Yann Forget wrote:
Hello,
This is now off topic for foundation-l. Better to continue this on wikisource-l.
Klaus Graf wrote:
Hello,
I agree with Ray here, and I think that Klaus' mail does not report exactly the reality. The French Wikisource has the greatest numbers of scanned texts so far,
Is there a proof for this claim?
http://wikisource.org/wiki/Wikisource:ProofreadPage_Statistics lists 40,043 pages for fr.ws and 16,939 for de.ws.
This is completely false; the German Wikisource have a high number of texts with scans that are not counted because they are not in their Page: namespace. This is because they have used a different tool before the availability of the Page: extension. Since the activation of the extension on de.ws, they have been converting old texts to the new format, but they are far from having finished. There are still plenty of pages on de.ws that contain several scanned pages (and sometimes or hundreds of them). These pages need to be split and moved into the Page namespace. Once this is finished, you'll be able to make statements based on those figures.
In addition, it is fair to estimate than more than 50% of the scans on fr.ws have never been proofread by a wikisource user. This contrasts with the 8.700 pages on de.ws that have been proofread once, and 11.400 that have been proofread twice.
The German WS adopted a policy of making scans mandatory, which explains why they are more advanced. I believe that this is the only sensible policy for Wikisource, and it should be generalized to all subdomains. Without scans, a text on wikisource will always look suspicious, no matter how carefully it was proofread. Without scans, our work cannot be trusted, no matter how much fun, pain or pleasure we had formatting it.
The German wikisource adopted their policy early, which gave them a quality advantage. It is now time for other subdomains to catch up.
Thomas