Wikisource:Eighteenth Birthday

Animated logo - Wikisource

Date: 24 November 2021

Time: 1:30 - 3:00 PM UTC / 7:00 - 8:30 PM IST (check your local time)

Moderator: SGill (WMF)

Where : ???

Notes: Etherpad link

For calendar invite: Write to sgill@wikimedia.org

Hashtag: #WikisourceBirthday

Agenda

• Welcome & Intros - 10 mins
• Presentations - 30 mins
  • Wikisource <> Anatomy of Accessible Knowledge - NRodriguez (WMF)
  • State of Wikisource - VIGNERON
  • Film transcriptions on Wikisource - PseudoSkull
  • Wikisource and the Two Centuries of Indian Print Project (2CIP) at the British Library - Tom Derrick
  • Research on Indic Wikisource projects - Sneha (CIS-A2K)
• Maryana’s Listening Tour - 40 mins
• Questions & Feedback - 10 mins

Questions for Maryana's Listening Tour

What motivates you to contribute to Wikisource?

1. In 2017 I got introduced to Wikisource. We have rich literature in Telugu language.Many old copies of the great texts are getting lost. Now to keep the texts available to posterity, there is nothing greater than Wikisource. We are keeping the sources intact so that they will be a great resource for resourceful individuals for their projects and general enthusiasts at large. --Ramesam54 (talk) 14:33, 10 November 2021 (UTC)
2. Wikisource in Neapolitan (created two years ago) is a way to maintain Neapolitan rich written literature alive. Even if the spoken language is alive and kicking, the written culture of Neapolitan is getting lost, since Italian (originally the dialect from Tuscany) is the language taught at school since the end of the 19th-century. Wikisource is one of the ways to keep the literary production of a rich culture alive. --Ruthven (talk) 09:24, 12 November 2021 (UTC)
3. I feel fascinated by wikisource since it gives me both an opportunity to read carefully works that I never imagined to read, and to build useful tools using my limited programming skills. --Alex brollo (talk) 13:19, 12 November 2021 (UTC)
4. I enjoy sharing my expertise as a proofreader and help build this immense virtual library in my native language, Hebrew. Of special interest to me is preserving books of historical and religious value, and making them easily accessible by the Hebrew-reading public.--Nahum (talk) 14:00, 12 November 2021 (UTC)
5. I see myself as a tiny part of a huge revolution shifting culture from paper to digital, and Wikisource is the best place to have it preserved, corrected and most of all kept available for free to posterity. - εΔω 14:42, 13 November 2021 (UTC)
6. There is a wealth of great literature in translation that is either not available online or else is not easy to find. I work to provide English translations of Greek and Sanskrit plays, although I also transcribe other works. --EncycloPetey (talk) 20:48, 13 November 2021 (UTC)
7. I was introduced to Wikisource in 2020 in the middle of a pandemic and it coincided with my love to book, especially proofreading. But, the low literary level of my country and its low economic level makes me realize that my language and my country has been lacking of source for many years. This makes me fired up and motivated to add more public domain books about my language to Indonesian Wikisource. Agus Damanik (talk) 12:48, 14 November 2021 (UTC)
8. I get to read old books, and to make some aspects of my history more avaliable to everyone. --Ignacio Rodríguez (talk) 15:40, 15 November 2021 (UTC)
9. We can show how to combine, link and enrich open (cultural) data with tools of the Wikversum (wikisource, wikidata, QS, structured data on Commons, Image Positions ...) plus citizen science (citizen data), crowd sourcing strategies (as a sort of R&D too). See: https://saxorum.hypotheses.org/tag/wikisource --Jeb (talk) 07:24, 16 November 2021 (UTC)
10. I love books, and there is a little number of books in arabic in this space (Wiki), and i am a wikimidian hopes to find every think in same place with an integral space.--Nehaoua (talk) 23:34, 22 November 2021 (UTC)
11. Every community has a large amount of literary works that can be added to Wikisource. Especially, the old works that can not be easily found on the Internet. Wikisource gives a very good opportunity to us to makes these works can be found. And also, our community (Turkish) has a tradition of oral literature in our own folk literature. Wikisource is a chance to put down our oral literary works on paper and record these. Justinianus (talk) 08:56, 24 November 2021 (UTC)

What makes the Wikisource community special?

