[Wikipedia-l] Wikisource

[Ray Saintonge]

Florence Devouard wrote:
> A couple of weeks ago, I went to an event organized in Paris by the 
> French Government about "economics of culture".
> During that event, I mentionned that the French chapter has several 
> ongoing discussions with various museums to set up content partnerships.
>
> Here are two examples of such potential partnerships:
> * a small museum with very old and precious documents. The museum has 
> limited room for access and documents are fragile, so only a few 
> visitors are allowed to look at them. The museum wants to digitize these 
> docs, but has limited technical infrastructure.
> Opportunity: we host their documents on wikisource and provide them 
> additional visibility through an article on Wikipedia, featuring their 
> best manuscripts.
> * a large museum already has a digitization procedure for the documents, 
> as well as a hosting service. However, the digitized version contains 
> mistakes (errors generated in the process) and the museum simply does 
> not have the human power to provide the corrections of the numerous 
> documents digitized by their services. Our members can take care of this 
> task.
>   
This is probably more about archives than about museums, but the 
problems for museums regarding three-dimensional objects is just as 
severe, as Raoul Weiller has been keen to point out at the last two 
Wikimanias.  Lars makes a good point about distinguishing between 
preservation and access digitization, but I think that capital-intensive 
preservation strategies are well beyond our capabilities.  Wikimedia 
works best when it can marshal large quantities of free labour to 
altruistic purposes; the kind of people whom we attract are properly 
annoyed with capitalist profiteering that depends on our free labour.  
It comes as no surprise that they intuitively support non-commercial 
clauses in free licenses. 

Your two examples present startlingly different circumstances.  In the 
first example it is up to the archives to provide the leadership, while 
acknowledging that providing the needed manpower exclusively through 
professional personnel is well beyond their limited budgets.  At the 
same time they are repeatedly the beneficiaries of acquisitions which 
they can neither properly process or store.  The recent story of the 
Royal Ontario Museum rediscovering a Tyranosaurus skeleton that had been 
misplaced for decades gives us pause to wonder.  The type of artifacts 
that concern us are much smaller, and consequently easier to misplace.  
Museums need to engage in volunteer training programmes so that 
volunteers can better take on more specialized and more responsible 
tasks.  If they believe that they will some day receive budgets adequate 
to the task, they have been breathing too many fumes from evaporating 
artifacts. They also need to make collections accessible to qualified 
volunteers for longer hours than the regular opening hours of the museums.

The second example is more within our grasp.  Proofreading is a tedious 
process, and we should never deceive ourselves into believing that the 
task can be handled by spell-checkers or other software based 
techniques.  In addition, since Wikisource likes to host whole books or 
multi-volume reference works there is a tendency to upload this material 
from other sources without any thought of checking the material for 
accuracy.  This means that material which clearly falls within the scope 
of Wikisource grows at a phenomenal rate when compared to its 
verification rate.  Image files are only one part of the solution.  They 
provide the basis for the verification, but not the verification itself.
> Wikisources members know all that very well and much better than I. I 
> just summarize that very quickly for reference.
>
> In Europe, at least in some countries, we meet several problems
> * many scholars have a rather bad image of Wikipedia (because written by 
> amateurs, anonymous members, plagued by vandals etc...)
> * the other wikimedia projects have rather poor popularity and would 
> benefit from more "light"
> * journalists are bored and need new information (otherwise, they focus 
> on all the bad stories)
> * some projects are more difficult to advertise than others, because 
> they are full competitors with other commercial projects of very good 
> quality (eg, wiktionary, wikinews...)
>
>   
I don't see the problem as one of publicity at all.  It's a matter of 
recruiting people who are satisfied doing humble tasks.  Such people do 
not want to participate in complex decision making processes; they are 
completely confused if they need to deal with anything but the most 
elementary of wiki markup; when faced with any conflict they just go 
away.  They are often older, and sensitive to disrespectful behaviour. 
> Besides, my feeling is that contributors and in particular members from 
> chapters need a project on which they can team.
>   
That's worth considering.  In theory at least chapter leadership is in a 
better position to understand the priorities of national governments.  
Chapters that host Wikisource sites themselves can better adapt to laws 
that restrict the export of charitable donations.
> I would like to propose that next year be Wikisource year.
>   
How can this be best co-ordinated with the Wikimania programme?
> And since the planet is very large, if this is done in large part 
> through chapters, that it be an opportunity for some european chapters 
> to work together.
>   
An EU super-chapter? :-\  
Appealing to nationalism could be more fruitful.
> I am not necessarily thinking of anything very complicated. Examples of 
> efforts we could make together:
>
> * leaflets about wikisource updated and available in a large number of 
> languages;
> * webbuttons to advertise the project on the web;
> * each time someone gives a conference about Wikipedia, take the 
> opportunity to spend a couple of minutes of Wikisource as well; 
> distribute leaflets;
> * summarize our best cases on Wikisource;
> * develop stories about these best cases. Illustrate. Feature these 
> stories on chapter websites;
> * develop initiatives on projects for cross project challenges (eg, best 
> article with content improved in at least 3 projects);
> * chapters may write and distribute a couple of press releases about 
> wikisource;
> * chapters may propose conferences about wikisource (and speakers 
> available to talk about it);
> * develop arguments for museums etc...
>
> Measures of success are numerous, from improvements of Wikisource 
> (number of docs), number of mentions in the press, partnerships 
> established with museums etc...
>
> What do you think ?
>   
Who is the target audience for all this?  How much of this will appeal 
to seniors?

Ec