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Happy New Year!

See here Here's looking forward to spreading a lot of free culture in the new year. What is your roadmap for 2017? What are you looking forward to here? —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 09:14, 31 December 2016 (PST)

news/updates?

could somebody "in the know" please post what is happening with the sign-ups problem?

also, what happened with ectiology?

& how does that affect site ownership, administration, etc.?

plus whatever other news there is?  :)

(btw still waiting for a fix on the max upload/pdf problem from 2 yrs ago... )

best, in any case

Lx 121 02:03, 1 January 2017 (PST)

"thanking"

btw;

maybe we should consider importing the "thank an editor for their edit" feature from wikipedia?

i know it's a very small community here; but it wouldn't hurt to have it.

& if we have any plans to grow the community in the future, it'd be very useful in fostering that.

Lx 121 02:06, 1 January 2017 (PST)

some other midiawiki fixes/updates/features it would be nice to have:

1. bigger max file upload size; at least a little bigger. 2mb isn't enough for .pdf's, & it is pretty small for photos, tiny for any audio or video.

2. wider range of accepted file types. i couldn't even upload a .txt file version of a story; we should be covering all (major) doc/text formats at least.

makes it easier for downloading content to users as well

3. would be nice to get the latest features for "hotcat"; esp. the ones that "guess" the category you are looking for; re: capitalisation & spelling.

best, Lx 121 07:36, 5 January 2017 (PST)

OK. To find unswer for yours questions read: Wikilivres:Community_Portal/en/Archive_2015#User:Eclecticology is deceased and see some previous topics on the page. We don't have possibility to change anyfhing here, at this moment because nobody have acces to the server. Electron ツ ➧☎ 14:53, 6 January 2017 (PST)

HotCat Yes, unfortunately, we have lost the person who was heading up the site--User:Yann was evidently in contact with this family but of course, that is a sensitive matter and it may take awhile before anyone is back in charge of the background technical issues. (For instance, the site has stopped sending me emails when something on my watchlist has changed. Have other users experienced this?) The good news is that if you want HotCat, you can easily import it. You can copy User:Koavf/monobook.js to User:Lx 121/monobook.js if you'd like. If other users want HotCat added to the site, I think that I can edit the common.js file to add it. Not sure about thanking though--that will probably require a newer version of MediaWiki. —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 11:44, 7 January 2017 (PST)

Page for technical issues

Name? I am thinking about making a page for technical issues/bug/wishlist for features. Do you have suggestions for the name? For now, I will just make Wikilivres:Technical requests. —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 11:45, 7 January 2017 (PST)

deletion appeal

yesterday, i uploaded "The Complete Works of Ian Fleming", story-by-story.

(i had to do it that way, because the filesize & page size limits on this wiki would not allow me to upload it in one "go"; either as a file, OR as c&p text.)

this work took HOURS; as i had to manually select EACH block to text to c&p. AFTER discovering that pages on this wiki WILL NOT SAVE PROPERLY if their size is >1,000,000 bytes.

since the one of the admins on here decided that they didn't like the page, & DELETED EVERYTHING

instead of fixing it, reformatting, creating separate pages, or, etc.

in fairness: the admin claims that 4 of the short stories were published posthumously, & are therefore not PD.

(the copyright page on the professionally released epub however made no mention of this: "This title is in the public domain in Canada and is not subject to any license or copyright.")

but that leaves 14 novels, 5 short stories, & 1 novel-length collection of essays.

ALL OF WHICH this editor decided to remove.

(NOTE THAT: the stories were separated into PAGE SECTIONS; one story per section. such that, it would have been EASY to move the blocks of text into separate pages, to delete ONLY the claimed-infringing items, etc.)

BUT this admin chose instead to delete everything, & sent me a note telling me to DO IT ALL OVER AGAIN.

only in a way that would take me even longer.

ADDITIONALLY, both the user's actions & their comments clearly indicate that the person did not EXAMINE the page before deleting it.

LITERALLY: the admin did not even scroll down to the bottom of the page before deleting it.

(a careful examination will reveal what they "missed")

& did not read the messages i left on their talkpage (this was BEFORE the deletion situation; we were both working on the ian fleming stuff, & i was responding to some edit comments the user had made) informing them of the upload.

i am NOT pleased about this,

& i will not be spending additional hours of my time, RE-uploading all the text.

IF some admin on here wants to un-delete, & use the material, move it, reformat it, whatever; then fine.

i would like to receive credit as the uploader, ifso.

ifnot, then wikilivres can get the material from somewhere else, or do without.

to quote a friend of mine, "i have done my loving duty by you guys", & what you do next is up to you.

i can always find another place to upload, or start my own "PD bookshelf".

i'm sorry if this isn't very "friendly",

BUT

you spend 1/2 a day on some VERY tedious uploads, & related technical probs with the wiki;

you "stick it out", until it's done;

then you come back the next day, to find out someone else has DELETED IT.

see what it does for your agf & "goodcheer".

i'm not declaring my resignation, but i don't "need" to be here either. so if we have come to a "parting of the ways", then so be it.

