On 8 November 2013 10:52, Fæ faewik@gmail.com wrote:
Having 'been around' for quite a while, dabbled in Wikisource and lurked around its back passages, I still find it comparatively hard to understand. If this is to attract newcomers, then it would be nice to see this go hand-in-hand with improving both the guidelines on exactly how to proofread (there's a complex multi-stage process that could do with a simpler work-flow), the peculiarities of how text is marked-up there and the rather convoluted underpinning process for turning a document/book into a djvu file, loading it on Commons and then setting it up as a book on Wikisource (phew). I'm fairly wizardly but I found the "norms" hard to work out and arbitrary.
These and Fae's other general comments are fair.
Since I spoke about Wikisource at the WMUK AGM in 2010, the project has been getting somewhat more attention, better technical support and so on. Obviously the competition initiative is a profile-raising exercise, and the context is other work going on that is off-topic here.
As a text repository Wikisource has plenty of rivals (even the logo acknowledges that). ProofReadPage, the MediaWiki extension that allows proofing via "text opposite scan", should become the USP, but needs to be supplemented by sound policies on annotation and translation. The enWS community anyway is hardcore and fairly slow to be impressed, but has been known recently to generate and accept initiatives.
Charles