Wikisource:Scriptorium

SpBot archives all sections tagged with {{section resolved|1=~~~~}} after 3 days and sections whose oldest comment is older than 30 days.

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: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)

Done — Alien  3
3 3 11:39, 5 March 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)

fixed was a rather complicated issue due to mw:strip markers. — Alien  3
3 3 12:48, 5 March 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)

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)

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. [2]
• 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. [3]
• 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. [4][5]
• 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. [6]
• Two new wikis have been created:
  • a Wikipedia in Jju (w:kaj:) [7]
  • a Wikipedia in Nawat (w:ppl:) [8]
• 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. [9]
• 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. [10]

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. [11]

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. [12]
• 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. [13][14]
• 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. [15]

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. [16]
• 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. [17]

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. [18]
• 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. [19][20]
• 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. [21]

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. [22]
• 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)

I have been trying to help - though I don't always understand the syntax.

On multiple page transclusions, is there any easy way to work out where the problem is?

Do you know why these works are appearing now, with errors that seem to date back years? -- Beardo (talk) 05:05, 4 March 2026 (UTC)

On point 1. By using <synatxhighlight lang="wikitext" inline=yes>mw.loader.load('//ja.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User:MawaruNeko/ShowPageLintError.js&&action=raw&ctype=text/javascript'); </syntaxhighlight> in your common.js. which add a test box on edit pages. You can them narrow down the page range for investigation.

On point 2. Sheer amount of Lints, mean that as more are cleared more can be shown. ShakespeareFan00 (talk) 21:05, 4 March 2026 (UTC)

Remaining (high to mid priority) : https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Special:LintErrors/html5-misnesting https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Special:LintErrors/fostered https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Special:LintErrors/stripped-tag

(low) https://en.wikisource.org/w/index.php?title=Special:LintErrors/missing-end-tag&offset=5583858&exactmatch=1&tag=all&template=all&titlecategorysearch=&wpNamespaceRestrictions=1%0D%0A1729%0D%0A1728%0D%0A829%0D%0A828%0D%0A711%0D%0A710%0D%0A102%0D%0A103%0D%0A101%0D%0A100%0D%0A15%0D%0A14%0D%0A13%0D%0A11%0D%0A10%0D%0A12%0D%0A8%0D%0A9%0D%0A6%0D%0A7%0D%0A4%0D%0A5%0D%0A2%0D%0A3 ( These are mostly pages I can't fix as they are protected.) https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Special:LintErrors/obsolete-tag https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Special:LintErrors/stripped-tag

ShakespeareFan00 (talk) 21:05, 4 March 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)

• So Goin' Home (1922) should be marked as problematic, right? TE(æ)A,ea. (talk) 13:32, 2 March 2026 (UTC)

  Why ? Isn't all the score transcribed there ? -- Beardo (talk) 17:57, 2 March 2026 (UTC)

  There's no score transcription done there. It's been done by superimposing the text on an image. The text is not searchable this way, so I'm not sure that there was any advantage gained. Beeswaxcandle (talk) 18:12, 2 March 2026 (UTC)

  @Jan.Kamenicek ? -- Beardo (talk) 04:36, 4 March 2026 (UTC)

  I am following the discussion and will accept any community verdict about Goin' Home (1922). Unfortunately, I am not able to use the score extension, so I at least tried to proofread it that way. However, I understand the points raised by Beeswaxcandle too. --Jan Kameníček (talk) 12:26, 5 March 2026 (UTC)

  Being pragmatic, as the pages of Goin' Home are usable in their current state, I suggest that they are manually put into Category:Texts with missing musical scores without using {{missing score}}. That way, they can stay in the Proofread state until a Lilypond person has time to render the score. The fact that they're in the maintenance category, will indicate that they need attention. Beeswaxcandle (talk) 07:17, 6 March 2026 (UTC)

Category:Newspapers of New York City

I moved Category:Newspapers of New York City to Category:Newspapers published in New York City to harmonize it with the other categories, will the newspaper titles be automatically migrated, or do I do it by hand? RAN (talk) 06:30, 2 March 2026 (UTC)

