Wikisource:Proposed deletions/Archives/2015-09

=Kept=

Three works uploaded by User:HectorMoffet
{{closed|Keep, consensus for delete not reached. There seems little doubt there is room for improvement, but replacement with higher quality work seems to be the consensus. Jeepday (talk) 11:44, 11 January 2015 (UTC) |text=
 * Agreed in all three cases.--Prosfilaes (talk) 21:02, 21 July 2014 (UTC)


 * Disagree in all three cases. Leave them there. They meet none of the criteria for deletion. Our job is to improve the entries. I too, like billinghurst, 'don't like the way they look', but users and editors should improve the aesthetically-challenged pages, rather than referring to them derisively, and marking for 'deletion'. Instead, a tag should be put at the top of each that informs that each of these 'need improvement'. Joe Hepperle (talk) 01:04, 11 August 2014 (UTC)
 * There's nothing aesthetic about the issues; they are miserable quality. If they're useful, we can produce them by the ten thousands in the time it takes to produce one quality work, one work that someone might actually read.--Prosfilaes (talk) 01:10, 11 August 2014 (UTC)


 * Regretfully, and to my detriment, I must admit that I can discern nothing that makes sense in what you just wrote. But yet, I'm sure you meant something. The misunderstanding most probably comes from me using my mother tongue, American English. In American English, the two phrases you used, "...nothing aesthetic about the issues..." and the phrase "...they are miserable quality...", are contradictory. In my dialect, the word 'aesthetic' carries a meaning of 'pleasing to the eye' (among other similar meanings). What word in your dialect would you use to mean that you "don't like the way it looks", or that it is "not pleasing to your eye"? Whatever that word is, that is the word I meant to use when I wrote that (Insert your dialect's word here for "it is not pleasing to your eye") is not a valid reason to delete these pages. Next (in my misunderstanding) is your beginning phrase, "If they're useful...". On researching what Wikisource is, I came across this sentence: "Originally conceived as an archive to store useful or important historical texts... it has expanded to become a general-content library" (at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikisource). In my dialect, the preceding quote describes a 'once existing thing', or 'state', that has now evolved into an 'other' thing, or 'state'. Are you of an 'Old Guard' who refuses to accept that Wikisource has "...expanded to become a general-content library" and, therefore, demands deletion of all submissions that are not "useful"? Or, am I dialectically deficient in not understanding that the phrase "...has expanded to become a general-content library" somehow actually means that it has not expanded, but rather that it remains as an exclusive archive solely for the storage of "...useful or important historical texts"? Then, you write that "...we can produce them by the ten thousands(sic) in the time it takes to produce one quality work". Please forbear my ignorance here, but who is "we", and what is the "them" that the "we" can produce by the tens of thousands? Why do you set out a mathematical equation, stating that the "time it takes to produce one quality work" is equal to the time that it takes "we" to produce "ten thousands" of "them"? User billinghurst wants to delete these three text sources because she doesn't like the way they look. There is no 'time' component in "...doesn't like the way they look". And, there is no Math problem to be solved in the phrase "...doesn't like the way they look". So, I'm confused (or maybe it's just my dialect) as to why my statement that "...'doesn't like the way they look' is not a valid reason to delete" would bring a response from you about time sequences and Math problems. Finally, I am reading these three texts (not all at the same time, of course). Your phrase, "...one work that someone might actually read" is moot now because I am 'someone', and I am reading these. If you are not reading these three texts, I question what business you have in this. These are electronic files, not paper from felled green-house-gas-fighting trees. Everyone would agree that what is posted now is the raw product of an OCR scan. Everyone would agree that the text needs to be proof-read for correctness and completeness. But what horse do you have in this race that makes you clamor for Deletion! rather than the usual method of improvement of the text? Second finally, I keep seeing the phrase, "delete and recreate from scans". What does that mean? Do you folks have the scans somewhere? Who is supposed to do this? Who has the scans? (forgot to sign) Joe Hepperle (talk) 07:28, 11 August 2014 (UTC)


