User talk:MichaelPittman

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Welcome

Hello, MichaelPittman, and welcome to Wikisource! Thank you for. I hope you like the place and decide to stay. Here are a few good links for newcomers:
 * Help pages, especially for proofreading
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Have questions? Then please ask them at either
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I hope you enjoy contributing to Wikisource, the library that is free for everyone to use! In discussions, please "sign" your comments using four tildes ( ~ ); this will automatically produce your IP address (or username if you're logged in) and the date. If you need help, ask me on my talk page, or ask your question here (click  [ edit] ) and place  before your question.

Again, welcome! --Xover (talk) 08:00, 19 May 2020 (UTC)

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A Philosophical Inquiry Concerning Human Liberty (3rd ed., 1735)
Hi MichaelPittman,

On a related topic, I see you are transcribing text into both the Page:-namespace pages associated with Index:A Philosophical Inquiry Concerning Human Liberty (Foote).djvu and into the mainspace page A Philosophical Inquiry Concerning Human Liberty (3rd ed., 1735). The setup on Wikisource is a little complicated compared to other wikis: we start with a scan on Commons; make an Index: page that maps physical to logical page numbers; transcribe each page's content into individual pages in the Page: namespace; and then transclude the pages together into the main namespace for presentation.

In other words, once you're done transcribing the pages in the Page: namespace, you'll use code like  to transclude them together on A Philosophical Inquiry Concerning Human Liberty (3rd ed., 1735) for presentation. You can see an example of this here (the red links are pages that have not yet been transcribed, they'll disappear once that page is done).

See Help:Adding texts for more information, or feel free to ask for help at Scriptorium/Help or ask me directly (use in your message and I will get a notification). --Xover (talk) 08:16, 19 May 2020 (UTC)
 * Ah, I see from your user page that these are different editions. That's excellent: we do host multiple editions of a work if anyone is willing to put in the effort. However, in that case I'm going to have to ask you to please not transcribe the 1735 edition directly in mainspace. All works on Wikisource should be scan-backed so all you're achieving with that approach is to create extra work for others to clean up afterwards. Please upload a scan and create an index, and then migrate the extant text to its Page: pages. Let me know if you need assistance with any part of that (write your answer here on your talk page, and use and I will get a notification). --Xover (talk) 09:48, 22 May 2020 (UTC)
 * I have had to remove your personal notes from A Philosophical Inquiry Concerning Human Liberty (3rd ed., 1735) as they violate our policy on annotation. I am also increasingly concerned that you do not engage in discussion when contacted on your user talk page (i.e. here). Could you please indicate here that you understand how to use a talk page, and that you have seen the links to guidelines and policies I have posted above on this page? --Xover (talk) 17:36, 22 May 2020 (UTC)


 * I am glad to see your comments. My intention and spirit continues: comply with all guidelines and policies of Wikisource. I am a new person here, but editing Wikipedia pages is more familiar to me—nevertheless, I used the Wikisource templates. My agenda was to create an accurate transcript of the text of the difficult-to-read 1735 edition. To do that, I found editing in the mainspace easier, for me, than in the namespace, and it was expedient for my purpose. I have stopped, but I have finished my task of creating an accurate transcript that anyone can use.


 * I did not come to a decision about taking the approach you mention, that is, to work from the namespace (I wrote that others are welcome to do that and they might find my transcription work here very useful). So, is there an alternative to the namespace; are there works at Wikisource that did not begin there, like Wikipedia articles?


