Category talk:Move to Wikisource

In the past, many full speeches and other complete works have been moved from Wikiquote to Wikisource, with the following link left in the article:

This speech has been transferred to Wikisource:Speeches

This was apparently done to preserve the link between projects that the transwiki process insists on. However, there are two problems with this approach:

• This link doesn't act like a standard redirect, so the reader winds up looking at an administrative message rather than the content they expect.
• The link doesn't point directly to the transwiki'd article, just to a general Wikisource page, from which one must still look up the relevant article.

This may very well have been done to save time when a massive amount of material was being moved by a very small number of people.

Now a question has been raised on Votes for deletion (under the entry for A Tryst With Destiny) about whether we should keep or delete these pages, or perhaps edit them to provide more useful linkage. I suggest we discuss alternatives here and decide how we want to handle these and future transwiki candidates. — Jeff Q (talk) 15:23, 5 Apr 2005 (UTC)

I think these page are harmful because they first do not show the content the title implies or direct you to it correctly. Secondly the discourage anyone from adding legitimate quotes to these possible articles as it appears a "executive decision" has already been made not to have a Wikiquote article on these subjects. Better I think to delete them and allow them to be recreated without obstacles as "proper" pages. Listing the contribution history on the talk page at Wikisource should be more than adequate. Rmhermen 03:57, 6 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Rmhermen, those are excellent points that also demonstrate a problem with the generic transwiki process. On the one hand, we want to have a link to the full works, if they're available; on the other, we really want to encourage people to add excerpts here, which I agree this format discourages. Perhaps we could add a procedure for Wikiquote->Wikisource moves that somehow gets the full article (with history) moving toward Wikisource, but leaves a legitimate (possibly stubby) quote article here. I don't want to take any serious actions (like deletions) until we have a chance to figure out how best to do this. (That implies that I should get moving on getting transwiki docs over here, which I'm behind on. ☺) — Jeff Q (talk) 04:32, 6 Apr 2005 (UTC)

I believe that the pages for speeches which have already been transferred to Wikisource can be safely deleted from here. The history of edits were transferred to the talk pages of the new pages at Wikisource and that should suffice. The transfers date from some of my own earliest days as a sysop, when I was far more reluctant to delete some things than I am now, and I probably created the links to direct people towards the relatively new Wikisource project as the place to properly add full speeches. I actually created the page for speeches at Wikisource, and it originally had a far different appearance (and far fewer speeches) than it does now. ~ Kalki 04:45, 6 Apr 2005 (UTC)

I think Jef Q's proposal very neat but doubt its scalability at the same time. So I prefer to hae it not as a rule but a recommendation. Simple deletion is ok if the history is adequately preserved (and here it is). So personally I like to keep them as a redirect but don't oppose to delete them.

By the way would you let me make a silly question? Where can I get teh list of those already moved articles? On this category I can find nothing but Polybius ... --Aphaia 07:20, 6 Apr 2005 (UTC)

I don't see the scaleability issue. The list Rmhermen came up with is a years' worth of moved articles. Normally, we won't have that many people creating entire speeches. HOWEVER, the more I think about it, the more I realize it isn't really necessary to leave even a stub behind, because most quotes aren't listed by speech name, but by person. If someone is really anxious to quote elements of a speech in a separate article (when they could instead add to the person's article, even emphasizing it with its own section), I suppose they could just create a new article, and they won't be discouraged by Wikisource link, as Rmhermen noted. That said, I guess I favor deletion rather than redirect, to avoid surprising people with an unannounced interproject jump. (That happened to me yesterday, when somehow I clicked on a Wikiquote link and got the Wikisource main page. It was quite disturbing.) But I could go with redirect if it went directly to the appropriate article instead of the main page. — Jeff Q (talk) 09:28, 6 Apr 2005 (UTC)