[Foundation-l] Wikisource and reCAPTCHA

[Aubrey]

> Perhaps we have competing interfaces / workflows.  but I expect we
> would be glad to share 99.99%-verified high-quality
> texts-unified-with-images if it were easy for both projects to
> identify that combination of quality and comprehensive data... and
> would be glad to share metadata so that a WS editor could quickly
> check to see if there's a PGDP effort covering an edition of the text
> she is proofing; and vice-versa.

As John was saying, right now there's plenty of stuff to be transcribed and
proofread, it is not so easy to duplicate ;-)

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 is still make us
amateurs, at least for "real" digital libraries (who focus mainly on the
metadata stuff, and sometimes provide either texts or images (it is really rare
to have both)).

> 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). 

It happens that I just finished my Master thesis about collaborative digital
libraries for scholars (in the Italian context), and the outcome is quite clear:
researcher do want collaborative tools in DLs, but wiki system are 
to simple and (right now) too naive to really help scholars in their work (and
there's a lot of other issues I'm not going to explain here).

I would love to have PP people involved in collaboration with Wikisource, just
don't know if this is possible.

> > If the Wikisource projects succeeds in
> > demonstrating the wiki way is a viable approach, the result is
> > different people choosing to work in different workflows/projects, and
> > more reliable etexts being produced.

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. 


Just one more thing: why this awesome thread has not been linked to the
source-l? Probably that would have been the best place to discuss. 

My regards, 
Aubrey