 * To answer the questions of the last line. The Internet Archive has the scans in various formats (see Help:Internet Archive for details on this). To make them available here, we upload them to Commons and then create an Index page for the file (see Index:Civil Service Competitions.djvu for my most recent one). Once the Index file has been created, then wikisourcerors can clean-up the OCR and make it available in the Mainspace. e.g. Civil Service Competitions. Because this process will use the archive.org OCR'd scans in the side-by-side format, it makes more sense to "delete and recreate from scans", rather than try to clean-up the copy/paste version of the same text. Beeswaxcandle (talk) 07:51, 11 August 2014 (UTC)
 * Okay, thank you Beeswaxcandle. It all looks daunting, but I'll get to work on this in the upcoming week - at least a start on it. If I understand you correctly, these three texts, as they exist now, should be deleted, and I would start new pages on these, done as you have done in the links you provided? Joe Hepperle (talk) 08:12, 11 August 2014 (UTC)
 * Answered on your talk page. Beeswaxcandle (talk) 08:24, 11 August 2014 (UTC)
 * Hmm, I don't like being misquoted. My comment was not "because I don't like the way that they look." The purpose of this site is to put quality proofread works with a semblance of quality into some structured format. It is not the purpose of the site to dump ugly, scrappy text just because it is easy. — billinghurst  sDrewth  19:01, 13 August 2014 (UTC)
 * See aesthetic. The example sentence is even "It works well enough, but the shabby exterior offends his aesthetic sensibilities." I'm not familiar at all with any dialect of English that conflates "aesthetic" (looks pretty) with "high quality".--Prosfilaes (talk) 19:00, 11 August 2014 (UTC)

The Healing of the Nations
The work has been added as a copy and paste of a OCR'd scan from archive.org. With next to no text correction, page headings, in place, and not necessarily a good scan. I would feel that the work would be better to be deleted, and if to be resurrected it would be done with scanned image available at Commons. — billinghurst  sDrewth  11:48, 21 July 2014 (UTC)
 * Keep. Maybe I'm confused because I'm new to this. If you are saying that you are going to Improve these because You are going to recreate these from 'scans' that you have, then okay. But if this is just trick words to make this text source disappear from Wikisource, then Not Okay. I am reading these three texts! (not all at once of course). Help me understand here. Joe Hepperle (talk) 07:42, 11 August 2014 (UTC)

The American Revolution (scriptural style)
Copy and paste of archive.org OCR'd scan. Needs plenty of work, has not had page headers removed, etc. We would be better to restart and to do as a scanned version. — billinghurst  sDrewth  12:04, 21 July 2014 (UTC)
 * Keep. Maybe I'm confused because I'm new to this. If you are saying that you are going to Improve these because You are going to recreate these from 'scans' that you have, then okay. But if this is just trick words to make this text source disappear from Wikisource, then Not Okay. I am reading these three texts! (not all at once of course). Help me understand here. Joe Hepperle (talk) 07:42, 11 August 2014 (UTC)

The First Book of Napoleon
A work that is simply a copy and paste of the OCR scan of a work at archive.org. Contains all the headers, etc. It would be better to delete the work, and restart with scans. — billinghurst  sDrewth  12:24, 21 July 2014 (UTC)
 * Delete and recreate with scans. Although some half-dozen fixes were done to the text (in December last year) there's not enough to make it worth chopping-up and moving this text into the Page namespace. &mdash; Sam Wilson ( Talk &bull; Contribs ) &hellip; 04:27, 11 August 2014 (UTC)
 * I changed this to keep, because the page doesn't actually need to be deleted. The Index has been set up, and the page can be modified to use it. &mdash; Sam Wilson ( Talk &bull; Contribs ) &hellip; 06:33, 10 November 2014 (UTC)
 * Keep. Maybe I'm confused because I'm new to this. If you are saying that you are going to Improve these because You are going to recreate these from 'scans' that you have, then okay. But if this is just trick words to make this text source disappear from Wikisource, then Not Okay. I am reading these three texts! (not all at once of course). Help me understand here. Joe Hepperle (talk) 07:41, 11 August 2014 (UTC)
 * Not trying to trick anyone here! :) The only changes made to this text can be seen here, so it won't be hard to surpass that will proper scan-backed transcribing. The Index page is all ready to roll. &mdash; Sam Wilson ( Talk &bull; Contribs ) &hellip; 06:33, 10 November 2014 (UTC)
 * This work needs a lot of work done to it. I am not sure what scans are used for, but obviously each section should be given its own page with each description in the header. --Riadse96 (talk) 00:27, 9 November 2014 (UTC)

