Help:Author pages

Page name
The name of the page should not include titles. The full name of the author is preferred, unless he/she is better known by a pseudonym—but if the author has multiple pseudonyms, the real name is the best choice. Use redirects for all alternative names (see below).

Author template
Use Author at the top of the page. The template as standard is used as follows: Other optional parameters can be added: The parameters' usage is explained in the template documentation.

Works by the author
Immediately following the author template there should be a section named "Works" which contains the list of the author's works with a link to the main page of the work. If the work was originally written in a language different to English, add the name of the translator with a link to his/her page.

If the author has written various types of works, use subsections in order to make finding a work easy.

Works translated by the author
If the author has translated works into English, list them in a subsection of "Works" with the name of the original author.

Works about the author
If there are works about the author on Wikisource, list them in a new section whose name includes "Works about" followed by the family name of the author.

Copyright tag
Authors should have a copyright tag, just like individual works, to indicate the status of their works. The most common copyright tags are:
 * If the author died over 100 years ago and their works were published prior to, use PD-old
 * If the author died more recently but their works were still published prior to, use PD/US
 * If any works were published after and before 1964 and their copyright non-renewal is confirmed, use PD-US-no-renewal
 * If any works were published between 1964 and 1996, use Pd/1996

With all of these templates except, if the year of the author's death is known, it can be added as a parameter to the template. For example:

See individual copyright tags for more information.

Authority control tag
Immediately after the copyright tag, please add a bare authority control tag. This tag allows the display of the available metadata and links through the web, predominantly to library systems.

Categories
The author template automatically adds categories about the initial letters of the family name, the period of life from the template data, and extracts from the corresponding Wikidata item for the author, the years of birth and death; and related information of occupation, affiliations, positions, awards, where they are configured. The copyright tag adds a category about the copyright status of author's works. Optional categories can be added manually. Add them as follows, using the name of the more specific categories you find in these category trees.

Hierarchy
Basic hierarchy of an author page is:

After creating the author page
Once you have done all that is specified above (where applicable), preview the page, verify that all works well, then save.

Author index
The author can be added to the appropriate sub-section of one of these lists:

Authors-A &middot; Authors-B &middot; Authors-C &middot; Authors-D &middot; Authors-E &middot; Authors-F &middot; Authors-G &middot; Authors-H &middot; Authors-I &middot; Authors-J &middot; Authors-K &middot; Authors-L &middot; Authors-M &middot; Authors-N &middot; Authors-O &middot; Authors-P &middot; Authors-Q &middot; Authors-R &middot; Authors-S &middot; Authors-T &middot; Authors-U &middot; Authors-V &middot; Authors-W &middot; Authors-X &middot; Authors-Y &middot; Authors-Z

N.B. Occasionally a new subsection will need to be created (e.g. Authors-Qk does not currently exist.) If you were to add such a new section, please don't forget to add a redirection page similar to: (The reason this is necessary is that the author presumes all these necessary links are present; omitting this step breaks the "Author index:" link on "Author:" pages.)

Wikidata
If the English Wikipedia has an article about the author, then the author almost certainly has a Wikidata item.

Therefore, look for such article:
 * If you find it, it will almost certainly have a "Data item" link in its sidebar. Click on it to access the Wikidata item and add the author page to its "Wikisource pages linked to this item" section.
 * If you do not find it, or it does not have a "Data item" link in its sidebar, search Wikidata for the item about the author:
 * If you find it, add the author page to its "Wikisource pages linked to this item" section.
 * If you do not find it, create a new item.

Author research
For numbers of authors and writers that Wikisource collects their work, we have found that often that tertiary citable sources are less available. So we encourage that identifying sources — be they primary, secondary or tertiary — are noted on author talk pages as finding aids for future researchers, or to enable data completion at Wikidata.

Authors with no known public domain or free texts
Most modern authors have no works in the public domain due to the long terms of copyright. In particular, any living author is highly unlikely to have any such works, unless they specifically licensed the work with a compatible license (e.g. CC-BY) and such a license is included in the original text or confirmed by OTRS.

Generally, author pages should not be created for an author with no known compatible works. A few very popular authors have pages, which are marked with copyright author to make this situation clear, because those authors are common places for people to add lists of copyrighted works. This is a defensive measure to prevent people repeatedly adding their works; it does not mean that all modern authors should all get such a page.

Disambiguation and redirects
If there are authors with the same name, the names of their pages should contain their birth and death years in the form after their name. In the disambiguation page, use disambiguation followed by links to each author's page.

Create a redirect at every author's alternative name. The text to use there is.

Where a page is part of a disambiguation set, we request that the respective author pages utilise the template similar to point back to the disambiguation page.


 * Example: Author:John Smith.

External help

 * Video tutorial about creating Author pages 4 min 52 s, 640 × 480 (49.27 MB)