There is no automatic migration between categories. If it's only a few entries, then move them by hand. If it's a larger number, make a request at Bot requests. Beeswaxcandle (talk) 18:07, 2 March 2026 (UTC)

Tech News: 2026-10

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

• Wikipedia 25 Birthday mode is now live on Betawi, Breton, Chinese, Czech, Dutch, English, French, Gorontalo, Indonesian, Italian, Luxembourgish, Madurese, Sicilian, Spanish, Thai, and Vietnamese Wikipedias! This limited-time campaign feature celebrates 25 years of Wikipedia with a birthday mascot, Baby Globe. When turned on, Baby Globe is shown on ~2,500 articles, waiting to be discovered by readers. Communities can choose to turn Birthday mode on by getting consensus from their community and asking an admin to enable the feature and customize it via community configuration on the local wiki.

Updates for editors

• Sub-referencing, a new feature to re-use references with different details has been released to Swedish Wikipedia, Polish Wikipedia and a couple of other wikis. You can try the feature on these projects or on testwiki and betawiki. Learnings from the first pilot wiki German Wikipedia have been published in a report. Reach out to the Wikimedia Deutschland team if you are interested in becoming a pilot wiki.
• Paste Check will become available at all Wikipedias this week. The feature prompts newcomers who are pasting text they are not likely to have written into VisualEditor to consider whether doing so risks a copyright violation. Paste Check tags all edits where it is shown for potential review. Local administrators can configure various aspects of the feature via Special:EditChecks. Research across 22 wikis found that Paste Check resulted in an 18% decrease in relative reverted-edits compared to the control group. Translators can help to localize this and related features.
• The Reader Experience team will be standardizing the user menu in the top right for all mobile users so that it is closer to the desktop experience. Currently this user menu is only visible to users with Advanced Mobile Controls (AMC) turned on. The only change is that a couple buttons previously in the left-side menu will move to the top right for users who do not have AMC turned on. This change is expected to go out March 9 and seeks to improve the user interface. [23]
• Starting in the week of March 2, the emails sent out when an email address was added, removed, or changed for an account will switch to a substantially nicer and clearer HTML email from the prior plaintext one. [24]
• Notifications are currently limited to 2,000 historic entries per user, and extend back to 2013 when the feature was released. This is going to be changed to only store Notifications from the last 5 years, but up to 10,000 of them. This will help with long-term infrastructure health and help to prevent more recent notifications from disappearing too soon. [25]
• The Global Watchlist which lets you view your watchlists from multiple wikis on a single page continues to see improvements. The latest update improves label usage experience. The extension now allows activating the language fallback system for Wikidata items without labels in the viewed language, and showing those labels in the user’s preferred Wikidata language if no uselang= URL parameter is provided. [26][27]
• The Wikipedia Android team has started a beta test of hybrid search on Greek Wikipedia. Hybrid search capabilities can handle both semantic and keyword queries enabling readers to find what they’re looking for directly on Wikipedia more easily.
• For security reasons, members of certain user groups are required to have two-factor authentication (2FA) enabled. Currently, 2FA is required to use the group, but not to be a member of it. Given that this model still has some vulnerabilities, the situation will gradually change in March. Members of these groups will be unable to disable last 2FA method on their account, and it will be impossible to add users without 2FA to these groups. Users will still be able to add new authentication methods or remove them, as long as at least one method is continuously enabled. In the second half of March, users without 2FA will be removed from these groups. This applies to: CentralNotice administrators, checkusers, interface administrators, suppressors, Wikidata staff, Wikifunctions staff, WMF Office IT and WMF Trust & Safety. Nothing will change for other users. See the linked task for deployment schedule. [28]
• View all 27 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, the issue preventing users from creating an instance in Wikibase.cloud has now been fixed. [29]