}}

In Thessaly
=Deleted=

Modern Italian authors
{{closed|deleted; modern living authors with little chance of works in the public domain|text=

All the above
A collection of modern Italian authors, most living, no works on Wikisource and no evidence of public domain or Free work available to put on Wikisource.--Prosfilaes (talk) 01:18, 25 July 2015 (UTC) }}
 * Delete all John Vandenberg (chat) 09:08, 20 August 2015 (UTC)

Importance of budget hotel in tourism sector
=Other=

Individual birth year categories: 2000 BCE - 1000 BCE
{{closed|No clear consensus this proposal initially had support than it generated conversation support and interest seem to have faded, A new proposal leveraging on lessons here, may be indicated. Jeepday (talk) 11:25, 11 January 2015 (UTC)|text= These categories are so sparsely used, they are useless for the purpose of grouping similar items, in this case cohort authors of a given year, together. Instead they serve to divide these ancient authors from each other!

If these author birthdates could be reduced to decades in which they were born, they could all be scanned by a reader who wants a population picture of the different authors of this era by means of the decade categories in about thirty seconds, but as it is, it takes about eight minutes to find them all. And I use the word "all" advisedly because so far we have three authors at the most listed in these thousand categories!

I think Pathoschild went overboard with this idea he came up with, and that the categories should deleted, and the "author" template tools used to place these and future ancient authors placed in their respective estimated decade categories. If we have a specific year, it can be put in the "notes" section of the Author: page. ResScholar (talk) 05:17, 25 September 2013 (UTC)
 * {{support}} Between these and the corresponding death year categories for the same period Special:UnusedCategories is unusable for maintenance. Only the first 5,000 items are listed there, sorted by ASCII, and we reach 2007 and run out. As a result any unused category beginning with a letter can't be monitored. I propose that the death year categories are managed in the same way. Beeswaxcandle (talk) 05:29, 25 September 2013 (UTC)
 * {{support}} I checked and there are two authors in the counterpart death year categories: Author:Hammurabi and Author:Suppiluliuma I.  ResScholar (talk) 06:32, 25 September 2013 (UTC)
 * {{support}} both proposals (birth and death). I would actually suggest removing the 1000 BCE - 500 BCE range as well.  I only found ten authors born in that period and 500 BCE would take us up to roughly the classical era.  (In fact, we could probably lose the decade categories too, and stick with centuries, or even one category each for pre-1000/500 BCE births and deaths.) - AdamBMorgan (talk) 17:36, 25 September 2013 (UTC)
 * {{support}} AdamBMorgan's view.--Mpaa (talk) 20:22, 25 September 2013 (UTC)
 * I disagree with Adam's proposal. I don't disagree with the spirit of Pathoschild's endeavor, and finding ten authors in a four minute search is not the same as three authors in an eight minute search.  More importantly, after 1000 BCE we start to have chronicles accurate to within a year of different cultures, particularly that of Israel.  By contrast, the pre-1000 BCE dates are only accurate to within 35 years at best (I just found out, except for King David) and present a misleading depiction of the accuracy of the birth and death dates.  We could finesse the situation and place the cut-off date for yearly categories at 800 BCE which would include everyone except some fragments by Assyrian, Babylonian, Egyptian and Chinese kings, whom admittedly it wouldn't hurt to lump together by decade, but I am all for keeping it as simple as possible and using a round number like 1000.  If we do want to lump the early authors together in some way, we could originate a 700 BCE and earlier "Prehistoric authors" category, which Pathoschild, the person who originated the "Ancient authors" category, suggested long before we got around to discussing the matter. ResScholar (talk) 21:21, 25 September 2013 (UTC)
 * More thoughts on this: Deleting the unused 500-1000 BCE birth and death years would help our users find the relevant authors in the grid displayed in each century.  But they would be user-unfriendly for newcomers who might be brave enough to introduce an author page for that era and then find their birth and death year categories red-linked and not know why.
 * I introduced a limited deletion in hopes of attracting interested parties in organizing these author "era" categories, starting with something we could all agree on and then discussing more involved issues in a larger forum like the Scriptorium. It turns out we did agree, Pathoschild himself stating he had no objection to the removal of the categories.  But I found the process getting carried away by Adam and Mpaa who had apparently thought about these issues even more than I had and, their imaginations being less limited than mine, thought they could summon interested parties and informally present consequent proposals in a single administrative action.  Holding the two processes separate in my thinking, I wasn't prepared to explain my reasoning very well when the time came, so I apologize if I fostered the impression that I was trying to arbitrarily direct the discussion.
 * But as for my second bullet point, although these same grids could also be used to aid in the speed of navigation of the 2000 BCE - 1000 BCE works as well, I think the inaccuracy of author birth and death years of that era that I eventually discovered still should override the continued existence of those years. And as I stated, I am of two minds about the unused birth and death years for the 500 BCE - 1000 BCE works, but think we should keep the used years, as I stated before, due to the accuracy of records from that era.
 * Moving forward with an observation, possibly for a larger discussion: The "Ancient authors" category has 290 items so this is what we could do:  We could allow users to add birth and death dates in the header template, have them appear automatically in their respective categories (either red-linked or pre-originated in the way we have it now).  And then WE go back and add a century category to group them by centuries as Adam suggested.  That would produce categories with (290 ÷ 11 centuries ≈ 26) an average of 26 authors per century.  And we could add an explanation in the century categories that the authors are double categorized and only very newly added authors would only be found in each century category's respective decade categories.  ResScholar (talk) 05:51, 3 October 2013 (UTC)


