User talk:52 Pickup

Hello, 52 Pickup, welcome to Wikisource! Thanks for your interest in the project; we hope you'll enjoy the community and your work here.

You'll find an (incomplete) index of our works listed at Works, although for very broad categories like poetry you may wish to look at the categories like Category:Poems instead.

Please take a glance at our help pages (especially Adding texts and Wikisource's style guide). Most questions and discussions about the community are in the Scriptorium.

The Community Portal lists tasks you can help with if you wish. If you have any questions, feel free to contact me on my talk page! John Vandenberg (chat) 13:40, 22 April 2008 (UTC)

p.s. you dont need to "check" this talk page. In Special:Preferences you can ask Wikisource to notify you when someone modifies this talk page.

It helps us if you let us use this talk page, as it keeps discussions local, which occasionally comes in handy when trying to find people who have discussed a page. John Vandenberg (chat) 13:40, 22 April 2008 (UTC)

mirror eggs
"mirror eggs" - that made me chuckle.

You may want to take a look at Translations. We prefer official or published translations, but there are many time where a published translation cant be found, or are protected by copyright. But, we dont let preferences get in the road of letting people have fun. for example there is a published English edition of Max Havelaar, but some guys wanted to do their own, so we have one: Max Havelaar (Wikisource).

We have recently started stipulating that all unpublished translations must be clearly marked as "Wikisource" translations, but we have a large number of works lurking around without proper attribution, such as Rome and Jerusalem, which may have been published, but could also have been translated by en.WP admin User:Humus sapiens. I just found this one in Category:Works originally in German. Published translations will look like Christianity As Mystical Fact, although hopefully the translators name is a blue link :-) ideally we want Author pages for all translators so that we can verify that the translator is sufficiently deceased that their works are in the public domain.

Portal:Australia is our local "Portal", and we are currently collaborating on an adopted Australian, Author:John Gould. Where possible, we try to obtain page scans of the works we include, so the text can be verified easily. see Page:Gould - Mammals of Australia - Vol III.djvu/2 for an incomplete page, and Gould's Birds of New Guinea for a short journal article that only needs a little proof reading before it is finished.

As an aside, are you aware the an Australian chapter of Wikimedia is being incorporated? If you are interested, see Wikimedia Australia.

This rabbit hole is deep. All the way back to The Garden of Eden. John Vandenberg (chat) 15:02, 22 April 2008 (UTC)

I've never thought of proposing that CITE or RS mention Wikisource, but in practise, I am often trying to coerce Wikipedians to upload their sources onto Wikisource, for accessibility reasons. Not surprising, WP:QUOTE mentions wikiquote. I think you are onto something here!

One thing to keep in mind with Wikisource translations : the original must be public domain, or assumed to be unrestricted based on our best knowledge of U.S. case law. This means that Wikisource is of little value to a large component of Wikipedia editors who are not editing topics which have historical sources that are still respected, and/or editors unwilling to grapple with copyright. In time, Wikisource will have copyright documentation as extensive as Commons, but right now, contributors usually need to know more of copyright than can be expected of volunteers (unless they deal with PD-1923/PD-old-100 works, which again -- isnt of much interest to many editors).

Perhaps a good place for you to start is by adding to Wikisource all of the PD works mentioned on Flag of Germany; that way you are working with documents you are already familiar with, the FA becomes even better, and as it is a FA, more links to Wikisource from it will bring in more readers, which we can hopefully convert into editors.

Of the sources, three stick out as primary candidates for being extremely desirable for Wikisource (i.e. each of these could be a Featured text because of the importance of the documents.)


 * Constitution of the North German Confederation
 * Constitution of the German Empire (dont be comforted by the blue link; it is one of the many texts that really should be tagged with translator? - I almost did a few months ago, but I couldnt bring myself to do it)
 * Constitution of the Weimar Republic

I've not replied in full, but I'll cut off at this point, and come back to your remaining points later this eve. John Vandenberg (chat) 10:52, 23 April 2008 (UTC)

Treaty on the Final Settlement with Respect to Germany
I have made a few changes to Treaty on the Final Settlement with Respect to Germany, in order to demonstrate how the text can be placed "onto" the images; at the moment only djvu files are supported, so I converted your PDF to a DJVU using Any2DjVu. Feel free to undo any changes you dont like; the changes were primarily to demo the software so that you can make use of these features when you please. John Vandenberg (chat) 01:25, 27 April 2008 (UTC)