On 31/05/06, Alphax (Wikipedia email) alphasigmax@gmail.com wrote:
Erik Moeller wrote:
On 5/29/06, Andre Engels andreengels@gmail.com wrote:
Well, as said, for Wikipedia wiki worked very well. That doesn't mean it works as well for other projects. A wiki means several things at once, and it is one of them (the wiki philosophy of free editing and control afterward instead of in advance) that made Wikipedia work where Nupedia did not. Wiktionary would I think work better in an environment with the same philosophy but a different technology (more database-like rather than marked up text). Wikiquote and Commons might well profit from a similar switch. For Wikisource the whole 'free editing' concept itself does not seem as suitable, or at least, not as necessary.
Largely true, however, one should never underestimate the advantages of even the simple technology we have. We take the ability to edit and improve the description of an image on Commons for granted, but that is something you only get from a wiki-like system. Similarly, at least some degree of consistency within our taxonomy can be maintained because people can add/remove categories as they please. Compare Flickr's tags, where keywords are rarely consistent across images of the same type.
As for Wikisource, I continue to hold that one of its great promises are free translations of public domain texts, and this is where wiki becomes quickly indispensable.
... but the *original source* should be protected at the steward level, which requires a software change.
Incidentally, this implies we ever have the "original source". For most of the material likely to be on Wikisource, by virtue of it being comfortably over a hundred years old, we don't; we have a scan of one particular edition. Much of that particular edition will have been silently altered several times between us and the author; indeed, even with contemporary editions, the author may never have seen it since manuscript.
And that's even before contemplating the effects of which public-domain source (and hence which iteration of expurgation) we have used...