I don't really think the German policy is the only way to go, although I appreciate their results. In English especially there are a large number of scans available online already with various terms of use or copyright claimed. And if the en.WS contributor lives in the UK that copyright is quite enforceable. en.WS does have texts which are proofread against scanned editions by multiple people even though the scan itself is not hosted on en.WS or Commons, but rather linked to on the talkpage. I don't exactly know exactly how the German policy reads but you all seem to be talking about scans which will eventually be in the Page namespace. en.WS also has texts which have been proofed through other organizations like Project Gutenburg. Although I have nothing against the Germans doing things in such a way, I would hardly support en.WS adopting this policy. It not the only way to secure quality texts.
In all seriousness en.WS will lagging behind other wikis in quality for the near future. This is due to sheer numbers as well as the "dumping ground" the origins of en.WS. I anticipate en.WS improving at a pace that doesn't burnout contributors, not necessarily "catching up" with anyone else. I congratulate de.WS on their success and hope they are able to translate it into breaking ground in other areas as well.
Birgitte SB
--- ThomasV thomasV1@gmx.de wrote:
Yann Forget wrote:
Hello,
This is now off topic for foundation-l. Better to continue this on wikisource-l.
Klaus Graf wrote:
Hello,
I agree with Ray here, and I think that Klaus'
mail does not report
exactly the reality. The French Wikisource has
the greatest numbers of
scanned texts so far,
Is there a proof for this claim?
http://wikisource.org/wiki/Wikisource:ProofreadPage_Statistics
lists 40,043 pages for fr.ws and 16,939 for de.ws.
This is completely false; the German Wikisource have a high number of texts with scans that are not counted because they are not in their Page: namespace. This is because they have used a different tool before the availability of the Page: extension. Since the activation of the extension on de.ws, they have been converting old texts to the new format, but they are far from having finished. There are still plenty of pages on de.ws that contain several scanned pages (and sometimes or hundreds of them). These pages need to be split and moved into the Page namespace. Once this is finished, you'll be able to make statements based on those figures.
In addition, it is fair to estimate than more than 50% of the scans on fr.ws have never been proofread by a wikisource user. This contrasts with the 8.700 pages on de.ws that have been proofread once, and 11.400 that have been proofread twice.
The German WS adopted a policy of making scans mandatory, which explains why they are more advanced. I believe that this is the only sensible policy for Wikisource, and it should be generalized to all subdomains. Without scans, a text on wikisource will always look suspicious, no matter how carefully it was proofread. Without scans, our work cannot be trusted, no matter how much fun, pain or pleasure we had formatting it.
The German wikisource adopted their policy early, which gave them a quality advantage. It is now time for other subdomains to catch up.
Thomas
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