[Foundation-l] Black market science

[Andrea Zanni]

2011/7/9 <Birgitte_sb at yahoo.com>

> You hardly need to re-transcribe the digital document.  You just need to
> re-format the images and special text within the paste, edit in appropriate
> wikilinks, and proofread it to ensure nothing was misplaced.
>

Yes, this is true, but as you know well this already much work.
If you are a scholar/student, and you want to share an article or a
dissertation,
you need to know a lot of about the architecture of Wikisource, and recreate
the logical structure of a thesis, format it in wiki-text and proofread
throurogh 3 quality levels in not a simple, easy job.

> Proofreading is not at all redundant for documents that have been
> re-formatted with only the lightest editing. I am certain you will find
> something to correct in any document of length, no matter how little editing
> you feel you have done.
>
I agree, but I always feel a little discomfort when I know that proofreading
has just been done on a born-digital text, and I need to spend hours on that
text just to find some typos (maybe it's me, but sometimes I don't find it
worth it)

> Having a corpus with some depth on Wikisource will open up a much different
> reading experience than an index of PDFs, even though the words all match.
> Just look at what is being done with the SCOTUS documents,  Wikis simply
> offer a richer study environment for documents that are properly linked
> together than other sorts of digital libraries. For all that born digital
> documents emphasize the "digital" they often treat the text as if printed on
> a page by regularly using hypertext only in footnoted references. It is
> worth putting such things on Wikisource, if you can anticipate being able to
> get a decent sized corpus of scholarship of some field under a free license.
>  And that will vary by field and maybe even sub-specialty.
>

Yes, it is definiw ittely worth it to put all these text on Wikisource.
I uploaded my thesis years ago, also with the explicit aim to test the
potential hypertextual features of Wikisource (in it.source we have proper
template for Work and Author citations, and I find them the real added value
of our digital library).

My point (working in an academic digital library and just seeing the amount
of thesis, dissertation, articles passing by) is that if for people is a
difficult, overcomplicated burden to upload a PDF in an institutional
repository (5 minutes of their time, even less), how can we wikilibrarians
think that they will come to us and upload and "curate" their text? I
clearly remeber the "Screw it" feeling I had the day after I graduated,
meaning that I would not even touch my thesis again for the next months (and
so it was).

I'm not offering solutions here, but if we want to work in the direction of
Open Access and of reaching a massive audience out there, maybe we should
think out of the (current) box.

Aubrey

BirgitteSB

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