Wikisource talk:Manual of Style

Setting up Wikisource's Formatting Guidelines

Any time soon? IMO the following should be set:

• no stylesheets whatsoever (font types, font sizes, font weight, margins, padding, etc) — that should be handled by the standard or custom skins.
• do not include author, title, or characters; only the source.

--Maio 22:36, 7 Feb 2004 (UTC)

I generally agree with the first point for most cases. Anything that requires people to wade through a lot of HTML should be avoided. In some cases, however, (mostly poetry) the formatting is part of the poetry, and it may be necessary to take fancy steps to be able to represent it properly.

The second point is a different matter. Although the title there would often be a redundancy, we may have given a shorter version of the title for the article title, and that needs to be explained. It's almost essential that the author be there. A person who has used the random page feature to find reading material is entitled to know who wrote it. The characters for a play are usualy a part of the source. To the headnote I would also add enough information to readily document the copyright status of the piece. Eclecticology 06:39, 8 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Yeah, I noticed that when submitting On Lucy, Countess of Bedford. Maybe we should propose a software change to categorize sources so that an appropiate stylesheet is used for them? By doing that, in the case of poems, the user submits the source without any HTML, but the standard stylesheet does the work of the poem's formatting. I don't know if you are familiar with CSS, but this would allow a stylesheet like #poem p { white-space: pre }

Or even a template, like:

Wiki source

{{Source   : Poem
|| Title   : On Lucy, Countess of Bedford
|| Author  : [[w:Ben Johnson|Ben Johnson]]
|| Context : This morning timely wrapt with holy fire,
I thought to form unto my zealous Muse,
What kind of creature I could most desire
To know, serve, and love, as Poets use.
}}

Stylesheet

#article p.title { font-size: larger; font-weight: bold }
#article p.author { font-size: smaller }
#article p.poem { white-space: pre }

Result code

<p class="title">On Lucy, Countess of Bedford</p>

<p class="author">by [[w:Ben Johnson]]</p>

<p class="poem">This morning timely wrapt with holy fire,
I thought to form unto my zealous Muse,
What kind of creature I could most desire
To know, serve, and love, as Poets use.

</div>

Result in browser

On Lucy, Countess of Bedford

by Ben Johnson

This morning timely wrapt with holy fire, I thought to form unto my zealous Muse, What kind of creature I could most desire To know, serve, and love, as Poets use.

--Maio 07:59, 8 Feb 2004 (UTC)

The appearance is fine. The difficulty will be in getting technophobes to understand how to use it. This is a problem with anything that deviates from Wik markup. There are probably a lot of other improvements that would really be appreciated, but they might not be easy to use: e.g. line numbering for poetry or verse plays like Shakespeare, or side by side annotation boxes that would allow notes to scroll beside the text, etc. Eclecticology 01:24, 9 Feb 2004 (UTC)

What about using infoboxes, like some series of Wikipedia articles, to provide necessary "cataloging" data? -- Jehanne 23:07, 17 Feb 2004 (UTC)~

What is this for?

This page seems empty and Wikisource: Style Guide seems to be doing what is mean to do? Should it be deleted? Too lazy to learn about the formal deletion process now... (Talpedia (talk) 23:50, 12 October 2016 (UTC))