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. It would be to Project Gutenberg what Wikipedia is to Nupedia. Maybe it should be called Project Sourceberg.
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.
The short answer is that people are going to add primary sources to Wikipedia, whether some people want them to or not. But Wikipedia isn't well equipped to handle primary sources. So instead of internecine fighting, the community can develop a part of Wikipedia which is well equipped to handle primary sources.
1. It's a lot harder to link to Project Gutenberg than it is to another page in Wikipedia.
2. If a person has access to a primary source which isn't on Project Gutenberg, it's a lot easier and faster to add it to Wikipedia than it is to Project Gutenberg.
3. Some primary sources really do make sense being in Wikipedia; even paper encyclopedias often contain particularly important or brief primary sources, such as the Gettysburg Address or the periodic table.
Then again, is Shakespeare Shakespeare? There's all the different folio versions, etc. But more the type of editing which would be useful and really great to encourage would be annotation, etc.--not changing the text but wikifying it, etc.
I think that we could really create something that was halfway in between PG and WP, that would be useful for both, maybe exploiting the Wiki philosophy for marking up texts in a free-form manner; Project Sourceberg could become a definitive repository for annotated texts.
Just an idea. I really think that if we just set up something that links PG to WP in some easy-to-use way, and allow flexibility in how people use those links, remarkable things will happen (that may go beyond the formal scope of either). --TheCunctator
I haven't really thought a lot about this, but I do think there is some use to our having some primary sources. Even though I helped start it, maybe not Shakespeare. But stuff like the U.S. Declaration of Independence, where the article itself might be longer than the document it's about, it seems that might be a good idea. That could be a rough rule of thumb: it's OK to put a primary source into Wikipedia if the source is shorter than an ideal article, or series of articles, about the source.
For this, we don't need a new wiki. We can just use a new namespace! See http://wikipedia.sourceforge.net/fpw/wiki.phtml if you haven't already. --LMS
I'm confused. What does that link mean? Note also that Project Sourceberg isn't necessarily about making a Wiki--it's about helping Wikipedia handle primary sources better, which may involve a wiki, or editing the wikipedia code, or setting up a dialogue with the project gutenberg people. Project Sourceberg is a project, not a technology. --TheCunctator
A useful implementation of the project would consist simply of Wikipedia's modest collection of primary sources, which doesn't need a name. (Actually, it already has a name--WikiBiblion.) The name "Project Sourceberg" makes it sound as if we're engaged in an ambitious project, comparable to Project Gutenberg. Do you want us to be? I don't want to be. I don't really want to be in the business of uploading zillions of novels, etc., to Wikipedia. The Gettysburg Address is one thing; the complete works of Dickens is quite another. --LMS