[Foundation-l] Wikisource and PGDP

[Birgitte SB]

--- On Thu, 6/24/10, James Forrester <james at jdforrester.org> wrote:


> 
> IME, PGDP's processes are /seriously/ heavy-weight, burning
> lots of
> worker time on 2nd or even 3rd-level passes, and multiple
> tiers of
> work (Proofreading, Formatting, and all the special
> management levels
> for people running projects). The pyramid of processes has
> grown so
> great that they have seemed to crash in on themselves -
> there's a huge
> dearth of people at the "higher" levels (you need to
> qualify at the
> lower levels before the system will let you contribute to
> the
> activities at the end). It's generally quite "unwiki".
> 
> I think Wikisource's model is a great deal more light
> weight that
> PGDP's - and that we really don't want to push Wikisource
> down that
> route. :-) Unfortunately I think that this means linking
> the two up
> might prove challenging - and there's also a danger that
> people may
> jump ship, damaging PGDP still further and making them
> upset with us.
> 

I definitely wouldn't want to see Wikisource move to a more heavy weight structure.  Right now it is easy for anyone completely unfamiliar to the nuts and bolts of setting up a text to show up at the Proofread of the Month and validate a single page and then have nothing further to do with the text.  Seldom do you even need to deal with formatting when you are validating an already proofread page.  I think that this is important to keep this very simple.  I would really encourage anyone who has never participated to try it out [1]

Of course, we don't really have any push to focus on a "finished" release like PGDP must have.  And this eventualism has the usual results even as it keeps the structure lightweight.

Linking up with PGDP texts is mostly avoided at en.WS because it is so often impossible to match their texts with a specific edition, which we are looking for to attach scanned images.  It has become easier to just start from scratch with a file we can more easily put through the Proofread Page extention. Their more rigid structure makes edition verification after release unnecessary for them, but it is very important for us since our structure is so open.  It is difficult to see how we might help one another given such basic incompatibilities in structure.

Birgitte SB


[1]http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Index:Frederic_Shoberl_-_Persia.djvu
Click on any yellow highlighted number.  Validate the wikitext against the image.  Edit the page to make changes (if necessary) and to move the radio button to validated.