Template talk:Gutenberg book

line break?

I don't know much about templates, however Around the World in Eighty Days had the following line:

{ {gutenberg|no=3456|name=Le tour du monde en quatre-vingts jours}} (French)

Whish translates as:

• Le tour du monde en quatre-vingts jours at Project Gutenberg (French)

Should there be a line break at the end of the template? Paul Weaver 07:55, 4 October 2005 (UTC)

Not sure I follow. Why are you expecting there to be a line break? The way it renders seems perfectly fine to me. AdamDiCarlo 04:22, 15 October 2005 (UTC)

I would argue against trying to put a line break after the template because for some instances (one example is shown above) it is helpful to add a little more information explaning some details of the text.

Andrew Sly 22:54, 19 October 2005 (UTC)

The template has been fixed, it did have a line break 132.185.240.121 13:23, 25 October 2005 (UTC)

(That's Paul Weaver by the way, I forgot to log in. It originally looked like at Project Gutenberg(line break)(French)) 132.185.144.120 14:19, 25 October 2005 (UTC)

The example at the beginning of this section appends additional information to show the language of the text in question. In case it's of interest to people using this template, I've found Language icons are a good way to indicate this. For the example above, it would simply be {{fr icon}}

Andrew Sly 23:53, 19 September 2006 (UTC)

title/author syntax seems awkward

Am I the only one who finds {{gutenberg|no=2383|name=The Canterbury Tales and Other Poems ''by Geoffrey Chaucer'}} rather awkward? Is this a misfeature of the template? If so, and if anyone is working on the template, I would suggest syntax like: {{gutenberg|no=2383|name=The Canterbury Tales and Other Poems|author=Geoffrey Chaucer}}. In case of multiple authors, comma separated or else mulitple 'author=' attributes accepted? — AdamDiCarlo 21:27, 14 October 2005 (UTC)

I would say that you should not try to include too much extra material within the template. The ideal content for "name=" should be just the title of the book. Anything else that might add further understanding could be added after the template as discussed above. In the example given, the only places where I could imagine the template being used is in an article where Geoffrey Chaucer has already been mentioned as the author, so further mention of him in the external link would seem to be redundant.

I'm not proposing we put more material in the template, I'm just saying that the recommendation for how to mark up this case is awkward. I guess I read your answer as saying, "we don't want to encourage use of author in the template by additing an optional attribute, but we have thate example just so people can deal with the (very rare) cases when the need to include the author in the Gutenberg citation." Which is a fine answer, tho I should add a caveat to the example itself, if so. — AdamDiCarlo 19:20, 20 October 2005 (UTC)

I second AdamDiCarlo's request. And as for complication, we don't seem to have a problem making any of the citation templates esoteric. jareha ^(comments) 05:11, 5 June 2006 (UTC)

I too felt the urge to include an author, primarily for when the author has a wiki page that can be linked. I stuck in an optional "author" parameter to do that. An example can be seen in George Bass#References. That's the only place I've used it for now, so if this unleashes a storm of controversy that's the only place to revert :-) -- Kevin Ryde 01:26, 29 June 2006 (UTC)

Excellent. I made use of that on the page. I think this makes the citations look much better as well, that is, closer to what a normal book citation looks like. — Adam Di Carlo (talk) 09:25, 17 December 2009 (UTC)

citing title which is also wiki article

Is there any advice for citing a title in gutenberg which is also a wikipedia article? Or is the answer "don't do that, leave the etext link in to wikipedia article"? — AdamDiCarlo 04:23, 15 October 2005 (UTC)

Again, I think this is a case where, if the article is well-written, this will simply not be an issue. The gutenberg template should be used where it links to an item which is clearly closely related to the subject of a wikipedia article. This will often be an article about a certain book, in which case any meaningful links should have already been made in the article. Do you have any examples I could take a look at? Andrew Sly 22:54, 19 October 2005 (UTC)

