John Vandenberg, 13/09/2009 01:18:
On Sat, Sep 12, 2009 at 7:31 PM, Federico Leva (Nemo)
I know (all of us know), but John pointed out that TIFF is useful also for Wikisource. :-)
People say "archives", but do not recognise or care that archives consist primarily of *text*.
That's obvious, and [scanned] texts are more valuable than images, but precisely for this reason it's more difficult to manage them. We can relatively easily upload a bunch of images, tag and categorize them, use them in galleries and Wikipedia+Wikiquote articles, correct errors etc. Thus we are focusing on images "donations" which can give an immediate result. But what could we do with a bunch of scanned texts? (The only partnership here was the one of WM-FR with ENVT, if I remember correctly)? See http://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Proposal:Make_Wikisource_scale
I don't think that here the problem is file format: large transcoding is feasibile, see Internet Archive, where you can put in a huge PDF and download a wonderful DjVu: http://www.archive.org/details/VocabolarioAccademiciCruscaEd3Vol3 (they don't use TIFF, I suppose because it's disk space-demanding and they have already JPEG images), although they use non free commercial software.
Nemo