...& there is no way in HELL that i am going to spend another 6 hours manually selecting text section-by-section to c&p & upload here ALL OVER AGAIN.

from THE SAME BOOK i already finished uploading.

to demand that is disrespectful of, & a waste of, my time.

i'm probably not going to be back here for a while after this, so y'all go figure out what you want to do; let me know how it turns out?

Lx 121 09:43, 24 January 2017 (PST)

Deletion It's good for us to be vigilant about copyright but it's also not necessary to immediately delete a file that is mostly within our scope. It looks like the admin in question and you have been in contact and I will happily work with the two of you. He's a good editor here and elsewhere and wants to make this site better, so I hope that we can all do just that. I understand being frustrated but let's see if we can take a step back and let cooler heads prevail--assume good faith, work together, and plan on how we can collaborate. —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 11:02, 24 January 2017 (PST)

• comment: hi. just to be clear this was not a file. this was a page with about 900,000 bytes of text (2 novels' worth, plus the title page & table of contents). selected for c&p in sections, by hand (which is EXTREMELY tedious, fiddly work) from a big, long .txt file made from the original epub.

the admin could have easily removed JUST the suspected "non-pd-because-of-posthumous-1st-publication" material, & left the rest intact.

in total, i uploaded ~8 million bytes of text, split into 8 pages (7 of which the deleting admin didn't even notice yet; because they DIDN'T BOTHER TO SCROLL DOWN TO THE BOTTOM OF THE 1st PAGE before deleting it).

i am NOT going to do all of that work over again; much less chapter-by-chapter, which would be ~100+ sections of the text to find & hand-select for c&p, & then set up as separate pages on here.

you can salvage the uploaded text from the deleted page (& the 7 other pages the deleting admin didn't even notice when making their administrative "decision") or not.

the page is broken down into sections; 1 section per novel or story. that should be fairly easy to work with, if you want to move it elsewhere.

if you do, that would give our website pretty close to a complete collection of Ian fleming's PD published works. the only things missing would be various essays & magazine articles by the author; all the novels & major stories were included.

either way, i am done with uploading ian fleming here. i spent ~6 HOURS dealing with it yesterday; between converting the file, technical probs on the wiki here, SLOW c&p, processing, & page-loading times on here, do-overs, & all the fiddly hand-searching of the very large .txt file for c&p to wikilivres. i have started a pd ebook blog, & the original epub of ian fleming's works is posted there.

on this wikiproject i am either moving on to other authors, or i am taking a wikibreak; maybe both.

best, Lx 121 12:10, 24 January 2017 (PST)

In my defence, for the past four days I have been away on holiday. I had to use the hotel's one public computer. Each time I visited a different web page (not just a site, a page) that page got automatically translated into Chinese and I had to keep clicking on "show original" again. That made wiki editing very difficult. I am also an admin on nine different wikis, the subject matter of three of them makes them potential targets for vandalism and another one gets lots of good faith edits of a very poor quality that have to be corrected. So I try to check all of them every day. I had been out all day and it was quite late at night by the time I got round to checking the wikis on the day that I deleted the page. It is true that I didn't scroll all the way down and see all of what was on the page that I deleted. Given its title, and the fact that it started with a full table of contents, I assumed that the whole book was on the page. After I had deleted the page, I saw that there were other Complete Ian Fleming pages. But by then I was really tired and wanted to go to bed. I thought I could undelete it the next day. But that day, there was no internet access at the hotel all evening.

I know what it's like to spend a long time doing something only to have somebody say, "That's not what we want." I am sorry for any hurt I have unintentionally caused.

However, building a decent wiki takes time and cannot be rushed. I would expect the process of uploading all of Ian Fleming's works to take several years. I would not expect it to be done in a day. I still think that the only way to add his novels here is chapter by chapter. Adding a chapter or two a week for a couple of months would be fine by me. Each novel would have a contents page with a link to every chapter. And then that page could be linked to from the Wikipedia page about each novel and a potentially much larger number of readers would come here. Simon Peter Hughes 02:49, 26 January 2017 (PST)

What's next? Lx 121, as you can see, Simon had a reasonable explanation and the content has been restored. As he's pointed out, though, it's still pretty haphazard and needs some work. Do you think we can move forward from here? Sometimes we can forget the human element behind all of this work--there's another person at a screen who knows how many miles away who is doing this work. And in this case, I think both of you were trying to be helpful and also made some missteps. We all do. What can we do to make Wikilivres better? —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 21:36, 26 January 2017 (PST)

