On Fri, Aug 14, 2009 at 1:03 AM, Stephen Bain<[email protected]> wrote: > ... > My own use of archival collections for research has recently got me > thinking: why don't we bring the wiki model to digitisation? >.... > 3) Taking the photos and transcribing at Wikisource. As far as I am > aware, all the various state archives are free to use (if you don't > use the copying services) so all participants would need would be a > camera and some spare time. > > Thoughts? ...
In short, we dont need more content; we need more people. Even if contributors don't stick around on Wikisource, we need more people who have participated in one Wikisource digitisation project ... so that they have an appreciation of what Wikisource is doing. e.g. DarkFalls, Daniel, Giggy, privatemusings - these guys have all come over and done a "bit" of work, and can now evangelise. ;-) The core of the problem is that very few people are: 1) aware of Distributed Proofreaders and Wikisource, and especially the potential of Wikisource, 2) interested in transcribing PD works, or 3) competent in identifying PD works (i.e. copyright) Adminiship is a fairly good indicator of "serious" Wikisourcerors, as it is liberally granted to anyone who has significantly contributed to the project - e.g. I nom. people who have 1000 edits, no major issues, and have touched a few namespaces. I have successfully nominated Poetlister, an IP address, and a person who appears to not like responding to questions on their talk page. They have all done fairly well as admins. Most people accept RtbaAs (requests to be an admin :-) ) because anyone with 1000 edits has probably sat in despair watching a vandal go crazy when no admin is around to stop them. We have had vandals do there magic for hours. In 2007 and 2008, the vandals usually became bored before they were blocked by an admin or a steward was fetched. I watched that happen two or three times before deciding that it would be wrong for me to _not_ offer my services to be an admin. So we have very few non-admins-by-choice, and very few ex-admins. btw, Australians I count 7 Australian admins, of a total of 39 admins, so we are doing our fair share. ;-) The en.WS community is probably about 40-50 odd people 'strong' in a given month, excluding the people who pop in for a visit. Stats here: http://stats.wikimedia.org/wikisource/EN/Sitemap.htm http://stats.wikimedia.org/wikisource/EN/PlotsPngWikipediansEditsGt5.htm We are gradually catching up to the output rate of Distributed Proofreaders, however that is largely due to the French and German projects. http://wikisource.org/wiki/Wikisource:ProofreadPage_Statistics The above charts show that there are plenty of pages in need of proofreading/validating. Our monthly proofreading project doesnt always finish a work in the month: http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/WS:POTM An example of an Australian work scanned overseas: http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Index:An_Australian_language_as_spoken_by_the_Awabakal.djvu In a few minutes we can import and initialise a djvu from Internet Archive ready for transcribing or OCR proofreading. Here is a list of the main ongoing transcription projects, most of which are barely started, and almost all of them are incomplete. http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/WS:TP In summary, a large percentage of works are available at the Internet Archive. And if a work is not there now, it will properly turn up in a year or two. So it is more economical to focus on the works that are already on IA, except where a specific work is likely to bring in new contributors and readers. -- John Vandenberg (hopping of hobby horse...) _______________________________________________ Wikimediaau-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimediaau-l
