2010/7/3 Lars Aronsson lars@aronsson.se:
Let me start from another angle: Does anybody have experience from teaching beginners how to contribute to Wikisource? What are the hardest concepts to explain? I think we should compile and rank the current obstacles to the growth of Wikisource.
There's a serious and overlooked problem that makes both contributing and reading hard for many people: a considerable number of texts use special characters which aren't supported in regular fonts. This is not a matter of pure aesthetics like Arial-vs.-Helvetica, but complete omission of characters or even scripts.
For example, there are several grammar books in the English Wikisource (see http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Category:Grammar ). Among them are Hebrew, Burmese and Sanskrit. Without manually installing proper fonts it's impossible to view any of them properly on Windows XP; the situation with GNU/Linux and Windows 7 is somewhat better, but still not perfect.
Bug 2361 ( https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=2361 ) could possibly solve it, at least partly, but there hasn't been any activity in it for a long time/