in the link above. The problem will be somewhere in Template:Nornabr, Module:Nornabr or Module:Nornabr/data. Would anybody with more template knowledge be able to fix this?— 🐗 Griceylipper (✉️) 19:25, 1 February 2026 (UTC)

I had a look, and while I'm not super familiar with wiki templates, it might have something to do with the fact that {{sup}} now uses TemplatesStyles instead of inline CSS (i.e. line 2 of Module:Nornabr/data). You might get more responses if you ask at Scriptorium/Help. —Tosca-the-engineer 09:19, 14 February 2026 (UTC)

Other discussions

Issues with editing window height in ProofreadPage

Tracked in PhabricatorTask T393231

Has anyone encountered that recently? I've been having issues with the editing layout being compressed to a very small height, making it kind of unusable. I can reproduce on another account, so I'm a bit surprised it'd affect only me. (For details, see my report at phab:T393231#11570707.) — Alien  3
3 3 21:22, 30 January 2026 (UTC)

Yes for past two days, I've been experiencing the second version you reported "the edit boxes overflowing onto the form buttons". No scroll bars on the edit window any more—instead the edit window expands to take in the entirety of the content, and the "form buttons" (Proofread status buttons, Publish buttons etc.) are floating in the middle of the edit box.

Edit: I've checked which feature was causing this extreme version of the problem in my case. It went away when I turned off "Improved Syntax Highlighting" in Beta Features. Pasicles (talk) 21:43, 30 January 2026 (UTC)

@Alien333: as a turnover you can use the grey handle above the Summary to expand the edit area. • M-le-mot-dit (talk) 22:19, 30 January 2026 (UTC)

My edit window suddenly reduced in height about the same time. I corrected the problem by dragging the edge of the editing window down, and it has stayed at the new height. I'm guessing that some sort of data was accidentally overwritten, or some change altered the default. The [OCR] button no longer appears at the top of my edit window; I have only the new drop-down OCR menu instead. And there in now an intrusive "Insert" drop-down menu at the top that was not there previously. The menu duplicates functions of the options below it, but also offers items that are completely useless in the Page namespace, like category and redirect insertion options, and the ability to sign my posts (in the Page namespace ??). This looks like Wikipedia-specific editing content misapplied to the Page namespace. --EncycloPetey (talk) 22:54, 30 January 2026 (UTC)

And for those of us who don't have the editing toolbar turned on, there is no grey handle to drag. I've got one line of text visible in header and footer, and four lines in the Page body box. The page image is a piece from the middle and can't be scrolled, so the Page: namespace is unusable for me, unless I turn the toolbar back on. It has no useful functionality for me, other than the occasional need to do OCR and it just wastes space on a smaller screen <grumble>. N.B. The "Insert" drop-down menu is the CharInsert gadget and is supposed to appear at the bottom of the Edit window between the footer box and the Summary. Beeswaxcandle (talk) 07:45, 31 January 2026 (UTC)

Addendum: It seems the page height value is now made uniform across all namespaces. So, when I enlarged the Page namespace editing window, it meant that I also made the Module and Author namespace windows larger, but the calibration is off. What is a good size in the page namespace is too tall in other namespaces; and a height that is good for Author and Module namespaces is too small for the Page namespace. The result is that I'm constantly having to adjust by edit window height every time I shift to working in a new namespace. --EncycloPetey (talk) 16:22, 31 January 2026 (UTC)

If you don't use the editing toolbar, you may add a style to the class wikiEditor-ui-view in your common.css, e.g.

.wikiEditor-ui-view { height: 600px; }

until a fix is found. • M-le-mot-dit (talk) 11:43, 1 February 2026 (UTC)

Thanks, but it didn't work. It starts up okay at normal height, but then shrinks down to the four lines etc. as the page completes loading. So, there's something in the patch that is overriding. Beeswaxcandle (talk) 07:31, 3 February 2026 (UTC)

.wikiEditor-ui-text { height: 600px !important; } might do better. — Alien  3
3 3 09:14, 3 February 2026 (UTC)

No, still collapses down. Will see what happens when this week's release propagates. Beeswaxcandle (talk) 07:26, 4 February 2026 (UTC)

I seem to be back to "normal" currently. Will see what happens as I move through some pages. Beeswaxcandle (talk) 06:02, 6 February 2026 (UTC)

Something new has just lost my ability to resize the edit window in the Page namespace. I will have to stop editing until this is fixed, since I cannot see enough of the text at one time to be able to proofread. I had a properly sized window until a few minutes ago, when I started a new page without window resizing. This problem exists on other Wikisource projects in their Page namespace equivalent as well, not just here. --EncycloPetey (talk) 01:12, 5 February 2026 (UTC)

They tried as far as I understand to revert last week's issues. Normally we should be back where we were. Is the window still too vertically small? I can't reproduce anymore. — Alien  3
3 3 07:29, 5 February 2026 (UTC)

It is no longer too small, but I have still lost the option to resize the window. There are times when I would rather run the scan page and edit window above each other, such as when proofreading footnotes that contain Greek. Without the option to alter the size of the edit window, this is still impossible. --EncycloPetey (talk) 14:38, 5 February 2026 (UTC)

Not being able to resize the edit window feels like an accessibility issue. --EncycloPetey (talk) 14:49, 5 February 2026 (UTC)

I have as well. I have found that resizing the optical window in a certain work carries over from page to page. —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 01:14, 5 February 2026 (UTC)

screenshot showing issue from User:Mathmitch7

I just wanted to add here that I've found that in the Monobook skin, there's no scroll-bar in the ProofreadPage editing window, which makes it extremely difficult to proofread large pages. This behavior happens in both Edge and Firefox, and has been happening for me for a few weeks now. Screenshot attached to the right. I'm not even sure if the above issue on Phabricator quite covers what I'm seeing. Mathmitch7 (talk) 16:01, 16 February 2026 (UTC)

I submitted a patch last week but it still needs someone to review. 析石父 (talk) 02:05, 19 February 2026 (UTC)

My patch has been deployed. 析石父 (talk) 02:00, 26 February 2026 (UTC)

I noticed it last night!! Thank you <3 -- Mathmitch7 (talk) 13:33, 26 February 2026 (UTC)

How do I start adding sources?

There are several primary source documents that I know are public domain (hundreds of years ago) that I'd like to add to Wikisource, but I am a bit confused; how do I start the new page? Is there a template? How does copyright apply to translations? VidanaliK (talk) 01:06, 31 January 2026 (UTC)

Have you read Help:Beginner's guide to adding texts? You should start by uploading a scan of the work to Commons, then create an Index here based on that scan.

Translations have their own separate copyright status. For a translation to be acceptable here, both the original and the translation need to be in public domain. -- Beardo (talk) 02:11, 31 January 2026 (UTC)

@VidanaliK: You can also start with proofreading or validating indexes that have already been uploaded by somebody else, e. g. within the Monthly Challenge collaboration, which might be easier for a beginner. Or if you have some specific scan that you want to transcribe here and need some help, we can help you with the technical stuff like uploading and creating the Index page. --Jan Kameníček (talk) 21:40, 31 January 2026 (UTC)

National anthems

I just wanted to note, since many national anthems have been put up for deletion as of late, that doing an actual transcription project of National Anthems of the World (1960), a text which was not renewed, might be a worthwhile endeavor so that we can have pages for specific countries' national anthems. I checked, and most of our national anthems that were considered for deletion did not originate from this collection. We've already more or less proven the Latvian and Portuguese anthems in this text are in the public domain, and many or most of the others likely are also. But the tricky thing is we will have to assess each of the anthems' copyrights individually, since for various reasons some originals or translations that appear in this book may have some way they were URAA'd or otherwise still under copyright, as has been noted before in the CV discussion threads. Pinging @MarkLSteadman, @TE(æ)A,ea.: as users who might be interested in this. Consider this somewhat of a request, as I can't work on sheet music and LilyPond myself (yet). I can help on the copyright parts if needed. SnowyCinema (talk) 12:56, 31 January 2026 (UTC)

