I would like to use this opportunity to once more bring forward an idea I have been toying with at least since the Frankfurt Wikimania: Using Wikimedia's methods in making archives available.
Archives are starting to put their material on the web, but still it's only used sparingly. Which is a pity, because it means there is much archival material that historians (both professional and amateur) are interested in that is not available to them because it is in an archive far away, and perhaps even unknown to them.
My idea was to scan these materials, put them on the web, and then make it available to some wiki-like collaborative effort. Volunteers from all over the world could then make themselves useful by doing the transcription of the material (I am thinking in the first place of manuscript material here - printed material is probably easier to transcribe through machine character recognition) and by creating descriptions, indices etcetera.
My idea would be to have something wiki-like, where the main pages would consists of a scan, its transcription (if available) and an area for comments.
Andre Engels
2007/1/9, Sage Ross ragesoss+wikipedia@gmail.com:
In the past there was some effort put into grant writing, but I'm not sure if any grant applications ever got submitted. In any case, it's been quite a while since anything was done on Meta about grants: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants
There is a new NEH grant that looks like something appropriate for Wikimedia (or at least for English Wikipedia, through Wikimedia): http://www.neh.gov/grants/guidelines/Digital_Partnership.html
From the program description, they want: "...proposals for innovative, collaborative humanities projects using the latest digital technologies for the benefit of the American public, humanities scholarship, and the nation's cultural institutions. These grants will support collaborations among libraries, museums, archives, universities, and other cultural organizations that may serve as models for the field. We encourage projects that explore new ways to share, examine, and interpret humanities collections in a digital environment and to develop new uses and audiences for existing digital resources."
It almost looks like it was written with Wikipedia in mind. The grant range is $50,000 to $350,000 over two years; not enormous, but it seems worth the time of some Wikimedian grant writers.
With some creativity, there are probably some other NEH and possibly NSF grants that Wikimedia might have a shot at as well.
-User:Ragesoss