 * Communicating on this talk page has convenience, but it has disadvantages, such as being impersonal and fostering misunderstanding, etc. Kind regards. —Mike


 * Index:A Philosophical Inquiry Concerning Human Liberty (3rd ed., 1735).djvu . If you wanted to migrate your transcription. ShakespeareFan00 (talk) 19:31, 22 May 2020 (UTC)
 * Thank you for the reply Mike.Yes, I absolutely agree that purely textual communication tends to be impersonal and mutes important nuances. But it is the medium available to us, and for a collaborative and entirely volunteer-driven project it is essential that we make the best possible use of it. Wikis in general have quite a bit of a learning curve when you are new to them, and even for someone used to the basic technical properties from Wikipedia there are significant differences, not to mention the differences in purpose, culture, and practices between Wikipedia and Wikisource. That's the reason we patrol recent changes on the project and contact new contributors with links to documentation, guidelines, and policies; and attempt to guide and assist them in navigating those differences.I also see I need to apologise for casual use of fairly obscure technical terms. The term "namespace" here refers to "the bit before the colon" in some page names here, like " Index: A Philosophical Inquiry.djvu" or " User talk: MichaelPittman". The MediaWiki software (the software that runs these wikis) uses those "namespaces" to attach different behaviour, functions, and user interface to different pages. You're probably used to every article wikipage on Wikipedia having an associated talk page, which has the same name as the article with "Talk:" in front of it. "User:" means it is the personal page associated with a user account, and based on that the software knows that there are some things that only that user account is allowed to do. On Wikisource the special namespaces are the "Index:" namespace and the "Page:" namespace. Pages in the Index: namespace are automatically associated with a PDF or DjVu of a scanned book, and with a special user interface for displaying and editing information about that book. Wikipages in the (confusingly named) Page: namespace are associated (by means of the page list in the Index: page) with individual book pages in the scanned PDF, and present a user interface specifically for transcribing (what we call "proofreading") scanned pages. Every wikipage on MediaWiki-based wikis are in a namespace, but an article on Wikipedia is in the special "Main" namespace; and wikipages in this "main" namespace are displayed by the software without the namespace prefix. For that reason we tend to colloquially refer to it as "mainspace" (which is a term nobody will understand without an explanation). Here on Wikisource, "mainspace" is the final destination works: that's where we present them to readers once done. Stuff in Index: and Page: namespaces are more akin to the workshop where we prepare then until they're ready: the "behind the scenes" part in theatrical metaphor.There are indeed a lot of works here that started their life directly on pages in "mainspace", and works that are not backed by a scan. These, however, are from the time before we got the special functionality for the Index: and Page: namespaces that enabled the much improved processes for proofreading that are now the norm. We expend a lot of volunteer time on migrating these older works to modern standards, and so we would strongly prefer for new additions to not add to this years-long backlog: we want volunteer time to go towards adding new works, not fixing up existing ones. It's a lot more efficient to get it right when first added, than to go back and fix them afterwards.Which brings me to the reason I contacted you here to begin with, and why it is important to engage in such discussions even if the textual medium isn't optimal for it. There are a bunch of little things that aren't necessarily obvious when you're new to Wikisource, and I was hoping to be able to guide you so that you could get them right from the start rather than inadvertently contributing to the maintenance backlog. The biggest issue was to not work from a scan and using the process outlined in Help:Adding texts. But there are smaller issues too, such as using the  syntax to create headings, which is not the practice here (one difference from how Wikipedia does things), or not proofreading the pages in the 1890 edition.I am happy to help out with these things (as is the community here in general; see e.g. the Index: that  has set up for you above), but that does require communication. Albeit, hopefully, mostly somewhat shorter than this doctoral thesis-sized letter… :) --Xover (talk) 11:15, 23 May 2020 (UTC)
 * I appreciate your time and attention. I accept your apology—the clearest word to me is “workspace” from help. As far as communication here, I wasn’t thinking only about missed nuances, but about misrepresentation, posturing, and misunderstanding. I think brevity, positivity, not jumping to conclusions, avoiding black-and-white thinking, etc., are most helpful. I have stopped work on the 1735 and 1890 editions in the workspace; the 1890 edition is as far as I can go. Kind regards. —Mike (MichaelPittman (talk) 19:29, 24 May 2020 (UTC))
