John Vandenberg wrote:
On Thu, Aug 14, 2008 at 4:50 AM, Lars Aronsson lars@aronsson.se wrote:
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.
That is a tough call. I havent seen a lot of discussion about this.
Wikibooks is about creating new books. Wikisource is focused on old sources.
Exactly, it all comes down to whether you consider a new translation to be "a new book" or "an old source". We can have different opinions on this. My personal opinion is that translations are new books. For example, the Church of Sweden in 2000 replaced its old official Swedish Bible translation from 1917 with a new one. It does make a difference which text you cite. Also, the translation from 2000 is under copyright, while the 1917 is in the public domain and freely available online.
However, this is not an issue where I take a strong position, it's more of a philosophical issue for me. I'm not active in Wikibooks and have no wish to tell them what to do. I'm not really active in Wikisource either, except that I (user:LA2) three years ago tried to introduce page scanning in Wikisource by uploading [[The New Student's Reference Work]] and [[de:Meyers Blitz-Lexikon]].
I would think that it is important for Wikisource to be a reliable source, one that users can trust and believe to be faithful. Page scanning is a way to achieve this, because "seeing is believing". Allowing freehand translations by unknown volunteers creates the same base for mistrust that Wikipedia suffers from. Perhaps freehand commentaries (user:XYZ's commentary on the Bible) are the next step? Such books exist, just like translations do. And where they don't exist, should they be written? Within Wikisource?