Lars Aronsson wrote:
Birgitte SB wrote:
Then there are things like creating translation and adding value to text by wikilinks.
In my opinion, translations (performed by wiki volunteers) should belong in Wikibooks and not in Wikisource, exactly because they are not (pre-existing, external) sources but creative efforts.
Copyright legislation recognizes translators just like authors, so the copyright to a wiki-translation belongs to the translators, who can license their work. (I'm assuming that the original authors are long dead and no longer can make such claims.) Whereas most books on Wikisource are in the public domain, where none of the wiki volunteers can claim copyright and thus cannot add any free license.
I think that translations belong to Wikisource much better than any other Wikimedia projects, for the reasons also mentioned by others (copyright, DoubleWiki extension, etc.). We already have translations by Wikisource contributors, both of old [1] and recent texts [2].
There is no such thing as the perfect translation. That's one of the reason why commercial editors translate old texts again and again instead of reprinting old translations. So if we accept the old ones, I don't see why we could not accept new translations.
Regards,
Yann
[1] http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/J%27accuse (Zola) [2] http://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/Libre_comme_Libert%C3%A9 (on Stallman)