Hello,

I agree with Ray here, and I think that Klaus' mail does not report exactly the reality. The French Wikisource has the greatest numbers of scanned texts so far, but does not make mandatory to have them to publish a text there. It is only a suggestion, which many contributors follow.

I think that the important point is not scanned texts, but notation on whether and how the texts are proofread by editors, whatever means the editors use to proofread the texts.

Regards,

Yann

Ray Saintonge wrote:

Klaus Graf wrote:

...

One can add de.Wikisource which is a project making historical Public Domain texts in German available with high quality standards. These standards are NOT (yet) shared by the other Wikisource projects, see also

http://wikisource.org/wiki/Wikisource:Scriptorium#The_huge_leap

Only de.Wikisource demands scanned texts (or digital photos) for contributions, most other Wikisource branches have a lot of texts which are unsourced. De.Wikisource has notes commenting the texts for lots of texts.

Much of what you suggest is not about to happen any time soon. The fact is that splitting up the Wikisource communities created circumstances where each Wikisource develops its own standards and criteria. The discussions which may have taken place leading up to these policies on de:Wikisource either did not take place elsewhere or did not have the same results. At best, there have been few determined contributors willing to lead by example. Simply telling people to do these gets nowhere.

There is a clear benefit to having to having our texts supported by scanned texts, but many of us who may work well with textual material, may not have the same technical ease when working with images of any kind. Even adding a small number of illustrations that may otherwise accompany a text can be a problematic chore. I am quite prepared to identify where I found my material, but I am quite content to have others do the work of digitization.

Commenting on texts is a great idea that could stand to be encouraged more.

I agree with the premise that we cannot hope to keep up with the massive digitization projects undertaken by well-funded institutions, but a lot of restrictive requirements is self-defeating. The need is really for a balance somewhere between the minutiae of quality and the feeling that contributors are seeing a lot of growth. Wikisource will not become great by trying to beat the big institutions at their own game. Thus we need to ask oursaelves what we can do to add value that no other similar project can do. In doing so we cannot afford to get bogged down in standardized headings that do not allow for easy expansion without a complete understanding of tranclusion technology. We need to allow our imaginations the freedom to find new ways of connecting data without being tied to formal structures that are so strict as to close off these paths.

Ec