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Quality color code for Wikisource

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This is now part of the Proofread Page extension.

This is a proposal for Wikisource, although it could be useful to other projects as well.

The idea is to add a table to the database, in order to indicates the level of quality of a text (such as incomplete, complete, formatted, proofread).

The existing links color codes (red=nonexisting, blue=existing) would be extended, in order to display the quality of a page in any link made to this page.

Example:

  • page does not exist (current code)
  • text is incomplete
  • text is complete
  • complete and formatted
  • proofread (current code for existing links)

ThomasV 10:22, 27 July 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Strongly against. First, it's not applicable to de.wikisource (and probably other language projects). Pages that are incomplete or without proper source will be deleted eventually, and the really important distinctions are between "not proofread", "proofread once", "proofread twice=finished". Since all that is only interesting for project contributors, I'd rather not want to burden other users (= readers) with all this internal stuff. --AndreasPraefcke 12:03, 27 July 2007 (UTC)[reply]
(edit conflict) The colours must not impair the accessibility of Wikisource. I've run this page through http://colorfilter.wickline.org/ and got these results:
  • red blindness: [1]
  • green blindness: [2]
According to w:Colour_blindness#Epidemiology, 7-10% of all males are afflicted with red/green blindness. This is not such a big problem with only two link colours. The current red/blue links should be easily distinguishable by red/green blind people. With five colours, however, we should think about accessibility. Maybe a colour blind person can come up with a good colour scheme? BTW, the text quality definitions on the English Wikisource are somewhat different from yours, see s:en:Wikisource:Text_quality.--GrafZahl (talk) 12:24, 27 July 2007 (UTC)[reply]
The semantics of quality grades may differ depending on the subdomains. this is a separate issue.
my question is, will a color code be less intrusive than the current icons system? currently we manually add icons next to links (here is an example). I think that a color code would be less intrusive for readers.
Note that if we add a quality table to the database, it will also be possible to keep the current icon system, and to add them automatically during page rendering.
in order not to impair accessibility, I agree that the number of colors should be small.
ThomasV 12:47, 27 July 2007 (UTC)[reply]
Oh, I see. Well, I don't find the current icon system particularly intrusive. The advantage of colour codes is that every page would have one (and it should be easy to configure the software to render icons or whatnot instead of colour codes). OTOH, most texts on the English Wikisource without an icon probably belong to the 25% category. I'm not sure right now if it's worth the effort.--GrafZahl (talk) 13:09, 27 July 2007 (UTC)[reply]

The process on fr.wikisource and other language projects is not at all usable at de.wikisource where we want to create a quality project with scholarly quotable material (completely based on scans). Hence, the quality icons on fr.wikipedia and elsewhere cannot be translated easily to de.wikisource. --AndreasPraefcke 13:26, 27 July 2007 (UTC)[reply]

I don't see what is different on the French Wikisource from that. And for some texts we are already quite well advanced on this way. Please check what is going on locally before making such judgement. Yann 14:09, 27 July 2007 (UTC)[reply]
I don't want to discuss this further here, but if you go through all the "new texts" on the fr.wikisource homepage, only four of them are actually linked to scans (3 x gallica, 1 x google). Pretty much everything else is just copies from some e-texts otherwise available, or doesn't even have a source at all. --AndreasPraefcke 10:54, 28 July 2007 (UTC)[reply]

I like the idea and I think it would be possible to use it on de.ws too with the following semantic:

  • page does not exist (current code)
  • (unvollständig, Scanfehler, Korrekturprobleme)
  • (unkorrigiert)
  • (korrigiert)
  • (fertig)

Maybe the colors could be changed per project by CSS?

