[Foundation-l] [Wikisource-l] Open Library, Wikisource, and cleaning and translating OCR of Classics

[phoebe ayers]

On Fri, Aug 21, 2009 at 5:52 AM, Joshua Gay<joshuagay at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> I think it would be easy to build upon this work and one could do a really
> powerful MW extension (and maybe some new templates, etc) that would allow
> people to contribute to both MW and OL simultaneously.
>
> I think that the OL should continue to do what is trying to do. I also think
> people should be able to quickly and easily create new and important
> wikimedia projects, especially when people are passionate to do so. And, I
> think when different projects on the Internet have a lot of overlap in what
> they are trying to do, and share similar philosophy and ethics,  that they
> should have their machines play nice with each other and make sharing
> (reading and writing) data between them easy.
>
> -Josh

I was gong to say basically this, and then Josh said it better :)
There's no special reason to reinvent the wheel; as DGG mentioned
there are several very difficult aspects of building a big
bibliographic database (cataloging standards, getting the data in the
first place, theoretical relationships between works) that the OL
folks have tackled with some success; and there is value in having a
project that focuses just on this hard problem. SJ is right that
Wikimedian expertise lies in making large wikis functional and
multilingual, and augmenting data; but that doesn't mean such a
project has to be a *Wikimedia* project. I think cooperation between
the projects would be better. Interlinking into Wikip/media would
raise OL's profile substantially, and would mean that WP had access to
some sort of canonical catalog data; a win for everyone.
-- Phoebe