Help:Author pages

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Author pages

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This page explains how to create a new Author page. Each person who has written one or more texts hosted on Wikisource should have a page in the Author namespace.

Additional currently accepted criteria for the creation of an Author page include:

Where a person has written works that meet What Wikisource includes (should include list of works)
Where a person has edited and/or significantly contributed to works, where a listing of their works are of interest.
Where a person has high notability and a list of their works is desired, regardless of copyright restrictions to host the works on Wikisource.

Contra-indications for creation of an Author page (when in doubt post to Proposed deletions):

Where a person is the subject of one or more works, but is not a creator of written work. (If highly notable see Portals)
Where a work is the creation of an organization, use a Portal in place of an Author page.
Where a person is self promoting and/or no works are likely to be hosted at Wikisource.

Page name

Components of an author page

Author template

Use {{Author}} at the top of the page. The template as standard is used as follows:

{{author
 | firstname    = 
 | lastname     = 
 | last_initial = 
 | description  = 
}}

Other optional parameters can be added:

 | invert_names   =  
 | portal         = 
 | related_author = 
 | meta           = 
 | defaultsort    = 
 | dates          = 
 | image_caption  = 
 | upright        = (yes, to force width parameter change)
 | wiktionary     = 
 | birthyear      = (deprecated, extracted from wikidata by default)
 | deathyear      = (deprecated, extracted from wikidata by default)
 | image          =  (deprecated, extracted from wikidata by default)
 | wikipedia      =  (deprecated, extracted from wikidata by default)
 | wikiquote      =  (deprecated, extracted from wikidata by default)
 | commons        =  (deprecated, extracted from wikidata by default)
 | commonscat     =  (deprecated, extracted from wikidata by default)
 | wikinews       =  (deprecated, extracted from wikidata by default)
 | wikibooks      =  (deprecated, extracted from wikidata by default)
 | wikiversity    =  (deprecated, extracted from wikidata by default)
 | wikispecies    =  (deprecated, extracted from wikidata by default)

The parameters' usage is explained in the template documentation.

Works by the author

Immediately following the {{author}} template there should be a section named "Works" which contains the list of the author's works with a link to the main page of the work.

== Works ==

* ''[[Title]]'' (year)

If the work was originally written in a language different to English, add the name of the translator with a link to his/her page.

== Works ==

* ''[[Title]]'' (year) translated by [[Author:Translator|]]

If the author has written various types of works, use subsections in order to make finding a work easy.

== Works ==

=== Novels ===

* ''[[Title]]'' (year)

=== Poetry ===

* ''[[Title]]'' (year)

Works translated by the author

If the author has translated works into English, list them in a subsection of "Works" with the name of the original author.

== Works ==

=== Translations ===

* ''[[Title]]'' (year) by [[Author:Original author|]]

Works about the author

If there are works about the author on Wikisource, list them in a new section whose name includes "Works about" followed by the family name of the author.

== Works about (family name)==

* ''[[Title]]'' (year) by [[Author:|]]
* ''[[Title]]'' (year) by [[Author:|]], translated by [[Author:|]]

Copyright tag

Authority control tag

Immediately after the copyright tag, please add a bare {{authority control}} tag. This tag allows the display of the available metadata and links through the web, predominantly to library systems.

Hierarchy

Basic hierarchy of an author page is:

{{author
 | ...
 }}

==Works==
* ...

==Works about (surname)==  (if present)
* ...


{{(copyright tag)}}
{{authority control}}
[[Category:...]]

After creating the author page

Once you have done all that is specified above (where applicable), preview the page, verify that all works well, then save.

Author index

The author can be added to the appropriate sub-section of one of these lists:

N.B. Occasionally a new subsection will need to be created (e.g. Wikisource:Authors-Qk does not currently exist.) If you were to add such a new section, please don't forget to add a redirection page similar to:

Page Name	Page Content
Wikisource:Authors-Qk	#REDIRECT [[Wikisource:Authors-Q#Qk]]

(The reason this is necessary is that the {{author}} presumes all these necessary links are present; omitting this step breaks the "Author index:" link on "Author:" pages.)

Wikidata

Author research

For numbers of authors and writers that Wikisource collects their work, we have found that often that tertiary citable sources are less available. So we encourage that identifying sources — be they primary, secondary or tertiary — are noted on author talk pages as finding aids for future researchers, or to enable data completion at Wikidata.

Authors with no known public domain or free texts

Most modern authors have no works in the public domain due to the long terms of copyright. In particular, any living author is highly unlikely to have any such works, unless they specifically licensed the work with a compatible license (e.g. CC-BY) and such a license is included in the original text or confirmed by OTRS.

Generally, author pages should not be created for an author with no known compatible works. A few very popular authors have pages, which are marked with {{copyright author}} to make this situation clear, because those authors are common places for people to add lists of copyrighted works^[1]. This is a defensive measure to prevent people repeatedly adding their works; it does not mean that all modern authors should all get such a page.

Disambiguation and redirects

See also: Help:Disambiguation and Help:Redirects

If there are authors with the same name, the names of their pages should contain their birth and death years in the form (YYYY-YYYY) after their name. In the disambiguation page, use {{disambiguation}} followed by links to each author's page.

Create a redirect at every author's alternative name. The text to use there is #REDIRECT [[Author:Name of the target page]].

Where a page is part of a disambiguation set, we request that the respective author pages utilise the template {{similar}} to point back to the disambiguation page.

Example: Author:John Smith.

External help

Video tutorial about creating Author pages 4 min 52 s, 640 × 480 (49.27 MB)

Notes

↑ See prior discussions: Wikisource:Proposed_deletions/Archives/2017#Living_author_pages_with_no_works and Wikisource:Proposed_deletions/Archives/2020#Author:Richard_Dawkins.

[1] See prior discussions: Wikisource:Proposed_deletions/Archives/2017#Living_author_pages_with_no_works and Wikisource:Proposed_deletions/Archives/2020#Author:Richard_Dawkins.

[1]