On Jan 4, 2008 9:28 AM, Yann Forget <yann(a)forget-me.net> wrote: I am surprised how few page scans are in the en namespace: 4883 of which 2792 are the NSRW. Of the remaining 2091, * 620 : Maxwell's Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism * 368 : H.R. Rep. No. 94-1476 * 289 : The How and Why Library * 200 :[[History of Iowa/Volume 4]] (google book; no images) * 66 : Spirella Manual (1913) * 59 : Faraday's Experimental researches in electricity * 45 : Secret history of the French court under Richelieu and Mazarin (google book; images on google) + 444 misc. others Even those numbers are inflated, as I know that many of the pages in Maxwell's treatise are empty shells that once contained only a header before the days of Index: pages. That number must include images that do not have Page:s, as there are 40046 articles in ns104 on frwikisource. http://tools.wikimedia.de/~st47/cgi-bin/pagesinns.pl?server=3&db=frwiki… If en.ws was to include those, all of the EB1911 images could be included :-) 40 thousand pages is a testament to the success of the fr.ws approach. While indicating a source is critical for scholarly purposes where many editions exist, it is also often completely irrelevant when only one edition is likely to exist. There are many newspaper and journal articles that are _only_ available online by way of Wikisource, and even when not proof-read these are invaluable for scholarly purposes. An example of a high quality transcription that is occurring without page scans, see Journal of Discourses and EB1911. http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Journal_of_Discourses http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/EB1911 Even in the case when many editions exist, a copy on Wikisource of poor provenance is _not_ worthless - it is merely a work in progress - anyone can improve it by pinning it down to one edition, and because Wikisource is a WMF project, any scholar knows without asking that the Wikisource community will welcome their involvement in our project. As a result, poor copies that put Wikisource into google search results do bring in new and valuable contributors. Stipulating that imperfection is intolerable is inhumane. Eradicating the imperfection is the path to perfection. Page scans are, for the most part, orthogonal to quality. Meticulous transcriptions of page scans of a collection poorly collated, or of a rushed translation, is nothing short of a wasted effort. On en.ws, we do need to increase the percentage of texts with page scans. Any suggestions on how to achieve this? -- John

Yann Forget wrote: This is completely false; the German Wikisource have a high number of texts with scans that are not counted because they are not in their Page: namespace. This is because they have used a different tool before the availability of the Page: extension. Since the activation of the extension on de.ws, they have been converting old texts to the new format, but they are far from having finished. There are still plenty of pages on de.ws that contain several scanned pages (and sometimes or hundreds of them). These pages need to be split and moved into the Page namespace. Once this is finished, you'll be able to make statements based on those figures. In addition, it is fair to estimate than more than 50% of the scans on fr.ws have never been proofread by a wikisource user. This contrasts with the 8.700 pages on de.ws that have been proofread once, and 11.400 that have been proofread twice. The German WS adopted a policy of making scans mandatory, which explains why they are more advanced. I believe that this is the only sensible policy for Wikisource, and it should be generalized to all subdomains. Without scans, a text on wikisource will always look suspicious, no matter how carefully it was proofread. Without scans, our work cannot be trusted, no matter how much fun, pain or pleasure we had formatting it. The German wikisource adopted their policy early, which gave them a quality advantage. It is now time for other subdomains to catch up. Thomas