Martin, Good post.
I am very excited about losing my Wikisource virginity too. I was on the Wikimania Scholarships Committee this year, and saw that many of the candidates were heavily and in some cases almost solely focused on Wikisource. I've had some good conversations about this since, with Wikimedians from India and Bangladesh in particular. What struck me was that everyone pointed out that it was more accessible than WP or most other projects. Best S On 8 May 2015 at 11:05, Martin Poulter <[email protected]> wrote: > Recently I lost my Wikisource virginity, becoming not a passive > cheerleader for the project but an active contributor. I have to say it's > been a more rewarding experience than expected. > > I'd heard in a few places that imports from the Internet Archive, or > imports of .djvu files, weren't reliable, but my little experience has been > fine. Maybe I've been lucky in my choice of files. The whole process of > loading in a book and starting transcription went quite smoothly, though it > required attention to a lot of little steps and I wouldn't recommend it to > non-geeky people. > > One surprise was that having entered data about the book into Commons, I > had to enter the same data again into Wikisource. Later when I went through > Preferences on Wikisource, I saw an option to automatically copy book data > from Commons to Wikisource, but for reasons I don't understand it's off by > default. > > The editing interface is last-century primitive but usable. An advanced > toolbar with more buttons would enable me to work more quickly, but this > might be possible with custom Javascript. > > In my new role as Wikimedian In Residence at the Bodleian Libraries, I'm > doing a lot of advocacy for Wikisource to my audience of librarians because > it's a great example of how sharing content improves content. It's also a > great example of something lay people with computers can do to support > research and free knowledge. > > There are two projects I'm working on (in volunteer time now and again, > not paid work), in case anyone's interested. > > Firstly, there's a collection on Wikisource related to Mary > Wollstonecraft, a very important philosopher and author of fiction and > non-fiction, not to mention the mother of Mary Shelley. > https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Author:Mary_Wollstonecraft > There are gaps, but with some additional transcription work it's in > hailing distance of being an impressive research resource, hopefully > enabling more interesting projects such as the Mary Wollstonecraft Twitter: > https://twitter.com/1759marywol1797 > Her short book about raising daughters had been scanned but not > transcribed, so I've been working on that, a quarter of an hour now and > again. > > https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Index:Thoughts_on_the_Education_of_Daughters.djvu > > The other project arises from a talk by a historian working with British > Library Labs. He is studying the humour of the Victorian era, marking up a > joke book to identify individual jokes and lines of dialogue. A fun > spin-off from this work is the Mechanical Comedian project > http://victorianhumour.tumblr.com/ > An ideal starting point for this work would be a checked, validated > transcription of the out-of-copyright source book, which the team are > gradually working on. So I'm urging them to use Wikisource as a platform, > and to demonstrate I'm transcribing a similar book from the same era. > > https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Index:Everybody%27s_Book_of_English_wit_and_humour_(1880).djvu > Disclaimer: a lot of Victorian jokes are *not funny*, but there are rare > gems. > > If, like I was, you're a Wiki*edian who's interested in Wikisource but > hasn't taken the plunge. I recommend having a go. > > -- > Dr Martin L Poulter > Wikipedia contributor http://enwp.org/User:MartinPoulter > Volunteer, Wikimedia UK http://wikimedia.org/wiki/User:MartinPoulter > <http://uk.wikimedia.org/> > Musician http://soundcloud.com/martin-poulter > http://myspace.com/comapilot > Person http://infobomb.org/ > > _______________________________________________ > Wikimedia UK mailing list > [email protected] > http://mail.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimediauk-l > WMUK: https://wikimedia.org.uk > -- *Stuart Prior* *Project Coordinator* *Wikimedia UK* +44 20 7065 0990 Wikimedia UK is a Company Limited by Guarantee registered in England and Wales, Registered No. 6741827. Registered Charity No.1144513. Registered Office 4th Floor, Development House, 56-64 Leonard Street, London EC2A 4LT. United Kingdom. Wikimedia UK is the UK chapter of a global Wikimedia movement. The Wikimedia projects are run by the Wikimedia Foundation (who operate Wikipedia, amongst other projects). *Wikimedia UK is an independent non-profit charity with no legal control over Wikipedia nor responsibility for its contents.*
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