1. They are Ambassadors of great past to the enlightenment of young and old. --Ramesam54 (talk) 14:33, 10 November 2021 (UTC)-
2. You can see here Wikisorcerers answers to the same question for Wikisource Tenth Birthday: I feel this Community still as lovable to-day, in 2021, as they used to be then :-) --Zyephyrus (talk) 11:02, 12 November 2021 (UTC)
3. It is an almost flameproof community, quiet in discussions but active in implementation.
4. The opportunities to contribute are as numerous and diverse as the contents of the largest library. --EncycloPetey (talk) 20:58, 13 November 2021 (UTC)
5. We feel like we are torchbearers for equal access. I think that is very specialAgus Damanik (talk) 12:50, 14 November 2021 (UTC)
6. No absurd discussions, just people trying to read and preserve, and helping each other very much. --Ignacio Rodríguez (talk) 15:40, 15 November 2021 (UTC)
7. Helpfulness, cooperativeness --Jeb (talk) 19:02, 16 November 2021 (UTC)
8. Wikisource has mostly been built by community volunteers from scratch to what it is now today without any major development from WMF or affiliates in the past, which makes it very special to me. It was ignored like other sister projects but the community grew against all odds by themselves. -- Bodhisattwa (talk) 05:32, 21 November 2021 (UTC)
9. Usually, wiki-projects except Wikipedias don't have a broad community to contribute. Small amount of users prefer to be in there and giving their best for this project to uplift. I can feel that these users are warm about that. Justinianus (talk) 09:07, 24 November 2021 (UTC)

What are the major challenges facing the movement/Wikisource going forward?

1. With the blowing hurricanes of social media, people's width increased but depth declined. Reading of great books of yore requires ingestion and deep digestion of the content and nuances. If the source is available, there may be one born to bring them into light, which is not possible if the source is extinct. --Ramesam54 (talk) 14:34, 10 November 2021 (UTC)
2. MediaWiki is not the best software for Wikisource and it needs constant adaptations and improvements. The integration with the other Wikimedia communities is not always so simple as it should be. - εΔω 14:42, 13 November 2021 (UTC)
3. First, the default search engine is not suitable for the types of rich textual searches required by academic institution or any other form of textual analysis. The WMF needs to sponsor the writing of a more appropriate search engine modeled on those already used by scholarly databases. Two, WS needs more accessibility features through an expanded visibility.js. Third, WS needs to find ways of bringing GLAM-U institutions on board. Languageseeker (talk) 15:04, 13 November 2021 (UTC)
4. There are five major challenges: (1) getting more libraries aware and involved in what we do, (2) acquiring quality scans of works, (3) training WS editors to proofread for accuracy of transcription from the printed text, rather than using a spellchecker, (4) updating the format of previously transcribed wikisource works as new technologies and templates become available, and (5) interfacing everything with wikidata. --EncycloPetey (talk) 20:54, 13 November 2021 (UTC)
5. Lack of source and access to public domain book, especially literary source from my country. We have been lacking of fund to do and permission to access that from the ountry's government, especially library cause of the difficult policy Agus Damanik (talk) 12:54, 14 November 2021 (UTC)
6. We need more visibility! More hands! Engange with real communities, new people that could like to work with us but don't know we exist. --Ignacio Rodríguez (talk) 15:40, 15 November 2021 (UTC)
7. Structured Data on Wikisource --Jeb (talk) 19:02, 16 November 2021 (UTC)
8. Lack of functional, consistent data modelling at Wikidata (and lack of interest in developing the models: c.f. all the models that are still "work in progress") Inductiveload (talk) 19:44, 18 November 2021 (UTC)
9. Lack of developer resources: I don't mean occasionally siccing Comm Tech on something, I mostly just mean the ongoing grind of incredibly slow and frustrating experience of getting bugs fixed or, even, when no bug is forthcoming and you learn PHP to fix it yourself, getting it applied. Case in point: 7 months of completely broken large-file uploads. Only time-strapped volunteers seem to be willing to take responsibility to own Wikisource issues and it shows. Also WS (and other sisters) needs are routinely ignored, de-prioritised, overlooked and minimized in favour of "it works for Wikipedia". Inductiveload (talk) 19:44, 18 November 2021 (UTC)
10. Lack of regular institutional technical support to resolve long term bugs and add cool feature requests. -- Bodhisattwa (talk) 05:34, 21 November 2021 (UTC)
11. In my opionion, the main challenge is the lack of general interest and attention to Wikisource from: 1) general reading public of the Internet, and 2) from Wikimedia users (which's majority are the Wikipedia contributors) - potential participants and contributors of Wikisource. For example, let's compare involvement in the Wikipedia and the Wikisource for the English language: as for now, the English Wikipedia has (as I see on w:en:Special:Statistics) 125,307 active users, and 1,072 administrators, and compared to the English Wikisource (per en:Special:Statistics): 377 (only!) active users and 24 (only!) administrators. So, the ratio of Wikipedia to Wikisource is 125307/377 = 332 for users and 1072/24=44.66 for admins. For the Russian Wikipedia and Wikisource that is similar (11,278 active users in the Russian Wikipedia against 96 (!!) active users in the Russian Wikisource), and it seems to be the same thing for all (or many) other languages. The Wikisource deserves much more attention than it has now, thus this disproportion should be carefully examined and the reasons of it should be revealed and the problems, preventing the growth of Wikisource contribution, must be fixed. Maybe, some sort of propagandist campaign amongst Wikipedians - for the purpose of inviting them to Wikisource - should be undertaken? --Nigmont (talk) 02:40, 24 November 2021 (UTC)
12. A very small amount of users contribute to Wikisource, in our community (Turkish). We need a larger community to do what we need to. Increasing the visibility of Wikisource is the most important problem at this time. Justinianus (talk) 09:32, 24 November 2021 (UTC)