 * Would you like assistance migrating the existing text in A Philosophical Inquiry Concerning Human Liberty (3rd ed., 1735) (the "mainspace" page) to the individual pages in the Page: namespace associated with Index:A Philosophical Inquiry Concerning Human Liberty (3rd ed., 1735).djvu? --Xover (talk) 19:43, 24 May 2020 (UTC)
 * I appreciate the question. I do not have an answer as I do not plan to work on the 1735 further. The 1890 edition is ready for a ToC—if appropriate—and to be proofread. Kind regards. —Mike (MichaelPittman (talk) 01:52, 25 May 2020 (UTC))
 * I'm sorry to hear that you've given up on the 1735 edition. I realise all this fiddly stuff related to the technical requirements of the software and our community practices can be a bit discouraging when all you're really interested in is making a good transcription of the text itself. I can only assert that it all does make sense in a larger context, and hope that you'll find the interest to come back to it in time.I am glad, though, that you've not given up on the the 1890 edition. But here I think we've run into another of those issues of terminology use here on Wikisource that is somewhat impenetrable to new users. The work you've been doing transcribing and formatting the 1890 edition is what we call "Proofreading". I looked over some of the Prefaces and, at least at first blush, it looks like apart from some minor technical things the pages are essentially finished. And that means that in the little group of radio buttons at the bottom of the editing window that is currently set to "Not proofread", the page status should really be set to "Proofread". "Proofread" means that the person transcribing and formatting them (i.e. you) believe that they are finished and a good representation of the original. The next step after proofreading is "Validation", where a second person independently verifies the transcription against the scan. The Validation step should normally not entail a lot of changes, apart from the inevitable missed typo and other minor stuff. The concept is explained, in somewhat technical terms, on Help:Page status.In other words, you should go through the pages, and mark the ones you believe to be finished with the "Proofread" status. If there are any that you are not sure about, or need help finishing, you can leave them as "Not proofread" or mark them as "Problematic" and we'll help you figure them out.The one issue I noticed looking over the early pages is that you've placed chapter headings inside the "Header" text box on the editing page. Things in this text field will not be displayed to the reader when we present the work. The Header and Footer fields are for various (mostly technical) purposes, and for the repeating elements on a page (chapter and work title that repeats on every page, page numbers on each page, etc.). Chapter headings at the beginning of a chapter and other elements that should be displayed to the reader should not go into these fields, but stay on the main text field. I've demonstrated the necessary change in this edit. --Xover (talk) 06:28, 25 May 2020 (UTC)
 * I appreciate your attention, though I am finished with both editions, as far as I want to go. I did not find the Wikisource process discouraging and give up, nor have I lost sight of the bigger picture. On the contrary. I am happy with the work and I enjoyed the inputting and editing experience: I worked on the 1890 the "preferred way" and the 1735 the "other way" (q.v. Help:Reliability), and the text is accurate, which "is more important than the typography" (q.v. Help:Proofreading). Kind regards. —Mike (MichaelPittman (talk) 14:35, 25 May 2020 (UTC))

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The Philosophical Inquiry
Just to let you know… The 1735 and 1890 editions have now been migrated to the "workspace" structure and proofread, and the results published where readers can find them. The author page at Author:Anthony Collins (1676-1729) now has a single entry for this work, that links to A Philosophical Inquiry Concerning Human Liberty. This page is a "versions page", which is how we deal with multiple editions of the same work. On the versions page are listed the two editions A Philosophical Inquiry Concerning Human Liberty (1735) and A Philosophical Inquiry Concerning Human Liberty (1890).

I've tried to make as few changes as I could, but some were inevitable. I hope you find the result to be to your satisfaction.

Regards, --Xover (talk) 19:07, 26 May 2020 (UTC)

I am glad to receive your update. What I've seen in the changes is well done, including the clear organization, the new ToC added to the 1890 ed., the fleurons and side margins on the 1735 ed., etc. It looks highly readable and usable. Kind regards, —Mike (MichaelPittman (talk) 06:36, 27 May 2020 (UTC))