John Vandenberg wrote:
On Thu, Aug 14, 2008 at 4:50 AM, Lars Aronsson
<lars(a)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?
--
Lars Aronsson (lars(a)aronsson.se)
Aronsson Datateknik -
http://aronsson.se