2010/7/16 Samuel J Klein <sj@wikimedia.org>
Hello Aubrey,

On Thu, Jul 15, 2010 at 7:26 PM, Aubrey <zanni.andrea84@gmail.com> wrote:

> The issue of metadata is nontheless serious, because it's one of the most
> important flaws of Wikisource: not applying standards (i.e Dublin Core) and not
> having a proper tools for export/import and harvest metadata

Both good points. Are there proposals on wikisource to address these
two points in a way that's friendly to wikisource contributors?


I have draft ideas, and probably naive ones.
First one was to implement in a beta wiki SMW and download the dump of it.source, to see how it is working.
My idea was to create a template with DC fields, so that the template can accept metadata the old wiki way, and all the Semantics can be embedded in the template itself.
Moreover, there could be a form like Commons has for file uploads: DC has optional fields and also repetitive ones (you can have them as many as you need).

This could be very important because some metadata needs to be properly addressed. If you think about the field "Year", you don't know if it is the year of creation or publishing, and there many other different possibilities.
I don't want to import the complexity of MARC (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MARC_standards) in Wikisource, just more reliability and authority.

Moreover, I just don't get what the OAIrepository extension (implemented everywhere) is doing.
I would like to understand better how it can be used. 

In the Italian Wikisource we have developed complicated procedures to harvest data via transclusion (the Labeled transclusion extension is extremely powerful).
Unfortunately, with section stransclusion you *always* need to explicitly write in wikitext the section tags (<section>), which "spoils" and complicate the text for users. I believe the best way is to hide complexity within software extension or templates, and maybe develop forms for guide users.

Yes, PP is ahead of us in some ways.  But in other ways they have run
into bottleneck and multilingual issues that a wiki environment can
resolve.

I believe that Prof. Greg Crane of the Perseus Project (cc:ed here) is
interested in starting to collaborate with Wikisource, even while
pursuing ideas about developing a larger framework for wiki-style
annotations and editions.

While it may be hard in the short term, in the long term that's what I
think we all want wikisource to become.

Yep, I would *love* that (I read many articles from professor Crane for my thesis, :-)
my focus was on Digital Humanities. Still, I reached this question in my research:

Is it better to make the PP software (or other digital library systems as DSpace, Fedora, Invenio among others)
"collaboratively editable" (wiki-style) or on the other hand make MediaWiki more metadata complaint and providing tools for research?
My interviewees said the former, but I would like very much to prove them wrong ;-)

Wow.  This is all great to hear -- can you include a link to the
project?  I'd like to blog about it.

I believe WMItaly is working on a press  release, I will get you updated.

My best regards

Aubrey

 
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