 * We definitely should be concatenating the BC birth and death categories by some means. I would think that anything that is BCE could be removed as an individual year, and then group by decade, century or millennium, whatever others consider appropriate. — billinghurst  sDrewth  05:31, 13 October 2013 (UTC)
 * I propose splitting the "Ancient authors" (though keeping the category), and you re-propose lumping the BCE categories! I think these philosophies deserve further explication because I expect opinions would differ on how best to keep these time categories organized.
 * I completed the 2000 BCE - 1000 BCE deletions today, so the topics that Adam broached can pursued without distraction. I combined them all into 2nd millenium BCE categories Category:2nd millenium BCE births, e.g. to keep them neat, and placed those categories in their respective Category:Births by century or Category:Deaths by century category, with a sort key to keep them first in the list.  I also added a 100 unit "decade grid" of each decade to the millenium categories, just as a century category sometimes contains a 100 unit "year grid".  The grid could use some neatening, but I wanted to wait in case I needed to undo.
 * I spoke vaguely about this and that year being a good boundary date for particular purposes. Billinghurst has joined the interest taken in reforming the categories, so I will get started in gathering the facts to which various sorting philosophies would be applied to help our fellow Wikisourceans decide for themselves what they think is the best way to proceed.
 * To not build suspense, my main concern with Billinghurst's proposal would be the loss of accuracy in the birth and death dates where a user places them on the author page. And if the author template could somehow be reworked to round the numbers automatically, we would still lose the birth time sequence at the very least of the three authors now shown in the 480s BCE authors category.  ResScholar (talk) 11:42, 13 October 2013 (UTC)
 * I am not proposing any change {{sc|to}} the author pages, just how we concatenate into the categories, so to the underlying template {{tl|author}}. There is already some coding and to me, if we look to manipulate anything that is BCE, we can probably get some better groupings. Too late for anything problem solving, just the abstract idea. — billinghurst  sDrewth  14:10, 13 October 2013 (UTC)
 * We don't need to be a drastic as I suggested above. It was only an idea.
 * There's no need to change author pages for any of this. The categorisation made by {{tl|author}} can be adjusted instead; I've been trying to make it smarter anyway.  The template {{tl|is year}} can return an appropriate decade or century as required. We just need to decide on a cut off. - AdamBMorgan (talk) 00:11, 14 October 2013 (UTC)
 * My suggestions are back to year zero, no change; 0-100BCE, ... 400-500 BCE; 500-1000BCE, 1000BCE+ ... KISS. This is based on that I have never even looked at any of the categories, and presuming that we are talking in the area of 100 to 200 authors. — billinghurst  sDrewth  11:02, 14 October 2013 (UTC)
 * You two's suggestions would spoil Pathoschild's "era" divisions. And they would deny a curious user's ability to "zoom out" by going to year cat then decade cat then century cat.  And they would cost precision in 480s BCE decade category and possibly others as I've already mentioned.  ResScholar (talk) 11:10, 15 October 2013 (UTC)
 * Then suggest a better grouping. Pathoschild's implementation is based on which factual source? And yes, it would destroy the zoom out functionality, and it would definitely spoil the worse drill down to emptiness which occurs in so many places. — billinghurst  sDrewth  03:31, 3 November 2013 (UTC)
 * Sorry I missed seeing your reply. The Library of Congress Classification uses 600 CE and 700 CE as divisions for Greek and Latin works respectively between ancient and later. Pathoschild couldn't have selected both, could he?  I don't know why he picked 1420 as mediaeval, but it's very close to the fall of the Byzantine Empire in 1453, which is a standard division between mediaeval and later.
 * I wanted to propose my suggested grouping (double categorization by both century and year), described above, in the Scriptorium, but it turns out from my account of each ancient century at the end of this section, that it looks like about a fourth of the ancient authors' birth dates aren't being placed in a century or year at all. Since one [or the only?] Maintenance of the Month for November is undated works, I was thinking of enlarging the Maintenance to include undated ancient authors.  However we accomplish the task, we can redo the tally, and I can do my proposal on the Scriptorium.  The tally seems necessary because it prevents conflicts that might arise from people making sweeping generalizations about the population of the categories.
 * I try to think ahead, and I had the idea of adding century cats to the mediaeval life dates as well. And the question of whether to do it collides with a third idea I had for improvement, that is of removing a lot of the mediaeval popes as authors (and consequently from birth and death date categories) that Sherurcij added a long time back, as it seems to be the case that a lot of them have no recorded writings.  This could be done fairly quickly by looking to see if any works are mentioned on each pope's Catholic Encyclopedia entry available here on Wikisource.
 * So I will check to see who is involved in doing the Maintenance of the Month and see if it's in any way convenient to add it. Otherwise I will start to work on them myself.  ResScholar (talk) 21:38, 5 November 2013 (UTC)

