I've crossposted my response to the Foundation and Wikisource lists since it could interest people there.

Delirium wrote:

Ray Saintonge wrote:

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geni wrote:

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On 9/20/06, Delirium delirium@hackish.org wrote:

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I guess as a reader I don't see the benefit in *not* covering everything. I agree there is a slant towards more coverage of recent news events, but that's simply because they're easier to cover. The solution, IMO, is not to cover recent events less, but to cover older events more. I want to know the equivalent of this stuff for other time periods! Were there short-lived but at the time massively-covered events in the 1890s, equivalent to today's frenzies over child kidnappings? What about the thousands of political scandals, major and minor, that have at various times shortened governments' tenures, forced cabinet reshuffles, etc., etc.? It's all good info we're missing!

Problem is that a lot of the data that would be useful in answering your question is stored on microfilm and there isn't really a quick way to scan that.

This is a Wikisource function, but that dosn't make it easier. I have most of the first 20 years of McClure's Magazine. It was a monthly that became famous for muckraking journalism, and exposing the behaviour of big companies and government administration in the pre WWI era. 1,200 pages per year for 20 years gives 24,000 pages, and is a daunting task. Weeklies and dailies don't make things any easier.

While it would certainly be nice to have it all scanned, I don't think it's necessary. We already cite lots of sources that aren't available on the internet---recently published books, journal articles, etc.---so I don't see why it would be a bigger problem that old news articles are only available in archives, on microfilm, or via digital subscription. Ain't nothin' wrong with citing sources that require a visit to a library to access.

This is certainly a fair comment. Of course the recent publications have copyright constraints that are a block to any kind of scanning. Certainly, for the sake of discussion I am limiting my comments to material where the public domain status is unquestioned. That's enough material to keep us busy.

Some of my old bound volumes of "McClure's", "Scientific American", "Popular Science", and other odd volumes have library markings and indications that they were discarded by some public or college library. I have no objection to people visiting libraries, but there's no guarantee that a nearby library will have the material sought. Project Gutenberg already includes 6 issues of "McClure's, a far but complete but substantial number of "Scientific American" when it was a weekly, and no "Popular Science". ("Popular Science" in the 19th century had far more in-depth articles than its present incarnation.) In general, I don't think we should be duplicating the efforts of PG; there's more than enough work for everybody to do.

Other important magazines like [[The Smart Set]], where H. L. Mencken wrote, are much more difficult to find. We do need to stay within the realm of the possible. Making information freely available is not a simple task; it will likely take the co-operation and co-ordination of many players who will each establish where they can work best. I would love to be able to create direct links from a WMF project to a specific spot in a book that has been digitized by another player without having to contend with a lot of proprietary restrictions being applied to public domain books.

The task is enormous.

Ec