It would be very exciting to get our hands on uncommon
materials such as the Libary of Congress must have.
However I am confused about your proposal about "A
commons-project to create form requests and a queue
for processing inbound content would be useful."
What do you dislike about the current methods being
used to put scanned images on Commons and attaching
these to the OCR text at Wikisoure? I personally have
never used these scripts myself, but judging from the
results alone I am not sure how it would be improved
on. Looking at the histories of the pages it seems to
work rather quickly as well. It would be very useful
if you could give us details about what problems you
see with the current system, before wwe start talking
of a new set-up.
As to educational materials for Wikibooks Wikisource
does contain a lot of things which would be useful as
a base for updated textbooks. I do not know what
anyone at Wikibooks is particularly interested in, but
there is some room for collaboration. Especially with
the WikiJunior people IMHO. If anyone at those
projects is interested in what we have email me I will
gather a list for you of what I think might useful.
Sometime in the future I think it would be great if
WikiJunior expanded into having a set of purely
literary books available. Although it would not be
actually adding new content to the world (except in
translation perhaps), putting them together would
require very little effort. Finding free content
illustrations would probably be the most work of
anything.
Birgitte SB
--- SJ <2.718281828(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Museums are good repositories of such information;
also non-digitized
archives. For them digitization is an expense; if
we can reliably
offer this for free, many will be glad to release
copyright in
exchange for more usable access to their own
materials.
The Library of Congress has a sizable collection of
materials that
they want to distribute more broadly; it is indeed
already PD or
equivalent, but not digitized -- or more commonly,
digitized somehow
but not in many formats, not classified, not easily
available.
A commons-project to create form requests and a
queue for processing
inbound content would be useful.
You could say the same about archived books that
have no commercial
value anymore. The same analysis goes for
processing book materials
donated to wikisource; which requires image
processing and OCR and
should perhaps have a commons aspect (raw page
images, raw ocr output
files, images from within the book extracted from
the raw page
images), and a wikisource text aspect (text
transcript, translations).
And again ties to the book industry would be useful
here.
Finally, source texts that are educationally useful
could generate a
third set of materials : living wikibooks built on
their foundation,
updated and improved over time.
SJ
<copynig all 3 project lists>
On 6/15/06, Magnus Manske <magnus.manske(a)web.de>
wrote:
I was wondering if there is some kind of
organized
effort to ask
photographers and image agencies for donations
(read: GFDL- or
CC-licensing) of images.
I am thinking especially of images that we cannot
take ourselves; dead
celebrities for example (and no, don't go
grave-digging ;-)
There must be a huge amount of photos that have
next no no commercial
value anymore, because they are not good enough
for a magazine cover,
but would do well for documenting an encyclopedia
article. Of course, we
would prominently credit the source in the image
description (which will
be transcluded to every wikipedia that uses it),
or even in the image
title. Images could be watermarked, of course,
and
for largeer amounts
of photos, we'd create a category, gallery
and
all. Repeaded mentioning
(in a good light!) in a project of the wikimedia
magnitude might be
worth more than paid advertisement, fo virtually
no cost.
We could even offer a service: I'm sure some of us
have
(semi-)professional film scanners (I do). Deal
goes like this: mail us
your films (encyclopedia/commons-style only; not
your family picknick;-)
and a note that releases them under
GFDL/CC/PD/whatever, and we'll
upload them in high-res on commons, where you can
download them. Free
film digitization!
With people on commons obviously interested in
media, there must be some
of us with ties to "the industry" who
can initiate
such contacts. "The
Yorck Project" already donated a lot of PD
images,
as you might
remember. If we can get just a few
photographers/companies to release
images as well, others might follow just to not
lag behind.
Magnus
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++SJ
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