[L]ike Larry, Im interested that we think it over to see what we can a — Wikisource

"A few times a week, Alastair Haines, a grad student at the Presbyterian Theological Centre in Sydney, sits down with a Greek version of the New Testament and translates a bit of Pauls first letter to the Corinthians. Haines doesnt speak Greek, but he can read it. When hes done, he loads his work onto a Wikipedia page as part of the Wiki Bible Project, a take-all-comers effort launched in January to create "an original, open content translation of the Bibles source texts," which by most counts includes about 30,000 manuscripts. Along with Haines, who admits to signing up for duty as a way to put off finishing his dissertation, 21 others have answered Wikipedias call to "claim a chapter!" The eclectic group includes a liberal Christian living in the United Arab Emirates and a Methodist financial counselor in Texas. Some claim to be formally trained in Biblical Hebrew and classical Greek; others, such as user John Kloosterman, admit to being "without qualifications of any kind." The project will take a few years to complete and require constant refinement, says John Vandenberg, one of projects main administrators. But "that is part of the beauty," he writes. "Its a laissez-faire translation." But Biblical scholars see the potential for an inaccurate, bias-filled mess. "Democratization isnt necessarily good for scholarship," says Bart Ehrman, a professor of religious studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, who worked on the most recent translation of the New Revised Standard Version in 1988. "Those were the best Greek and Hebrew scholars in the country, and it took them 20 years."

"It would be to Project Gutenberg what Wikipedia is to Nupedia."

"[W]e dont want to try to duplicate Project Gutenbergs 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."

"The hard question, I guess, is why we are reinventing the wheel, when Project Gutenberg already exists? Wed want to complement Project Gutenberg--how, exactly?"