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

[Tim Starling]

cc'ed from foundation-l to wikitech-l.

Ray Saintonge wrote:
> I understand too that the commons has been growing fast with an average 
> file size that is much larger than what we would find in a text bsed 
> project.  In principle I think that these scans do belong in the 
> Commons, but if any kind of division is needed a logical split would be 
> by having text page scans in something like a Wikiscan project.

The extension design I have in mind is something accessible by all 
projects. You'd just have something like...

<scan_collection>
name=EB1911
index_format=Grosz
</scan_collection>

And that would give you an embedded image, with navigation links to 
other pages. The URL for a typical page would be something like

http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/1911_Encyclopedia_Britannica?vol=02&page=34

The extension would read the volume and page from the respective URL 
parameters and display the appropriate image.

The extension would be configured with a directory of page scans, 
probably a directory under 
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/. It would be accessible 
by any wikimedia wiki with the extension enabled. Technically, they 
wouldn't be a part of any wiki, they wouldn't appear in 
[[Special:Imagelist]] for example. However I imagine Wikisource would be 
the project primarily interested in hosting the relevant extension tags 
and indexing the collections.

Adding more page image collections could be done by FTP. I have an FTP 
server set up at the moment for Brian's uploads. It isn't very well 
configured at the moment, which is why it's password protected, but with 
proper restrictions and quotas we could probably open it up for 
everyone, or at least anyone on request.

-- Tim Starling