I have been wondering the same thing for years. When I upload prints to Wikimedia Commons, I am generally in a hurry and just use the default uploader to get it out there. Weeks or months or sometimes years later I will add in the detailed metadata like the book it was first published in, alternate sources for the print from the one I used, the publisher if that is a different person than the artist, etc. What I don't bother with is page numbers, because this is often unknown and changes from edition to edition. You can get around this problem by naming specific editions held in specific libraries with specific page numbers, which I have done occasionally. Some prints are so well known they go by their own titles, and the Wikimedia Commons artwork template even has a field "Original title" to deal with this issue.
When you go through an index of plates in any older book, generally there are some mistakes, such as blank pages that are indexed because the plate didn't make it to the printer, some plates the printer added that didn't make it into the index, and of course the really confusing one, the prints that a reprinter added that neither the original author nor the original publisher ever saw.
One reason I have not spent much time on Wikisource is because I feel I have to decide up front what the structure of the book will be with page numbering (which sometimes does not count the plates), so I need to base this on the original index or original list of chapters. Sometimes a book becomes famous just for one passage, and that passage may not even be indexed in the original version. How do you add these links? On Wikimedia Commons you can keep on adding values to fields, and change the "Information" template to "Artwork" to get more fields. You can even add annotations to files and then put links to other files in the annotations, so that through the "Global usage" property you can see where such prints have been "quoted" or re-used. How do you do this with books?
I would like to see a flexible way to set this up that makes it easy to come back and make corrections or additions to the published information in both indexes and ToC's based on later discovery. This book of prints for example shows a page order based on one edition that was reproduced in facsimile version, but other versions exist with different plates: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:32_afbeeldinge_der_Graven_van_HOL... How do you set up page numbers for this, because there weren't any to start with? Jane
2013/6/7, Andrea Zanni zanni.andrea84@gmail.com:
On Fri, Jun 7, 2013 at 1:36 AM, David Cuenca dacuetu@gmail.com wrote:
Automatic creation of page transclusion is nice but also dangerous... too many structures to have an easy solution.
What Alex is thinking, if I understand his work correctly, is that when you work on a new book in nsPage, you "define" what the structure is (his work right now is wrapping titles/chapters in {{title}} templates, to give the book a logic structure), and then a bot runs, create corrispondent ns0 chapters and transclude pages.
I think that ns0 automation is something long needed, as we could suggest users to focus just on nsPage and Indexes. All the difficult transclusion part would be automatic (or semi-automatic).
I wonder if there is a better way to define the logic structure of our book, maybe directly in the Index page. I don't know what would be easier for the user:
- define the table of content once for all in the Index page
- define the table of content once in the book Toc (there is often one, if
not always, when needed)
- define the table of content just putting templates thorough the book, as
the reader goes through the book.
What do you all think?
Aubrey