Birgitte wrotw:
"despite our experimentation the only WP type edit
wars I can remember were a few over stylistic issues and one translation"
Birgitte, thanks for the information. In other words, at Hebrew Wikisource which is a
smaller (but active) wiki, there has never once been an edit war over this in the 8 years
of our history (at least to the best recollection of my admittedly faulty memory). At
English Wikisource, which is the largest and most active wiki of all, there have been
perhaps two over the many years, and they were satisfactorily resolved.
However, even saying that, it is clear that Marc Galli is certainly quite correct in
principle: The bottom line is that any activity that requires any amount of creativity
could possibly result in an edit war. But not everything that is correct in theory is
always borne out in practice. The Wikisources in English and Hebrew both indicate that the
editing process involved in producing corrected/styled/annotated editions do not in
practice produce a lot of edit-warring. As I suggested earlier, it may be both because of
the people and processes involved:
*In terms of the process, editing a text is far less likely to be a source of passionate
controversy than are the many highly controversial topics covered in Wikipedia.
*In terms of the people, those who enjoy editing such texts, even if they are passionate
about what they do (in a positive sense), seem to be less argumentative on the whole than
do the people who collaborate on Wikipedia articles that deal with highly controversial
topics.
Sébastien wrote:
"On the French WS there are some minor corrections
I personally don?t
consider as "too major" to qualify these of critical edition:
- modernized (but not too much) version, e.g. the replacement of long S
(?) by a modern S (s) (see e.g. [1] there is a gadget on the left column
to change that: Options d?affichage > Texte modernis?) -- I have more
concerns about rewritings of Ancient French to modern French and I even
have concerns about rewritings of old spellings to modern spellings (e.g.
in [1] a modern version could replace "toy" by "toi"), I don?t know
the
opinion/policies of the French community about that
- very very obvious spelling mistakes (mostly typography errors I guess);
there is a template on fr.ws for that
[1]
https://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/Le_Loup_et_l?Agneau"
Just so people can get a better idea of what we are dealing with at Hebrew Wikisource, I
would like to radically build upon Sébastien's example. Imagine a literature which
until a century ago was mostly published in a fashion that lacked not just some updated
spelling, but far more: Zero vowelization, zero punctuation (periods, commas, etc.), zero
division into paragraphs of reasonable size, zero precise citation of exact sources (when
an average work cites many thousands of sources by quoting them verbatum or as paraphrase
but rarely provides the exact reference). Regarding the latter, the ability to easily put
in wikilinks to sources is the ultimate tool for revolutionizing the entire body of
literature as a whole, and not just the specific book at hand.
Now on the one hand, any modern published edition of these same source texts adds all of
these features to the great benefit of readers, but they are all of course copyrighted! On
the other hand, to simply post the plain text on Wikisource without vowelization,
punctuation, division into paragraphs and citation of sources provides little benefit to
users. And I once again emphasize that this is the case for the *majority* of public
domain literature in the language! (By the way, nothing I've written about here is a
critical edition; that is something that goes beyond this. Rather, this is what is
involved just to present an average text in a usable fashion.)
There is no question that even adding this basic level of styling to a text involves
creative effort, and therefore it is possible, even likely, that two different editors
might differ sometimes on details. But in practice, we've found that cooperation and
collaboration in wiki style, far from creating problems, is actually a congenial and
enjoyable way to provide classic texts to the public in a useful way.
Dovi