I requested a different collection of National Anthems from 1943, hoping that it again would be non-renewed, alas it was renewed. MarkLSteadman (talk) 11:30, 1 February 2026 (UTC)

Vast free space at the bottom of a page

Does anybody have any idea why there is so much free space at the bottom of Manifesto of the Communist Party, below the disclaimers and everything? -- Jan Kameníček (talk) 01:17, 2 February 2026 (UTC)

On the left hand side it has links to the advertisement pages, so it seems to be something to do with that. -- Beardo (talk) 02:51, 2 February 2026 (UTC)

It's an issue with the advertisement template [1], introduces the extra space. GhostOrchid35 (talk) 04:04, 2 February 2026 (UTC)

I note that Fantastic Universe/Volume 08/Number 3 also has a lot of blank space - I guess for the same reason. -- Beardo (talk) 23:01, 3 February 2026 (UTC)

From what I've seen it appears to be every page that uses that template where more than one page is transcluded within the template. ToxicPea (talk) 00:44, 4 February 2026 (UTC)

While this error does seem to only occur with multi-page transculsions. The Merry Men and Other Tales and Fables, The Dawn of Canadian History and Dreams of a Spirit-Seer, transclude multiple pages without this error. GhostOrchid35 (talk) 13:48, 8 February 2026 (UTC)

Does the problem only arise when the adverts are at the end ? -- Beardo (talk) 16:22, 8 February 2026 (UTC)

Nope. See The Famous Speeches of the Eight Chicago Anarchists in Court for example. ToxicPea (talk) 16:26, 8 February 2026 (UTC)

And I tried moving the ads in the Fantastic Universe and that did not help. -- Beardo (talk) 16:31, 8 February 2026 (UTC)

Revise Template:Advertisements?--TunnelESON (talk) 06:22, 15 February 2026 (UTC)

If I try replacing {{advertisements}} with {{front matter}} the extra space still appears. The issue is likely with {{collapsed section}}. ToxicPea (talk) 16:35, 15 February 2026 (UTC)

Is there a reason the advertisements are transcluded at the front of the work instead of the end (which is where they are in the scan)?Tcr25 (talk) 14:03, 26 February 2026 (UTC)

@Jan.Kamenicek, @Beardo: though it is not recommended, replacing the tag pages by Page: seems to be a workaround. Please check Manifesto of the Communist Party. • M-le-mot-dit (talk) 15:42, 26 February 2026 (UTC)

┌───────────────────────────────────────┘
The issue is that the [page numbers] on the left (added by script next to < pages > transclusions, which is why switching to direct transclusion removed the issue) rely on knowing where the ws-pagenums actually are (jquery .offset()) to line up the numbers with the text.

mw-collapsible works by essentially just setting height 0, making the overflowing content invisible and resuming content flow afterwards. The problem is that the content actually still is here, just invisible.

When the collapsible is initially collapsed, we can not show page numbers for stuff inside it with this bit of CSS: .mw-collapsed .mw-collapsible-content { display:none; }. This rememdiates the worst of the issue.

Something that would be nice would be to actualise the page number placement when the user collapses/uncollapses something. (Else when you collapse something initially uncollapsed you still have the page numbers lurking around.) This would require adding a listener à la $(".mw-collapsible-toggle").on("click", ...). — Alien  3
3 3 11:04, 27 February 2026 (UTC)

Tech News: 2026-06

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Updates for editors

• The "Page information" feature, which gives validating information about a page (example), now automatically includes a table of contents. If there is a local MediaWiki:Pageinfo-header page created by individual users, it can now be removed. [2]
• View all 21 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, VisualEditor previously added bold or italic formatting inside link descriptions, making the wikicode complex. This has now been fixed. [3]

Updates for technical contributors

• There was no XML dump on 20 January. Additionally, from now on, dumps will be generated once per month only. [4]
• The MediaWiki Interfaces team removed support for all transform endpoints containing a trailing slash from the MediaWiki REST API. All API users currently calling those endpoints are encouraged to transition to the non-trailing slash versions. If you have questions or encounter any problems, please file a ticket in phabricator to the #MW-Interfaces-Team board.
• Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki

Weekly highlight

• Users are reminded that the Wikimedia Foundation has shared some guiding questions for the July 2026–June 2027 Annual Plan on Meta and Diff. These focus on global trends, faster and healthier experimentation, better support for newcomers, strengthening editors and advanced users, improving collaboration across projects, and growing and retaining readership. Feedback and ideas are welcome on the talk page.

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

MediaWiki message delivery 17:43, 2 February 2026 (UTC)

Problem with the editing interface

Hello. For the last few days I've been having a strange issue with the editing interface. The left box (where I can actually edit the text) doesn't have a roll bar, and the text just keeps going, with parts of it behind other elements, which makes it not viable to edit. It has something to do with my account, since it works after I log off it goes back to normal. It affects only Wikisource in several languages. I tried changing the appearance and disabling all gadgets, and the problem persists. Any one else dealt with this? HendrikWBK (talk) 18:08, 2 February 2026 (UTC)

See #Issues with editing window height in ProofreadPage above. There seem to be several connected issues with editing the Page namespace right now. --EncycloPetey (talk) 18:35, 2 February 2026 (UTC)

Thank you, I must have missed this. HendrikWBK (talk) 18:39, 2 February 2026 (UTC)

Handling an entire chunk of misplaced text

In one of the works I've been proofreading, Page:The reference shelf v4 no5 1926.djvu/45 there is an obvious error in the paragraphs of text currently marked using the SIC template. The chapter is a reprint from the Educational Record, and based on a check of the original it seems that the line "appropriations. Most students of government, however," has been accidentally swapped with "appropriations totaling two hundred million dollars.". What would be the best way of handling this? Arcorann (talk) 00:21, 3 February 2026 (UTC)

I would put a note in the page header when it gets transcluded, something like

{{header|...|notes=Note: the source text contains errors, which have been reproduced faithfully. The errors are: The lines "[Line A]" and "[Line B]" at [insert location] have been accidentally swapped. The passage should read: "[The original passage]". The original passage can be read here: [link] }}

—Tosca-the-engineer 08:25, 3 February 2026 (UTC)

You're going to get a conflict here between the people who think the purpose of WS is to be an exact transcription of pages, and nothing more, and those who think the purpose is to create a work that someone might actually want to read. Personally, I'd either just swap the lines back (with a note in the source page), or use SIC. qq1122qq 09:31, 4 Feb 2026 (UTC).

• I think that this range of text is too large for SIC to be reasonable. (Such a large amount of text, all underlined, would be quite ugly.) I would place the text in the correct position and use a reference with {{user annotation}}. TE(æ)A,ea. (talk) 15:10, 5 February 2026 (UTC)
• @Tosca-the-engineer: I also think it would be better in this case to just swap the lines to their correct positions and add an annotation or note. I support preserving spelling, punctuation, and grammar errors, but I think structural mistakes like this (e.g. swapped lines or pages) should be fixed when possible, provided it is documented. Nosferattus (talk) 18:38, 26 February 2026 (UTC)
• I'd say two SICs. By the way, there's no need to SIC the entire paragraph: you could just do [content before first line swapped]line A[content between the two]line B. It's only six words on either side. If you really don't want SIC, I'd leave a header note. — Alien  3
  3 3 22:23, 26 February 2026 (UTC)

Best practice and accessibility for eye spellings

I searched and found no previous discussion. I'm inclined to think that eye spellings should have {{SIC}} applied for 1.) intelligibility and 2.) accessibility. Is there any reason to not do this? —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 20:15, 3 February 2026 (UTC)

Throwing out a few reasons to not put tooltips:

• Because texts which use such spellings usually use them extensively, and we'd end up with a sea of tooltips.
• Because it means assumptions from our part and decisions on how it "should" look that would be integrated into the text about everywhere.
• (Specific to using {{SIC}} Because it implies that such spellings are errors: to quote the doc, This template should only be used for words that are actually typos. It is not for indicating a different or obsolete spelling.)
• (Because it could be largely vain endeavour knowing tooltips are not supported by a wide range of devices.)

