With the deployment of Wikidata it is a good moment to re-examine what "Index" pages are and what should be their function.
The most direct transition to a Wikidata-supported Wikisource could be something like this:
https://sites.google.com/site/dacuetu/BookData.pdf
That would allow:
- to share data book data between Commons, Wikisource and Wikipedia
- to update it, when any of the sites has been updated
- to facilitate better search functions (like searches by author, or topic, limiting the date range or the language)
That would only apply to those texts which use a "Index:" page, so now the question is, what do we do with books that do not have supporting scans (and therefore no index page)?
Some possible options:
a) ignore pages without sources and focus only on works with supporting scans
b) use ns0 pages also as data containers (instead of, or in addition to "Index" pages)
c) create "Index:" pages for all works, with or without scans. Use that instead of "Template:Textinfo"
Personally I prefer "option c", even if it would require to rename "Index:" to "Source:" to make more clear what are those pages, however I would like to hear the opinion of other wikisourcerors about this.
Cheers,
Micru