User talk:Rajcelem

Beeswaxcandle (talk) 18:02, 25 August 2021 (UTC)

The Urantia Book, specific style ideas
Hi! I noticed you've been working through The Urantia Book 1st edition for quite some time. I noticed it's accumulated a lot of inconsistent stylistic conventions over its many years here and several editors (e.g., curly versus stick quotes), and also some things that are not aligned to WS:STYLE (e.g., applying the Georgia font styling as a div element). User:Beeswaxcandle has been helping me understanding this all better; this user is clearly a senior editor here.

Would you mind looking over my attempt to codify editorial conventions for this work at Index talk:The Urantia Book, 1st Edition.djvu and edit/discuss there?

Thanks! Brad606 (talk) 21:18, 26 September 2023 (UTC)


 * Hi! Yes, styling definitely needs to be improved.
 * I was waiting for more experienced editors to take care of such stylistic coordination, thanks! Rajcelem (talk) 16:31, 12 October 2023 (UTC)
 * Great! Glad to be working on this with you. I'm hardly more experienced here at WS, but I do know this work quite well. Still learning all the templates and conventions here, so by all means contribute anything to the formatting conventions I've drafted. Happy editing. Brad606 (talk) 20:49, 12 October 2023 (UTC)
 * Hi. I see you've changed the page 1553: https://en.wikisource.org/w/index.php?title=Page:The_Urantia_Book,_1st_Edition.djvu/1553
 * For me, the status can be changed to "Proofread", which I do for previous editions.
 * What else needs to be changed to make the status "Proofread" correct? Rajcelem (talk) 18:12, 26 October 2023 (UTC)
 * Hi! Yes, I used a semi-automated tool to review up through text page 1516 and correct some common things like hyphenation across linebreaks, "quotation marks," etc. I stopped after this page because it looks like basic proofreading and formatting hasn't yet occurred past that point quite yet. On this particular page you asked about, the automated review cleaned up some things. But I was moving quickly and didn't want to actually declare pages as proofread until someone looked at it more carefully.
 * Looking at this one page carefully, I'd say I see two things:
 * I think it calls for an extra blank line before the paragraph that starts "War on Urantia will never end..."
 * Notice how in the original scan there's a larger space between this paragraph and its preceding one. Gaps like this are used throughout this work to convey breaks in thoughts.
 * In Wikitext this is easily accomplished using an additional linebreak (there are other approaches like dhr but at least one senior editor said he prefers the simple two-linebreak approach)
 * Senior editors here (I'm not one of them!) seem to prefer all unnecessary linebreaks removed from the wikitext, even though leaving them there does not harm how the text is displayed.
 * That is, the original OCR softwarer put an extra "return" at the end of every line, to match the original text page. To see an example where all of these have been removed, see the wikitext for text page 2069.
 * This is a lot of manual work. There's a tool that can automate it. If you copy, from User:Brad606/common.js lines 6 through 25 into your own User:Rajcelem/common.js, in the editor you'll get a new option on the left side called "Clean up OCR," which will do a great job removing all these linebreaks if you just click it.
 * However, you still have to watch this tool carefully. If a hyphenated word breaks across a line that is supposed to be hyphenated (e.g., "self-governing"), it will remove the hyphen (e.g., "selfgoverning"). In theory, I already reviewed all hyphenation across linebreaks up through text page 1516, but of course I could have missed something.
 * Brad606 (talk) 15:48, 27 October 2023 (UTC)
 * I leave line breaks because it's easier to compare word by word with original text, when columns are aligned. I plan to remove them for pages with "Validated" state on next pass for whole text. Along with the style fixes you suggested. Thanks for explanations. Rajcelem (talk) 17:20, 11 November 2023 (UTC)
 * Sounds like a great approach. I'll do the same as I proofread and validate. Brad606 (talk) 13:03, 13 November 2023 (UTC)
 * FYI, I've been working through proofreading of Part IV, starting at the end of the book and working backward in groupings of papers. If it's just you and me working on this, I expect we'll meet somewhere in the middle! All your edits are looking great, and I'm glad to be collaborating with someone on this. Merry Christmas! Brad606 (talk) 18:00, 23 December 2023 (UTC)
 * I completed the proofreading stage today. Thanks for working with me on this! I'd love to keep working on validation. One thing that's helped me out is listening along to the free audiobook as I proofread (and now begin validating). I'll be removing linebreaks as you suggested during validation, and looking for any formatting oddities. Brad606 (talk) 23:04, 21 January 2024 (UTC)
 * Great job, thank you.
 * What you think about this page, hyphens should be removed, like in current version?
 * https://en.wikisource.org/w/index.php?title=Page:The_Urantia_Book,_1st_Edition.djvu/1387&action=edit Rajcelem (talk) 19:07, 22 January 2024 (UTC)
 * Thanks. Yes, I agree with your decision to remove the hyphens. Enjoy validating! Brad606 (talk) 20:56, 22 January 2024 (UTC)