On 3/23/07, Lars Aronsson <lars(a)aronsson.se> wrote:
Luiz Augusto wrote:
Wikisources are going to reach 200 000 articles
(now all 52
Wikisources have 190 865 articles)
Wikisource is in bad need to be restructured. You cannot digitize
books and talk about 200,000 articles. What does that tell
anybody about the size? The number of articles is a size
measurement for an encyclopedia or dictionary, but not for a
collection of digitized books. How many books do we have?
The number of articles doesn't help to determine the number of books, this
is true. But Wikisource isn't only books. Wikisource have also a large
amount of texts that never constitute a book.
How
many printed pages? How can I download one book?
Some people
want to download the entire French Wikipedia but very few can be
interested in downloading the whole of Wikisource. The book
should be the unit, not the library.
Portuguese and Spanish Wikisources have the "Print Version" project [1],
based on the Print Version from the English Wikibooks [2] (English Wikibooks
releases .pdf files containing a full book but Portuguese and Spanish
Wikisource have rejected to duplicate the current avaiable material on
another file type). This may help to download a entire book for works that
are books. But MediaWiki have some limitations for general printing [3] and
a external tool to export pages from a category and convert then in a
downloadable file may be more helpfull.
This isn't the main problem for me. I really rate the Protection policy used
in the most majority of Wikisources to protect the integrity of a text.
Wikisource is powered by the MediaWiki, a *wiki* content managing system. A
fully proofread text is a fully proofread text, not a dead page that never
more receive a new category schema [4] or a interwiki for translation or a
annotation or a link pointing to some Wikipedia/Wiktionary article for some
specific word or a free image found in some edition that helps to understand
the text or (...). I'm anxious to see new developments in the "stable
version".
Anyway, the number of "articles" is a valid number of general development.
These numbers are something like the total pages from a book that a publishing
house have released to the general public. You know the total number of
"paper" used at Wikisources but you don't know yet the total number of
books
and others publications that these publishing house have released.
(sorry for my poor English in a long message)
[1] <
http://pt.wikisource.org/wiki/Wikisource:Vers%C3%A3o_para_impress%C3%A3o>
and <http://es.wikisource.org/wiki/Wikisource:Versi%C3%B3n_para_imprimir>
[2] <http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Wikibooks:Print_versions>
[3] Some of these listed by a en.ws user at <
http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/User:Newmanbe/Printing_works>
[4] <
http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikisource-l/2007-February/000163.html…