One thing that I find disappointing is that the number of texts without scans still increases at en.ws (see the graph). In fact, it even increased at a rather alarming pace recently, if we balance the amount of new text created with our capability to proofread it.
This suggests that the en.ws community, or at least an influential part of it, still considers texts without scans as a valuable addition for Wikisource.
However, texts without scans are *harmful* to Wikisource.
1. Texts without scans cannot be verified as easily as they can be vandalized. 2. Texts without scans harm our reputation. Any sensible person who tries to understand how a wiki can provide text that remains faithful to a reference edition can only have strong doubts when they discover an edit window that invites them to freely modify the text. In contrast, the presence of a scan next to the edit window, combined with the notion that other users have access to the same window with the same scan, and can check what you are doing, makes the whole process constrained and trustable. 3. The continued presence of texts without scans, that almost nobody can verify, conveys the feeling that most texts present at Wikisource are never verified, and that rubbish may very well remain undetected for years. (which is actually true) 4. Finally, low quality standards can only deter serious contributors, and attract contributors who fail to understand the problem, or who refuse to see it because they are happy with the current situation where nobody checks what they do.
Part of the problem comes from the fact that some users see Wikisource as an extension of Wikipedia, and believe that Wikipedia's error correction principles similarly apply to Wikisource.
However, this is completely wrong. We have much less contributors than Wikipedia, and the number of texts that we have in scope is much larger. Thus, the number of times a Wikisource text is likely to be corrected is orders of magnitude below that of a Wikipedia article. Once a text without scan has been declared "ok" by its contributor, it often remains untouched (and most likely unread) for years. In those conditions, it is wishful thinking to believe that Wikipedia's principles of error correction by peers similarly apply to Wikisource.
Wikisource will not be trustable until we stop accepting texts without scans.
And no matter how virtuous some subdomains are, I think that the reputation of Wikisource as a whole strongly depends on what is being done at en.ws.
Thomas