The article in question was William_Harrison_Ainsworth. Previous to my edit, all of the book titles were wikilinks (to non-existant articles). I decided to un-link'ify them. I think you're saying: if an author article contains a link to the book article (e.g., the book is significant enough to warrant it), the gutenberg reference should be in the book article and not the author article anyway? Which is a sensible answer, I guess, in the name of reducing redundancy. AdamDiCarlo 19:30, 20 October 2005 (UTC)

Perhaps it helps to put it in perspective by saying that both the Project Gutenberg catalog and wikipedia are works in progress. Both have their own quirks and attempts to get them to work together will always have weak points.

Personally, my opinion is that the best place to use a gutenberg template is in an external links section, not in a list of book names. I also try to make any external links relate as directly as possible to the main topic of the article, rather than to something related at a tangent. So, I generally use a template:gutenberg author in an article about an author, and a template:gutenberg in an article about a book, or an article where the gutenberg text is about the same subject as the article and is relevant. Andrew Sly 22:42, 26 October 2005 (UTC)

Use with bibliographies

I removed the "of", for use in cases where the title was already mentioned (all Gutenberg titles are also available in printed form; the links will typically appear in bibliographies where title, author, year, ISBN etc. were just mentioned. dab (ᛏ) 17:03, 31 January 2006 (UTC)

New wording for template

Currently the template looks like this:

Free eBook Pinocchio at Project Gutenberg

I'd like to suggest a change to look like this:

Pinocchio a free e-book at Project Gutenberg

Or another alternative:

Pinocchio a free e-book at Project Gutenberg

It is common practice in external link sections to highlite the title of the book, with other descriptive information afterwards. It looks cleaner, is easier to read, and is more standard. Highlite the title only is standard practice not only on Wikipedia but everywhere in citations. The fact that it is "free" and an "e-book" and "Project Gutenberg" is just descriptive information that should not be part of the title. For example see the external links section of David Copperfield (novel), the Gutenberg doesn't fit in with the others. There are many other examples like this where this template doesn't fit in with other standard formating. Note the above wording is just a suggestion, but the key is to have only the title of the book as the external link, and have the title come first. I assume the mention of a "free e-book" is there for newbies, so wikilinking e-book would be in line with helping newbies as well. -- Stbalbach 15:38, 1 April 2006 (UTC)

It now seems to read:

"Pinocchio available for free via Project Gutenberg" --Blainster 23:55, 1 May 2006 (UTC)

I'd much prefer it read something like "Full text of Pinocchio, available from Project Gutenberg". Somehow I find myself unhappy with the word 'free'. --Tagishsimon (talk)

I don't care for the word "free" either (as if other links are not free? It's also redundant with "available"). But I do think it is important that the first word in the sentence be the title of the work. -- Stbalbach 00:15, 28 May 2006 (UTC)

I'm not in agreement with Blainster at all. Tons of boilerplate verbiage is a bad thing, not a good thing. Imagine a case where you want to cite 8 gutenberg titles! We should be striving to look like other WP:CITE templates, IMHO. — Adam Di Carlo (talk) 09:29, 17 December 2009 (UTC)

Esamples of correct usage

{{gutenberg|no=2383|name=The Canterbury Tales and Other Poems ''by Geoffrey Chaucer'}}
should perhaps have another apostrophe at the end?
{{gutenberg|no=2383|name=The Canterbury Tales and Other Poems ''by Geoffrey Chaucer''}}
Are they even necessary at all? --Bensin 14:26, 6 October 2007 (UTC)

Complete obsoleted now that we have a proper author attribute, so the question is moot. — Adam Di Carlo (talk) 09:26, 17 December 2009 (UTC)

Adds blank

This template adds a blank before the period. Example (link 2). --Subfader (talk)

Fixed. Thank you. Plastikspork _―Œ^(talk) 17:58, 11 December 2010 (UTC)