More specifically, I at any rate strongly oppose requiring tooltips because that would mean tons of unneeded work.

And then on reasons to do so:

• intelligibility: we host published editions, not modernisations. What we offer is supposed to be the work as it was.
• accessibility: erm, why? I don't see the link with the topic at hand. As I said above tooltips are very inaccessible so it wouldn't change much accessibility-wise.

— Alien  3
3 3 20:45, 3 February 2026 (UTC)

I'm not concerned about tooltips as such, I'm concerned about a screen reader coming across a bunch of wonky spelling nonsense that a blind person will hear as a string of gibberish or a deaf person who can read standard English will see as a bunch of gibberish. If we can make this intelligible to a person who is using assistive technology or who is literate but has never heard English, why wouldn't we? —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 20:47, 3 February 2026 (UTC)

This sounds to me like a good use case for creating an annotated version tbh —Beleg Tâl (talk) 21:14, 3 February 2026 (UTC)

I did consider that for cases that have a lot of eye dialect spellings for a certain character, but there are also works where there are very occasional deliberate misspellings like this and it seems a little much to create an entire secondary edition just for a handful of words. —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 21:16, 3 February 2026 (UTC)

Because screen readers have the option of "go back and spell that word for me", and the English language already has objectively absurd spelling rules, and idiosyncratic spelling is not that difficult to understand. It might take a few pages to get your bearings, but tbh, sometimes that's part of the appeal. Phonetic spelling is often indistinguishable from the "correct" spelling when read aloud anyway (e.g. skool vs school), and considering that a large proportion of wikisource texts are 100+ years old, if a reader can't handle the idea that language and spelling change over time, they're probably in the wrong place anyway. —Tosca-the-engineer 18:33, 4 February 2026 (UTC)

Okay, but did you see what I wrote above about deaf readers? —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 20:40, 4 February 2026 (UTC)

For TV programs, they will subtitle the speaker if they believe the dialect is going to interfere with the ability of a viewer to understand what is being said. That's a form of annotation, and we already have a process in place of creating annotated editions, as previously mentioned. --EncycloPetey (talk) 14:45, 5 February 2026 (UTC)

And how does that answer the question I asked to a different person? Do you know if Tosca-the-engineer read what I wrote about the deaf? —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 14:50, 5 February 2026 (UTC)

• This would be inappropriate use of {{SIC}}, which should only be used for errors, not intentional differences; the use of eye dialect is obviously an intentional choice, so marking it as incorrect (using {{SIC}}) would be misleading. For intelligibility, an annotated version is more appropriate; (although I haven’t finished it,) some years ago I was working on transcribing a text with much in the way of nonstandard English. My solution was to keep the text as is, with no adjustments, in the standard transclusion, and use many instances of {{asw}} to create a “modern” English rendition. This could also be applied to a work with eye dialect, to create a “clean” version. However, in both cases, the modified version is more appropriately placed as an annotation. As for accessibility, well, eye dialect is also fairly inaccessible to people who don’t use screen readers, so I don’t think that there is a major difference in this respect. For comparison, if somebody wanted to listen to an audiobook of a novel which uses eye dialect, it would be strange if all dialogue was pronounced “correctly,” without any indication of the eye dialect in the text. Thus, there’s no reason for it, and as for reasons against it, it is the goal of Wikisource to create an accurate transcription of the text. TE(æ)A,ea. (talk) 15:10, 5 February 2026 (UTC)

  This adds up, especially re: {{SIC}}. I suppose the problem may be with the template itself: using "sic" in a text does not only apply to actual typos or errors, but any usage of language that could reasonably be perceived as an error. So we have restricted this template to one of the two main uses of the word, which means that I have proposed a non-solution based on the scope of the template. It seems like an annotated version is the only solution based on the existing templates and best practices. —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 15:19, 5 February 2026 (UTC)

• {{SIC}} should not be used for eye spellings, IMO. And the suggestion that deaf people can't read non-standard English is unfounded. Just like the rest of us, deaf people use context and similarity to other words to infer the meaning of unrecognized text. They just lack one of several tools to accomplish this task (sounding out words). If there is evidence this is actually a problem, I'm open to changing my mind about it. I think most people, even deaf people, would find such use pedantic and doctrinaire, however. Nosferattus (talk) 19:31, 26 February 2026 (UTC)

FYI: Spotlighting the World Factbook as We Bid a Fond Farewell

https://www.cia.gov/stories/story/spotlighting-the-world-factbook-as-we-bid-a-fond-farewell/ —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 22:50, 4 February 2026 (UTC)

I am working on rounding up folks to help put up current editions of the The_World_Factbook text - the most current years just lead to a field of red links. I think this is just a copy paste job from the internet archive, unless anyone has a more bot-directed idea. -- Phoebe (talk) 22:41, 11 February 2026 (UTC)

ps this page may be helpful; and the archive has now made a collections page. -- 22:47, 11 February 2026 (UTC)

Watchlist pop-ups

Is anyone else bothered by pop-ups on the Watchlist. I keep getting them, over and over, on every project where I am active, which is about seven projects right now. I know some folks are active on even more projects. Is there a way to opt out of the pop-ups across all projects without having to visit every project one by one and click through them each time on each project? --EncycloPetey (talk) 14:48, 5 February 2026 (UTC)

Do translations done only for the Marxist Internet Archive meet inclusion criteria?

For example, the translation at "What is an Anarchist?" appears to have been done only for the Marxist Internet Archive, sourced to this page. Many others by the same translator appear to be a similar situation. As this is an online source, where these translations seem to be self-published without editorial controls, how do we feel about these? Do they meet our inclusion criteria? SnowyCinema (talk) 15:38, 5 February 2026 (UTC)

It is just a web page which can disappear any time. We should host transcriptions of texts published in a fixed stable format, we should not be doing a mirror to the Internet. --Jan Kameníček (talk) 16:23, 5 February 2026 (UTC)

No one is suggesting "mirroring the Internet": that's completely insane. There are plenty of very valuable educational and cultural documents that originate online and there's no reason why a digital-first or digital-only work that is otherwise in our scope ceases to be. —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 18:04, 5 February 2026 (UTC)

Of course. That is why I was not talking about digital-first (or -only) but about non-fixed web pages. Nothing against fixed electronic documents (e.g. pdfs), which can be easily uploaded to Commons. —unsigned comment by Jan.Kamenicek (talk) .

There's no reason why a filetype should change whether or not something fits our criteria as an acceptable text. —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 19:31, 5 February 2026 (UTC)

Again: Of course. That is why I gave .pdf just as an example. It can be any kind of a fixed electronic document. --Jan Kameníček (talk) 19:39, 5 February 2026 (UTC)

HTML is a document. A PDF online has a URI, just like an HTML document has a URI. —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 21:21, 5 February 2026 (UTC)

On the topic of these translations being "otherwise in our scope", I'm going to check that. So, when reading through the relevant policy at WS:Translations, it says (emphasis mine):

Published translations (public domain or open-licensed) have been created and released by an external translator and publisher. They allow the project to fill Wikisource with peer-reviewed, edited content and verifiable translations into English.

