Wikisource talk:New vote on language subdomains/archive1

In the aftermath of the vote before I leave

Hi folks. In the aftermath of the vote it looks like we are now beginning to discuss the meaning/ramifications of the vote. I would obviously like to participate in that discussion, but I won't be able to: For the next 2-3 weeks I will be away from home performing a civic duty (no, not a vacation) away from home and my job in a place that will allow me little or no internet access. So as the person who made this proposal in the first place, I am going make some final personal comments here. I hope that the project proceeds in positive ways while I am gone, and I look forward to seeing what has taken place when I return. (It is not entirely clear exactly when I have to leave - today, tommorrow, or Wednesday afternoon the latest. I will try to check in again before I acually go.) In the meantime, here are some comments.

• Analysis: It is not surprising that the vote was followed by "analysis"; on the contrary, the motivation for adding "analysis" to the vote accurately reflects the very nature of the vote itself. This was quite clearly a vote between "insiders" and "outsiders." It was a disagreement between a small group of active contributors who are quite satisfied with the way the project works right now, versus another small group of outsiders (including a core group of German speakers) who would like to type, edit, and format texts in their own language environment. Thus, the very motivation for analysis is, in itself, a value judgement: Which group is more "important"? Current active contributors in an environment that does not provide full language-support, or potential contributors who want to set up the easily available tool of a German or Spanish language domain? In my opinion, both groups are equally important. Nevertheless, I think there is something fundamentally wrong when the first group actively works to deny the second group a useful tool that has been readily available for a very long time already, and is clearly very useful for a language-intensive project. I am also not convinced that the various wikimedia projects are really so exclusive: An active contributor to a sister project who would like a language-domain here seems no less valuable to me than the people who have been uploading texts here, and we should try to attract him/her by giving him any reasonable resources that he needs (like a language domain).
• Other digital archives: One thing that never really came up in the debate was reliance on Project Gutenberg and other digital archives. If there is anything that fundamentally divides a "source-texts" project in English from other languages, it is that there is vastly more material in English that can be copied and pasted into WikiSource than any other language. In Hebrew, for instance, there are exceedingly few public domain digital texts (yes, I am aware of Project Ben-Yehudah). In European languages there are many more, but it is still just a drop in ocean compared to what is available in English. What this means on a practical level is that unlike English, many or most WikiSource texts in other languages are not just uploading texts and wikifying, but actually sitting with old printed texts and typing away, formatting, etc. This kind of work needs language support and language subcommunities much more than does the cut-and-paste of texts "as is", which is how most of the work in English here is done.
• Language intense: It should be emphasized that the language-intensive nature of the work done here is in the content itself, not the documentation. In this it is quite unlike uploading images at the Commons, where language diversity has so far been relegated to documenting the uploads. (And even the Commons presents very severe language problems will eventually have to be resolved; just take a look at the Hebrew page, even though it is still just a draft).
• Sister projects: The language domains in the other wikimedia projects complement each other nicely, and this has already started to mean that in a number of languages, wikipedias are using material from the associated language-specific wikibooks, wikiquote, wiktionary. The inability to associate a language-domain for wikisource to each language project slows not only the growth of wikisource itself in other languages, but also slows how much and how well the materials already available here are known to and used by other projects. Adding the available language platform as was was done in wikibooks so that anyone who wants can simply start typing away in his own language will add to the overall value and cohesion of the entire wikimedia project, as well as spurring the addition of content in non-English languages.
• I have a strong intuition that the fact that there are so few steady contributors to wikisource, especially in languages other than English, is partially because of the lack of language support. As Eclecticology has correctly pointed out, there is no way I can prove this intuition. But the fact that Wikisource today is nearly identical in every way to the project of about a year ago (besides the slow but steady addition of texts) seems to me to indicate that something basic is in need of change.
• I wish everyone well (on both sides!) while I am gone, and look forward to seeing when has happened when I get back. Dovi 09:07, 1 Nov 2004 (UTC)
  • It turns out I will have ocassional web access where I am while I am away (though unfortunately on a rather slow server). So I'll show up once in a while, thought it may be only once every couple of days. Dovi 19:17, 4 Nov 2004 (UTC)