Bullet

The template could really do without a bullet. It does not look right when used outside a bulleted list, e.g. in an inline reference. GregorB (talk) 11:35, 30 May 2013 (UTC)

Agree. But the template is also often used in the External links section, which is normally formatted as a bulleted list; so either we'd have to go round all those articles inserting the missing bullet by hand, or put some sort of parameter into the template, like |bullet=no for use in the inline instances. --Redrose64 (talk) 13:35, 30 May 2013 (UTC)

Apparently this has been done (it's actually |bullet=none), and a good thing too, I was wondering why it was making a line break when used within <ref></ref> tags... Herostratus (talk) 05:47, 27 March 2016 (UTC)

I just got bit by the bullet, |bullet=none should be the default behavior, with |bullet=yes adding the bullet. In an "External list", an editor is expected to bullet the cites. I suspect the extra linefeed was a coding flaw. User-duck (talk) 21:56, 19 April 2021 (UTC)

This is a bit of a mess. When used with any option other than |bullet=none and preceded by a bullet, the template and the preceding bullet render as an extra blank bulleted line before the bulleted template. I have created Category:Pages with Gutenberg book template using bullet in order to see how many templates are using "none"; with 2,400 transclusions, the category may take a few days to populate. We may need to modify those |bullet=none pages when we fix the template. Editors are welcome to experiment in the template's sandbox and on the testcases page. – Jonesey95 (talk) 22:43, 19 April 2021 (UTC)

Italic override

The template needs an override to turn off italicization for works which shouldn't be italicized.--JFH (talk) 18:13, 18 May 2016 (UTC)

Please provide a link to an example article in which this feature is needed. Thanks. – Jonesey95 (talk) 18:40, 18 May 2016 (UTC)

Ninety-five Theses#External links. See Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Text formatting#Names and titles --JFH (talk) 20:34, 18 May 2016 (UTC)

Fixing links

It seems like gutenberg changed their URL from etext to ebooks (where I've seen it so far, including the templates doc), causing the template to break, someone with editing privileges please modify the template 8ya (talk) 14:52, 28 August 2020 (UTC)

I sent a note to Project Gutenberg asking them to put in a site-wide redirect. This template uses [[gutenberg: to make its links, which can't be fixed at this template. I'll ask at WP:VPT. – Jonesey95 (talk) 16:19, 28 August 2020 (UTC)

I have worked around this problem temporarily by manually inserting the new URL prefix instead of using Wikipedia's built-in prefix. – Jonesey95 (talk) 16:32, 28 August 2020 (UTC)

Add to doc?

{{Gutenberg
|bullet=
|ref=
|no=
|name=
|year=
|author=
|first=
|last=
|authorlink=
|origdate=
|origyear=
|chapter=
|format=
|others=
|edition=
|series=
|language=
|publisher=
|pages=
|doi=
|id=
|isbn=
|oclc=
|access-date=
|quote=
}}

.... 0mtwb9gd5wx (talk) 02:11, 11 June 2021 (UTC)

Subject Parameter or Even a Template?

This came up because I edited the Sam Slick page to add a Project Gutenberg link to Thomas Chandler Haliburton -- which is only partly helpful since he wrote other books too. There's a "Sam Slick" subject in PG, but there is no "subject" parameter in the template that lets me point to it. Can it be added?

(That's assuming it shouldn't be a template by itself, of course, in which case I could write { {Gutenberg subject | id=9673 | name=Sam Slick} }). John Gamble (talk) 04:49, 15 August 2023 (UTC)

You could hack the current template:

• {{Gutenberg book|no=subject/9673|name={{noitalic|Books about Sam Slick}}}} gives
• Books about Sam Slick at Project Gutenberg

-- Michael Bednarek (talk) 05:06, 15 August 2023 (UTC)

That's really clever, and if I could be assured that I wouldn't be struck down by an editor's lighting bolt I might do it. John Gamble (talk) 14:25, 15 August 2023 (UTC)