Thanks to everyone who came to the Wikisource meetup at Wikimania 2014. We had a very nice talk and it was wonderful to get to know each other in person!
Some of the topics that were discussed at the first Wikisource Community User Group meet up:
- lack of OCR for Belarusian and other languages -> I just sent an email to the Tesseract list to see what could we do about it
- what to do with "
wikisource.org" (oldwikisource) -> probably it is worth creating a mul.* domain so we can connect it with Wikidata. It needs broader discussion / promotion
- Wikidata -> not clear what to do with "Index:" pages, needs some thought about how to move that metadata to Wikidata. Consider that the relationship between the "index" (supporting/containing media, closer to Commons) and the edition item (version of a work) is not always 1:1. Perhaps, using "part of" or "published in" could be used here, but as said it needs thinking and work on some use cases (let's be brave creating properties and examples on
test.wikidata.org)
- tabular data (csv) -> wikisource could host such sources if there is enough interest and a technical solution to manage this kind of information. Needs more discussion, and gather tech support.
- user engagement -> proposed to gamify proofreading. Identified potential interested partners, if we don't manage to get support, it can be thought as a GsoC next year.
- advocacy -> wikisourcerors are encouraged to contact their nearest wikimedia chapter to look for support and raise awareness about the issues that need attention. These kind of trust relationships are necessary to organize the next proofreading contest. Chapters should be aware that with just 100eur in prizes and help reaching out (for instance banners on Wikipedia) a lot of things can be accomplished by volunteers like us.
- outreach -> tell GLAM members about wikisource so when they contact with libraries they can promote wikisource as well (and not only wikipedia/commons)
- open access -> identified as a high potential project for wikisource. It needs some automatic text verification so we don't waste volunteers time proofreading digital born documents.
- social -> more boldness needed! Let's not be afraid of changing things to make the project more attractive for readers (for instance cover galleries on the main page, or try collaborative or experimental tools). More contact wished with the German community. Promote Wikisource on social platforms and on GLAM newsletters.
- adminship -> it was proposed to promote Tpt to global steward so he can help better new communities. It was also proposed that experienced members could mentor wikisourcerors from new communities so they get to know all the tools/hidden gems that we have.
Besides this year there were several wikisource related submissions
- Wikisource technical infrastructure-> Tpt presented his advances on the visual editor integration and on the new beta feature "sister projects" to be deployed in the next weeks [1]. Xelgen presented the advances of his grant project for new Wikisource tools [2].
- Crowdsourcing the Digitization of Ben-Yehuda's Dictionary -> Asaf presented his Hebrew crowd-sourced dictionary project [3]
- Wikisource panel -> Charles Matthews, Magnus Manske et al. explained what is Wikisource about, possible options to gamify it, and its possible role as a host of tabular data [4]