[Foundation-l] [Wikisource-l] Universal Library

[John Vandenberg]

On Fri, Sep 4, 2009 at 6:58 AM, Birgitte SB<birgitte_sb at yahoo.com> wrote:
> You two seem to be talking past each other.  Might I suggest that perhaps the quality of information on OPL and/or Wikipdia/Wikisource sites is rather different depending on whether you are reading in French or English?  I don't know if this is the case but it could explain the discrepancies between your experiences.

That could be it.  We cant hide the fact that the French Wikisource is
leaps and bounds ahead of English Wikisource. ;-)

I also suspect that David is heavily biased due to his predominately
English Wikipedia experience.

The underlying problem is that OL is approaching this from a
traditional library perspective, and so is opening up slowly, and
progress is slow and methodical.  Wikisource is approaching the same
goal with openness as a core philosophy, and progress is rapidly
increasing.

To some, it seems that OL will reach the holy grail first, however
they have seeded their database with lots of junk records, and they
don't have digital items for these.  The reality is that there is a
lot of bibliographic entries which are wrong, and this data is usually
fixed once the object represented has be reviewed.  Without digital
objects, there is no way for the world to know which are duplicates
and which are slightly different editions which should have different
records.  Even if someone out in the real world knows that there was
only one edition in a given year, there is no mechanism for the
"community" to merge records.  Without digitial objects, OL is
_directory_ of works held in other locations; but it is not a library.

OTOH, Wikisource only has records for items that it has the full text
for, which means it rarely has duplicates, and is much more like a
"library" because people can actually read the text.  And of course it
has already has figured out a lot of the community process problems.

I dont think Wikisource is on a logarithmic growth yet overall,
however there are spurts of logarithmic growth like you can see on the
Hebrew Wikisource.

http://stats.wikimedia.org/wikisource/EN/PlotsPngArticlesTotal.htm

Keep in mind that the stats for Wikisource domains need to be
_combined_, as French works are on the French WS, and English works
are on the English WS.  The total growth is the sum of all of the
projects - this isnt like Wikipedia where each project is intending to
have the same content in different languages.

--
John Vandenberg