On Sun, Nov 29, 2015 at 3:39 PM, Andrea Zanni <zanni.andrea84(a)gmail.com>
wrote:
(...)
Unfortunately, for the time being, we hare scattered communities with no
software support whatsoever: we don't have a Proofread page for
Right-to-left languages, just imagine how much time it would take to
redesign a MediaWiki for being a multilanguage, unique digital library, in
which anyone can contribute.
(...)
What about two multilanguage Wikisources? One for RTL languages, another
for LTR languages. Or at least one multilanguage Wikisource for languages
based on roman script
It's very disturbing to work on Wikisource if you is interested in a
subject and is able to read in more than one language. On the very specif
subject of "slavery on Brazil" you will find works in Portuguese, Spanish,
English, French, German and Latin, with at least 90% of them never
translated to another language.
Also is very annoying to create thousands of Author pages to simply show
snippets of biographical data for persons mentioned in a given work, since
any regular research work (current or ancient) *will* refer to works in
more than one language; most of those persons don't have any work
translated to your language, PD-old or copyrighted, but you still will need
to create an Author page if you is interested to help readers to proper
understand a given text.
BTW this need pointed me to create a new local innovation: a template to
point the reader to the Wikisource edition that will have works by a given
person ({{autor-idioma}}). And, to prevent good faith users uploading
copyrighted translations, there's also the need to put an old local
innovation from es.Wikisource (currently adopted in many subdomains,
en.Wikisource including). See the
https://pt.wikisource.org/wiki/Autor:Bonaventure_des_P%C3%A9riers
Not to mention that each subdomain have their own way to sort and store
data on Author namespace, that certainly is the crossing barrier for those
that searchs for a subject on libraries OPACs to never adopt Wikisource as
a search point (eventually going to Wikisource pages thanks to Google
search): they don't have time to be trained on 60 subdomains website
designs to research to find information in a language that they are able to
read (or to translate using a software).
In this current subdomain approach, Wikisource will be able to proper store
only fiction works (since language is the main criteria for adopting a
fiction work to read), but never non-fiction works (neither non-fiction
works that describes fiction works: the world was culturally globalized
centuries ago).