On Aug 6, 2012, at 8:16 AM, Dovi Jacobs <dovijacobs(a)yahoo.com> wrote:
Thanks Lars.
Your examples 1 and 2 are the combination of two
printed
editions or variants into one digital product. That process is
scholarly, text-critical editing, an intellectual exercise. For
example, if the British and American editions would be found
to differ not only in spelling but also in content, you would
have to develop a policy for how to deal with that.
Absolutely correct, and that is exactly what we have done at Hebrew Wikisource. If there
is a book that requires special editorial guidelines beyond just simple proofreading, then
a page in the Wikisource namespace is created such as [[Wikisource:The Kinematics of
Machinery]] where the community collaboratively develops those guidelines.
<snip>
Does anyone understand whether the years of discussion of "Wikidata" might have
anything to do with #1-2?
Wikidata is really not being thought about for such a thing. Wikidata is more about
data*points* than anything else. Also it will give permanent IDs to wiki pages in a way
that won't be broken by moves or renames. So that a (forevermore identifiable) text on
Wikisource linking to the author page that is linked to the (forevermore identifiable)
biography article on Wikipedia which is also linked to the LOC permanent URL and is also
linked the same way to another authority's database, we can say the author of this
work is the same as the person in that biography, who is the same as the person listed in
that database and in that one too. Even if they all *name* the author with different
variations, we will be able to have them all linked through the Wikipedia biography. Or it
can be done with a subject, linking through "dc subject" to say that this
Wikisouce text contains information about the same concept that that this Wikipedia
article contains information about (which is pretty much how they plan to do interwikis
from what I understand).
This is done without having to decide on any names for labels. The only label is some
string of numbers unique to Wikidata, and this label is not so much defined by any other
label as it is correlated to the others. Wikidata will give machine readable labels to
information that defined only by its source (X is defined only as "the number given
by the 2010 US census" and X is correlated with the population of Iowa), and Wikidata
will then correlate everything else which is alike (all the fields within infoboxes in all
languages of Wikipedia which are to display numbers that correlate with to the population
of Iowa). That is a bit simplified because all of this is done with multiple sources and
without picking one source to be the definitive one (the population of Iowa would be
correlated with many datapoints, with the more recent being weighted, in order to display
a range in the infoboxes instead of the simple example of displaying X).
I barely can grasp much of the Wikidata stuff myself. So fair warning, I might be
misleading you all horribly! The neat thing about it is that since it is not semantic,
the underlying idea of how to describe the data does seem to be a useful way to *think*
about alternative texts. However I do not understand how Wikidata itself would quite fit
in with what you are thinking about in 1 & 2. Wikidata sort of ignores the expression
level from what I heard. Now, I don't really understand how it *can* ignore the
expression level, but I am repeating what I heard. As I have pretty much trained myself to
think about Wikisource at the expression level, this is a big roadblock for me. I just
don't see how Wikidata would find a handle on the text itself in Wikisource as opposed
to how it might handle the metadata about the texts.
I hope you can make sense of some of this, and that I am have not largely misunderstood it
all myself.
Birgitte SB