Help:Author pages

Purpose

For our purposes an author is any person who has written a text that is included in Wikisource. These texts can be in any genre including fiction, non-fiction, letters, speeches, etc. For the moment we are concerned with individual authors, but it could be extended to apply to corporate authors.

Language

All ancillary information on an author page should be in the author's own language.

Layout

Where section headings are required they use h2 titles.

Uptrace

At the top of the page their should be an "uptrace" to the parent page. This concept allows every page to be traced back to the Wikisource main page. For an author page this trace has the format <[[Wikisource:Authors-''xx'']] where the xx represents the beginning of usually the author's surname. Currently the first letter is sufficient, but it is conceivable that as the project grows, it could be longer.

Biography

This tells us about the author. A biographical paragraph will not normally be necessary unless he is not of sufficient importance to merit an article in any Wikipedia. This section should begin with the person's full name if known. This should be followed by alternate names, including pseudonyms. A new line should show the author's years of birth and death.

The bulk of the section will be taken up by a bulleted list of links to all biographies in any of the Wikipedias. The link will be to the name as written in that project and piped to show the language in that language. Thus [[eo:George WASHINGTON|Esperanto]] leads to the Esperanto article on George Washington. Note that it is the policy of the Esperanto Wikipedia to show surnames as all capital letters.

The link to the author's own language should be shown first, and preference should be given to listing the languages in alphabetical order.

Works

This is a bulleted list of the author's works. It is not limited to those works which are included in Wikisource. In listing works priority is given to the original language of the work. A long work may be subdivided into chapters as the circumstances warrant, and, unless the list is long enough to merit a sub-page, these should be indented. Translations should be indented at a further level. The works should be listed alphabetically for ease of location with, if at all possible, the year of publication added as well.

In the case of very prolific authors who wrote works of various types (e.g. poetry, short stories, novels, etc.), sub-sections--using h3 markers--should be used to make easier locating a particular work by that author.

Other Sections

Additional sections will not usually be needed, but may sometimes be required because of a special problem.

Subjects and Categories

The application of these to author pages is being considered. It is conceivable that subjects and categories reflecting an author's area of expertise or nationality could be useful.