It would be an improvement to see the status of a page directly, e.g. in the table of s:de:Die elektrischen Kräfte (I am working at the moment on this project). --Raymond de 13:36, 27 July 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Adding meta data about text quality to the database is a very good idea. I don't know what is the best way for rendering this information on the project, and it probably should be left to decide separately for each project. BTW this information would also be useful to other projects, including Wikipedia, especially with the WP 1.0 project. Yann 14:06, 27 July 2007 (UTC)[reply]

meta data would be useful to have, but I think recoloring the links is too confusing. Currently, a user could figure out fairly easily why some links are red and others are blue. But having a rainbow of colors would be two confusing; when visiting a page with a lot of links, some that have already been seen and some not, they potentially get 10 different colors! And that still doesn't even account for unrated articles. A better approach may be to use an icon scheme (like wikibooks has) where there's a more clear progression, and it doesn't obscure the current functionality; then either have a parser function to generate a marked link, or if it's prevalent enough, maybe use a hook to mark all of the links. -Sanbeg 15:02, 27 July 2007 (UTC)[reply]
On it.source we are using the icons since the end of 2005 and we have all textes marked in that way. Using the icons we just put a little and clear picture near the link; it's an easy procedure and the users can understand immediatly the quality level of any text. Using the coloured-links we'll have pages that look like rainbows. I quote Sanbeg. IPork 15:19, 27 July 2007 (UTC)[reply]
Huh? I like too much those little coloured squares, I love them and I think that they are more self-explanatory than intrusive. We use those images also as a redirect to help pages. I couldn't say the same for different colours in wikilinks. - εΔω 15:43, 27 lug 2007 (CEST)

Colors are not an acceptable form for meta data (WMF projects should be accessible barrier free). These should be plaint text. I am again the suggestion and agree with Praefcke. --134.130.68.65 15:40, 27 July 2007 (UTC)[reply]

ACK --Histo 15:40, 27 July 2007 (UTC)[reply]
There isn't any additonal help by the colorcoding, exept having rainbow-colored pages. I am again the suggestion and agree with Praefcke. --Joergens.mi 21:13, 27 July 2007 (UTC)[reply]

The choice of displaying icons or colours can be made through css. here is an example fr:s:User:ThomasV/Quality_icons_css ThomasV 21:02, 27 July 2007 (UTC)[reply]

For other kinds of graphic quality indicators, see commons:Progress bar. --LA2 21:33, 27 July 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Several people have voiced support for the inclusion of metadata into the database while the representation of a certain piece of metadata (progress as colour code) is discussed rather controversially. I suggest we reach a consensus on metadata first, then we can talk about representation. Here is what I have in mind:

  1. Hammer out a metadata concept.
    This deserves some thought as books or texts in general come with much more metadata than just progress. Right now, I can think of
    • Author
    • Title
    • Publisher
    • Original edition
    • Original year of publication
    • ISSN/ISBN of original
    • Keywords
    • Standardised categorisation schemes
    • …
    There are some MediaWiki extensions readily available which might be helpful. I haven't looked particularly thoroughly into any but some that might be useful are SemanticMediaWiki, Data, RDF and Wikidata.
  2. Hook up our shiny new metadata with the search engine.
    This is, IMO, much more important than doing any representation stuff. Presenting our readers with a search engine of a quality comparable to standard search engines provided by libraries will go a long way regarding usability. The SemanticMediaWiki extension actually claims to have such a feature.
  3. Add code to represent metadata.
    This might best be done on a per-wiki basis since e.g. the French, German and English Wikisources have different standards and hence different interpretations of metadata. Some knobs and dials might even be added to the user preferences. For example (coming back to the original proposal) a user might elect to have text progress displayed in two, five or ten different custom colours.

What do you think?--GrafZahl (talk) 11:32, 28 July 2007 (UTC)[reply]

I think that the idea of using metadata to perform search is great, but it is a little bit off-topic. what I had in mind is to add the capability of displaying textquality through links. other metadata could be displayed that way, of course, but I guess this was not your point... so let me just talk about how to modify links using quality.
I checked the code a bit, and started to write an extension. the extension will add a 'class' property to links, depending on their quality level. with this property, it will be very easy to choose between colors or icons using CSS. users who want both will even be able to have both.
I found that this interfers with the already existing "stub threshold" feature. I guess that it will not make sense to use both at the same time. (the stub threshold shows links to short pages in a different color than blue). while it might make sense for wikipedia to consider article length as an indicator of their quality, I think it is not the case for wikisource. so I propose to have only one of those options available. In addition, the stub threshold code is in the parser. I will ask developers if this can be made an extension instead; I don't think that this should be in the parser.
ThomasV 12:46, 29 July 2007 (UTC)[reply]
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