Ah, now I understand what you meant! But why do you think the editing guidelines will be "without reference"? Just like a Wikipedia article can and should be based on sources, the Wikisource guidelines for editing a text should be written by people familiar with the scholarship on that text, while referencing both that scholarship and the relevant editions and manuscripts. Which is exactly what we try to do. And it works quite well. Here too I agree with you completely. The editing guidelines at Wikisource are meant to implement the scholarship on a work in a neutral way. Regarding this it must be pointed out that at times there may be several legitimate ways to edit a single text (all of them based on good sources!), and the best way to achieve neutrality would be to allow the user to choose which style of editing s/he prefers. First of all Wikipedia is an amazing success despite that. But secondly and more importantly, editing texts is a very different kind of process that writing an encyclopedia article, and I think that is why it is much less likely to lead to edit wars and to a culture of negative argumentation (as it unfortunately often does at Wikipedia). Once again, the idea that edit wars aren't much of a problem is not just a hypothesis, but the result of 8 years of experimentation and work. Quite frankly, I fully agree with all those people who find the negative culture of argumentation that is often present at Wikipedia to be quite distasteful, and one reason I prefer Wikisource is that for our project it hardly exists at all. In other words, I agree with your concerns. However, I don't thing that sense of distaste is a legitimate reason to prevent people from contributing texts in ways other than simple proofreading. If you personally are so afraid of this, then stick to proofreading for yourself! But be generous enough to allow others to contribute source texts in other ways. Plus, as I said, our experience shows that it is really not much of a problem. Have a good weekend! :-)