Now on the one hand, any modern published edition of these same source texts adds all of these features to the great benefit of readers, but they are all of course copyrighted! On the other hand, to simply post the plain text on Wikisource without vowelization, punctuation, division into paragraphs and citation of sources provides little benefit to users. And I once again emphasize that this is the case for the *majority* of public
domain literature in the language! (By the way, nothing I've written about here is a critical edition; that is something that goes beyond this. Rather, this is what is involved just to present an average text in a usable fashion.)
There is no question that even adding this basic level of styling to a text involves creative effort, and therefore it is possible, even likely, that two different editors might differ sometimes on details. But in practice, we've found that cooperation and collaboration in wiki style, far from creating problems, is actually a congenial and enjoyable way to
provide classic texts to the public in a useful way.
Dovi"
In Swedish (sv) we have regularly talks about how long-s: ſ, dubble-s: ß etc should be written on Wikisource. The conclusion is not
always the same.
It often depends of the age of the text, and the nature of it. If we correct spelling, or not, depends on the age. There were no such thing as a standard for
spelling in the 15'th century-swedish. The texts I work with is filled with latin words and therefor influence from latin grammar. I also see æ regularly,
even if it dissapeared from the swedish
language during the 16's century, together with everything that reminds about Denmark. The way the swedish
letters åäö, looked in the 16'th to 18'th century, is very different from today, but we choose to write modern versions on wikisource.
Old texts can also be filled with tiny lines, that show that a word is missing one or a few letters. (thn instead of then) It is obvious that paper and ink
was expensive in the old days.
/Ronnie