Updates for technical contributors

• To help ensure fair use of infrastructure, over the next month the Wikimedia Foundation will implement global API rate limits across our APIs. In early March, stricter limits will be applied to unidentified requests from outside Toolforge/WMCS and API requests that are made from web browsers. In April, higher limits will be applied to identified traffic. These limits are intentionally set as high as possible to minimise impact on the community. Bots running in Toolforge/WMCS or with the bot user right on any wiki should not be affected for now. However, all developers are advised to follow updated best practices. For more information, see Wikimedia APIs/Rate limits.
• The Wikidata Query Service Linked Data Fragment (LDF) endpoint will be decommissioned in February. This endpoint served limited traffic, which was successfully migrated to other data access methods that were better suited to support existing use cases. The hardware used to support the LDF endpoint will be reallocated to support the ongoing backend migration efforts. [30]
• The new Parsoid parser continues to be deployed to additional wikis, improving platform sustainability and making it easier to introduce new reading and editing features. Parsoid is now the default parser on 488 WMF wikis (268 Wikipedias), now covering more than 10% of all Wikipedia page views.
• The process and criteria for requesting exceptional access to the high volume feed of the Wikimedia Enterprise APIs (at no cost for mission-aligned usecases), have now been published. This is to provide more thorough and clearer documentation for users.
• Tech Blog, the blog dedicated to the Wikimedia technical community will be migrating to Diff, the community news and event blog. The migration should be complete in April 2026, after which new posts will be accepted for publishing. Readers will be able to access posts – old and new – on the landing page at https://diff.wikimedia.org/techblog.
• 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 17:51, 2 March 2026 (UTC)

Rotate templates

There are three templates whose aim is to enable rotating the text: {{rotate}}, {{transform-rotate}} and {{rotate text}}. Do we need all of them? Could they be merged? -- Jan Kameníček (talk) 23:03, 2 March 2026 (UTC)

• This is really only two templates—{{transform-rotate}} doesn’t work on its own, and serves as the background code for {{rotate text}}. (The code for both is fairly simple, however, so it should be simple to combine the two and delete {{transform-rotate}}.) As for the specifics, {{rotate text}} (through {{transform-rotate}}) uses transform:rotate, while {{rotate}} uses -webkit-transform:rotate;-moz-transform:rotate;-o-transform:rotate;-ms-transform:rotate;transform:rotate. I only use {{rotate}}. TE(æ)A,ea. (talk) 00:34, 3 March 2026 (UTC)

There's also {{vrl}}/{{vlr}}, which if I recall correctly are better as far as vertical text is concerned, because they take care of spacing and avoid overlaps. — Alien  3
3 3 10:08, 3 March 2026 (UTC)

A Dark Night's Work

I refer to the current PotM, and the fact that there exists A Dark Night's Work which is a standalone version of the title story. Should that be left where it is ? Or moved to a disambiguated page to all that page to become a versions page ? -- Beardo (talk) 23:53, 2 March 2026 (UTC)

• A Dark Night's Work should be moved to A Dark Night's Work (1863 book), and A Dark Night's Work turned into a versions page with the 1863 book, (1863 serial, and) 1890 version, with the 1890 collection as a see also (the proper title of which is A Dark Night's Work and Other Tales). TE(æ)A,ea. (talk) 00:34, 3 March 2026 (UTC)

  That was my feeling. Any other views ? -- Beardo (talk) 04:36, 4 March 2026 (UTC)

Category:Early modern authors

Currently, Category:Early modern authors defines the early modern period as 1631–1899. This is out of line with standard definitions of the early modern period, which the Wikipedia article says "is variably considered to have ended at the 18th or 19th century (1700–1800)". It is defined in Module:Era, taken from Module:Date, which added this feature in 12 January 2017, but the logic behind it, including the year 1899, seems to be much older, as seen in this discussion from 2007. Would anyone object to changing this to reflect a more typical definition of early modern? --Yodin^T 14:38, 3 March 2026 (UTC)

I would. Modern and early modern is pretty ambiguous, and many of our readers may not be thinking in terms of the definitions you give. Given that even when suggesting changing it, you leave an ambiguity of a century, that implies that the lines aren't going to be clear even to those who do think along those lines.

