The following comment was made by Ben W. Brumfield:
- I really hope you can hack something out on MediaWiki, not least because it seems to be the most vibrant platform out there (aside from FromThePage, of course!), with cool features like Publish-On-Demand integration baked in. Based on my own experience with FromThePage and the Julia Brumfield Diaries, I'd encourage you to ask these questions:
- If links are used for indexing, what should the scope of the indexed material be? In other words, if Henderson mentions "Shiloh, TN", should browsing that entry pull in all references within the Henderson Field Notes [obviously yes], all of those plus other naturalists' field notes [probably yes], all naturalist's field notes plus mentions of Shiloh, TN within Civil War diaries of the battle of Shiloh [maybe], or all mentions of Shiloh in any Wikimedia project context anywhere? In FromThePage, I've chosen to limit the scope of subject indexes to a "collection", which is an arbitrary aggregation of works. Nevertheless, I'm not at all sure that this was the right decision, so am eagerly watching other projects' design decisions.
- Is there a chance you could use/create a new namespace-like-thingy within Wikisource without having to jump directly to Wikipedia? I didn't understand namespaces at all when I was working with Mediawiki in 2005, and still am on unsure footing when I speak of them. As a result, I hope that other Mediawiki projects will grapple with them, since the Page: namespace was the solution to my transcription vs. annotation differentiation problem.
- How much control do you need over the record of page-to-subject links? This level of indirection forms the core of FromThePage, and most of the features that differentiate it from other transcription tools spring from exploiting the very simple page_id, subject_id, link_text data model.
It was added to WikiSource by me. -- Gaurav (talk) 22:46, 8 December 2011 (UTC)