This seems to at best imply, and at worst outright rule, that peer-reviewed translations are the only thing we want at enWS, besides user translations at the Translation: namespace. And this is an official Wikisource policy. So, were MIA translations peer-reviewed? They don't appear to me to have been, so unless I'm mistaken about either the meaning of the policy or the situation behind marxists.org works, I think a number of these should be considered for deletion. SnowyCinema (talk) 18:22, 5 February 2026 (UTC)

They were published by AK Press: https://www.akpress.org/down-with-the-law.html. MarkLSteadman (talk) 18:25, 5 February 2026 (UTC)

Ah, on inspecting that book, there's a problem. The book does not internally state that any of it has a free license. Here's the copyright notice in full, as can be seen here:

Down with the Law: Anarchist Individualist Writings from
Early Twentieth-Century France
© 2019 Mitchell Abidor
ISBN: 978-1-84935-344-1
E-ISBN: 978-1-84935-345-8
Library of Congress Control Number: 2019933776
AK Press
370 Ryan Ave. #100
Chico, CA 95973
www.akpress.org
akpress@akpress.org
AK Press
33 Tower St.
Edinburgh EH6 7BN
Scotland
www.akuk.com
ak@akedin.demon.co.uk
[...]
Cover and interior design by Margaret Killjoy
Cover illustration by Flavio Costantini, Les Travailleurs de la nuit I. Parigi, 1 ottobre 1901, 1964. Courtesy Archivio Flavio Costantini, Genova

@MarkLSteadman: I was going to say maybe we could bring a scan of it here to enWS, but this makes that a bit of an issue. The copyright status of the introduction and the cover, and possibly some of the other work within it, seems up in the air. Any ideas? SnowyCinema (talk) 18:55, 5 February 2026 (UTC)

Abidor certainly has recognition: https://www.nyrb.com/collections/mitchell-abidor. Example: https://www.google.com/books/edition/Notebooks_1936_1947 and https://www.marxists.org/archive/serge/1944/notebooks.htm . NYRB certainly meets our editorial standards, so how to handle the Copyleft MIA version and the Copyright NYRB version. MarkLSteadman (talk) 20:19, 5 February 2026 (UTC)

There is one more issue: Marxist org. copied the text from Brochure Mensuelle no 26, February 1925. That makes it a second-hand transcription, which is disallowed here per WS:WWI#Second-hand transcriptions. --Jan Kameníček (talk) 19:52, 5 February 2026 (UTC)

Surely Brochure Mensuelle had a French original ? Not an English translation. -- Beardo (talk) 19:59, 5 February 2026 (UTC)

Ah, so in that case it was probably transcribed from the AK press publication (issued 2019), which is the same problem. --Jan Kameníček (talk) 20:15, 5 February 2026 (UTC)

It wasn't, unless the Marxist Internet Archive has a time machine. Or how else did they transcribe in 2011 a book published in 2019? MarkLSteadman (talk) 20:20, 5 February 2026 (UTC)

Oh, now I can see my fault: I misread 1925 for 2025. Apologies for the confusion, I am taking all this back. -- Jan Kameníček (talk) 20:43, 5 February 2026 (UTC)

Little Bitty Pretty One

I noticed that the Wikipedia article references a 1992 Billboard article (this one) which notes that the song lapsed out of copyright. Nighfidelity (talk) 17:56, 6 February 2026 (UTC)

• The song (EP114181) was not renewed; but I am unsure of a usable source, as the recording is copyrighted. TE(æ)A,ea. (talk) 21:06, 6 February 2026 (UTC)

Given the date, I'd assume that it would have been published on paper to be copyrighted. HathiTrust theoretically has a source, but a school newspaper sans copyright notice that has a list of the lyrics for popular hits is a questionable source.--Prosfilaes (talk) 00:31, 11 February 2026 (UTC)

Tech News: 2026-07

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Updates for editors

• Logged-in contributors who manage large or complex watchlists can now organise and filter watched pages in ways that improve their workflows with the new Watchlist labels feature. By adding custom labels (for example: pages you created, pages being monitored for vandalism, or discussion pages) users can more quickly identify what needs attention, reduce cognitive load, and respond more efficiently. This improves watchlist usability, especially for highly active editors.
• A new feature available on Special:Contributions shows temporary accounts that are likely operated by the same person, and so makes patrolling less time-consuming. Upon checking contributions of a temporary account, users with access to temporary account IP addresses can now see a view of contributions from the related temporary accounts. The feature looks up all the IPs associated with a given temporary account within the data retention period and shows all the contributions of all temporary accounts that have used these IPs. Learn more. [5]
• When editors preview a wikitext edit, the reminder box that they are only seeing a preview (which is shown at the top), now has a grey/neutral background instead of a yellow/warning background. This makes it easier to distinguish preview notes from actual warnings (for example, edit conflicts or problematic redirect targets), which will now be shown in separate warning or error boxes. [6]
• The Global Watchlist lets you view your watchlists from multiple wikis on one page. The extension continues to improve — it now properly supports more than one Wikibase site, for example both Wikidata and testwikidata. In addition, issues regarding text direction have been fixed for users who prefer Wikidata or other Wikibase sites in right-to-left (RTL) languages. [7][8]
• The automatic "magic links" for ISBN, RFC, and PMID numbers have been deprecated in wikitext since 2021 due to inflexibility and difficulties with localization. Several wikis have successfully replaced RFC and PMID magic links with equivalent external links, but a template was often required to replace the functionality of the ISBN magic link. There is now a new built-in parser function {{#isbn}} available to replace the basic functionality of the ISBN magic link. This makes it easier for wikis who wish to migrate off of the deprecated magic link functionality to do so. [9]
• Two new wikis have been created:
  • a Wikipedia in Jju (w:kaj:) [10]
  • a Wikipedia in Nawat (w:ppl:) [11]
• View all 23 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week.

Updates for technical contributors

• A new global user group has been created: Local bots. It will be used internally by the software to allow community bots to bypass rate limits that are applied to abusive web scrapers. Accounts that are approved as bots on at least one Wikimedia wiki will be automatically added to this group. It will not change what user permissions the bot has. [12]
• Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki

Meetings and events

• The MediaWiki Users and Developers Conference, Spring 2026 will be held March 25–27 in Salt Lake City, USA. This event is organized by and for the third-party MediaWiki community. You can propose sessions and register to attend. [13]

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

MediaWiki message delivery 23:30, 9 February 2026 (UTC)

Proofread of the Month is missing pages

Hello, I just noted this on the work's talk page, but I've noticed that February's (first) Proofread of the Month, Index:Modern Tendencies in Sculpture.djvu, is missing at least two pages. I haven't gone through every single page to verify those are the only two missing pages, but this seems to be a major problem. Advice is appreciated -- In the meantime, I'll double check the other pages in the scan; and try to find a scan that includes the missing pages, so the file can be fixed ASAP. -- Mathmitch7 (talk) 00:19, 10 February 2026 (UTC)

@Mathmitch7: Repaired. 2 pages were missing (American VII and VIII). • M-le-mot-dit (talk) 14:15, 10 February 2026 (UTC)

Missing pages retrieveed from Internet Archive identifier: moderntendencies00taft--• M-le-mot-dit (talk) 14:19, 10 February 2026 (UTC)

Thank you!!! Mathmitch7 (talk) 23:48, 10 February 2026 (UTC)

Make file from images

Is there anyone whom I could trouble, please, to make a PDF/ DjVu file from the 11 images in c:Category:The Dweller In The Darkness, splitting the double-page spreads where needed?

