[Foundation-l] Re: Hosting scans of the 1911 Britannica onWikimedia

[Brian]

Robert Scott Horning wrote:

> Anthony DiPierro wrote:
>
>> On 11/9/05, Poe, Marshall <MPoe at theatlantic.com> wrote:
>>  
>>
>>> --- Tim Starling <t.starling at physics.unimelb.edu.au> wrote:
>>>   
>>>
>>>> ...
>>>> The only question in my mind is the domain: should this be under
>>>> eb1911.wikipedia.org <http://eb1911.wikipedia.org>? We could make it
>>>>     
>>>
>>> visually distinct, to avoid
>>>   
>>>
>>>> confusion with Wikipedia itself. Or would 
>>>> eb1911.wikimedia.org<http://eb1911.wikimedia.org>be
>>>> better? Or eb1911.wikisource.org <http://eb1911.wikisource.org>?
>>>>     
>>>
>>> It absolutely should *not* be on a Wikipedia subdomain. Wikisource is
>>> the place for this.
>>>
>>> -- mav
>>>
>>> This is exactly right. An encyclopedia from 1911 is a primary source of
>>> historical interest; it's data, not metadata. If it goes anywhere, it's
>>> Wikisource.
>>>
>>> --Marshall Poe
>>>   
>>
>>
>> Wikisource is the place for the text, maybe. For the images themselves I
>> don't see the disadvantage of just using bittorrent, maybe by volume.
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>>
>>  
>>
> What???  Wikimedia Commons is the best place for images, and indeed 
> there have already been several scans of this encyclopedia that have 
> been put into Wikimedia projects.  We don't need to use bit torrents 
> unless this is a move to do bit torrents for all Wikimedia projects 
> (perhaps a good idea but a seperate discussion).  There is also a 
> license tag that has been specifically established on commons just for 
> content from the 1911 Encyclopaedia Brittanica because of the large 
> number of potential images that can come from this source.  Look them 
> up right now with the associated categories at 
> http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Template%3APD-Britannica
>
> One thing I see missing from this discussion is working in cooperation 
> with Distributed Proofreaders, who is not only transcribing the 
> contents of this encyclopedia into plain ASCII text (and XML markup as 
> well), but is also providing scans of the figures and images from 
> within the volumes and making them available with a public domain 
> license.  What more do we want here?  The slow going on that project 
> with Distributed Proofreaders is something that goes to show how large 
> of a project it is.
>
> That trying to organize the content onto a Wiki has been difficult, 
> yes. It may also be a good idea to access a direct scan of the image 
> to compare against the transcribed text.  The real question is if the 
> contents of a whole DVD ought to be moved to commons or not, 
> especially if the source of the scans is in the public domain.
>
> That is the real issue here, because you can copyright a scan of an 
> image.  Weak copyright protection at best, but you can copyright the 
> scan itself which would in turn force you to have to find the original 
> materials and do the scan seperately.  In the case of the 1911 
> Encyclopaedia Brittanica, however, that is much easier to do than some 
> other older works.  Again, working with the Distributed Proofreaders 
> on something like this is going to make life much easier because they 
> have done the scans themselves and are granting explicitly the scanned 
> images and content into the public domain.  It also avoids duplication 
> of labor with a huge project like this.
>
The scans from Britannica that are currently on Commons are scans of 
illustrations, not text. While I think that illustrations from 1911EB 
should be on commons, we are talking about pages of text. Since the 
project that could benefit the most from the text is the 1911 Britannica 
project on Wikisource, it should be on Wikisource. Once people grab the 
illustrations out of the pages, then Commons can have those.