Lars Aronsson a écrit :
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.
Maybe I can provide answers to that question... at fr.ws we now have lots of contributions to the "Page:" namespace, and I think that we have a good experience on how to teach beginners on that.
I guess the hardest concept to explain is transclusion ; this should not come as a surprise to you, since you pointed out the existence of a "Page:" namespace as an obstacle.
The solution is simple : just forget about it, do not explain it to beginners :-) . It is something they do not need to understand right from the beginning ; they will discover it later.
Instead of trying to explain transclusion to beginners, we redirect them to the "Page" and "Index" namespaces, right from the beginning. And it works : many new contributors make their first contributions in the "Page" namespace, without knowing anything about transclusion.
How do we do this ? Of course, we use the "help" pages, but also : *we use the "welcome" message *we have a "contribute" toolbox, visible from everywhere, with a "random book" link that leads to a random index page. *we have categories of Index pages sorted by progress, and these categories can be reached from the RC page.
Of course, this comes at a cost : New users who started to contribute in this way do not always handle hyphenated words correctly, and they sometimes write the page header in the main box. But this is something they learn quickly, and it is a minor problem compared to the benefits.
Another difficult thing is the upload of djvu files and creation of index pages ; this is a bit difficult for beginners. However, if index pages are already created by more experienced users, then beginners can start proofreading immediately, and this allows them to get a taste of Wikisource. So, create as many index pages as you can. One of our contributors spends most of his time creating new index pages, and I believe that we owe him a lot of contributors. I also create an index page everytime I find a text that does not have scans. In addition, we are planning to create 1416 new index pages very soon with a robot, following an agreement with BnF/Gallica.
So the conclusion is : create lots of index pages, and expose them to as many beginners as possible.
Thomas