On Thu, Aug 14, 2008 at 9:33 PM, Lars Aronsson <lars(a)aronsson.se> wrote:
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.
:-)
Translations are a new work; no doubt about it.
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]].
Then you will be comforted to see this:
http://wikisource.org/wiki/Wikisource:ProofreadPage_Statistics
The German project now mandates pagescans for all contributions; I
learnt this the hard way ;-)
We have page quality indicators to indicate how much trust a person
should have in the text. We are still young and undermanned, so there
is much room for improvement on how we quantify and present this trust
metric.
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.
The same mistrust will occur whether the wiki-translation is on
wikisource, wikibooks or wikipedia (which has thousands of Wiki
translations without any clear evidence that it is a wiki
translation).
On Wikisource we require that all wiki translations are clearly marked
as such. See the pages in here:
http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Category:Wikisource_translations
and our proposed guideline here:
http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Wikisource:Translations
In my opinion, Wikisource will be better prepared to deal with the
problems of wiki-translations, as the project rejects all other
unpublished works. Our intention is not to accept new works, so
people cant wiki-lawyer in order to keep a wild adaption of the
original.
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?
Annotations can be included on English Wikisource. Annotated editions
cant be styled after the persons name.
http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/WS:ANN
A recently finished annotated work is:
http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Copyright_Law_Revision_(House_Report_No._94-1…
See:
http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Copyright_Law_Revision_(House_Report_No._94-1…
--
John