[Wikisource-l] [Wikitech-l] Wikisource bugs

[Lars Aronsson]

On 07/01/2010 12:22 PM, ThomasV wrote:
> I apologize for the length of my answer. I wish to thank those who
> have had the patience to read this entire post.

The problem is not a long post or two, but the fact that
you seem to have locked yourself to this single issue.
I'd like to discuss some far more visionary changes
in how Wikisource works, but all you can talk about are
these two stages of proofreading.

Let me start from another angle: Does anybody have
experience from teaching beginners how to contribute
to Wikisource? What are the hardest concepts to explain?
I think we should compile and rank the current obstacles
to the growth of Wikisource.

Just as one example, I would put the multiple namespaces
(Index: and Page:) pretty high on that list, and I think
that a redesign could do away with them. There was indeed
a bug report filed for something similar, from the Polish
community, that wanted to disconnect the naming of Index
pages from the naming of PDF/Djvu files:

"<pagelist> should have file parameter",
https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=21398

ThomasV replied with "WONTFIX", which is understandable
since this is not a simple bug fix, but a more complicated
change of architecture. The problem is that this
architecture was never documented, so we don't know
which the design decisions are. Or was it?

This is just one example of how Wikisource is really
overly complicated, putting extra burden on newcomers,
and where Wikisource would benefit from a redesign.
But my suggestion is that we start to compile a catalog
of such problems, rather than submitting bug reports.
Where is a good place to start?


-- 
   Lars Aronsson (lars at aronsson.se)
   Aronsson Datateknik - http://aronsson.se