[Wikisource-l] Proofreading

[Cecil]

I think German Wikisource has a rather high quality standard compared to a
lot of other Wikisource projects. There are several projects which don't do
proofread at all or request scans. That is where we should start to unify
the Wikisources.

German Wikisource is also one of the project which have the longest time
experience with PR. In all this time we never had problems with IPs
proofreading. The community is small and it's usually the same few people.
Our contributions by IPs are overviewable (check Latest Changes for it) and
AFAIK we never had miss-use by IPs. That's why I have problems to understand
why a plugin gets developed in a way that is more secure but less
user-friendly when there never were problems with security but some with
user-friendlyness (e.g. currently you should not be colour-blind if you want
to change the status after proofreading because there is no description of
the radio-buttons; I don't consider having to create a special monobook as
user-friendly, especially considering that not everybody is able to do that
just like that).

Next thing: if somebody wants to cheat he will cheat. Switching of IPs does
not bring anything since there is sockpuppeting. It actually causes the
opposite. While we can see the IP-adresses and can check if they are from
the same range, we can't do the same with accounts. Only checkuser can do
that and German data privacy law is rather rigorous when it comes to that
kind of activity. It is not at all like on Commons (the only other project
where I have CU-experience), where you have a suspicion and ask a CU to
check it. On German projects (and that is something we can't change) the
hurdle is much higher. For those who speak German, you could check the
CU-request-page at German Wikipedia to see what kind of information
collection is necessary to get a CU ([
http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Checkuser/Anfragen]). So actually the
chance to detect a cheater is now much lower than before.

To the suggestion of 'searching a new developer': I don't know how much
quality ThomasV produces in his code (comments, format, speaking names for
variables/...; bugs are normal, but the amount of bugs in each release is
not a good sign), but one thing I know from several years experience: taking
over the code of somebody else is no fun at all. Often enough I ended up
rewriting the whole code. Getting a second developer to work on the same
plugin is a bad idea from my point of view as a developer, even if it is in
a second branch (to prevent conflicts). It usually takes months until the
first working output gets generated (one that does not cause troubles at zig
other places, because you had not yet had the overview and did not know that
changing something at this place will cause consequenses in a totally
different area). Sorry, but I suppose that Birgitte does not know what
developing a working software (not speedily hacking some emergency-tool)
includes, because we are having the problem now and not in half a year (just
a estimate as I have not seen the sourcecode of PR2).

And we are stuck with PR2. It IS a good idea, and it is more encouraging for
those who do the proofreading, because they can do one page now and then
later another without a huge text complex. So in the last few years German
Wikisource has transfered a majority of its projects to this solution
(especially the large ones). Thus switching off the PR2-extension is not an
option, since it would break most of our projects and converting them back
would probably take several man-months (even with the help of bots). We
don't want to get rid of PR2, we just want to be able for everybody to use
it, not discriminating a few users who for whatever reason prefer to work
without an account. They are as valuable to the German community as
registered ones.

Sorry, that got a bit longer, so I will stop now.

Regards,
Cecil
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