On 4/2/07, Birgitte SB <birgitte_sb@yahoo.com > wrote:
Due to past conversations I have had with people
involved with incubator, I read the comment about
"merging processes" differently than you did.  Perhaps
I am mistaken, and that is not what was meant in this
case.

However there are people who have been clear with me
that they think  [[:oldwikisource:]] should be
completely merged into [[:incubator:]] in the long
term.  

With long term you is trying to say "starting at the 2859 year"? If yes, it is fine to me. The world have more than 5,000 languages and the Wikimedia Foundation at this time have 63 Wikipedias, the most google-friendly project, with less than 100 articles [1]. I think that the [[:incubator:]] is a temporary hosting, not a hosting for someone trying to found more people speaking on a specific language that have Internet access, knows something related to free culture, historical texts, OCRing and wiki culture like [[:oldwikisource:]] is for some languages.

Personally I don't like to see the process of
starting new Wikisources taken over, because outside
people simply fail to appreciate the reality of
wikiSOURCE, where the content already exists in
tangible form (with corresponding dialects and
orthographies already pre-determined for each edition
of a text).  Processing requests at meta has led to
people being encouraged to start a new wikisource for
a variation of a language without ever trying to work
in the existing wiki (or even talking to them). [1]
The people I have spoken to from incubator also seem
unable to see the intrinsic differences between a
wikisource and a wikipedia.  From what I can see they
are planning a one-size fits all process, with no
differences in handling based on projects.  Despite
the fact that there are strong arguments for having
one Wikisource where there are several Wikipedias with
related languages.  If plans have changed, or I am
simply mistaken, please correct me.

[1]
http://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Requests_for_new_languages/Ancient&diff=prev&oldid=360204

The full page seems to have been lost on meta, so I
linked one of my contributioins there

My propose is a attempt of a {{merge}} between the current Wikisource Multilingual policy + langcom policy + proposed policies to the Wikisource Multilingual [2].

The problem is the pun "Wikimedia" naming the foundation. The press generally ignores the others projects due to it. Google and Yahoo! sometimes aren't friendly with theirs search results for non-Wikipedia projects, specially for non-English languages. The Wikimedia Foundation tries to do attention to all projects, but sometimes Wikipedia suck all of their energy due to the media coverage to Wikipedia and the lack of media coverage for non-Wikipedia projets. The result: users with only basic knowledge thinks that Wiktionary is a mini-Wikipedia with the same rules and needs, Wikibooks is a Wikipedia for big articles and the Wikisource is the big trashcan for texts that newbies adds to the Wikipedia articles.

Moving the requests to the Meta-Wiki is IMHO the best solution because:

* You don't need to someone remeber the existence of a wiki that may have requests for new languages placed on then, neither to prays to someone check that page/wiki regularly during the small amout of seconds per month that Wikipedia isn't sucking all attention
* You can simply vote as against on meta if no one is placing text-units on the correct place (specially if something on [2] may give a chance to move from proposal to policy)
* You stop the behaviour "let's go to the [[:oldwikisource:]] only to vote for new languages and to delete old stuff" specially because you can vote as against if no one is adding texts neither in the right place neither in the wrong place, again specially if something on [2].... forcing to that wiki having someone rather than Volapuk and India national languages speakers adding periodically new texts.


[1] - http://s23.org/wikistats/wikipedias_html.php

[2] - http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikisource-l/2007-April/000224.html