[Wikipedia-l] Dream a little...

[gwern branwen]

On 10/15/06, Lawrence Lo <lorenzarius at gmail.com> wrote:
> Academic journals, thousands of them. If free access to all knowledge
> is our goal, freeing the journals is a major step towards there. I
> don't know what Open access or Wikiversity might impact the process of
> knowledge generation in the future, but I know the academy was/is the
> most important part in the process. Though I wonder if a million
> dollars is enough :P
>
> Another thing I have in mind, albeit maybe off-topic, is the
> digitization public domain works. Not only text (which is what Project
> Gutenberg is doing), but books, documents, photos, paintings,
> pictures, recordings etc. Forget about copyrighted stuff, there are a
> lot of goodies without copyright but I can't access them simply
> because I am not sitting next to them.
>
> --Lorenzarius

I second this. There are plenty of journals which are slipping into
obscurity, ne'er digitized or summarized elsewhere, and slowly being
microfilmed or simply chucked out by librarians, but which are still
in the public domain. Even just scans of them without any OCR work
would be tremendously useful (for Distributed Proofreaders to take
care of later, for example).

If that isn't feasible, it would be awesome to buy up the estates of
certain scientists and other thinkers. For example, James Joyce, or
Alan Turing, or Kurt Godel - their estates are half in the public
domain already (actually, I think the first publication of Ulysses may
already be in the public domain), and would be invaluable for
Wikisource and related articles.

--Gwern