On Aug 6, 2012, at 3:31 AM, Andrea Zanni <[email protected]> wrote:
> > I'm currently working with the BHL on a two-month, unrelated metadata
> > project, part of which is making sure that BHL's illustration metadata can
> > be easily synced with content in the Commons (see
> > http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Template:Information_Art_of_Life for more
> > details). So I don't know anything about BHL's plans for Wikisource, but
> > let me know if I can help!
> >
> > Personally, I'd love to see more (annotated!) biodiversity texts in
> > Wikisource, such as
> > http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Salticidae_(Spiders)_of_Panama/Zygoballus
> > -- these species descriptions are the formal definition of a new species,
> > and the BHL has been a huge help in making these definitions available,
> > online and for free, to taxonomists everywhere (to say nothing of tons of
> > gorgeous illustrations! [1]). However, their transcription and indexing are
> > largely automated, via OCR and text matching. Moving these essential
> > resources into Wikisource, where transcriptions and indexing could be
> > improved by hand, would be awesome!
>
> To be honest I don't think they knew what Wikisource did before Wikimania. So
> I doubt there is anything so firm as "plans". I know Aubrey and I, at least,
> spoke with them. They are definately interested in the platform at
> Wikisource, but they want to re-integrate the corrections made back into
> their collection. This is something that is a problem with djvu files that we
> do not yet have an answer for.
>
> Hi Gaurav,
> I agree with Birgitte :-)
> The BHL were very intrested in what we do, as were the guys from NARA.
> The GLAM is a huge and crucial "dimension" ofr Wikisource future, I tried
> (very, very badly) to list some things here.
>
> <snip>
>
> Another BIG issue is that we have a small userbase,
> and I someone comes to us and says "here, you can have a gazillion books",
> we won't proofread them untile the end of the times.
>
> I think this is something who went "wrong" with the Gallica partnership
> (by far the greatest Wikisource-GLAM collaboration)(I'm not blaming anyone,
> the fr.source community did great, but the books were just too many).
> Is this something we can work together on?
> Reaching a critical mass of users is crucial for sister projects,
> and if some specific community found some solutions it would be great to
> share.
>
>
I think this is a very important issue. I don't know any tried and true
When I spoke the BHL troika, I particularly described Wikisource as a platform.
I also explained to them that if they had any issues with working on our
platform, they could optionally install MediaWiki and Proofread page on their
own server as it was all open source. I did not wish to describe Wikisource as
a *service* for proofreading and transcription. We are really not capable of
being such a service. We *are* capable of providing the basic platform for
transcription, of providing some guidance for presenting texts with very
limited tech support, and also of handling the interwebs aspect (not only
managing the servers and bandwidth but handling the user accounts, the privacy
issues, the spambots, the drawing of lines that must be drawn somewhere, and
the finding of space for the people who will inevitably show up at their
project only to discover they would actually rather be doing something else
entirely with it all).
I think sometimes we downplay too much what we are capable of offering, because
we would wish to be able to offer more. Don't underestimate how valuable every
piece of what we offer is. Just WMF and our community set processes taking
responsibility for the privacy issues (and doing it competently by Internet
standards) is an immense burden off of an institution! Many of these things are
not issues anyone would necessarily know to think about before starting a
crowd-sourcing project. But we should remember that they were (and still are)
hard issues for the WM movement to figure out. We now have won some of the
prize of age, the ability to draw on our own experience, and that of others
within the movement, in order to spare those that partner with us from some of
the problems of naïveté. This is meaningful. Even though we can never
proofread all their documents with the efforts of just our small community,
what we can do for them is meaningful.
NARA with their dashboard, directing people from their community straight into
the Page: namespace of documents they want transcribed and proofread, is to my
mind the way forward. I would like see this dashboard concept developed
further, so we can show other interested institutions how to set dashboards up
for their communities. So they might direct people they are connected with
toward working directly with institutional texts on Wikisource without anyone
getting too lost in in the wiki. I believe that we can be a platform for this
sort work by these institutions, that we can offer institutional supporters a
low barrier way to contribute directly to the mission they support, that we can
help facilitate the institutional "followers" becoming a real community that
does real work within the areas where our missions overlap. I don't believe we
can, in good faith, accept a large donation of institutional digital files from
institutions which expect the donation to be the beginning and end of their
involvement with Wikisource.
Birgitte SB
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