What are your questions to Maryana?

1. Will it be possible to establish Book Scanning Centers to scan and upload books to Wiki Commons at major cities by Wikisource ? --Ramesam54 (talk) 12:18, 10 November 2021 (UTC)
2. (this has already been asked to Community Tech) Wikisource is a typical project that can be improved by machines (basically it's a human OCR). However, in 2021, humans are still better than machines in reading and customize the layout of texts in different languages and from different centuries. Why do WMF doesn't use this rich resource to take an active role in the (technological) development of knowledge? It would just require involving academia in projects (e.g. improving automated text reading tools) that make use of WMF data (e.g. proofread texts from Wikisource), founding a driving research toward free knowledge applications. --Ruthven (talk) 09:45, 12 November 2021 (UTC)
3. How can WMF do more to promote WS on the broader web? A twitter bot? Advertisement? Contacting influential sites? Better integration with Wikipedia? Languageseeker (talk) 15:06, 13 November 2021 (UTC)
4. I think Wikisource has been lacking attention from the public and has been and there is only small people know of this website less than his sister project. What kind of way WMF will do to increase Wikisource's visibility to the public?Agus Damanik (talk) 13:00, 14 November 2021 (UTC)
5. What are you planning to do with: 1) increase awareness and visibility of the "small sisters" of Wikipedia (aka us at Wikisource) 2) get Wikisource to be the #1 place for book scanning, digitalization and text preserving in the world. --Ignacio Rodríguez (talk) 15:40, 15 November 2021 (UTC)
6. What will be the WMF's strategy to resolve huge backlogs of technical issues and feature requests related to Wikisource? -- Bodhisattwa (talk) 05:27, 21 November 2021 (UTC)

Participants

1. --Ramesam54 (talk) 14:37, 10 November 2021 (UTC)
2. --Mardetanha (talk) 13:03, 10 November 2021 (UTC)
3. --Sakhalinio (talk) 16:01, 10 November 2021 (UTC)
4. --Satirdan kahraman (talk) 16:05, 10 November 2021 (UTC)
5. --Agus Damanik (talk) 03:29, 11 November 2021 (UTC)
6. --Hanamaria23 (talk) 03:29, 11 November 2021 (UTC)
7. --Jeb (talk) 17:46, 13 November 2021 (UTC) & DieDatenlaube (German Wikisource w/ Wikidata)
8. --Empat Tilda (talk) 12:17, 19 November 2021 (UTC)
9. --Info-farmer (talk) 05:43, 21 November 2021 (UTC)
10. -- Nehaoua (talk) 20:12, 22 November 2021 (UTC)
11. -- Jagseer S Sidhu (talk) 16:09, 23 November 2021 (UTC)
12. -- Elvorix (talk) 08:24, 24 November 2021 (UTC)

probably not

• I seem to be offline on this day, unfortunately :-( -jkb- (talk) 17:44, 10 November 2021 (UTC)
• The event will be far too early in the morning for me to attend. --EncycloPetey (talk) 20:55, 13 November 2021 (UTC)
• --Ignacio Rodríguez (talk) 15:40, 15 November 2021 (UTC) Maybe the weekend