Our current system is bad, I think, and I don't think tinkering with it is going to do any good. It's

Category:Ancient authors: 700BCE–600, which says it follows the prehistoric period; in actuality, we include authors like Author:Hammurabi (c. 1810 BCE – c. 1750 BCE) in it. It has 755 authors in it.

Category:Medieval authors: 601–1420. Lumping the dark ages in with the High Middle Ages is interesting, but sure. 888 authors.

Category:Renaissance authors: 1420-1630. Note that it includes the start of the Early Modern Period as given by Wikipedia, which is 1500, and I don't know why 1420 or 1630 was chosen. It's 210 years and 1,608 authors.

Category:Early modern authors: 1631-1899, or 268 years. 35,571 authors.

Category:Modern authors: 1900- , or currently 126 years. Moving Early Modern back to 1800 makes it a mere 168 years, and modern 226 years, and 1700 makes modern 326 years. I'd say that the more recent an era is, the more the narrow the focus should be. Modern has 24,341 authors in it.

If we want to change it, I think we should just go with centuries, at least since 1500. The line between Early Modern and Modern isn't clear, but the line between 20th century and 19th century is much clearer. Move Medieval to 601-1500, and make 1501-1600, 1601-1700, 1701-1800, 1801-1900 and 1901-2000, and 2001- century categories. Or even 1901-1950, 1951-2000 "early" and "late" 20th century categories. In any case, Modern Authors does not need to be any bigger than what it is.--Prosfilaes (talk) 05:59, 4 March 2026 (UTC)

I would support switching to centuries instead of the current approach. It does seem to have been a very arbitrary set of choices, made in the early days of Wikisource. --Yodin^T 10:52, 4 March 2026 (UTC)

Most of our current system is modeled on the LoC cataloguing system, though the choices of date and grouping for authors in the above set of date categories is not. The LoC categorizes modern authors by century, so we should probably do so as well. Looking at their categorization of European literature, there is a period from 1500-1700 grouping for most western European countries, though of course this period does not necessarily have meaning in Asian countries. Switching to centuries can work for authors from the Renaissance forward, but will not work well for Ancient and Medieval authors. Additionally, I suggest we would need to establish clear choices for authors whose birth and death years are across century boundaries. For example, an author born in 1790 is unlikely to be an 18th-century author, since few authors publish works by the age of 10. --EncycloPetey (talk) 12:43, 4 March 2026 (UTC)

Certainly, I was not proposing moving the earlier categories to centuries, though we'd need a clean century end-line; we could either move Renaissance to 1600 or 1700, and drop it all together and run medieval to 1500.

We do have authors that published that young, like Author:Daisy Ashford, all of whose important work was written in the 19th century. On the flip side, Author:Laura Ingalls Wilder was 65 when she was first published and Author:Anna Sewell was 57. Short of keeping track of first publication, I figure it's probably best to continue to include all authors alive in the 19th century in that category (now Early Modern, then 19th century) without worrying about whether they were really authors.--Prosfilaes (talk) 10:21, 5 March 2026 (UTC)

 Comment Can we not just get rid of the entire thing? What utility do these categories even have? People all across the board disagree about what counts as "ancient" or "modern". I'd say on a hunch that it seems far more useful to sort by actual decade, century, millennium, etc. than with this framing. We also could sort by things that are much more unambiguously agreed to be "eras", like the Gilded Age or the Great Depression for example (but of course, there's still debate even within those). SnowyCinema (talk) 21:39, 4 March 2026 (UTC)

For example, if you asked someone in 1920 whether they thought 1895 was part of what they'd consider the "modern era" compared to, say, 1810, I think they'd be in unanimous agreement that it was, because they had living understanding of what came before and after. Wouldn't we think so, as regular readers of their texts? So the framing of "modernity starts at 1900, pre-modernity ends at 1899" seems problematic just for that reason alone. SnowyCinema (talk) 21:41, 4 March 2026 (UTC)

