Hi Guys,
I am a new member of the wikipedia society. I have a plan to start wikipedia
in a new language. Please give me any suggestion.
On 16/10/06, Yann Forget <yann(a)forget-me.net> wrote:
Hi,
Danny tells it right. I have little to add to his mail.
daniwo59(a)aol.com a écrit :
My own thoughts on this, which I also expressed
on the meta page:
1. There is plenty of material out that that is already public domain.
Part of the problem is that it can take forever and a day to digitize it
all. In the case of books and magazines, digitization often involves
destroying the hard copies in the process. There are, however,
specialized scanners that can do the work without ruining the books
themselves. These are expensive (about US $30,000 a machine). Ten
machines, strategically located around the world, along with student
staff to operate them around the clock could help to preserve these
texts and store them for prosperity. Additional people (paid and
volunteer) will be needed to OCR, proof, and hyperlink the material to
ensure that it doesn't get lost in a glut of material (I have visions of
the final scene of Raiders of the Lost Ark, when the Ark was finally
stored in some crate in an army warehouse).
2. While OCR capacities exist for some languages, they do not exist for
other languages, where the material is much more likely to get lost.
Manuscripts in Tibetan monasteries, for example, can be scanend but not
OCRed easily. To make this information available, developers should be
paid to create adequate OCR tools for these languages. Rough cost: $5
million.
Much of the limits of Wikisource now is on the capability to scan and
ocr documents. There is no good free OCR software, apart the new
software recently released to GPL by Google, but it works only for
English and has still limitations. So developing a good free and
multilingual OCR software would be my priority. AFAIK there is no good
OCR software (free or not) for any Indian languages, including Sanskrit.
I have never seen any for Tibetan either.
But having a software is not enough. A few OCR servers managed by the
Foundation where anyone can sent an automated OCR request would be very
useful. There are already proprietary OCR software who can do that.
3. Music has been recorded around the world for
well over a century, yet
many of the early recordings are being lost, especially those on wax
cylinders and porcelain records. Preservation includes locating,
identifying, and remastering. People must be trained to do this. Rough
cost: $35 million over two years.
4. This is true of old films as well. Celluloid copies are extremely
rare and extremely flammable. Restoration is exceedingly costly. For
example, [[Theda Bara]] is a well-known vamp of early Hollywood (the
word "vamp" was first used to describe her), yet none of her films
survive, and they were made less than a hundred years ago. Films are
international, they include important historic documents such as
newsreels, and they are being lost every day. Today, most
preservation work is being done by major studios, since it is so costly.
In other words, they are taking important works now in the public
domain, restoring them, and contending that the restoration is an
original work, i.e., another hundred years at least until some Vigo or
Charlie Chaplin films enter the public domain ... and little attention
is being paid to newsreels of events like the Russian revolution, World
War I, etc. Like music, people should be offered scholarships to learn
the art of film restoration and work on these projects. Until this
happens it can be outsourced. Rough cost: $50 million.
I would add a special request for some of Cartier-Bresson photographs of
Gandhi's funerals. I would have said a copy of the Encyclopedia of the
Enlightment (1750, by Diderot and d'Alembert), but we already have it. ;o)
5. To ensure all of this remains accessible, we
will need a LOT of
servers and bandwidth: Initial outlay: $10 million.
Yes, it's important not to forget that point.
Total $100 million dollars, spent over 5 years.
Costs include staffing,
identifying prospective targets, transportation, overhead, etc. Just
coordinating a project of this scope will take a lot of effort.
Yes, I would generally put more money on people's work than on documents.
And there is competition too. As an example,
http://historical.library.cornell.edu/IWP/ is a collection of
Internation Women's Journals, some of which are very important
historically. They are already scanned, but they are inaccessible
because a private company has (rightfully or wrongfully) copyrighted the
scans.
Lots to be done. You will see how quickly $100 million can be spent.
Danny
In a message dated 10/15/2006 11:27:57 AM Eastern Daylight Time,
jwales(a)wikia.com writes:
I would like to gather from the community some examples of works you
would like to see made free, works that we are not doing a good job
of
generating free replacements for, works that
could in theory be
purchased and freed.
Dream big. Imagine there existed a budget of $100 million to
purchase
copyrights to be made available under a free
license. What would
you
like to see purchased and released under a
free license?
Photos libraries? textbooks? newspaper archives? Be bold, be
specific,
be general, brainstorm, have fun with it.
I was recently asked this question by someone who is potentially in
a
position to make this happen, and he wanted
to know what we need,
what
we dream of, that we can't accomplish on
our own, or that we would
expect to take a long time to accomplish on our own.
Yes, fun has just started.
--Jimbo
Regards,
Yann
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