Hi,
Tamil Development Board (an autonomous institution under Government of
Tamilnadu) releases its Encyclopedia (10 volumes, 7407 pages) and
Children's Encyclopedia (10 volumes, 969 pages) under Creative Commons
license. Tamil Wikipedians lead by Prof. C. R. Selvakumar and Prof. P. R.
Nakkeeran, (Director, Tamil Virtual Academy) spearheaded this initiative
coinciding with Tamil Wikipedia's 10 years celebrations.
An official confirmation (in Tamil) can be seen at
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/46/Letter_from_Tamil_Devel…
Scanned copies of these works are already available at
http://tamilvu.org/library/kulandaikal/lku00/html/lku00ind.htm
At Tamil Wikipedia, we are discussing how we can get this content typed and
transferred to WikiSource. Doing so can be a good model to encourage more
such works to be released in public domain.
Following are two options I can think of:
1. Volunteers type all the content. Besides taking years to complete, this
won't do justice for the value of time of volunteers who can do more
valuable work than typing mechanically.
A program like IT@School present in Kerala or a contest can encourage more
people to join this effort but not all communities can't emulate this model
successfully.
2. Request WMF to give a grant to the owner of the content and let them
hand over the typed content to Wikisource volunteers who will upload and
wikify the content.
This will ensure maintaining the spirit of volunteerism and yet getting the
work done in a professional and time bound manner.
Numerous works in Wikisource are such ready made content uploaded already
in the web through other projects like Project Gutenberg.
If providing grants to non-Wikimedia organizations is an issue, a grant
towards this can be given to community / chapter who will then outsource
the typing work.
I welcome community's input on any other model for this as India has vast
amount of literature and works like this are waiting to be transfered to
Wikisource. This is one area where we can add lot of content to Wiki
projects at once.
Ravi