Facts about works to which categorization will apply
Civilization: Greece

Earliest date known to within about one year: 776 BCE Event of earliest date: First Olympic Games Earliest author known to within about one year: Solon Life years of author: 638 BCE-558 BCE

Civilization: Israel

Earliest date known to within about one year: 931 BCE Event of earliest date: Death of Solomon/Rebellion of under Rehoboam Earliest author known to within about one year: Solomon Life years of author: ? – 931 BCE

Notes: Authorship of various works is disputed, but usually not his existence. I was wrong about David’s death date being accurate to a year; Solomon’s reign was 40 years, which may be a figurative expression. Method of dating: The Assyrian Siege of Jerusalem (701 BCE) was dated from archeological studies of Assyrian documents Sennacherib’s Annals and applied to the event mentioned in three books of the bible and then back-dated back to Solomon’s reign according to the list of regnal years of the series of Kings of Judah.

Civilization: Assyria and Babylon

Earliest date known to within about one year: around 900 BCE Event of earliest date: none Authorship: See below

Notes: Chronology of the ancient Near East states “The chronologies of Mesopotamia depend significantly on the chronology of Ancient Egypt” and “around 900 BC, historical data, written records become more numerous once more, with the rise of the Neo-Assyrian Empire, enabling the certain assignments of absolute dates.”

The Assyro-Babylonian Literature article only shows one work after that time period by individuals significant to have their birth or death years listed: Babylonian Chronicles. These would have to be edicts by various Babylonian Kings after around 900 BC, if there are any actual quotation of edicts in these chronicles (I haven’t looked), often written centuries after the events they describe.

Civilization: Egyptian

Earliest date known to within about a year: 1069-525 BCE. Event of earliest date: Unlisted synchronization of chronology with known historical event from three years down to one year. Earliest author known to within one year: First tomb biography existing from that period after the above-mentioned event with life span described in terms of regnal years. Life years of author: ? - ?

