Hi Billinghurst, Thanks for your sharing your concerns and sorry if I didn't outline the problems in my email. I thought the main ones were already well-known, namely: - Redundancy of templates/modules, everything has to be done again for each language Wikisource and it is not easy to benefit from the advances from other communities - Having small disperse communities makes harder to keep their tools up-to-date and to share know-how - Hard to have cross-language projects (like multi-lingual books) While on the Amsterdam Hackathon I asked several people about why the project was split, but I didn't get a clear answer. I can imagine that it was because back in the day there were no easy ways of localizing templates, documentation, etc. but if you find any conversation or decision in the archives, please do share it. If we, as Wikisource users, should "push harder to get components to strengthen our community", then it is a good thing to start this debate to know what is wanted. The proposed centralization of modules (see below), it is only one way of approaching it, however I think it is important to consider all options to make sure it is the best way. Cheers, David --Micru On Sat, Jun 1, 2013 at 9:40 PM, billinghurst <billinghurst(a)gmail.com> wrote: -- Etiamsi omnes, ego non

I imagine something like "a shared proofreading lab" with shared tools; a "shared html/xml standard" for final book output; a "shared library" for level-4 quality books, fully and easily usable and deeply indexed for any wiki project and external users. I presume that such goals are someway indipendent, but the strategy to get them shold consider the principle "If you are repeating yourself, you are going wrong". Alex 2013/6/2 David Cuenca <dacuetu(a)gmail.com>

The reason for moving Wikisource content to Commons that I think is most important is the fact that many original manuscripts have a one-to-many relationship with other texts in other languages. There is no "definitive translation" of the bible, Anna Karenina, Don Quixote, and so forth. However, when reading these texts, the reader should be able to see where related content is available in sister projects. On Wikimedia Commons, you see this with the "Global usage" feature. This would be perfect to use for text pages of books as well. Many engravings are used on Commons in multiple projects, without the original text being available on Wikisource. It would be a good project just to line up what we already have; so for example unite a title page with one of the other engravings in a book on a Wikisource book stub page. Look at the global usage of this file for example: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Don_Quixote_5.jpg Up until now only illustrations are common, but I think the whole book should be possible to read in DjVu on Commons, no matter what language the text is in, and no matter what the language interface is of the user on Commons. As it stands now, it is only possible to see this "Global usage" feature on Commons files, not on text files (because they can only link to one version of a text in another project per page). In the example above you can see that the same engraving is used on two different pages on the French Wikisource. You can't see that anywhere on Wikisource, only here in the Global usage feature on Commons. By the way I am not for getting rid of the separate Wikisource language projects altogether, because I think they still fill an important purpose for government documents and other things that will never or rarely be translated. I am just saying that it would be better to have full texts of original works easily available on Commons page by page (and perhaps we should involve Wikiquotes in this too, to split pages when necessary). 2013/6/2, Federico Leva (Nemo) <nemowiki(a)gmail.com>om>:

Alex thanks for that perspective. I myself was wondering if anyone counted how many entries are in the books category here: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Books and then the entries for books per sister project on Wikisource. My gut feeling is that the number per Wikisource entity will be smaller, but I may be wrong 2013/6/2, Alex Brollo <alex.brollo(a)gmail.com>om>:

Hi all, I didn't read the whole discussion, but let me put here few links: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Wikisource/Archives/2003 (there are more archives..) and http://wikisource.org/wiki/User:Angela languages. As Amir (http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/User:Aaharoni, cc'ed) can explain to us, LTR languages are a big and underrated issue. Aubrey On Sun, Jun 2, 2013 at 11:41 AM, Federico Leva (Nemo) <nemowiki(a)gmail.com>wrote;wrote:

On Sun, Jun 2, 2013 at 11:41 AM, Federico Leva (Nemo) <nemowiki(a)gmail.com>wrote;wrote: I agree with Nemo here. Commons and IA store a lot of files just for saving them, but not *everything* is worth working on, or (the other way around), we don't find users who want to work on them. For the Global usage, I still think we could implement tools like that in Wikidata and Wikisources, to track file/text usage and have a more coordinated set of translations and original texts. Nowadays, it's probably the lowest hanging fruit. Beside, we still have wikisource.org, and we can use that for storing books. Synchronization of data between Commons adn Wikisource, via Wikidata, will have to happen anyway, so I would not go in the direction fo actually using Commons for transcribing books. Aubrey

On Sun, Jun 2, 2013 at 3:33 AM, Federico Leva (Nemo) <nemowiki(a)gmail.com>wrote;wrote: Ideally we should aim to keep that sense of communities and at the same time share tools and certain pages across Wikisources. I wonder if some day it would be technically feasible to have a way of marking certain pages as "global" so they can exist simultaneously in all language versions. That would be a boon for script/template sharing. Micru