[Wikisource-l] help needed searching for pagescans and front covers

[John Vandenberg]

On Mon, Aug 11, 2008 at 3:40 AM, Lars Aronsson <lars at aronsson.se> wrote:
> John Vandenberg wrote:
>
>> To be honest, this blogger is spot on.  Our editions for these
>> stories are terrible, usually being uploaded by one person from
>> a crappy online edition, altered to partial conform to another
>> crappy online edition of unknown provenance :- rinse and repeat,
>> until we have a very crappy edition indeed.
>
> That kind of criticism has also been voice against Google Book
> Search.  But libraries still refuse to burn these inferior books.

If a book made it to print, and into a library, it has _made it_ in my
opinion.  It has gone through the fire of the publishing world, and
should be retained forever.  Wikisource accepts any edition that has
gone through this process.

What I would like to see is that people can turn to Wikisource for an
accurate edition of the original article that appeared in a pulp
magazine which is now PD.  _Then_ people can write their own editions
of these stories with full knowledge of the original.

> They're kept on shelves, side by side with good ones.  Library
> catalogs seldom indicate the difference.

In a real library, you can pick up the work in your hand, and see the
publishing details.

At present, it is extremely rare to find a well attributed and
verified edition of these stories, so the casual internet searcher has
little chance of knowing which edition came first.

On Wikisource, these pulp magazine articles that are copied from the
internet are not well described, so readers have no idea which edition
it is that they are reading.  I could tag them all with {{fidelity}},
but I would prefer to be surprised by someone saying "I have that
issue in my attic", or "yea, these stories are an important piece of
our culture: lets pool funds and purchase some pagescans".

> So, should Wikisource behave like a library or like a publisher
> that prints a new edition (with up-to-date foreword) of the book?

An interesting question that Wikisource is trying to figure out.
Opinions differ, as usual.

English Wikisource permits annotations without much restraint, which
means we are often acting as a publisher, and some are suggesting we
permit "user contributed" forewords as well.

http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/WS:S#Are_we_obliged_to_reproduce_Wikipedia.3F

--
John Vandenberg