[Wikisource-l] Subject linking in Wikisource (was: Advice on a custom extension)

Fri Feb 9 14:09:48 UTC 2007

I think we are far away from having the subject
categories worked out at en.WS.  We are still slowly
working on populating the easy categories (like dates
and languages).  Basically categories in general need
to be populated with manposer we do not currently
have.  Subject categories need discussion and
decisions on how we are going to map those areas which
is harder to produce than the manpower to populate
easy categories.

More to your point about Wikisource encyclopedia
articles linking back to Wikipedia.  en.WS currently
uses a space called "notes" in the header of the page
to say something like "See the modern Wikipedia entry
at [[w:Ethiopia|Ethiopia]]".  Of course this is all in
the transcribed page than on the scanned page.  But I
would think the scanned pages are used primarily to
proofread the the transcribed pages and the
transcribed pages would be what readers are seeeing. 
So I am not sure why the scanned page need links to
Wikipedia.

http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_New_Student%27s_Reference_Work/Abyssinia

Birgitte SB

--- Lars Aronsson <lars at aronsson.se> wrote:

> Jim Hu wrote:
> 
> > For example, the web service at Pubmed provide the
> abstract and 
> > links to full text (at yet another website) for a
> publication.  
> > My users would want to add things like: "This
> paper describes a 
> > resource that turned out to be useful for doing X"
> or "Figure 1 
> > in this paper shows this thing that the authors
> didn't notice" 
> > or "The xxx gene described in this paper is also
> known as yyy; 
> > they were shown to be the same 10 years later"
> etc.
> 
> 
> I have a similar problem.  At http://runeberg.org/ I
> digitize old 
> books, among them several encyclopedias.  For the
> sake of 
> familiarity, you can think about scanned books in
> Wikisource 
> rather than my website.
> 
> In many cases an encyclopedia from 1889 is useful
> for knowing the 
> population of Aberdeen in 1889.  It could be nice to
> report what 
> the current population is, but in some cases it is
> also important 
> to point out that the reported number for 1889 was
> indeed wrong.  
> But if scanning and OCRing one page takes 3 seconds
> and 
> proofreading takes 3 minutes, how long does it take
> to check all 
> the facts?  Not knowing how this should best be
> addressed, it 
> seemed like a stupid idea to digitize more old works
> that are full 
> of errors.
> 
> When Wikipedia was started in 2001 and started to
> get off the 
> ground, this became the obvious place to put
> information on the 
> current and historic population of Aberdeen.  The
> scanning of old 
> texts no longer had to carry this role.  It was
> really only in 
> 2002 and 2003 that I got the energy to scan more
> works for my own 
> site, and in 2005 I scanned this for Wikisource,
>
http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_New_Student%27s_Reference_Work
> 
> Turns out Aberdeen's population in 1911 was 163,084,
>
http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_New_Student%27s_Reference_Work/1-0016
>
http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_New_Student%27s_Reference_Work/Aberdeen
> but this bit of information is not linked to or
> included in
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aberdeen#Population
> 
> So one problem still exists: From the scanned book
> page, there is 
> no link to the Wikipedia article that provides more
> up-to-date 
> information.  The reader of the scanned page can of
> course use a 
> search engine, and will often find the Wikipedia
> article.  But is 
> this really the ultimate solution?  And even if the
> Wikipedia 
> article is found, the other scanned pages that link
> to the same 
> article are not found from there.
> 
> Should each scanned book page include a list of
> links to Wikipedia 
> articles that are relevant for the page?  Could such
> lists be 
> compiled (or suggested) automatically?
> 
> Should Wikisource have a [[category:Aberdeen]] that
> collects all 
> pages, chapters and books that pertain to this town?
>  Today the 
> English Wikisource has one [[Category:Works by
> subject]], but 
> under this is a very small tree, compared to all
> articles in 
> Wikipedia.  There is no category for Aberdeen, but
> one for 
> Scotland that has 15 links of which 4 are to
> articles in the 1911 
> Encyclopaedia Britannica.  The 1911 EB article
> "Aberdeen (burgh)" 
> is not among these four, 
>
http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/1911_Encyclop%C3%A6dia_Britannica/Aberdeen_%28burgh%29
> 
> Wikisource also has a [[Category:Ottoman Empire]]
> that contains 
> four articles from the 1911 Encyclopaedia
> Britannica, one other 
> chapter and two other works.  But the corresponding
> category on 
> the English Wikipedia has 56 pages and 12 immediate
> subcategories. 
> Even the sub-subcategory Ottoman railways has 6
> Wikipedia 
> articles.  On Wikisource there seem to be 6 mentions
> of the 
> "Orient Express", but these are found through Google
> and not 
> through links on the website,
>
http://www.google.com/search?q=%22orient+express%22+site%3Aen.wikisource.org
> 
> 
> -- 
>   Lars Aronsson (lars at aronsson.se)
>   Aronsson Datateknik - http://aronsson.se
> 
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>
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> 

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