On Wed, Apr 21, 2010 at 7:30 AM, Lars Aronsson lars@aronsson.se wrote:
At the Wikimedia chapter meeting in Berlin last week, Wikisource was mentioned as an interesting project in several different settings.
I know a lot of interesting projects and attempts are being tried in various languages of Wikisource, but perhaps there isn't enough coordination and exchange of ideas and experience between all volunteers.
Agree with you that more sharing of information would be beneficial to the various projects.
How could we improve this? I personally think this mailing list is the first place to start. We could all write short notices of any new idea or project that we are undertaking.
How can we help this happen consistently?
Then we should probably
get together at a session during the Wikimania conference in Gdansk this summer.
Excellent idea especially if the discussions are then brought back to this mailing list for a broader audience.
The Wikimedia "chapters" are national or regional membership associations that provide means to go beyond the ordinary project volunteer communities, for example when expenses need to be covered for travel or equipment, or when contracts need to be signed. One example is that Wikimedia France recently signed a deal with the Bibliothèque nationale de France to provide access to scanned images of books, that can be proofread in fr.wikisource.org.
Excellent to hear.
Deals of this kind fit in with a larger pattern, where chapters seek collaboration with galleries, libraries, archives and museums (= GLAM), hoping that they will contribute free images to Wikimedia Commons and Wikipedia. Or where museums will allow wikipedians to take photos of their collections.
Other chapters are buying scanners for volunteers to use. But perhaps digital cameras are more useful than scanners these days. How many know how to use them correctly? Maybe we need workshops.
Informal discussions and workshops that share this information can spur people to try something like this in their own region.
Also more outreach to groups of people already doing this type of work could be very fruitful.
Many of the chapters are now growing fast and are quite successful at fundraising. This creates an interesting challenge to fund projects that really make a difference. The chapters need good projects to fund, that they can show off to donors at the coming fundraiser in the fall 2010/winter 2011.
I think Wikisource has a lot of potential for supplying chapters with good projects to fund.
Big picture Wikisource adds value to WMF by enhancing the information available about a topic with links from other WMF projects to wikisource, so content wise it is a win for people not directly involved in the Wikisource.
Sydney Poore (FloNight)
-- Lars Aronsson (lars@aronsson.se) Wikimedia Sverige - stöd fri kunskap - http://wikimedia.se/
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