[Wikipedia-l] what to do with the money?

[Imran Ghory]

On Wed, 24 Dec 2003, Jimmy Wales wrote:

> Imran Ghory wrote:
> > Something else we could do is use the money to obtain public domain books
> > (e.g. biographical encyclopedias) that can be scanned/ocred and used for
> > creating basic articles in areas which wikipedia currently lacks coverage.
> 
> What would something like that cost, anyway?  My guess is that if
> someone wanted to do this, the cost would be close to zero anyway, am
> I wrong?

The cost is primarily in buying the books, we could work with Project
Gutenberg to get them scanned (they have several high-speed
destructive scanners - you just remove the covering and spine of the book
and put the pages into a feeder system), ocred and proofread.

If we wanted to get something major like the full 1st edition of the
"Dictionary of National Biography" (20 volumes) we'd be lucky to find it
for under a couple of hundred dollars. Although if we're just looking for
any works that we could use we might be get lucky just by looking in
second-hand bookstores. There are many books such as Joseph
Thomas' "Universal pronouncing dictionary of biography and
mythology" which have articles which we could import into Wikipedia with
minimal changes to form useful stubs.

Imran
-- 
http://bits.bris.ac.uk/imran