On Wed, Oct 22, 2008 at 3:36 AM, Florence Devouard Anthere9@yahoo.com wrote:
Forward. I was on the wrong list. ... In Europe, at least in some countries, we meet several problems
- many scholars have a rather bad image of Wikipedia (because written by
amateurs, anonymous members, plagued by vandals etc...)
- the other wikimedia projects have rather poor popularity and would
benefit from more "light"
- journalists are bored and need new information (otherwise, they focus
on all the bad stories)
In English speaking nations, we are also seeing contributors becoming bored, resulting in contributors giving journalists bad stories. Wikisource will not only give the contributors _work_ to do, they will have infinitely more to write about historical topics.
- some projects are more difficult to advertise than others, because
they are full competitors with other commercial projects of very good quality (eg, wiktionary, wikinews...)
Besides, my feeling is that contributors and in particular members from chapters need a project on which they can team.
I would like to propose that next year be Wikisource year.
I second that! :-)
And since the planet is very large, if this is done in large part through chapters, that it be an opportunity for some european chapters to work together.
I am not necessarily thinking of anything very complicated. Examples of efforts we could make together:
- leaflets about wikisource updated and available in a large number of
languages;
- webbuttons to advertise the project on the web;
- each time someone gives a conference about Wikipedia, take the
opportunity to spend a couple of minutes of Wikisource as well; distribute leaflets;
- summarize our best cases on Wikisource;
- develop stories about these best cases. Illustrate. Feature these
stories on chapter websites;
- develop initiatives on projects for cross project challenges (eg, best
article with content improved in at least 3 projects);
- chapters may write and distribute a couple of press releases about
wikisource;
- chapters may propose conferences about wikisource (and speakers
available to talk about it);
- develop arguments for museums etc...
Measures of success are numerous, from improvements of Wikisource (number of docs), number of mentions in the press, partnerships established with museums etc...
This is the (only?) important measurement - proofread pages backed by scans:
http://wikisource.org/wiki/Wikisource:ProofreadPage_Statistics
As those graphs are in such a lovely upward direction, it would be great if we could see an update to these stats:
http://stats.wikimedia.org/wikisource/EN/
There are a few more languages adopting the proofreading technology, and other Wikisource site requests listed here:
http://wikisource.org/wiki/Wikisource:Bugs
The biggest structural problem is the inability to upload djvu files greater than 20Mb. Changing the limit to 40Mb will make the situation only marginally better. e.g. [[w:JPS197]] is over 63Mb, and this held us up for over 12 months in a ridiculous copyvio discussion until it was split into four chunks, which means that a "page" can not be simply and reliably found.
http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Wikisource:Possible_copyright_violations/Archi... http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Special:PrefixIndex/Index:JPS1917
Also we are now building a centralised list of works digitised by the various Wikisource projects.
http://wikisource.org/wiki/Wikisource:Completed_texts
-- John V