[Wikisource-l] [Foundation-l] A successful request not yet fulfilled

[Yann Forget]

Hello,

Mark Williamson wrote:
> There was some debate about this regarding Ancient Greek.
> 
> Should Ancient Greek texts be put on the Greek Wikisource, since the
> interface is by default in Modern Greek, which will be difficutl to
> understand for some people looking for texts in Ancient Greek? Should
> it have its own Wikisource with an interface in Ancient Greek?
> 
> Nobody suggested housing it at Oldwikisource... but I for one was in
> favor of having a new Wikisource with an interface in Ancient Greek.
> 
> Mark

The issue is not the language of the interface. You can change the
language of the interface anyway once you are logged in.

The issue is "Are there enough contributors to manage an independant
subdomain?" If the subdomain is plagued with spams and crap because
people don't care to survey and clean it when needed, it is better not
to create it. If there are regular contributors willing to manage to
subdomain, then fine, create it.

Regards,

Yann

> On 05/04/07, Ray Saintonge <saintonge at telus.net> wrote:
>> Yann Forget wrote:
>>
>>> Hello,
>>>
>>>
>>>> On 4/2/07, *Birgitte SB* wrote:
>>>>
>>>>    Due to past conversations I have had with people
>>>>    involved with incubator, I read the comment about
>>>>    "merging processes" differently than you did.  Perhaps
>>>>    I am mistaken, and that is not what was meant in this
>>>>    case.
>>>>
>>>>
>>> This clearly shows the misunderstanding of what Wikisource is and what
>>> [[:oldwikisource:]] is meant for.
>>>
>>> Although some Wikipedias will remain small for a long time because of
>>> lack of contributors, some Wikisources will never get more than a few
>>> dozen or hundreds of pages, simply because the original content in that
>>> language doesn't exist. Another example is Sanskrit (a bit more than
>>> 1700 pages) which could qualify to have its own subdomain because of the
>>> amount of content, but does not because of lack of contributors.
>>> Although we could dream to have the whole of Shakespeare and Victor Hugo
>>> translated in Sanskrit, the quantity of existing Sanskrit texts will
>>> never be more than a few thousand pages. For some other languages, it
>>> will ever be much less, so creating and *maintaining* a wiki for only a
>>> few pages is quite a waste of work and time. That's why
>>> [[:oldwikisource:]] exists and will continue to do so. In that sense,
>>> this interwiki name is also badly chosen.
>>>
>> Of course the fundamental difference is that a Wikipedia is there for
>> the benefit of those who currently write in and work in that language.
>> A Wikisource contains texts in its language even if it is a dead
>> language.  Old English texts do not need a complete interface in Old
>> English.
>>
>> Ec