Handling primary sources, or Project Sourceberg

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.

Necessary features

Wikipedia is designed for anonymous, constant editing, which is great for the accumulative, morphing encyclopedia entries. Project Sourceberg needs to encourage easy additions and corrections but discourage arbitrary editing of the primary texts.

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.

I would rather see Wikipedia cooperate very closely with both Project Gutenberg and the Online Book Initiative so we can easily link to their databases. I think that the Wikipedia should have articles about significant original works like Shakespeare. It should include excerpts and an external link to the aforementioned databases where readers can download the entire piece. <>< tbc

Add your own ideas; be bold in editing.

Getting it going

We could definitely start Project Sourceberg as a plain vanilla Wiki and quickly implement the [[ps:*]] notation, and just begin by moving off the primary sources that are already on Wikipedia, like the Constitution and the GPL.

Related commentary

There are numerous other discussions of the primary sources problem, which should be listed below.

Note some primary sources have already been copied to wikipedia; a few are listed at WikiBiblion.

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The hard question, I guess, is why we are reinventing the wheel, when Project Gutenberg already exists? I mean, what really is the need for having this project? --LMS