[Foundation-l] [Wikisource-l] Open Library, Wikisource, and cleaning and translating OCR of Classics

Joshua Gay joshuagay at gmail.com
Fri Aug 21 12:52:25 UTC 2009


David Strauss did a quick implementation (basically a demo) of an
OpenLibrary extension for MediaWiki. In very little amount of code, he was
able to easily search the OL (via AJAX) and when the user selected a given
result, it poppulated a Citation template. What was nice is that when no
results came up for a given search, there was an "add to open library"
button that brought you to the OL site to add your bibliographic
information.

I think it would be easy to build upon this work and one could do a really
powerful MW extension (and maybe some new templates, etc) that would allow
people to contribute to both MW and OL simultaneously.

I think that the OL should continue to do what is trying to do. I also think
people should be able to quickly and easily create new and important
wikimedia projects, especially when people are passionate to do so. And, I
think when different projects on the Internet have a lot of overlap in what
they are trying to do, and share similar philosophy and ethics,  that they
should have their machines play nice with each other and make sharing
(reading and writing) data between them easy.

-Josh


On Fri, Aug 21, 2009 at 7:33 AM, Yann Forget <yann at forget-me.net> wrote:

> Lars Aronsson wrote:
> > Yann Forget wrote:
> >
> >> As I already said, the first steps would be to import existing
> >> databases, and Wikimedians are very good at this job.
> >
> > Do you have a bibliographic database (library catalog) of French
> > literature that you can upload?  How many records?  Convincing
> > libraries to donate copies of their catalogs has been a bottleneck
> > for OpenLibrary.
>
> No, I don't have such a database. There is a copyright on databases in
> Europe, which makes things complicated.
>
> Probably we need to start with libraries which are already collaborating
> with open content projects. There was a GLAM-wiki meeting in Australia
> recently: there might be a possibility with an Australian library?
>
> But even before that, if we could extract the data from Wikimedia
> projects, we could create a basic working frame. I have been collecting
> such data on Wikisource and Wikibooks, but the lack of a structured
> system is a bottleneck.
>
> Examples:
> 1. Comprehensive bibliography of Gandhi in French
> http://fr.wikibooks.org/wiki/Bibliographie_de_Gandhi
>
> 2. French translations of Russian authors:
> http://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/Discussion_Auteur:L%C3%A9on_Tolsto%C3%AF
>
> http://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/Discussion_Auteur:F%C3%A9dor_Mikha%C3%AFlovitch_Dosto%C3%AFevski
>
> Regards,
>
> Yann
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