On Thursday 18 April 2002 12:02 pm, Magnus wrote:
IMHO such a project *could* work with the wiki system, especially for OCRed pages that need manual work. This could be done by a community rather than by a single person, especially if, e.g., a book is broken into chapters taht can be edited seperately. There would have to be some special features, though, like subpages for the chapters (back to square one;) , a better diff system maybe, and access for logged-in users only to cut down troll activity. Another advantage would be that it could be easily interlinked with wikipedia ([[source:The Origin of Species]]...)
Magnus
This would be an excellent feature and adding a source:namespace with more restrictive rules would probably work out nicely. However, for source texts like this I would further limit editing ability to sysops or maybe only to users who have been in the database more than a set amount of time (there is nothing stopping a vandal from logging in to do some harm).
Per a previous feature request I submitted, I still think it would be nice to display parts of protected text in a text box within a regular wikipedia world-editable article (maybee have all source:namespace articles automatically have numbered lines, so that a user could call upon those particular lines to display in a regular article.....just brainstorming). Whatever we decide to do, we do need to somehow protect the integrity of what the author said -- otherwise it is useless.
Annotation is a different story and usually has small sections taken out of contex to be discussed (often by critics) -- there is much less expectation that what is being annotated is the actual words of the original author than would a dump of the complete text. Therefore, nothing really special is needed for that other than regular wiki magic. Although a link to some kind of 'protected' source would only help the argument of the annotator (or detract from, depending on the validity of the argument).
If something is going to be seriously planned along these or similar lines, then we should perhaps just have the sysops go around and protect the source material and maybee replace it if there is reason to believe that it has been tampered with (thus changing what the Bible said, for example). Otherwise we should probably remove all such material from the current versions of articles and replace it with external links to the text.
maveric149
Daniel Lee Mayer wrote:
This would be an excellent feature and adding a source:namespace with more restrictive rules would probably work out nicely. However, for source texts
I think such a project should be given a different name and kept separate from Wikipedia. The Wikipedia brand should represent something that is similar to an encyclopedia, or everybody will get confused. The same people (and company) can be involved in more than one project. There can be close links (even namespace-like links) between two websites that run under different brands.
Other than this, the current Wiki technology has limited use for source texts, because there can be any number of texts having the same title, so [[source:The Raven]] could be very ambiguous.
What we could easily do is to introduce a link scheme, that translates the Wiki text gutenberg:1063 into a useful link like http://digital.library.upenn.edu/webbin/gutbook/lookup?num=1063 just like the 'ISBN:' rule we have today. If the upenn website goes away, the Wikipedia pages still contain "gutenberg:1063" and the link rule can be rewritten to use another website.
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