Hélène Pedrosa-Masson, 21/07/2010 08:13:
Le 21 juil. 10 à 06:01, Lars Aronsson a écrit :
Wikisource is a project that could have a great importance in the future, if it succeeds to grow. Scanned books should be useful references in Wikipedia. (...)
Wikisource may aim towards being a repository of sources for Wikipedia. But IMHO it is not its only goal.
I agree. Well, I think it isn't its goal at all.
Lars Aronsson, 21/07/2010 06:01:
For Arabic and other languages where Wikipedia is still rather small, finding and scanning such a small 5 volume encyclopedia could be a great help, but for the languages where Wikipedia is bigger (and this is true for all languages where Wikisource is now active, except maybe Armenian), we need to look for more specialized reference works to be really useful as sources.
Dictionaries! Wiktionary is the place where you still can give small "easy" contributions (as well as Wikiquote, but not bigger Wikipedias) and in fact it has the higher contributors/editor ratio in Wikimedia projects, as Erik Moeller showed at Wikimania (but the same applies to Wikiquote). The problem is that building a dictionary from scratch is a nightmare. If you look Wiktionaries statistics, you see that sever Wiktionaries started to grow significantly when they imported automatically some PD dictionary and reached a critical mass (the tipping point). It could even be sensible to actually buy the rights of old (but not PD) out of print dictionaries (even if not available in digital form and to be proofread on Wikisource) to improve smaller Wiktionaries, where PD dictionaries are not available. Such countries may have a greater need of dictionaries (I mean, Italian has dictionaries since 1583, lots of them are PD and you can buy a copy of a five years old dictionary for 20 €, but it's not the same in avery country, I suppose).
Nemo