On 03 January 2017 at 14:44 John Levin <anterotesis@gmail.com> wrote:
<snip>
My user page is: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Technolalia
Hello John - we actually exchanged mails a few years ago
My Phd has involved a lot of digging around for historic statutes, and this has led to a side project, and one that I hope will work with Wikipedia. In short, I have OCRd around 80 volumes of various editions of the Statutes At Large and the Public General Statutes. They cover the period from Magna Carta, up to 1875 (after which digitized volumes are scarce). I believe they contain a more or less complete set of public acts from about 1765 to 1875. Although it is obviously alphanumeric soup at the moment, I am working on automatic correction of the more obvious errors, and on producing decent metadata.
Wikisource can host primary rsource material, subject to some caveats.
My aims are to make finding legislation easier, to make it easier to examine, both by eye and by machine, and to produce reliable metadata from and for it. My immediate priority is to extract the tables of contents from the collections, and build a reliable list of acts with regnal codes and full titles (correctly spelled). My site for this project: http://statutes.org.uk and my github repo: https://github.com/Anterotesis/statutes Wikipedia has many useful lists of statutes, some entries on particular acts, & in wikicommons a few of the texts. I very much want my work to contribute to wikipedia and improve this aspect of it.
Well, laudable doesn't begin to cover it.
I've been talking with Andrew Gray, mainly with regard to Wikidata, butsuch is the size of the task I think more hands will be needed. & of course I don't want to start making great changes without consultation.
Wikidata is a good place to develop metadata. It can do that in conjunction with Wikisource, but I wouldn't want to imply that is the only way.
Charles