Conventional Egyptian chronology states: “The dates of Dynasties 21 to 26 are from Kenneth Kitchen (1973), supplemented by Ian Shaw (2000). There is a 60 year discrepancy between the dates proposed by these two authors.”

The reference section speaks of three competing chronologies (high, middle and low) put forward by Kitchen, so I would guess the authors of the Wikipedia article must have picked the one that matches Shaw’s the best, and the 60-year discrepancy refers to the one that matches the worst. This guess is borne out by two dates listed side by side for Ramesses XI’s death date, used as the end of the 20th Dynasty (1072/1069 BC). So apparently about a three-year accuracy range is available at the 21st Dynasty which at some point or points tapers down to one year by the end of the 26th Dynasty in 525 BC, as there is no mention of date discrepancies in the article on the Persian invasion of Egypt.

Ancient Egyptian Literature only mentions tomb biographies as potential sources of author life dates after 1069 BCE.

Civilization: Chinese

Earliest date known to within about a year: 841 BCE. Event of earliest date: Exile of King Li of the Zhou Dynasty. Earliest author known to within one year: Authors in Classic of documents, such as Marquis Wen of Jin. Life years of author: 805-746 BCE

Note: See List of rulers of China for 841 BC date.

Civilization: Indian

Earliest author known to within one year: Aryabhata. Life years of author: 476-550 CE

Note: Earliest listed on List of historic Indian texts

[Addition: "List of historic Indian texts" doesn't include rock carvings, so I was able to find Ashoka of the Mauryan dynasty (304-232 BCE) who had the Edicts of Ashoka carved during his reign from 269 BCE to 231 BCE.] ResScholar (talk) 08:21, 18 October 2013 (UTC)

[Addition Arthashastra of the same dynasty is attibuted to Chandragupta Maurya (lived c. 350 - 283 BCE)] ResScholar (talk) 08:29, 18 October 2013 (UTC)

Civilization: Persian

Earliest author known to within one year Darius the Great. Life years of author: 550-486 BCE

Note: Behistun Inscription is the work.ResScholar (talk) 04:01, 16 October 2013 (UTC) Clarification: 18:07, 16 October 2013 (UTC)

Death century tallies will obviously be similar.

BCE: 10th, 0; 9th, 0; 8th, 3; 7th, 1; 6th, 7. BCE: 5th, 19; 4th, 14; 3rd, 13; 2nd, 9; 1st, 19. CE: 1st, 35; 2nd, 22; 3rd, 16; 4th, 24; 5th, 10. CE: 6th, 10, 7th, 24; 8th, 14, 9th, 7; 10th, 19, 11th, 28, 12th, 42.

ResScholar (talk) 06:49, 2 November 2013 (UTC)

Ancient Popes with no writings
In addition to mediaeval popes, I also found some popes from the Ancient era with no recorded writings:

[I updated this list on November 20th, comparing it with the Documenta Catholica Omnia website. Unfortunately, although this website does in some places speak to the authenticity of the writings of the early popes, in other places it offers no opinion. In order to positively discount the authenticity of a certain pope's writing, I have had to rely on explicit statements from the Catholic Encyclopedia, {nevertheless,} the absence of which {in the cases where a pope's alleged writings are not referred to as primary sources} suggests to me a lack of certainty on their part, rather than a positive endorsement of their authenticity; and that {to me} this {seeming} lack of certainty is also {ultimately the primary reason} why they did not mention these works as primary sources in each pope's Catholic Encyclopedia Entry.]

Linus Marcellus I

John I Sylverius

There are also some Ancient popes whose only recorded writings are spurious. These writings by other persons, well-meaning or otherwise, are attributed to the following popes:

Evaristus, Pius I, Urban I, Fabian and Lucius I. Also Felix I and Mark. Reclassified as works being spurious but not absent: Telesphorus, Zephyrinus and Anterus. Also Anastasius II

This covers 33 CE to 254 422  495 600 CE. I will continue to add more up to 600 CE while my day-to-day health keeps up, then finish the tally. ResScholar (talk) 09:47, 12 November 2013 (UTC) 07:41, 17 November 2013 (UTC) 12:44, 20 November 2013 (UTC)

Summary
Can one of the involved; summarize the outcome of this discussion? Jeepday (talk) 12:37, 2 February 2014 (UTC) }}