We have a complaint about Wikisource having a censored edition of a work by Robert E. Howard:
http://praxeology.net/blog/2008/08/08/he-picked-picts-to-depict/
It is in regards to:
http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Wings_in_the_Night
by
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_E._Howard
There is no Wikipedia article for it, and only a few mentions which might help write a new article:
http://www.google.com.au/search?q=howard+%22Wings+in+the+Night%22+-%22List+o...
To be honest, this blogger is spot on. Our editions for these stories are terrible, usually being uploaded by one person from a crappy online edition, altered to partial conform to another crappy online edition of unknown provenance :- rinse and repeat, until we have a very crappy edition indeed.
Example: http://en.wikisource.org/w/index.php?title=The_Call_of_Cthulhu&limit=100...
Weird Tales, and the many stories by Howard and Lovecraft, are mostly in the public domain, but they are incredibly hard to find pagescans of. archive.org has none that I can see:
http://www.archive.org/search.php?query=Robert%20E.%20Howard%20AND%20mediaty...
I would rather have crappy editions on Wikisource rather than none at all, as it does invite more discussion and participation, and I think the key is to construct the best catalog possible, so that everyone links to us for their bibliographic data. I made a start on this last time I got a bit motivated on this topic:
http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Weird_Tales
There is heaps of bibliographic data within easy reach on various author pages:
http://www.google.com.au/search?q=%22weird+tales%22+site%3Aen.wikisource.org
There are a lot of sites that provide images of the front covers, which are mostly PD and could be uploaded to Commons.
http://members.aol.com/weirdtale1/covers23-32.htm
Slightly related, user Atomicsteve did some fantastic work along these lines with US-PD-no-renewal comics.
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:Contributions/Atomicsteve http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Special:Contributions/Atomicsteve
It looks like some people are making pagescans available, .. for a price:
http://members.aol.com/weirdtales/moreinfo.htm
Is there any way we can organise a "bounty" with the foundation for donations to be collated and put towards purchasing pagescans of these rare items?
One source of hope is a PGDP project for "H.P. Lovecraft's Writings in the United Amateur (1915-1922)". No other related PGDP projects that I can see.
http://www.pgdp.net/c/project.php?id=projectID41ef39d98f43c&detail_level...
and in the PGDP forum is the following:
"As a bonus, I've uploaded the rest of Lovecraft in the United Amateur to a image hosting site, if you're curious about what was written in 1924 or want to help clear part of it. It's only 6 pages.
http://bayimg.com/eAEKIAabJ http://bayimg.com/EaekKaabj http://bayimg.com/faeKgAaBj http://bayimg.com/fAekiAABJ http://bayimg.com/FAEKjaaBJ http://bayimg.com/GaekFAabJ"
-- John Mark Vandenberg