Martin,
Good post.
I am very excited about losing my Wikisource virginity too. I was on the
Wikimania Scholarships Committee this year, and saw that many of the
candidates were heavily and in some cases almost solely focused on
Wikisource.
I've had some good conversations about this since, with Wikimedians from
India and Bangladesh in particular. What struck me was that everyone
pointed out that it was more accessible than WP or most other projects.
Best
S
On 8 May 2015 at 11:05, Martin Poulter <infobomb(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Recently I lost my Wikisource virginity, becoming not
a passive
cheerleader for the project but an active contributor. I have to say it's
been a more rewarding experience than expected.
I'd heard in a few places that imports from the Internet Archive, or
imports of .djvu files, weren't reliable, but my little experience has been
fine. Maybe I've been lucky in my choice of files. The whole process of
loading in a book and starting transcription went quite smoothly, though it
required attention to a lot of little steps and I wouldn't recommend it to
non-geeky people.
One surprise was that having entered data about the book into Commons, I
had to enter the same data again into Wikisource. Later when I went through
Preferences on Wikisource, I saw an option to automatically copy book data
from Commons to Wikisource, but for reasons I don't understand it's off by
default.
The editing interface is last-century primitive but usable. An advanced
toolbar with more buttons would enable me to work more quickly, but this
might be possible with custom Javascript.
In my new role as Wikimedian In Residence at the Bodleian Libraries, I'm
doing a lot of advocacy for Wikisource to my audience of librarians because
it's a great example of how sharing content improves content. It's also a
great example of something lay people with computers can do to support
research and free knowledge.
There are two projects I'm working on (in volunteer time now and again,
not paid work), in case anyone's interested.
Firstly, there's a collection on Wikisource related to Mary
Wollstonecraft, a very important philosopher and author of fiction and
non-fiction, not to mention the mother of Mary Shelley.
https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Author:Mary_Wollstonecraft
There are gaps, but with some additional transcription work it's in
hailing distance of being an impressive research resource, hopefully
enabling more interesting projects such as the Mary Wollstonecraft Twitter:
https://twitter.com/1759marywol1797
Her short book about raising daughters had been scanned but not
transcribed, so I've been working on that, a quarter of an hour now and
again.
https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Index:Thoughts_on_the_Education_of_Daughters…
The other project arises from a talk by a historian working with British
Library Labs. He is studying the humour of the Victorian era, marking up a
joke book to identify individual jokes and lines of dialogue. A fun
spin-off from this work is the Mechanical Comedian project
http://victorianhumour.tumblr.com/
An ideal starting point for this work would be a checked, validated
transcription of the out-of-copyright source book, which the team are
gradually working on. So I'm urging them to use Wikisource as a platform,
and to demonstrate I'm transcribing a similar book from the same era.
https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Index:Everybody%27s_Book_of_English_wit_and_…
Disclaimer: a lot of Victorian jokes are *not funny*, but there are rare
gems.
If, like I was, you're a Wiki*edian who's interested in Wikisource but
hasn't taken the plunge. I recommend having a go.
--
Dr Martin L Poulter
Wikipedia contributor
http://enwp.org/User:MartinPoulter
Volunteer, Wikimedia UK
http://wikimedia.org/wiki/User:MartinPoulter
<http://uk.wikimedia.org/>
Musician
http://soundcloud.com/martin-poulter
http://myspace.com/comapilot
Person
http://infobomb.org/
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