As an active Wikisourceror myself, I greatly value Multilingual Wikisource (which in my opinion should have the code "mul") and would be very sorry to see it either broken up into its various languages or relegated to Incubator. Some points from my experience:

  1. I'm active in adding texts in both Irish and Welsh. Welsh has its own separate Wikisource; Irish does not. I much prefer adding Irish texts to mul-ws than adding Welsh texts to cy-ws because the infrastructure support is much better. If something goes weird with formatting or display or something, there is always somebody at mul-ws who can fix it for me. At cy-ws, on the other hand, I am often the only editor there for months on end, and on the rare occasions when somebody else does show up, it's almost certain not to be someone who has experience fixing Wikimedia projects' formatting and display. So cy-ws feels much more lonely and much less well tech-supported than mul-ws. I will never request a separate Irish Wikisource for this reason; I want Irish to stay at mul-ws.
  2. The individual Wikisources have their own rules about what texts are allowed there, and some individual WSes have more restrictive rules than mul-ws does. This pertains to copyright in some cases, but not in all cases. For example, I wanted to add a German-language reference grammar and reader of Old Irish to German Wikisource and was informed that the text was unwelcome there. There was no copyright problem, as the work is clearly public domain (> 70 years p.m.a.), nor was the problem that the Reader portion of the book is in Old Irish. The problem is that the last text I entered on German Wikisource has never been completely validated. German Wikisource works strictly on the 4-eye principle: each text has to be validated by a different user than the one who did the initial proofreading. The previous text I added was a highly technical and esoteric phonetic description of a dialect of Modern Irish, and no other German Wikisourceror has felt equal to the task of validating it, presumably because of all the special characters involved (a lot of weird phonetic characters that are nearly unique to this work) and probably the boring nature of the text to anyone who isn't a specialist. And since the first work I put up on de-ws has remained unvalidated for over a decade, I was told in no uncertain terms that I was not welcome to add the second work, because there was so little chance that it would ever be validated. So I'm adding it to mul-ws instead, since it is technically a multilingual work (Grammar portion in German and Reader portion in Old Irish); but ultimately the real reason is that the arcane and unpopular nature of the texts I'm interested in uploading have made me persona non grata at German Wikisource.
Am 2021-02-24 um 15:44 schrieb Nicolas VIGNERON:
Hi,

"Why does Multilingual Wikisource exist" is a long and unrelated question (but to sum it very badly and quickly: Multilingual Wikisource is not just an incubator, it's also a kind of Meta for Wikisource and has some specific uses and extensions).

That said, thanks Vito! It gave me an idea, I looked at the Incubator, Meta, Wikidata or Commons sitelinks in Wikidata : *the language of these sitelinks is also English* (see this SPARQL query https://w.wiki/32N5 ).
The problem is more general than just the Multilingual Wikisource...

Cheers, ~nicolas

Le mer. 24 févr. 2021 à 14:55, Gerard Meijssen <gerard.meijssen@gmail.com> a écrit :
Hoi,
You are right. One other solution could be to support it in the same way as Commons; without a language code.
Thanks,
      GerardM

On Wed, 24 Feb 2021 at 13:49, Nicolas VIGNERON <vigneron.nicolas@gmail.com> wrote:
Hi,

English is clearly and obviously wrong. "mul" or "und" are not perfect but far better (and "mul" seems to fit better I guess).
Anyway, the multilingual wikisource is meant to be a temporary incubation so maybe we don't need perfect here as the point will solve itself eventually as the language gets its own Wikisource.

@Gerard: yes title can easily be changed (or not used, whatever and what not) but here we are talking about the language of the sitelink (which also raises the question of the language of the website which is also "en" right now), and that part can't be changed by the user (and AFAIK is unique for a wikimedia project).

Cheers, ~nicolas

Le mer. 24 févr. 2021 à 13:28, Gerard Meijssen <gerard.meijssen@gmail.com> a écrit :
Hoi,
In Wikidata there is a property "title" is has a mandatory parameter in the language. It is also used for books and other publications... It is completely separate from the link to the Wiki .. it being English is totally irrelevant, it can be removed changed whatever from the Wikidata item.
Thanks,
       Gerard

On Wed, 24 Feb 2021 at 09:56, Amir E. Aharoni <amir.aharoni@mail.huji.ac.il> wrote:
Hi,

Wikidata is adding support for sitelinks to the Multilingual Wikisource.

There's a discussion there about which language should it use. Currently it's "en", which is not quite correct: technically, the site language of Multilingual Wikisource is English, but most of the content is in other languages.

Ideally, each link should specify the language of the page to which it's linking, but currently this is not possible technically.

Until it's possible, suggestions to use "und" or "mul" have been raised:

I don't have an opinion about this myself. Does anyone else have thoughts about it?

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