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 want us to get better, faster, less held up by the idea of coordinating with other projects, because there are much larger projects out there worthy of coordinating with. The annotators who work on the Perseus Project come to mind... but that's truly a harder problem than this one.
The Perseus project is an *amazing* project, but I regard them far more ahead than us. The PP is actually a Virtual Research Environment, with tools for scholars and researcher for studying texts, (concordances and similar stuff).
<
I would love to have PP people involved in collaboration with Wikisource, just don't know if this is possible.
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.
It is interesting because a project similar to PGDP (it is Italian and started in 1993, emulating the glorious PG, just with Italian texts) is, right now, moving to a wiki. Although the scale is way smaller, Wikipedia and Wikisource showed them a system which tends to eliminate bottlenecks, and for them this is becoming crucial.
<
Luckily, the relationships with the Italian Wikisource are really good, and they'll probably share an office with Wikimedia Italy, in October. The interesting fact is that the offices will be within a library ;-), so I really expect a collaboration there.
Wow. This is all great to hear -- can you include a link to the project? I'd like to blog about it.
Warmly, SJ
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
Wikisource-l mailing list Wikisource-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikisource-l
Samuel J Klein, 16/07/2010 21:49:
On Thu, Jul 15, 2010 at 7:26 PM, Aubrey zanni.andrea84@gmail.com wrote:
Luckily, the relationships with the Italian Wikisource are really good, and they'll probably share an office with Wikimedia Italy, in October. The interesting fact is that the offices will be within a library ;-), so I really expect a collaboration there.
Wow. This is all great to hear -- can you include a link to the project? I'd like to blog about it.
There are some info in the newly published Wikimedia News no. 29 (WMI report January-July 2010): http://www.wikimedia.it/index.php/Wikimedia_news/numero_29/en#Wikimedia_Roma
Nemo
wikisource-l@lists.wikimedia.org