Thanks Mathieu. What really strikes me is that challenge is doable in fr.wikisource: in many others would be complete madness ;-) Also, Polish Wikisource is doing great.
What interest me is understanding how they are building their community of active and super-active proofreaders: are they doing something that other wikisource aren't?
Aubrey
I think I will nor betray any secret If I tell about that.
At the moment our community is based on few active users and we are trying to support newcommers actively. We noticed that many new users do not like classic on-wiki communication (through talk pages or Scriptorium) so we support them also through other channels (email, IRC). They are always welcome to ask.
I think we have no two users that come to the project in the same way. Our users are often active in many fields. We have a Facebook page, sometimes we mention our project on various fan sites (eg few years ago a short note about plwikisource on an ebook fan site brought over 100 new users; a few of them is still active). We also appreciate occasional actions of our fellow colleagues from Polish Wikipedia and Wikimedia PL (interviews, blog articles, workshops).
We notice that our community originates from different societies than Wikipedia community (in Wikipedia some level of creativity is required, in Wikisource other skills are preferred) and as Polish orthography and grammar did change significantly since XIX c. and even since 1920-ties and 1930-ties, we do not look for new users among teenagers (we do not want to break their fresh orthography-related skills; we look for users rather among retired :) ).
Also I think, OCR tools progress (thanks to Wieralee), a short techical guide for newcommers (also thanks to Wieralee) and a lot of automation (thanks to Zdzislaw) made plwikisource more familiar for new users, even if they have no earlier wiki experience. (When I really came to plws in 2010, almost all books were re-written manually)
We also noticed that various near goals when announced (eg. reaching 90% ProofreadPage-based pages in main, 300.000 pages in Page namespace, 150.000 proofread pages or prepare the full set of Sienkiewicz's texts onto 100th anniversary of his death) make our community more active.
Ankry