Wikipedia commentary/Project Sourceberg

Primary sources Pedia, 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.

Add your own ideas; be bold in editing.

Related commentary

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