Or is there a tool that I can throw them at that will do the job to a sufficiently high quality? Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 18:59, 11 February 2026 (UTC)

Someone may respond here, but we have Wikisource:Scan Lab for requests like that. --EncycloPetey (talk) 20:27, 11 February 2026 (UTC)

I can do it. And EP is correct that the other board is better for these requests in the future. —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 20:55, 11 February 2026 (UTC)

@Pigsonthewing: File:Reginald Berkeley - The Dweller in the Darkness.pdf —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 21:10, 11 February 2026 (UTC)

Thank you. Now transcribed at The Dweller in the Darkness. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 14:51, 12 February 2026 (UTC)

authority control template in Author pages

I've just been informed that I've been missing off {{authority control}} from the Author: pages I create. If it's a requirement to put it on Author: pages, can we not add it to the default template for Author pages? Otherwise I'm sure I'll start forgetting again at some point. Qq1122qq (talk) 20:12, 13 February 2026 (UTC)

On a related note, can someone with the ability to run scripts on the sites add the template to any Author: pages I've created that don't have them? Qq1122qq (talk) 20:14, 13 February 2026 (UTC)

Automatically having it added to author, main/works, and portal pages is a good idea. —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 20:16, 13 February 2026 (UTC)

It was included on all the author pages that I have created using the default template, at the bottom, after the note about license. I don't know why Qq did not get those. -- Beardo (talk) 20:57, 13 February 2026 (UTC)

When I go to Author:foo, there is no authority control added. Also, it should be on all content pages. —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 20:59, 13 February 2026 (UTC)

If you use {{Author/preload}} it appears. I assumed that was what was meant by "default template". -- Beardo (talk) 21:02, 13 February 2026 (UTC)

When I create a blank author page (e.g. for Author:Banana) this is what I get:

{{author

| firstname =

| lastname = Banana

| last_initial = Ba

| birthyear =

| deathyear =

| description =

}}

==Works==

I have no idea when/where I would use {{Author/preload}} - if there are settings I need to change in order to get better defaults, let me know and I'll change them. (edit: line breaks not displaying properly there but I don't want to mess with the threading markup) Qq1122qq (talk) 21:05, 13 February 2026 (UTC)

When I create an author page it has nothing in the box, but within the text above, there is a line which says "Click to preload this page with an author template" - when I click that, it gives the header, the works subheading and then below those:

"<!-- please add author license here; see [[Help:Copyright tags]] -->

{{authority control}}"

How do you get the heading and "Works" line ? -- Beardo (talk) 21:38, 13 February 2026 (UTC)

What happens when you click on Author:Beardo? —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 21:40, 13 February 2026 (UTC)

A edit box with nothing in it. Above it, the following text:

"This page does not exist yet; you can create it by typing in the box below and publishing the page. If you are new to Wikisource, please see Help:Adding texts.

You are editing in the author namespace. This page should include an {{author}} template. Please review its documentation and Help:Author pages.

Click to preload this page with an author template

As an alternative, English Wikisource has a gadget to preload this and other namespace-relevant templates.

Note: Birthyear and deathyear parameters are deprecated in favour of pairing the author page with Wikidata and extracting the requisite data. Search for this person on Wikidata: Beardo" -- Beardo (talk) 21:45, 13 February 2026 (UTC)

There is a gadget the Editing section: "Preload useful templates such as header, textinfo and author in respective namespaces." So, looks like there's more than one way at present. Beeswaxcandle (talk) 21:45, 13 February 2026 (UTC)

Is there a name for the use of a semicolon when it connects two complete, independent thoughts?

Is there a name for the use of a semicolon when it connects two complete, independent thoughts, replacing a period in headlines? For example: "McDowell Homestead Razed by Blaze; Origin Unknown" Some newspapers do not use periods in headlines, so use that style, it must have a name. RAN (talk) 17:53, 15 February 2026 (UTC)

Isn't that what semicolons are usually used for? —Beleg Tâl (talk) 14:20, 16 February 2026 (UTC)

en:wikipedia:Semicolon#English covers the main use cases; I don't think there are specific names. For example, you can use them to coordinate clauses without the use of a coordinating conjunction; to combine two sentences; or to place between items in a list. The use you're describing is kinda a combination of those types; common to this type of "Headlinese". -- Mathmitch7 (talk) 16:46, 16 February 2026 (UTC)

Portal naming

Looking for suggestions about what to name a portal for books about exercise and fitness. Eievie (talk) 06:00, 16 February 2026 (UTC)

Portal:Fitness ? —Beleg Tâl (talk) 14:20, 16 February 2026 (UTC)

If people agree on that name, then it's fine. I was just sort of hesitant to name it that all alone because it seemed like a kinda modern phrasologly. Eievie (talk) 15:31, 16 February 2026 (UTC)

LOC Classification uses Exercise for RA 781 and LOC subject heading is Physical Fitness. MarkLSteadman (talk) 15:48, 16 February 2026 (UTC)

Thanks. If I have to pick between "Exercise" and "Physical Fitness", I think I'll go with "Exercise". Nutrition is also part of physical fitness, and that seems like enough of a different topic that it should probably be a different portal? Eievie (talk) 15:52, 16 February 2026 (UTC)

There's a woman name to fix

Here: A Cyclopaedia of Female Biography the wrong name "Scacrati-Romagnli, Orintia" should be fixed into the right one "Sacrati-Romagnoli, Orintia". I don't know details of your policy about moving pages/fixing links... Here the original warning into itwikisource scriptorium. Alex brollo (talk) 09:42, 16 February 2026 (UTC)

I find that's an original mistake into the source book. Here her wikidata id: Q126367424. Alex brollo (talk) 12:11, 16 February 2026 (UTC)

We match the original source text, you can add a {{SIC}} or {{Sic}} if you like to indicate the error. MarkLSteadman (talk) 15:39, 16 February 2026 (UTC)

I updated the page to include a {{SIC}} note on the transcribed page in pagespace and added a clarifying note the transcluded version. This is the standard for en.wikisource. I'll make a note in wikidata as well. Mathmitch7 (talk) 16:11, 16 February 2026 (UTC)

Orintia Romagnoli Sacrati

Hello, I've noticed an error: in A Cyclopaedia of Female Biography there is a link to "/Scacrati-Romagnli, Orintia/" but the correct name is "/Sacrati-Romagnoli, Orintia/" (this person on itwiki). I don't usually edit Wikisource and currently I don't have time to learn how to fix it, so I will appreciated if someone could do it for me. Thank you Una tantum (talk) 15:47, 16 February 2026 (UTC)

Ah, Alex brollo has already done the report, above. Una tantum (talk) 15:49, 16 February 2026 (UTC)

Tech News: 2026-08

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Weekly highlight

• The SRE Team will be performing a cleanup of Wikimedia's Etherpad instance, the web-based editor for real-time collaborative document editing. All pads will be permanently deleted after 30 April, 2026 – if there are still migration projects in progress at that point the team can revisit the date on a case by case basis. Please create local backups of any content you wish to keep, as deleted data cannot be recovered. This cleanup helps reduce database size and minimize infrastructure footprint. Etherpad will continue to support real-time collaboration, but long-term storage should not be expected. Additional cleanups may occur in the future without prior notice. [14]

Updates for editors

• The Information Retrieval team will be launching an Android mobile app experiment that tests hybrid search capabilities which can handle both semantic and keyword queries. The improvement of on-platform search will enable readers to find what they’re looking for directly on Wikipedia more easily. The experiment will first be launched on Greek Wikipedia in late February, followed by English, French, and Portuguese in March. Read more on Diff blog. [15]
• The Reader Growth team will run an experiment for mobile web users, that adds a table of contents and automatically expands all article sections, to learn more about navigation issues they face. The test will be available on Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Indonesian, and Vietnamese Wikipedias.
• Previously, site notices (MediaWiki:Sitenotice and MediaWiki:Anonnotice) would only render on the desktop site. Now, they will render on all platforms. Users on mobile web will now see these notices and be informed. Site administrators should be prepared to test and fix notices on mobile devices to avoid interference with articles. To opt out, interface admins can add #siteNotice { display: none; } to MediaWiki:Minerva.css. [16][17]
• View all 19 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, an issue on Special:RecentChanges has been fixed. Previously, clicking hide in the active filters caused the "view new changes since…" button to disappear, though it should have remained visible. The button now behaves as expected. [18]

Updates for technical contributors

• New documentation is now available to help editors debug on-site search features. It supports troubleshooting when pages do not appear in results, when ranking seems unexpected, and when you need to inspect what content is being indexed, helping make search behavior easier to understand and analyze. Learn more. [19]
• Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

MediaWiki message delivery 19:17, 16 February 2026 (UTC)

Portal or author?

