John Vandenberg wrote:
To be honest, this blogger is spot on. Our editions for these stories are terrible, usually being uploaded by one person from a crappy online edition, altered to partial conform to another crappy online edition of unknown provenance :- rinse and repeat, until we have a very crappy edition indeed.
Lars Aronsson wrote:
That kind of criticism has also been voice against Google Book Search. But libraries still refuse to burn these inferior books. They're kept on shelves, side by side with good ones. Library catalogs seldom indicate the difference. [...]
That is because Google Book Search is no other than a digital library: scanned books in pdf format. Nobody there is intended to create nothing but "digital photocopies".
If Wikisource is another digitization project into the galaxy of digitization projects that we can find nowadays on the net, then let's look for scanners and developers who are able of creating some good OCR software, let's look for contributors who are inclined to use them, and we will upload the files to Commons. No need of a Wikisource project to do that.
But, in fact, none of the wikimedia projects are copy/pastes from paper sources (or ''digitization projects''): * Wikipedia is an on-line encyclopaedia created by hundreds of contributors, not a copy/paste from a paper edition of some old encyclopaedia (even when it's lawful to copy text from encyclopaedias which are in PD, as some contributors actually do). * Wikiversity, Wikibooks, Wiktionary, Wikispecies and Wikinews are all mainly related to the creation of new text, even when we can copy PD text from other sources. * Wikiquote is a new database of quotes from everywhere created by the contributors (and fr.wikiquotes has suffered the fact of partially copying the structure of another database). * Commons is full of contributors' works... and PD works, sure.
Why are there people who think that Wikisource is not related to the act of creating something? that is, why WS is not "like a publisher that prints a new edition", even when we are publishing a new encyclopaedia, new textbooks, a new quote database, new images... ?
When the creation of « another sister-project to the wikipedia about current events » was proposed in 2003, the response was:
« I think we should go further still and shoot for the ultimate goal of creating "Wikimedia." That's media with an "m." It would use Wiki-style rules to enable public participation in the creation and editing of all kinds of media. » (Sheldon Rampton, from http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikien-l/2003-March/001887.html)
"Public participation in the creation and editing of" whatever you want has no relation with any kind of digital library.
I agree with you when you say that "digitization projects should be digital libraries", but the sister-projects to the Wikipedia were never planned as "digitization projects", and that is also applicable to Wikisource.
The main goals of the Wikimedia projects are "public participation" and "creation". I think we should not forget it.
And the blogger... is spot on ;)
LaosLos