And we can make all kinds of arguments about when "modernity" started, that are all arbitrary, and it really depends on what you philosophically consider "modern". Some people would genuinely consider pre-Internet life to be not modern. So that would put the start of modernity around the early 90s at best. What about cars being the starting point, or nuclear weapons being the starting point, or the countercultural revolutions of both China and the West being the starting point? Industrialization being the starting point? It's all up in the air and it depends on your interpretation, and also where you're starting from. Why is it our job to define "modern" in any sense? SnowyCinema (talk) 21:44, 4 March 2026 (UTC)

 Comment Sorting ancient and medieval authors by decade, or even by century, would make finding them nearly impossible; they would be too sparsely distributed. I'm also unsure how we would sort Authors by decade. Using "eras" like the Gilded Age would apply only to literature in some languages in certain limited parts of the world; it would not be a universally applicable designation like centuries. --EncycloPetey (talk) 22:41, 4 March 2026 (UTC)

For one, they are useful as base-level categories for our Author pages. If someone is looking for an author, and isn't sure what English form of their name we're using, they can often spot it by using categories. I do this regularly at other-language Wikisources when I desire to know which classical authors they have and which they do not. --EncycloPetey (talk) 22:43, 4 March 2026 (UTC)

For modern specifically it seems problematic on so many levels. The 1899–1900 year cutoff seems bizarre given the continuity between the 1900s (decade) and the 1890s. The scientific progress narrative, the early automobiles, the early film evolution, the fashion, the gender roles, the political climate, the average writing style, the education system, the racial norms, everything. All of that was essentially a continuum between the two decades, not a cutoff. I don't know enough about the ancient world to comment too much on it, but the 1899–1900 cutoff is a specific point that I think a lot of writers from our typical early 20th century time period would have fervently disagreed with. Would they not have called 1895 "modern", in the historiographical sense, in 1930? The categories would be arguably more defensible if "early modern" at least included pre-industrialized or barely-industrialized life and stopped somewhere around the time industrialization started, like about the time that Karl Marx was alive and writing about it (to critique it from the perspective we all know). This is a problem with the categories that I've had for a while but haven't gotten around to writing it out as a concern. SnowyCinema (talk) 07:52, 5 March 2026 (UTC)

Re: "the continuity between the 1900s (decade) and the 1890s", where does this continuity exist? Is that statement equally applicable in Spain, Greece, Japan, and Persia? Any boundary will be unsatisfactory somewhere, but dividing by century is the way that the Library of Congress is doing it. Matching their system makes the two inter-compatible. --EncycloPetey (talk) 20:51, 5 March 2026 (UTC)

Default index progress

Should we change the default proofreading progress status for new indexes to "Not proofread" instead of "Pagelist needed (to verify file is complete and correct before commencing proofreading)"?

I think that we should: it mostly serves to confuse new users with a big red warning. I don't think there's anyone creating an index that a) understands this warning and b) needs it. — Alien  3
3 3 15:33, 3 March 2026 (UTC)

Wouldn't the change also confuse new users, by leading them to believe that they can start proofreading before checking the pagelist? —Beleg Tâl (talk) 17:54, 3 March 2026 (UTC)

Depending on what you mean by "checking the pagelist":

• if you mean checking the whole file to see if it has missing pages etc: I, and I think a certain number of people, don't do that completely before starting to proofread because it's a hassle and issues can be fixed later with not more work; also "verify file is complete and correct" is not a very clear instruction (from my perspective at any rate)
• if you mean making a pagelist: probably they don't know how to do that anyhow

(Also, in changing the default option we'd probably remove the "pagelist needed etc" from the options.) — Alien  3
3 3 18:08, 3 March 2026 (UTC)

I mean making a pagelist - and if they don't know how to do that, then it seems to me that we should link them to Help:Pagelist rather than encouraging them to proofread without doing the pagelist first. At the very least, there should be some sort of flag to indicate to more experienced users that the pagelist still needs to be done. —Beleg Tâl (talk) 18:23, 3 March 2026 (UTC)

