Ronnie, thanks for your comments. It's interesting to learn that you've chosen to
publish modern versions of older texts on Wikisource. It would be nice to hear from a
variety of our many dozens of languages as to how they handle these issues, so that our
various projects can be aware of what each other are doing and learn from each other, and
also so that the "Wikisource Roadmap" can better reflect the needs of projects
in diverse languages and cultures.
Lars wrote:
What you describe here might apply to any language,
primarily for texts from the time before the language
got a stable and modern orthography.
Russian Wikisource has a method for modernizing the
pre-1917 orthography, using the /?? page name suffix.
Swedish Wikisource has many texts in pre-1906
orthography,
but hasn't implemented any method for modernizing it;
readers are expected to be able to read the old spelling.
Here too I am grateful for the examples from other languages. Though what I described
might in principle apply to any language, I think it is clear that it applies much more to
the literatures of some languages than to others. There is such a huge corpus of
literature in English and other large European languages that it doesn't apply to, but
less so in others. (Though even in English I can think of examples.)
Back in 2005, when I proposed to use scanned images in
Wikisource, I added two works in German and English
as examples,
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:LA2/Digitizing_books_with_MediaWiki
I think you need to do something similar. Most of us
can't read Hebrew (or Swedish), and won't fully
understand any example given in such a small language.
If I've understood you correctly, you mean that I should create a page that shows
examples of other methods of editing? I'll have to think about how to accomplish
making that understood for examples in a non-Latin alphabet...
By the way, I've been aware of those pages and examples since you first published
them, and I've always admired your work :-)
Dovi