User talk:Sgconlaw

Moving student articles into mainspace

Hello, I have been editing the M Ravi page recently and have discovered that some of his cases, namely Kenneth Jeyaretnam v Attorney-General; Ravinthran Ramalingam v Attorney-General; and Chee Siok Chin v Minister for Home Affairs have draft articles under this account done as part of a student project. I am wondering if these can be moved into the mainspace as articles? I think they would be useful as pages on Wikipedia. Cheers, Dawkin Verbier (talk) 12:17, 23 December 2022 (UTC)

@Dawkin Verbier: yes, they were done as part of a student project some years ago, but I didn't have time to edit them for the mainspace after marking them. Perhaps you can suggest a priority for them to be rolled out, and I can see if I can find some time to work on them. — SGconlaw (talk) 14:32, 23 December 2022 (UTC)

Thanks for the reply. What do you mean by "priority for them to be rolled out"? Cheers, Dawkin Verbier (talk) 12:02, 24 December 2022 (UTC)

@Dawkin Verbier: I meant, which are the articles which you think are higher priority? I could have a look at them first. No promises, though. — SGconlaw (talk) 14:18, 24 December 2022 (UTC)

I see. Do you have a list of draft articles you have not in the mainspace? I could take a look and let you know - and also assist with the moving and edits. Dawkin Verbier (talk) 09:17, 27 December 2022 (UTC)

Isaac Barrow book scan

Hi Sgconlaw,

I originally reverted your replacement of an Isaac Barrow book scan from the internet archive with a Google books scan. But then I "un-reverted" it and included both links on the page, since your link is to a scan of the first edition of the book. As a general matter, I find the internet archive's web UI to be significantly more usable than Google books's. Hopefully the IA will eventually get around to adding this Google Books scan to their collection. Cheers. –jacobolus (t) 01:55, 17 February 2023 (UTC)

@Jacobolus: I will be uploading the scan to the Internet Archive later today as https://archive.org/details/barrowpopessupremacy. I work a lot with quotation templates of first and early editions over at the Wiktionary (see, for example, “wikt:Template:RQ:Barrow Pope's Supremacy”), and came across Barrow’s book in this context. Generally, if a work is available only at Google Books and not the Internet Archive, I upload it to the Internet Archive as a backup. — SGconlaw (talk) 04:04, 17 February 2023 (UTC)

Awesome, thanks! Do you have a good method of getting the best-quality possible version of a book from Google? –jacobolus (t) jacobolus (t) 04:21, 17 February 2023 (UTC)

A tangentially related question, but while we are here, do you happen to have any recommendations for what I should do if I have obscure books that aren't yet in the IA and want to scan and add them? (I guess the first step would be to hire someone with a book scanner ....) –jacobolus (t) 04:23, 17 February 2023 (UTC)

@Jacobolus: regarding the first question, not really. I just use Google Books’ PDF download option. Before uploading the file, I do sometimes delete duplicated or wrongly scanned pages, and have on occasion combined two files if there are missing pages in one file. As for the second question, anyone can register a free account with the Internet Archive and upload files which are in the public domain. So, yeah, do a good-quality scan! — SGconlaw (talk) 05:03, 17 February 2023 (UTC)

Ah. Perhaps we should chat with other Wikipedians about trying to better scrape Google Books for higher-quality images to upload to IA. My experience is that the downloadable PDF is not the best image quality available when looking at Google Books (and sometimes much worse, e.g. in black and white instead of full color). –jacobolus (t) 05:06, 17 February 2023 (UTC)

@Jacobolus: yes, I’m not sure why Google Books PDFs are stripped of the original scanning colour. Sometimes full-colour scans are available from the HathiTrust Digital Library, but I find that most of their content, even those obviously in the public domain, cannot be downloaded entirely but only page by page, which makes it impractical except for works with, say, only a few tens of pages (and you’d still need a lot of patience to do that and to recompile them into a PDF). I only did that once with a short 17th-century play which, for some reason, was presented with the pages arranged backwards from the largest page number to the smallest. — SGconlaw (talk) 05:13, 17 February 2023 (UTC)

That’s why someone needs to write a computer program to download the separate images, stick them in a folder with the appropriate XML metadata file, and zip the thing up ready to be uploaded to IA. This should be eminently technically do-able (though I’m not sure if Google would appreciate it). –jacobolus (t) 05:20, 17 February 2023 (UTC)

@Jacobolus: ah, that would be beyond me. (It might also be against the Google Books use policy; I don’t know.) — SGconlaw (talk) 05:23, 17 February 2023 (UTC)

@Jacobolus: OK, I've uploaded the file to the Internet Archive. — SGconlaw (talk) 16:50, 17 February 2023 (UTC)

Wiktionary

Hi there. I removed the link to Wiktionary from the Further reading section of Tight end. AFAIK, links to Wiktionary are mostly common in disambiguation pages. Is there a reason to link from a page where there is already encyclopedic content on the subject? Regards. —Bagumba (talk) 00:26, 5 March 2023 (UTC)

@Bagumba: those of us who work on Wiktionary usually add interwiki links in appropriate Wikipedia articles to the Wiktionary, and not just on disambiguating pages. I don’t see anything wrong. It’s no different from adding a link to the Wikimedia Commons. — SGconlaw (talk) 04:54, 5 March 2023 (UTC)

Thanks for the input. It's the first time I noticed the wikt links. Was there any past discussions on this? In the case of Commons, presumably more pictures are provided than already on the WP page. —Bagumba (talk) 05:09, 5 March 2023 (UTC)

@Bagumba: see “Wikipedia:Wikimedia sister projects”. — SGconlaw (talk) 05:17, 5 March 2023 (UTC)

OK. Nothing explicit about adding wikt to any page, but also nothing discouraging it. I still question its worth, but not sure I'm motivated to start a wider discussion. Thanks for discussing.—Bagumba (talk) 10:13, 5 March 2023 (UTC)

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Good article reassessment for Chng Suan Tze v Minister for Home Affairs

Chng Suan Tze v Minister for Home Affairs has been nominated for a good article reassessment. If you are interested in the discussion, please participate by adding your comments to the reassessment page. If concerns are not addressed during the review period, the good article status may be removed from the article. Z1720 (talk) 21:13, 29 November 2023 (UTC)