On 2012-08-19 08:25, Dovi Jacobs wrote:
Just so people can get a better idea of what we are dealing with at Hebrew Wikisource, I would like to radically build upon Sébastien's example. Imagine a literature which until a century ago was mostly published in a fashion that lacked not just some updated spelling, but far more: Zero vowelization, zero punctuation (periods, commas, etc.), zero division into paragraphs of reasonable size,
What you describe here might apply to any language, primarily for texts from the time before the language got a stable and modern orthography.
Russian Wikisource has a method for modernizing the pre-1917 orthography, using the /ДО page name suffix.
Swedish Wikisource has many texts in pre-1906 orthography, but hasn't implemented any method for modernizing it; readers are expected to be able to read the old spelling.
Before 1801 Swedish orthography was less standardized and would be harder to read. For texts from this period, your methods for annotations would make more sense. But there are very few texts from that period. And in some cases, 15th century texts (manuscripts) were republished (printed) in the 19th century with annotations, in critical editions whose copyright has now expired, e.g. http://sv.wikisource.org/wiki/Index:Svenska_medeltidens_bibel-arbeten_%28185...
Back in 2005, when I proposed to use scanned images in Wikisource, I added two works in German and English as examples, http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:LA2/Digitizing_books_with_MediaWiki
I think you need to do something similar. Most of us can't read Hebrew (or Swedish), and won't fully understand any example given in such a small language.