Thanks to everyone who came to the Wikisource meetup at Wikimania 2014. We
had a very nice talk and it was wonderful to get to know each other in
person!
Some of the topics that were discussed at the first Wikisource Community
User Group meet up:
- lack of OCR for Belarusian and other languages -> I just sent an email to
the Tesseract list to see what could we do about it
- what to do with "wikisource.org" (oldwikisource) -> probably it is worth
creating a mul.* domain so we can connect it with Wikidata. It needs
broader discussion / promotion
- Wikidata -> not clear what to do with "Index:" pages, needs some thought
about how to move that metadata to Wikidata. Consider that the relationship
between the "index" (supporting/containing media, closer to Commons) and
the edition item (version of a work) is not always 1:1. Perhaps, using
"part of" or "published in" could be used here, but as said it needs
thinking and work on some use cases (let's be brave creating properties and
examples on
test.wikidata.org)
- tabular data (csv) -> wikisource could host such sources if there is
enough interest and a technical solution to manage this kind of
information. Needs more discussion, and gather tech support.
- user engagement -> proposed to gamify proofreading. Identified potential
interested partners, if we don't manage to get support, it can be thought
as a GsoC next year.
- advocacy -> wikisourcerors are encouraged to contact their nearest
wikimedia chapter to look for support and raise awareness about the issues
that need attention. These kind of trust relationships are necessary to
organize the next proofreading contest. Chapters should be aware that with
just 100eur in prizes and help reaching out (for instance banners on
Wikipedia) a lot of things can be accomplished by volunteers like us.
- outreach -> tell GLAM members about wikisource so when they contact with
libraries they can promote wikisource as well (and not only
wikipedia/commons)
- open access -> identified as a high potential project for wikisource. It
needs some automatic text verification so we don't waste volunteers time
proofreading digital born documents.
- social -> more boldness needed! Let's not be afraid of changing things to
make the project more attractive for readers (for instance cover galleries
on the main page, or try collaborative or experimental tools). More contact
wished with the German community. Promote Wikisource on social platforms
and on GLAM newsletters.
- adminship -> it was proposed to promote Tpt to global steward so he can
help better new communities. It was also proposed that experienced members
could mentor wikisourcerors from new communities so they get to know all
the tools/hidden gems that we have.
Besides this year there were several wikisource related submissions
- Wikisource technical infrastructure-> Tpt presented his advances on the
visual editor integration and on the new beta feature "sister projects" to
be deployed in the next weeks [1]. Xelgen presented the advances of his
grant project for new Wikisource tools [2].
- Crowdsourcing the Digitization of Ben-Yehuda's Dictionary -> Asaf
presented his Hebrew crowd-sourced dictionary project [3]
- Wikisource panel -> Charles Matthews, Magnus Manske et al. explained what
is Wikisource about, possible options to gamify it, and its possible role
as a host of tabular data [4]
- Reform citation structure -> where several panelists explained the new
landscape of citations that is coming with Wikidata. I presented Wikisource
very briefly, to raise awareness of our project and the role it plays
supporting Wikipedia [5]
- From paper to digital book on Wikisource -> where Xelgen described the
best techniques to digitize a book and convert it into a digital one [6]
I hope I didn't forget anything... there was *a lot* of Wikisource this
year at Wikimania :)
Thanks
Micru
[1]
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Beta_Features/Other_projects_sidebar
[2]
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:IEG/Tools_for_Armenian_Wikisource_an…
[3]
https://wikimania2014.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:The_Old_New_Thing.pdf
[4]
https://wikimania2014.wikimedia.org/wiki/Submissions/Panel:_Wikisource,_fro…
[5]
https://wikimania2014.wikimedia.org/wiki/Submissions/Reform_of_citation_str…
[6]
https://wikimania2014.wikimedia.org/wiki/Submissions/From_paper_book_to_a_d…