By the way, I do hear you about checking for missing pages - but there's a difference between (one page is missing and I didn't notice when I uploaded) vs (this scan only includes half of the work but I didn't realize this until I was nearly done), and I think that the pagelist requirement is more helpful in avoiding the latter case than it is unhelpful in the former case, if that makes sense —Beleg Tâl (talk) 18:25, 3 March 2026 (UTC)

So what would be the difference between "Not proofread" and "To be proofread" ? I don't see any major problem with what is there now - but if you think it excessive, why not just have "Pagelist needed" ? -- Beardo (talk) 04:41, 4 March 2026 (UTC)

The current system serves to alert newcomers that an Index needs some examination prior to proofreading. There are a lot of instances where someone set up an Index to a scan without doing the slightest bit of checking to determine that pages are mostly there, in the right order, and don't have severe scan issues. Setting up a pagelist prior to proofreading is also what allows the running header templates and PAGENUM to properly add the page numbering. Reducing this to a statement that the Index isn't proofread removes that information. --EncycloPetey (talk) 12:49, 4 March 2026 (UTC)

Match index to filename

File:The Gentlewomans Companion.pdf was renamed to File:The Gentlewomans Companion, 3rd ed.pdf. Index:The Gentlewomans Companion.pdf needs to be renamed to match. Eievie (talk) 22:56, 4 March 2026 (UTC)

Done — Alien  3
3 3 11:36, 5 March 2026 (UTC)

Pagelist not including all the pages in the scan

Where a scan has several blank pages at the end, is it acceptable to omit those from the pagelist? Or should the pagelist include everything in the scan? -- Beardo (talk) 05:01, 5 March 2026 (UTC)

Everything in the scan must be in the pagelist. See the green box at Help:Index pages#The Pagelist tag. Beeswaxcandle (talk) 05:57, 5 March 2026 (UTC)

Thank you - that was what I suspected but I could not see where it was stated. -- Beardo (talk) 15:05, 5 March 2026 (UTC)

OCR tool worked yesterday, but not today

Has something happened to the OCR tool or the support around it? It is not returning text today, though it was doing so yesterday. I merely get a popup notice whenever I try, which tells me that no text was returned. --EncycloPetey (talk) 20:54, 5 March 2026 (UTC)

Erm. It's a long story, but essentially today a WMF engineer unwittingly loaded a malicious script on their account, which caused a great lot of havoc. The wikis were put on read-only for an hour of so this (UTC) afternoon, and when editing was enabled again they temporarily disabled most javascript. We should get it back somepoint soon. — Alien  3
3 3 21:18, 5 March 2026 (UTC)

Actually, on OCR specifically, I was wrong, that's not the issue. The problem is actually what the WMF was working on when it caused this whole havoc, which is CSP restrictions (Content-Security-Policy). Essentially, it forbids connection to ocr.wmcloud.org which well means no OCR. I've reached out to see how we can fix this. — Alien  3
3 3 22:03, 5 March 2026 (UTC)

Update: OCR is back. (JS isn't.) — Alien  3
3 3 22:19, 5 March 2026 (UTC)

Cleaner look of the newspaper indexes

Nice job on the newspaper indexes via the header template. The index looks much cleaner by removing the name of the newspaper in each title. RAN (talk) 23:26, 5 March 2026 (UTC)

Index rename

Index:A brief argument against the present law-pages-deleted.pdf needs to be matched to File:Peter FitzGerald; A brief argument against the present law affecting marriage with a deceased wife's sister.pdf Eievie (talk) 01:47, 6 March 2026 (UTC)

Another issue - Page:Womensmeasuremen454obri.djvu/105

https://en.wikisource.org/w/index.php?title=Page:Womensmeasuremen454obri.djvu/105&action=edit

Why is the edit text area hear appearing at a 'silly' size? ShakespeareFan00 (talk) 13:29, 6 March 2026 (UTC)

• The size of the edit box is determined by the height of the image. The height of the image, in turn, is determined by the width of the image, which is set per browser. Because the image is so wide, the resulting height of the image is very small, thus creating an almost unusably small text edit box. TE(æ)A,ea. (talk) 04:58, 7 March 2026 (UTC)