Tamil Development Board (an autonomous institution under Government of Tamilnadu) releases its Encyclopedia (10 volumes, 7407 pages) and Children's Encyclopedia (10 volumes, 969 pages) under Creative Commons license. Tamil Wikipedians lead by Prof. C. R. Selvakumar and Prof. P. R. Nakkeeran, (Director, Tamil Virtual Academy) spearheaded this initiative coinciding with Tamil Wikipedia's 10 years celebrations.
An official confirmation (in Tamil) can be seen at
Scanned copies of these works are already available at
http://tamilvu.org/library/kulandaikal/lku00/html/lku00ind.htm
At Tamil Wikipedia, we are discussing how we can get this content typed and transferred to WikiSource. Doing so can be a good model to encourage more such works to be released in public domain.
Following are two options I can think of:
1. Volunteers type all the content. Besides taking years to complete, this won't do justice for the value of time of volunteers who can do more valuable work than typing mechanically.
A program like IT@School present in Kerala or a contest can encourage more people to join this effort but not all communities can't emulate this model successfully.
2. Request WMF to give a grant to the owner of the content and let them hand over the typed content to Wikisource volunteers who will upload and wikify the content.
This will ensure maintaining the spirit of volunteerism and yet getting the work done in a professional and time bound manner.
Numerous works in Wikisource are such ready made content uploaded already in the web through other projects like Project Gutenberg.
If providing grants to non-Wikimedia organizations is an issue, a grant towards this can be given to community / chapter who will then outsource the typing work.
I welcome community's input on any other model for this as India has vast amount of literature and works like this are waiting to be transfered to Wikisource. This is one area where we can add lot of content to Wiki projects at once.
Ravi
