One of the things that we've actually used the wiki for in the past is putting together working editions of literary texts. In reference to this kind of work, Jacob raised the issue recently about how these working editions should link to CDLI data and, in turn, how comments on individual texts introduced via the comment feature on CDLI pages can be fed back into working editions in the wiki.

Ideally, the first major section in any synthetic working edition (based on multiple witnesses) should outline which particular p-numbered texts are the basis for the partitur, the synthetic text and any comments about the text as a whole. At present, these are being built up in an idiosyncratic way in, for example, the Enmerkar and the Lord of Aratta partitur that a couple students in my Sumerian class are building (see http://cdliwiki.mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de/doku.php/enmerkar_and_the_lord_of_aratta under Witnesses). It would be better, I think, to have a section of witnesses organized on the basis of p-numbers (and with sigla merely serving as an auxiliary for building partituren rather than as page names; this would also avoid the namespace problems described earlier). This would look a lot like the http://cdliwiki.mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de/doku.php/text_comments page with an individual wiki page for each witness. But these links to the individual witness pages and to images and transliterations on the CDLI page would appear as part of the synthetic page for each individual literary composition rather than on the Text Comments page.

One interesting possibility would be to see if these individual witness pages as well as synthetic working editions could be generated programmatically on the basis of information in the CDLI catalog or even ETCSL in conjunction with a template for synthetic literary texts. This would allow contributors to add fragments of transliteration, comments and so forth to any particular witness in the literary corpora without having to worry about building the individual and synthetic pages beforehand.

JCJ