What to do about primary sources? People like to add them to Wikipedia, but people also are (rightly) disturbed by their presence. Is the answer to enter an arms race in which the Primaryists add and the Pedists (short for Pure Encyclopia-ists) delete?
No.
I think the long term solution is to make a complementary Wiki just for primary sources/original texts, maybe at http://ps.wikipedia.com, which would be for original texts. It would be to Project Gutenberg what Wikipedia is to Nupedia. Maybe it should be called Project Sourceberg.
Can I suggest that we call it something else, anything else? Gutenberg is named after someone, Sourceberg just sounds like someone ran out of ideas. Even "wiki sourcetexts" would be better.
1. Different interface; maybe three fields, one for prefatory comments, one for the text itself, and one for external references
2. Easy reference/crosslinking to Wikipedia, like with links such as (from Wikipedia) [[ps:The Declaration of Independence]] or (from PS.Wikipedia) [[wp:History of the United States]].
3. Alternate formats of texts, such as text, HTML, multiple-page HTML, wikified text, etc.
4. Understanding of scope and mission; we don't want to try to duplicate Project Gutenberg's efforts; rather, we want to complement them. Perhaps Project Sourceberg can mainly work as an interface for easily linking from Wikipedia to a Project Gutenberg file, and as an interface for people to easily submit new work to PG.
Add your own ideas; be bold in editing.
Note some primary sources have already been copied to wikipedia; a few are listed at WikiBiblion.
Gack! We should NOT use http://ps.wikipedia.com, since that's already supposed to be reserved for a language wiki. Pushto? language, to be exact. (I have no idea what Pushto is, though.)
I propose that if we did something like this, it should be at: http://sources.wikipedia.com/
And, like Larry, I'm interested that we think it over to see what we can add to Project Gutenberg. It seems unlikely that primary sources should in general be editable by anyone -- I mean, Shakespeare is Shakespeare, unlike our commentary on his work, which is whatever we want it to be. -- Jimbo Wales