I've started working on the Chicago Tribune issue that covered journalist Alfred "Jake" Lingle's death, but I'm not sure if I should make it a portal or author. Nighfidelity (talk) 21:17, 16 February 2026 (UTC)

If someone has written anything that was published in a place that we recognise as in scope, then they are an Author. Use the Works about xxx subheading on the Author page for published works that are about the person. The Portal: namespace in this context is only for people who have not had any in scope publications. Beeswaxcandle (talk) 21:30, 16 February 2026 (UTC)

Were any articles credited to him, do you know ? -- Beardo (talk) 23:01, 16 February 2026 (UTC)

Apparently, he never wrote any any of his articles according to this. Nighfidelity (talk) 12:25, 18 February 2026 (UTC)

Excerpts and works in Wikisource

Since we now have "works" that have been added from 1990s newspapers being kept under the idea they have no copyrightable expression, I felt like pushing back against this. WS:WWI says "Random or selected sections of a larger work are generally not acceptable." and "Wikisource does not collect reference material ... Some examples of these include Lists; Mathematical constants (such as digits of pi); Tables of data or results..." What is a death notice but a list of data? In fact, that is the argument for it not being copyrightable. We should not have tiny snippets of data from larger works included here as works on their own. Prosfilaes (talk) 05:31, 17 February 2026 (UTC)

•  Keep Here is the example: Commons:File:Ruth Eleanor Borland (1914-1990) funeral notice.jpg. The form has not changed much in 150 years, it is designed to be terse since it is a paid advertisement. It can be read to completion just like a news article, unlike a few paragraphs of a Dicken's short story. It is created by filling out a form at the mortuary by a family member, two people filling it out would provide the same output. Anyone can read it and understand the content. It isn't a bunch of numbers, or other raw data. We exclude data dumps because they need context that is not contained within the data. For example we might host a published book that has lapsed into the public domain on the number pi, that may also contain pages of the digits of pi. But the book would be giving context to why we have several thousand numbers. We already host a large number of government research publications with pages of data. The difference is that the research publications come with context/explanations/trends/conclusions/overviews for the data. A raw data file would not. --RAN (talk) 06:15, 17 February 2026 (UTC)

If two people filling out the form would provide the same output, it's raw data. No, the digits of pi doesn't "need" context, especially not compared to one random obituary. Everyone knows what pi is, many of us know that it's supposed to be normally distributed, etc. Yes, the research publications come with context, etc.; your obituary doesn't.

"It can be read to completion" has never been the standard for an excerpt. There are many excerpts that can be read to completion, but WWI still clearly forbids them. If you're saying it's a paid advertisement, WS:WWI also says "Wikisource does not collect advertisements that are not publications themselves."

I'm not a fan of tiny snippets being taken as stand-alone. We do that for poems sometimes, but poems at least are artistic works that have a clear distinct identity. You want to see an author's poems on their author page. Commons:File:Ruth Eleanor Borland (1914-1990) funeral notice.jpg I think shows the issue quite well; what do we gain by hosting this on Wikisource? It's fully transcribed on Commons and it's not adding anything to Wikisource.--Prosfilaes (talk) 07:24, 17 February 2026 (UTC)

• Lean  Keep too. As said before, I don't think that these funeral notices are necessarily extracts of larger works, but works in their own right, just like how a recipe in a cookbook could be considered its own work in some contexts (I've seen cookbooks where all the recipes were by different authors). Newspaper issues often have hundreds of articles (and we accept that each thing we'd call an "article" is its own work), often with very little there to distinguish what is and isn't an article, so with newspapers specifically it can be harder to distinguish "work" and "non-work". The notices are in prose form (even if just barely), so I don't think they're "lists" either. And the legal argument (in the US) for it being uncopyrightable is that it just contains basic facts—it says nothing about the form that those facts come in. SnowyCinema (talk) 07:05, 17 February 2026 (UTC)

Would we accept a recipe from a cookbook? I would argue against it; it's not a separate work. I generally tolerate newspaper articles as works for pragmatic reasons; they're really all part of one composite work, but that composite work is huge and tedious. Literary magazines consistently get stories from them published separately. For a book on poets, would we let the chapter on Henry Timrod be uploaded alone? If no, I don't see why we should let one death notice be uploaded alone.--Prosfilaes (talk) 07:24, 17 February 2026 (UTC)

If the "chapter" on Henry Timrod is actually an essay, then it's a work. I think in that case, keeping that chapter here only would be about the same as keeping "Four O'Clock" only. But if it's actually just a chapter (and thus not its own work) then yes, delete that IMO. SnowyCinema (talk) 15:27, 17 February 2026 (UTC)

• Dispose of Under the argument of extracts from larger works being presented as works on their own. We either bring in the entire containing work or none of it. That's what the extracts policy is about (acknowledging that there some exceptions written in that policy). The Chicago Tribune for 1990 is under copyright. The fact that a few snippets are not does not change the overarching fact. In essence, all we're doing by bringing in these few random tiny chunks of various random newspapers is replicating what can be obtained from Legacy.com. We're not giving these snippets any imprimatur of validity, unlike the principal work of Wikisource. Note that we're not even bringing in the whole section of Death Notices from an issue of a newspaper—just one or two notices. This is not in alignment with the purpose of Wikisource. I mentioned the exceptions earlier: I don't see how a single Death Notice from a newspaper meets the exceptions. Beeswaxcandle (talk) 07:08, 17 February 2026 (UTC)

We shouldn't be "replicating what can be obtained [elsewhere]". Isn't almost all we do replicating what is available at other transcription projects like Project Gutenberg and Project Runeberg and a dozen other projects performing digitization/transcription/formatting. The 1990 death notice in question predates Legacy.com, which began in 1998. --RAN (talk) 18:38, 17 February 2026 (UTC)

No, we don't replicate what the other projects have. We may end up proofreading the same works, which is an expected outcome. But we do not pick up what they have done and put it here. Our policy is no secondary sources, instead we must be doing fresh proofreading. For me, the fact that a Death Notice probably doesn't carry copyright with it, is not germane to the wider issue of it being an extract from a larger publication (or publications if the Notice was published in several issues or several different newspapers). Wrt Legacy.com, I understood that they were pulling in older notices and not just those that have been published since they commenced. I've certainly found notices from the 1950s there, so I have no reason to think that a 1990 notice would not be available. Beeswaxcandle (talk) 07:42, 18 February 2026 (UTC)

"We either bring in the entire containing work or none of it." Wouldn't this be an argument against "Four O'Clock" which was recently kept at CV, as that's a short story that appears in a collection that's otherwise copyrighted? And also against Toki Pona: The Language of Good? SnowyCinema (talk) 08:14, 17 February 2026 (UTC)

Note that saying it survived CV doesn't mean that it merits inclusion. Like I could upload a compiled computer program, we could argue about it's licensing but that is orthogonal to does it even belong here? And in general, yes it is an argument against inclusion, among other things it makes scan backing difficult, it should be listed as a subpage of it's parent work but the front matter of the parent work that would go there is copyrighted, etc. However, there are arguments to keep it, e.g. it has been reprinted later, the lag between creation and publication, the independent authorship and copyright, etc. MarkLSteadman (talk) 08:54, 17 February 2026 (UTC)

(Usually much or all of the front matter of a work is ineligible for copyright anyway) but yes, if we want to be consistent, we shouldn't allow "Four O'Clock" to stay either, because like the funeral notices which were admitted to have been reproduced on Legacy.com, "Four O'Clock" has been reproduced time and time again across formats since its 1940s release.

