On 9/23/06, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
We'd try to get the best scans we could. But I suspect that if you put up the raw scans and any of it could be turned to an actual use, volunteers to do the tedious labour would turn up. I'm amazed at the tedious jobs people do for Wikimedia projects in the cause of getting information into the public domain.
The scanning itself is pretty tedious labor. If the map is of any size it means you have to fold it to get the middle sections, which increases the likelihood that things won't line up later (slightly different angles, etc., make for very unsightly alignment problems).
Anyway, I've no doubt of the power of Wikipedians to volunteer for boring tasks -- I've done some pretty dull ones in my day for the project (like extracting and cropping and formatting hi-res images of all of the major plates in Vesalius' [[De Humanis Corporis Fabrica]], which is now at Commons), but having tried to stich together maps and other large images from scans in the past, I have to admit I'm pretty skeptical. It is not just boring work, it is boring work where more often that not one just feels frustrated by it. In my experience.
But again... I'm thrilled if people want to do it! :-)
FF