[Wikisource-l] Subject linking in Wikisource (was: Advice on a custom extension)

[Lars Aronsson]

Jim Hu wrote:

> For example, the web service at Pubmed provide the abstract and 
> links to full text (at yet another website) for a publication.  
> My users would want to add things like: "This paper describes a 
> resource that turned out to be useful for doing X" or "Figure 1 
> in this paper shows this thing that the authors didn't notice" 
> or "The xxx gene described in this paper is also known as yyy; 
> they were shown to be the same 10 years later" etc.


I have a similar problem.  At http://runeberg.org/ I digitize old 
books, among them several encyclopedias.  For the sake of 
familiarity, you can think about scanned books in Wikisource 
rather than my website.

In many cases an encyclopedia from 1889 is useful for knowing the 
population of Aberdeen in 1889.  It could be nice to report what 
the current population is, but in some cases it is also important 
to point out that the reported number for 1889 was indeed wrong.  
But if scanning and OCRing one page takes 3 seconds and 
proofreading takes 3 minutes, how long does it take to check all 
the facts?  Not knowing how this should best be addressed, it 
seemed like a stupid idea to digitize more old works that are full 
of errors.

When Wikipedia was started in 2001 and started to get off the 
ground, this became the obvious place to put information on the 
current and historic population of Aberdeen.  The scanning of old 
texts no longer had to carry this role.  It was really only in 
2002 and 2003 that I got the energy to scan more works for my own 
site, and in 2005 I scanned this for Wikisource,
http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_New_Student%27s_Reference_Work

Turns out Aberdeen's population in 1911 was 163,084,
http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_New_Student%27s_Reference_Work/1-0016
http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_New_Student%27s_Reference_Work/Aberdeen
but this bit of information is not linked to or included in
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aberdeen#Population

So one problem still exists: From the scanned book page, there is 
no link to the Wikipedia article that provides more up-to-date 
information.  The reader of the scanned page can of course use a 
search engine, and will often find the Wikipedia article.  But is 
this really the ultimate solution?  And even if the Wikipedia 
article is found, the other scanned pages that link to the same 
article are not found from there.

Should each scanned book page include a list of links to Wikipedia 
articles that are relevant for the page?  Could such lists be 
compiled (or suggested) automatically?

Should Wikisource have a [[category:Aberdeen]] that collects all 
pages, chapters and books that pertain to this town?  Today the 
English Wikisource has one [[Category:Works by subject]], but 
under this is a very small tree, compared to all articles in 
Wikipedia.  There is no category for Aberdeen, but one for 
Scotland that has 15 links of which 4 are to articles in the 1911 
Encyclopaedia Britannica.  The 1911 EB article "Aberdeen (burgh)" 
is not among these four, 
http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/1911_Encyclop%C3%A6dia_Britannica/Aberdeen_%28burgh%29

Wikisource also has a [[Category:Ottoman Empire]] that contains 
four articles from the 1911 Encyclopaedia Britannica, one other 
chapter and two other works.  But the corresponding category on 
the English Wikipedia has 56 pages and 12 immediate subcategories. 
Even the sub-subcategory Ottoman railways has 6 Wikipedia 
articles.  On Wikisource there seem to be 6 mentions of the 
"Orient Express", but these are found through Google and not 
through links on the website,
http://www.google.com/search?q=%22orient+express%22+site%3Aen.wikisource.org


-- 
  Lars Aronsson (lars at aronsson.se)
  Aronsson Datateknik - http://aronsson.se