[Wikipedia-l] Re: Ideas on a source:namespace

[Daniel Lee Mayer]

On Thursday 18 April 2002 12:02 pm, Magnus wrote:
> IMHO such a project *could* work with the wiki system, especially for OCRed
> pages that need manual work. This could be done by a community rather than
> by a single person, especially if, e.g., a book is broken into chapters
> taht can be edited seperately.
> There would have to be some special features, though, like subpages for
> the chapters (back to square one;) , a better diff system maybe, and access
> for logged-in users only to cut down troll activity.
> Another advantage would be that it could be easily interlinked with
> wikipedia ([[source:The Origin of Species]]...)
>
> Magnus

This would be an excellent feature and adding a source:namespace with more 
restrictive rules would probably work out nicely. However, for source texts 
like this I would further limit editing ability to sysops or maybe only to 
users who have been in the database more than a set amount of time (there is 
nothing stopping a vandal from logging in to do some harm). 

Per a previous feature request I submitted, I still think it would be nice to 
display parts of protected text in a text box within a regular wikipedia 
world-editable article (maybee have all source:namespace articles 
automatically have numbered lines, so that a user could call upon those 
particular lines to display in a regular article.....just brainstorming). 
Whatever we decide to do, we do need to somehow protect the integrity of what 
the author said -- otherwise it is useless. 

Annotation is a different story and usually has small sections taken out of 
contex to be discussed (often by critics) -- there is much less expectation 
that what is being annotated is the actual words of the original author than 
would a dump of the complete text. Therefore, nothing really special is 
needed for that other than regular wiki magic. Although a link to some kind 
of 'protected' source would only help the argument of the annotator (or 
detract from, depending on the validity of the argument).  

If something is going to be seriously planned along these or similar lines, 
then we should perhaps just have the sysops go around and protect the source 
material and maybee replace it if there is reason to believe that it has been 
tampered with (thus changing what the Bible said, for example). Otherwise we 
should probably remove all such material from the current versions of 
articles and replace it with external links to the text.    

maveric149