Birgitte wrotw:
"despite our experimentation the only WP type edit wars I can remember were a few over stylistic issues and one translation"
Birgitte, thanks for the information. In other words, at Hebrew Wikisource which is a smaller (but active) wiki, there has never once been an edit war over this in the 8 years of our history (at least to the best recollection of my admittedly faulty memory). At English Wikisource, which is the largest and most active wiki of all, there have been perhaps two over the many years, and they were satisfactorily resolved.
However, even saying that, it is clear that Marc Galli is certainly quite correct in principle: The bottom line is that any activity that requires any amount of creativity could possibly result in an edit war. But not everything that is correct in theory is always borne out in practice. The Wikisources in English and Hebrew both indicate that the editing process involved in producing corrected/styled/annotated editions do not in practice produce a lot of edit-warring. As I suggested earlier, it may be both because of the people and processes involved: *In terms of the process, editing a text is far less likely to be a source of passionate controversy than are the many highly controversial topics covered in Wikipedia. *In terms of the people, those who enjoy editing such texts, even if they are passionate about what they do (in a positive sense), seem to be less argumentative on the whole than do the people who collaborate on Wikipedia articles that deal with highly controversial topics.
Sébastien wrote:
"On the French WS there are some minor corrections I personally don?t
consider as "too major" to qualify these of critical edition: - modernized (but not too much) version, e.g. the replacement of long S (?) by a modern S (s) (see e.g. [1] there is a gadget on the left column to change that: Options d?affichage > Texte modernis?) -- I have more concerns about rewritings of Ancient French to modern French and I even have concerns about rewritings of old spellings to modern spellings (e.g. in [1] a modern version could replace "toy" by "toi"), I don?t know the opinion/policies of the French community about that - very very obvious spelling mistakes (mostly typography errors I guess); there is a template on fr.ws for that [1] https://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/Le_Loup_et_l?Agneau"
Just so people can get a better idea of what we are dealing with at Hebrew Wikisource, I would like to radically build upon Sébastien's example. Imagine a literature which until a century ago was mostly published in a fashion that lacked not just some updated spelling, but far more: Zero vowelization, zero punctuation (periods, commas, etc.), zero division into paragraphs of reasonable size, zero precise citation of exact sources (when an average work cites many thousands of sources by quoting them verbatum or as paraphrase but rarely provides the exact reference). Regarding the latter, the ability to easily put in wikilinks to sources is the ultimate tool for revolutionizing the entire body of literature as a whole, and not just the specific book at hand.
Now on the one hand, any modern published edition of these same source texts adds all of these features to the great benefit of readers, but they are all of course copyrighted! On the other hand, to simply post the plain text on Wikisource without vowelization, punctuation, division into paragraphs and citation of sources provides little benefit to users. And I once again emphasize that this is the case for the *majority* of public domain literature in the language! (By the way, nothing I've written about here is a critical edition; that is something that goes beyond this. Rather, this is what is involved just to present an average text in a usable fashion.)
There is no question that even adding this basic level of styling to a text involves creative effort, and therefore it is possible, even likely, that two different editors might differ sometimes on details. But in practice, we've found that cooperation and collaboration in wiki style, far from creating problems, is actually a congenial and enjoyable way to provide classic texts to the public in a useful way.
Dovi
Dovi wrote: "Just so people can get a better idea of what we are dealing with at Hebrew Wikisource, I would like to radically build upon Sébastien's example. Imagine a literature which until a century ago was mostly published in a fashion that lacked not just some updated spelling, but far more: Zero vowelization, zero punctuation (periods, commas, etc.), zero division into paragraphs of reasonable size, zero precise citation of exact sources (when an average work cites many thousands of sources by quoting them verbatum or as paraphrase but rarely provides the exact reference). Regarding the latter, the ability to easily put in wikilinks to sources is the ultimate tool for revolutionizing the entire body of literature as a whole, and not just the specific book at hand.
Now on the one hand, any modern published edition of these same source texts adds all of these features to the great benefit of readers, but they are all of course copyrighted! On the other hand, to simply post the plain text on Wikisource without vowelization, punctuation, division into paragraphs and citation of sources provides little benefit to users. And I once again emphasize that this is the case for the *majority* of public domain literature in the language! (By the way, nothing I've written about here is a critical edition; that is something that goes beyond this. Rather, this is what is involved just to present an average text in a usable fashion.)
There is no question that even adding this basic level of styling to a text involves creative effort, and therefore it is possible, even likely, that two different editors might differ sometimes on details. But in practice, we've found that cooperation and collaboration in wiki style, far from creating problems, is actually a congenial and enjoyable way to provide classic texts to the public in a useful way.
Dovi" In Swedish (sv) we have regularly talks about how long-s: ſ, dubble-s: ß etc should be written on Wikisource. The conclusion is not always the same. It often depends of the age of the text, and the nature of it. If we correct spelling, or not, depends on the age. There were no such thing as a standard for spelling in the 15'th century-swedish. The texts I work with is filled with latin words and therefor influence from latin grammar. I also see æ regularly, even if it dissapeared from the swedish language during the 16's century, together with everything that reminds about Denmark. The way the swedish letters åäö, looked in the 16'th to 18'th century, is very different from today, but we choose to write modern versions on wikisource. Old texts can also be filled with tiny lines, that show that a word is missing one or a few letters. (thn instead of then) It is obvious that paper and ink was expensive in the old days./Ronnie
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On 2012-08-19 08:25, Dovi Jacobs wrote:
Just so people can get a better idea of what we are dealing with at Hebrew Wikisource, I would like to radically build upon Sébastien's example. Imagine a literature which until a century ago was mostly published in a fashion that lacked not just some updated spelling, but far more: Zero vowelization, zero punctuation (periods, commas, etc.), zero division into paragraphs of reasonable size,
What you describe here might apply to any language, primarily for texts from the time before the language got a stable and modern orthography.
Russian Wikisource has a method for modernizing the pre-1917 orthography, using the /ДО page name suffix.
Swedish Wikisource has many texts in pre-1906 orthography, but hasn't implemented any method for modernizing it; readers are expected to be able to read the old spelling.
Before 1801 Swedish orthography was less standardized and would be harder to read. For texts from this period, your methods for annotations would make more sense. But there are very few texts from that period. And in some cases, 15th century texts (manuscripts) were republished (printed) in the 19th century with annotations, in critical editions whose copyright has now expired, e.g. http://sv.wikisource.org/wiki/Index:Svenska_medeltidens_bibel-arbeten_%28185...
Back in 2005, when I proposed to use scanned images in Wikisource, I added two works in German and English as examples, http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:LA2/Digitizing_books_with_MediaWiki
I think you need to do something similar. Most of us can't read Hebrew (or Swedish), and won't fully understand any example given in such a small language.
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