I would not agree with this, but I'm just pointing out that this is where BWC's argument appears to lead us to.

And I was not arguing that it being keepable at CV automatically meant it can be included here. What made it seem like I was? In fact if you look at what triggered this discussion, I made that exact point in reverse—that CV was not the place to discuss this, so I recommended it be brought here. (Well, to PD, but I guess this is okay too.) SnowyCinema (talk) 15:20, 17 February 2026 (UTC)

It doesn't necessarily, as I said there are arguments that might distinguish between them. And in general, it is likely that it won't be absolute clear rules: e.g. if the death notice was a clipping from an 18th century newspaper preserved somewhere and that is all that survived would that merit inclusion in a transcription of that newspaper? The main points of differentiation are:

• The type: things like independent copyrightable and textual nature of a short story as opposed to structured reference data or advertisements
• How the work describes it: e.g. is it listed in the TOC as an independent work or appendix vs. unlisted / or as a chapter
• The history: did it exist independently previously (e.g. is it a translation of an existing separately published work?)
• Broader recognition of it as a independent work: e.g. does it have a WP page or listed on WP as a work? Does it have independent ids on the Wikidata page (e.g. "Four O'Clock" is ISFDB #1053104)? Was it reprinted or cited elsewhere? Was it posted as an independent work in an archive or listing (e.g. a scan of just the newspaper clipping mentioned at a digitized library collection)?

While for Four O'Clock these tilt one way, for a death notice they generally tilt the other.

MarkLSteadman (talk) 18:58, 17 February 2026 (UTC)

I am okay with allowing "reference material", provided it's published in a manner that is otherwise acceptable under WS:WWI (and provided that the community agrees to update WS:WWI accordingly).—However, we should not be allowing extracts, unless they are entire works per se and the collection they are extracted from cannot be hosted in its entirety for other reasons (e.g. a PD work in an otherwise copyrighted collection). —Beleg Tâl (talk) 14:50, 17 February 2026 (UTC)

(Note: I have not investigated the obituaries in question, and have no opinion regarding whether or not they should be considered works per se) —Beleg Tâl (talk) 14:52, 17 February 2026 (UTC)

• Remember, not obituaries in these cases, but funeral notices. Although some obituaries may just be a rehashing of a funeral notice, and not contain any creative effort. --RAN (talk) 21:15, 21 February 2026 (UTC)

Rename Template:PD-US-periodical

The license tag {{PD-US-periodical}} is used to indicate that different parts of a periodical may have different copyright statuses. It does not indicate whether any part of the periodical is in the public domain in the US. For this reason, I think that the "PD-US" in the template name is misleading, and I'd like to suggest that this template be renamed to something else, such as for example Template:License-periodical —Beleg Tâl (talk) 16:05, 4 February 2026 (UTC)

(Moved from WS:CV in the hopes that this will get more attention here.) SnowyCinema (talk) 17:57, 17 February 2026 (UTC)

• I think -US is appropriate because date of publication—which varies greatly with periodicals, and is mentioned in the template—is only of relevance to U.S. law. TE(æ)A,ea. (talk) 03:24, 19 February 2026 (UTC)

How can I create a single epub document from a work that has multiple pages on Wikisource?

In a Wikisource page, you can click "Download" to get an epub version of that page. How can I download all of the pages of a work into a single epub document? Heyzeuss (talk) 12:28, 20 February 2026 (UTC)

I suspect https://ws-export.wmcloud.org/ is what you're looking for. In theory, selecting the epub option on the main/root page of the work will generate an epub file with all the subpages included, but I haven't tested it. —Tosca-the-engineer 17:48, 20 February 2026 (UTC)

Is there a specific book that isn't working properly ? -- Beardo (talk) 18:17, 20 February 2026 (UTC)

@Heyzeuss: If you are trying to export Signs and Wonders God Wrought in the Ministry for Forty Years: the table of contents does not comply with the Wikisource standard; each link should refer to a subpage of the main page (e. g. Signs and Wonders God Wrought in the Ministry for Forty Years/Chapter 2, not to a page (e. g. Page:Signswondersgodw0000wood.djvu/31). That's the reason why the export doesn't include the whole text. • M-le-mot-dit (talk) 19:03, 20 February 2026 (UTC)

Additionnaly the TOC from index is not included in the main page. --• M-le-mot-dit (talk) 19:07, 20 February 2026 (UTC)

Thanks for having a look. After checking out some books that ws-export does export properly, I found that they have a TOC on the main page of the work. This Woodworth-Etter book that I'm trying to export does have its own TOC, but not until after the preface and foreword. I added an AuxTOC to the main page, and now I can get it exported properly. It is messy to have two TOCs, but I'll have to accept it that way for now. Does anyone have solution that is better than having two TOCs? Heyzeuss (talk) 20:46, 20 February 2026 (UTC)

@Heyzeuss Depending on the length of the forward and preface, they can be transcluded on the main page, i.e. so that everything up until and including the printed ToC is transcluded on the main page. Regards, TeysaKarlov (talk) 21:02, 20 February 2026 (UTC)

That works better. Thanks. Heyzeuss (talk) 23:32, 20 February 2026 (UTC)

Tech News: 2026-09

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Weekly highlight

• Reference Check has been deployed to English Wikipedia, completing its rollout across all Wikipedias. The feature prompts newcomers to add a citation before publishing new content, helping reduce common citation-related reverts and improve verifiability. In A/B testing, the impact was substantial: newcomers shown Reference Check were approximately 2.2 times more likely to include a reference on desktop and about 17.5 times more likely on mobile web. [20]

Updates for editors

• The InterwikiSorting extension, which allowed for the sorting of interwiki links, has been undeployed from Wikipedia. As a result, editors who had enabled interwiki link sorting in non-compact mode (full list format) will now see links reordered. The links moving forward will be listed in the alphabetical order of language code. [21]
• Later this week, people who are editing a page-section using the mobile visual editor, will notice a new "Edit full page" button. When tapped, you will be able to edit the entire article. This helps when the change you want to make is outside the section you initially opened. [22][23]
• The Reader Experience team is inviting editors to assess whether dark mode should still be considered "beta" on their wiki, based on their experience of how well it functions on desktop and mobile. If the feature is deemed mature, editors can update the interface messages in MediaWiki:skin-theme-description and MediaWiki:Vector-night-mode-beta-tag to indicate that dark mode is ready and no longer considered beta.
• The improved Activity tab which displays user-insights is now available to all users of the Wikipedia iOS app (version 7.9.0 and later). Following earlier A/B testing that showed higher account creation among users with access to the feature, it has been rolled out to 100% of users along with some updates. The Activity tab now shows your edited articles in the timeline, offers editing impact insights like contribution counts and article view trends, and customization options to improve in-app experience for users.
• View all 21 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, a bug that prevented DiscussionTools from working on mobile has now been fixed, restoring full functionality. [24]

Updates for technical contributors

• The Global Watchlist lets you view your watchlists from multiple wikis on one page. The extension that makes this possible continues to improve. The latest upgrade is the inclusion of a new hook, ext.globalwatchlist.rebuild, which fires after each watchlist rebuild. This allows you to run gadgets and user scripts for the Special page. [25]
• Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

MediaWiki message delivery 19:03, 23 February 2026 (UTC)

Getting rid of BenchBot imports?

Context: BenchBot was a bot run by slaporte which in 2010-2011 imported 118201 mainspace page's worth of US Supreme Court cases from http://bulk.resource.org/ (relevant archive here), a website maintained by https://public.resource.org/index.html.