*reply -- HI; busy last-part-of-the-week, sorry. will have time to spend on here tomorrow (hopefully). fine @ explanation, good @ restored. i have no "commitment" to the present format & layout of the material; it was just the most convenient way of getting it "up", given the present technical limitations of our site. if i could have uploaded the epub (size limit problem), i'd have just done that, & moved on to the next thing. do not have any objections to moving the texts around, reformatting them, etc. i just bring 'em back to the village; you guys can slice & dice them however you like. just please don't waste good, "clean copy", useable text, & then ask me to "do it all over again"? (especially when it's something that is a pain to uplaod) that is VERY frustating(!) best regards, Lx 121 06:55, 27 January 2017 (PST)

In fact I still do not understand what is the matter here. You uploaded obviously a very huge unformated pages, without consulting the community here; why to consult? it not only here but in all such projects like wikisource absolute unusual to upload such files. And then, as I understand (and as I saw), you are expecting that somebody will formate it here. This is unusual as well. It is normal that other user do help in some points and correst this odr that. But I think a text, fully unformated, and in this size that probably loads too long (if), is nothing usefull for people who would like to read it. Simon, as I can see, did apologize it. So we schould find a way now what we can do with it. In another way. Cheers -jkb- 15:22, 27 January 2017 (PST)

HI i'm not sure if i understand your comment? but: i find texts for public domain (in canada) literature, i upload them here; you can do whatever you want with them, after that.

i'm sorry, but i'm not interested in doing all the mark-up stuff & page-creation & other fine-tuning to make it "pretty"; i'm just not interested in spending my time working on that, or mastering those skills.

i didn't come here from wikisource, i came from wikipedia. & if i feel like doing something that involves "focussed concentration" & working more directly & in detail with text, i'll just go & edit there; or sort items @ wikimedia commons. or work on my own writing.

in the limited time that i have available to work "here", i'm here to find digitised texts of PD books & get them online.

especially stuff that's newly-PD; because i feel that it is important to protect public domain rights, by asserting them.

the e-texts i do "bring back" here are or will be, to the best of my ability to find them, accurate/"faithful" & "clean" copy of the original work.

& it is not "unformatted", in the sense that it has full punctuation & paragraph & chapter breaks (as per the style of the original text).

what it doesn't have, is "wikisource"-style layout, formatting, & markups.

from what i can see in the logs, i seem to be one of the biggest providers of new text-material on here, at least english-language text.

we now have more of ian fleming than gutenberg.ca does; & i uploaded the narnia series here months before gutenberg.ca had them online.

& i have & can find lots more material.

but if my contributions to the community are unwelcome or unwanted, i can find someplace else to upload it.

i do think this little project has potential, but the project is is VERY small & rather "moribund"; & we really need to sort out the ownership & hosting future of the site, asap.

we also need to figure out our "role" in the canadian PD/open source/free culture "scene"; vis a vis gutenberg.ca, etc.

my "take" has been that we should try to get as much material up as possible, as fast as possible (while maintaining basic quality control); focussing on stuff that is not uploadable @ wikisource (to avoid redundancy); so therefore "things that are public domain in canada, but not in the USA".

AND i think we should try to get as much of the "newly" PD stuff up as we can, as soon as we can, after the latest year's worth of authors "graduate" into the public domain.

& then we can make those texts all "pretty"; formatted & laid out in wikisource-style.

btw: i haven't really looked, but do we have any "tools" for end-users to DOWNLOAD complete texts from wikilivres?

by that i mean: to compile a complete set of pages making up the text of a complete book (or whatever), laid out in wikisource-style; & turn that "pile of stuff" into one download for the end-user? for them to read offline, print out, or etc.

Lx 121 19:02, 27 January 2017 (PST)

Content I think you are mostly right here but there are a couple of important considerations. While it is true that we need more content and I also agree that freshly public domain content is a really attractive draw, there is some value in having minimal formatting. In the case of pages which are 400kb in length, those will simply not load at all in some browsers. This isn't a matter of using fancy templates and formatting--I agree that this is simply unnecessary and that plain text versions of pages are very valuable. But creating pages that are difficult or impossible to render isn't a trivial matter. Also, in this particular case, it's not really that important that we have a scan and arrangement of these stories in this manner--what is helpful is having his short stories in general. Many writers have many collections of short stories--some of them hodge-podge, some of them definititive--but if I'm looking for a given story, I don't really care how it's arranged next to other ones which are totally unrelated except by author. If you want to just dump pure text into a few dozen pages that are titled after the individual stories, I think that is much more preferable, honestly. —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 23:01, 27 January 2017 (PST)