On 25 November 2014 at 11:33, Andrea Zanni <[email protected]> wrote:

>
> How would I do that now? Wikisource pages are not structured data (though
>> Wikimedia Commons image metadata will soon be!), so there is not a clear
>> way to use the Wikisource API to extract just the relevant transcribed text
>> on the page as a field. And on top of that, any text you do extract this
>> way will be full of templates and other code that has no meaning outside of
>> the context of Wikisource. I don't see a way to easily extract just the
>> plain text that is meaningful and relevant (along with other fielded data,
>> like what page or text it belongs to).
>>
>
> Wikisource as a "structured" repository is what we ask from the dawn of
> time :-)
> The problem, as usual, is that if things are left to volunteer developers
> thing will go slooooowly.
> I do think this is fundamental: an ideal Wikisource would ingest and
> understand many times metadata standards, and would give them back as well.
>
> As for the Wikimedia API, I did this awful script:
> https://github.com/Aubreymcfato/ws_scraper
> Please come and make it better :-D
>
> Awesome! I'll definitely give it a whirl.


> It just scrapes the data from the HTML (it is localized to it.source, but
> a quick glance at the HTML source of your own ws could help you, especially
> if you use microformats) and puts them on a csv.
> If you take the HTML you can also get the formatted text.
> (I also wonder of a Wikisource which understands Markdown, but that's too
> far :-)
>

You have a good point, though. One of the differences between Wikisource
and most other platforms is that it is actually richly formatted. It's kind
of a shame to strip all that formatting information out when extracting the
transcriptions. (Though many destinations wouldn't know what to do with
formatted text anyway.)
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