[Wikisource-l] Goals for Wikisource

[Federico Leva (Nemo)]

Hélène Pedrosa-Masson, 21/07/2010 08:13:
> Le 21 juil. 10 à 06:01, Lars Aronsson a écrit :
> 
>> Wikisource is a project that could have a great importance
>> in the future, if it succeeds to grow. Scanned books should
>> be useful references in Wikipedia.  (...)
> 
> Wikisource may aim towards being a repository of sources for  
> Wikipedia. But IMHO it is not its only goal.

I agree. Well, I think it isn't its goal at all.

Lars Aronsson, 21/07/2010 06:01:
 > For Arabic and other languages where Wikipedia
 > is still rather small, finding and scanning such a
 > small 5 volume encyclopedia could be a great help,
 > but for the languages where Wikipedia is bigger
 > (and this is true for all languages where Wikisource
 > is now active, except maybe Armenian), we need to
 > look for more specialized reference works to be
 > really useful as sources.

Dictionaries! Wiktionary is the place where you still can give small 
"easy" contributions (as well as Wikiquote, but not bigger Wikipedias) 
and in fact it has the higher contributors/editor ratio in Wikimedia 
projects, as Erik Moeller showed at Wikimania (but the same applies to 
Wikiquote).
The problem is that building a dictionary from scratch is a nightmare. 
If you look Wiktionaries statistics, you see that sever Wiktionaries 
started to grow significantly when they imported automatically some PD 
dictionary and reached a critical mass  (the tipping point).
It could even be sensible to actually buy the rights of old (but not PD) 
out of print dictionaries (even if not available in digital form and to 
be proofread on Wikisource) to improve smaller Wiktionaries, where PD 
dictionaries are not available. Such countries may have a greater need 
of dictionaries (I mean, Italian has dictionaries since 1583, lots of 
them are PD and you can buy a copy of a five years old dictionary for 20 
€, but it's not the same in avery country, I suppose).

Nemo