Hello everyone,

As you might already know, Community Tech team at the Wikimedia Foundation runs a Community Wishlist Survey every year to identify the needs of active Wikimedia contributors. 2020’s Community Wishlist Survey is focusing on Wikimedia projects other than Wikipedia, Commons and Wikidata, in order to serve smaller projects. The Community Tech team will work on the top 5 proposals voted by the community.

Some of you might know me already but let me reintroduce myself. I am Satdeep Gill and I work in the Community Programs (GLAM) team at the Wikimedia Foundation, and my work is heavily focused on supporting Wikisource, a digital library of public domain and freely-licensed texts. While many languages written in latin and similar scripts have had transcription projects such as Project Gutenberg running for many decades, Wikisource is the only transcription platform for many languages, especially those which use non-latin scripts.

I have been working on documenting various pain points and case studies around Wikisource and I will be coordinating with the Community Tech team if any of the Wikisource-related proposals get voted among the top 5 in Community Wishlist 2020. Voting runs until December 2, 2019. 

Based on a workshop I participated in recently with the Indic community at Wiki Advanced Training 2019 organized by CIS-A2K, I have created a list of top priorities for the Indic Wikisource community. This might be useful to the global Wikisource/GLAM community in evaluating Wishlist proposals, and I have identified specific proposals that closely match these priorities. They are:

1. Tools/scripts across various Wikisources - There are many scripts/tools that exist on some Wikisources and not on others. There isn’t enough documentation available to easily localize and integrate them in other Wikisources. (Similar to the proposal Migrate_Wikisource_specific_edit_tools_from_gadgets_to_Wikisource_extension 2020 proposal)

2. VisualEditor for Wikisource/Improving the Proofreading Interface - Wikisource uses a lot of templates and VisualEditor for Wikisource needs to be designed accordingly. (Similar to UI_improvements_on_Wikisource 2020 proposal)

3. Tool to integrate book viewing with pagelist creation and identity page scan errors - the workflow for creating pagelist could be improved by an integrated bookviewer for PDF/DJVU files improving the page identification experience and allowing for adding/removing errored pages from a scanned file. (Similar to the proposal Index creation wizard 2020 proposal)

Check the entire report from the Wiki Advanced Training at the link given below:

https://outreach.wikimedia.org/wiki/GLAM/Newsletter/October_2019/Contents/Wikisource_report

Besides these, it might be worthwhile to consider the following proposal around supporting inter-wiki links on Wikisource: 

• Inter-language_link_support_via_Wikidata 2020 proposal

Once again, don't forget to vote on your favorite proposals before December 2, 2019 as the Community Tech team will be working on the top 5 voted proposals.

Feel free to reach out to me at sgill@wikimedia.org, in case you want to discuss any of the above, or to further discuss needs and strategies for Wikisource.

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Regards,

Satdeep