Having 100k pages copypasted by bot was hard enough, but the closer you get the uglier it looks. I think we should delete them: the imports were done quite sloppily and frankly given the size of it it's simply unmaintainable; little wonders like

[[Additional amendments to the United States Constitution#Amendment XV|[[Additional amendments to the United States Constitution#Amendment XV|[[Additional amendments to the United States Constitution#Amendment XV|[[Additional amendments to the United States Constitution#Amendment XV|[[Additional amendments to the United States Constitution#Amendment XV|[[Additional amendments to the United States Constitution#Amendment XV|[[Additional amendments to the United States Constitution#Amendment XV|[[Additional amendments to the United States Constitution#Amendment XV|[[Additional amendments to the United States Constitution#Amendment XV|[[Additional amendments to the United States Constitution#Amendment XV|[[Additional amendments to the United States Constitution#Amendment XV|[[Additional amendments to the United States Constitution#Amendment XV|[[Additional amendments to the United States Constitution#Amendment XV|[[Additional amendments to the United States Constitution#Amendment XV|[[Additional amendments to the United States Constitution#Amendment XV|[[Additional amendments to the United States Constitution#Amendment XV|[[Additional amendments to the United States Constitution#Amendment XV|Fifteenth Amendment]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]

(sometimes even worse, and often multiple per page), or

<nowiki>*</nowiki>  <nowiki>*</nowiki>  <nowiki>*</nowiki>  <nowiki>*</nowiki>  <nowiki>*</nowiki> 'Sec. 16. [...]

or this wonderful table

Population
County 
Hamilton............ 1682,027       1,    Kearney............. 1591,571       1,    Finney.............. ---3,350       3,    Gray................ ---2,415       1,    Ford.............. 3,1225,308       5,    Edwards........... 2,4093,600       3,    Pawnee............ 5,3965,204       5,    Barton........... 10,318       13,172      13,    Rice.............. 9,292       14,451      14,    Reno............. 12,826       27,079      29,    Sedgwick......... 18,753       43,626      44,    Sumner........... 20,812       30,271      25,    Cowley........... 21,538       34,478      30,156 
---------   ---------    ---------
104,793      186,552     178,

which renders like this:

Population County Hamilton............ 1682,027 1, Kearney............. 1591,571 1, Finney.............. ---3,350 3, Gray................ ---2,415 1, Ford.............. 3,1225,308 5, Edwards........... 2,4093,600 3, Pawnee............ 5,3965,204 5, Barton........... 10,318 13,172 13, Rice.............. 9,292 14,451 14, Reno............. 12,826 27,079 29, Sedgwick......... 18,753 43,626 44, Sumner........... 20,812 30,271 25, Cowley........... 21,538 34,478 30,156

---

--------- ---------

104,793 186,552 178,

are legion, with also occasional links here and there to of Amendment & This amendment, capitals for what probably should be smallcaps, etc.

And, cherry on top, this is from only skimming less than 0.5% of benchbot imports.

Someone took plaintext files and tried to make wiki pages out of it without supervision, which a) tends to be a bad idea and b) ended up quite badly.

These pages are a remnant of older times but are quite below standards for formatting, and especially due to the sheer volume impossible to take care of properly. We delete OCR dumps regularly, and this isn't much better.

Notice also in the table the ............. ---, which quite clearly shows that the source being relied upon was itself OCR or OCR-based. None of this was ever proofread as far as I can see. — Alien  3
3 3 20:57, 25 February 2026 (UTC)

Absolutely agree.  Delete all, and I'm glad someone's finally saying it. These pages are simply relics of another time, a time when dumping loads of content here was much more acceptable than it is now. We have a ginormous backlog of pages without scans that have all kinds of problems, just in general, and frankly they all make us look bad as a project. Getting rid of a nice chunk of them this way would be really nice. The proper way to get these pages onto Wikisource is to scan-back them. And there are already plenty of people working in the area of US and foreign law properly right now, and the fact of these being deleted would likely increase rather than decrease interest in doing this. Having pages not there that are important makes people want to add them, but having them already there in any form is a psychological barrier to that happening. So, in every measure, deleting these is a benefit. SnowyCinema (talk) 21:45, 25 February 2026 (UTC)

• I generally support this—a frequent issue I have faced, in scan-backing court cases, is that BenchBot has, for whatever reason, given the court case an incorrect title; so I have frequently had to move pages when I see them referenced in more modern court cases. (In addition, most of these should be under United States Reports, but they are instead top-level pages.) A problem is that many of them have been improved without being scan-backed, and I think it would be a waste to lose these; but it may be hard to identify them. I guess we could make a list of all pages created by BenchBot, and only edited by SDrewthbot (or something like that). This will still probably leave a lot of junk behind, but that should be a much more manageable backlog. TE(æ)A,ea. (talk) 22:28, 25 February 2026 (UTC)

I'll try and build a more detailed list of each of them, to get more precise estimates of how many were since proofread (I know a few have been, but when talking about something this size getting statistics is hard). — Alien  3
3 3 23:06, 25 February 2026 (UTC)

My only caution here after reading through the Talk pages for both BenchBot and slaporte is to be sure that enWP aren't linking to the pages here. There was conversation going on related to a wikiproject over there. Beeswaxcandle (talk) 06:09, 26 February 2026 (UTC)

• I'm a Wiktionary editor, and I often add links there to Wikisource court cases when I'm adding quotations. — excarnateSojourner (ta·co) 18:07, 27 February 2026 (UTC)

I've done the lists: of the ~50k non-redirect mainspace pages, I think about 1129 may have changed substantially. (If I did it right, the other 49k have only undergone minor corrections.) of these, 854 were worked on by Apt-ark or JoeSolo22 (to Apt-ark and JoeSolo22: ideally you should be proofreading based on an uploaded scan through an index page), two users proofreading cases based on the United States Reports, and as such can probably be safely kept; and 275 need a closer look. — Alien  3
3 3 16:10, 27 February 2026 (UTC)

Lints..

https://en.wikisource.org/w/index.php?title=Special:LintErrors/missing-end-tag&dir=prev&offset=6354830&exactmatch=1&tag=all&template=all&titlecategorysearch=&wpNamespaceRestrictions=0

Can someone else PLEASE work on clearing the remaining ones in namespace. It feels like I am doing it single handed at times :rage ShakespeareFan00 (talk) 00:04, 26 February 2026 (UTC)

The Guide for the Perplexed

There are a set of untranslated pages under a different title than the titlepage. Please just delete them; they don't need to be redirects.

• The Guide for the Perplexed (Friedlander)/Part I
• The Guide for the Perplexed (Friedlander)/Part II/Chapters
• The Guide for the Perplexed (Friedlander)/Part II/Propositions
• The Guide for the Perplexed (Friedlander)/Part III/Introduction
• The Guide for the Perplexed (Friedlander)/Introduction
• The Guide for the Perplexed (Friedlander)/Part III/Chapters
• The Guide for the Perplexed (Friedlander)/Translator's Introduction

Eievie (talk) 23:04, 26 February 2026 (UTC)

Index:Pentagon-Papers-Part IV. B. 5.djvu; a missing appendix?

United States – Vietnam Relations, 1945–1967: A Study Prepared by the Department of Defense/IV. B. 5. Notes makes references to an appendix, but the document has no appendix. the hasc edition on hathitrust also doesn't have an appendix. so, this is a long shot, but does anyone know where it is? ltbdl (talk) 15:23, 28 February 2026 (UTC)

Sheet music

Is it acceptable to just transcribe the lyrics and ignore the music - such as here Page:Yes We Have No Bananas score.djvu/3 ? Or should those pages be marked as problematic with {{missing music}} ? -- Beardo (talk) 18:18, 28 February 2026 (UTC)

Only transcribing the lyrics is an intermediate stage. The score should also be done. If such pages are not marked, then those of us who do scores won't know that they're needed. I wasn't aware of the missing music template and use {{missing score}}. As long as pages marked with either end up in the same category, then it's okay. Beeswaxcandle (talk) 18:30, 28 February 2026 (UTC)

Thanks. That was what I suspected. (The template that I linked is just a redirect to the other - sorry.) -- Beardo (talk) 18:37, 28 February 2026 (UTC)