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(This is a guest post by Wikisource volunteers Andrea Zanni and David Cuenca)

English

There was an Indian librarian who once wrote five laws on what libraries should be. The fifth and last law read: “A library is a growing organism.“ Wikisource is a wiki digital library that doesn’t grow by itself. Volunteers like you, like us, make it grow everyday, digitizing books from the public domain, proofreading OCR text and recently also transcribing sheet music.

Almost 10 years have passed since Wikisource started, on November 24, 2003. It began as a support project for Wikipedia. While we cannot tell you what dreams are made of, we know that the Wikipedia dream is nurtured by many of the sources, books and first-hand knowledge that populate Wikisource.

Wikisource users Andrea (Aubrey) and David (Micru) were recently named recipients of a Wikimedia Foundation Individual Engangement Grant, and we intend to periodically keep you updated about the progress of our work. We are sharing the progress we have made during the month of April and we invite you to participate defining the Wikisource vision for the future with us.

During the first month of work for the grant, we have been focusing on writing the first draft of the Wikisource values and ways of applying them. The suggestions are based on a Wikimania meeting last year, on our experience with the wiki, and on volunteer wishes. If you expect more of Wikisource, help us expand our list and comment on the suggestions.

That is not only a “wishlist,” but a list of specific proposals that can be transformed into action. As part of this commitment, we are giving support and formally endorsing the GSoC^[1] proposal: Book upload customisation (candidate 1, candidate 2). The reason for this endorsement is the high importance that such a project could have for the Wikisource community, enabling users to import external book metadata and spread it to the relevant pages to avoid redundant work.

There are three other candidates that are additionally applying for the Outreach Program for Women with proposals that, if accepted, will also be of paramount importance:

• Refactor proofread extension: to integrate the Visual Editor into Wikisource.
• Improve support for book structures: a long expected and needed feature.
• Prototype inline citations: combining the wonderful OKFN Annotator with Mediawiki.

We expect that once we have reached an agreement on what the other important tasks for Wikisource’s future are, we can keep offering more volunteer projects.

Another task we are tackling is the relationship with external organizations. It is useless to have an amazing digital library if it is not well connected with other libraries, websites, users and the world. It will take time to develop partnerships with other related organizations, like the Open Library, or free knowledge organizations, such as the Open Knowledge Foundation. We have started developing these connections and exploring possible ways of collaboration.

And finally there is Wikidata, a new member of the Wikimedia family that will also be a key for resolving one of Wikisource’s long standing issues: book metadata management. As a first stage of this ongoing work, we have started the Wikidata books task force to define the necessary properties for having reusable data about books in Wikimedia Commons, Wikipedia and Wikisource.

In May, we are looking forward to interviewing core users from the different language Wikisources. Special thanks to Haitham for his aid in visualizing the activity data in Gephi.

If you have any suggestions, requests or feedback, please reach out either via email or our talk pages. All Wikimedia users are invited to join and build a better Wikisource together. It’s your call too.

Andrea Zanni and David Cuenca, Wikisource

Note

1. ↑ Google Summer of Code 2013: http://www.google-melange.com/gsoc/homepage/google/gsoc2013

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When a text is written, when it is printed for a first time, it will have a contemporary look. When you then look at historic texts, at a first publication, you will notice the many details that show its age. It can be in differences in orthography, differences in vocabulary and also differences in the layout, the fonts used.

When sources are published in Wikisource, maintaining the atmosphere of the original text is very important. It is why the original orthography and vocabulary are maintained and with the availability of the  WebFonts extension there is a potential to use fonts that give this impression of age.

In the Office hours of the Localisation team, the question was raised if we could support cuneiform. The answer to that was that we can when there is a freely licensed font. We found a freely licensed cuneiform font and it is made available on the Wikis that support WebFonts. The bigger question however is about all the other scripts that are of  historic significance. This is of particular relevance to the Sanskrit Wikisource; the Sanskrit language is written in many scripts and it is only recent when the Devanagari script became the default script.

For sources like the Quran maintaining the original orthography and characters is an article of faith. It is for this reason that characters were added to Unicode because alternate representations of the same characters were missing. We do have a beautiful freely license font, the Amiri font and we would love to support it in MediaWiki but we are struggling with technical issues.

For the Wikimedia Localisation team, it is impossible to identify all the needs for fonts, for historic text representation. This is why we have language support teams. They know their language, they can identify a need and hopefully they can identify usable freely licensed fonts. When they do, we can and will support fonts. In the mean time we will continue our work on a unified language selector.  This will make the use of WebFonts easy and obvious. At this time it works, but it is hard work for you as a user.

Thanks,
Gerard Meijssen
Internationalization / Localization outreach consultant

India is different. Given that India is very strategic for the Wikimedia Foundation, the question is what can we do to raise the profile of our projects and what can we do to support the Indic language effectively.

Many well educated people, people with a university level education are effectively illiterate in their own language. For them a Wikipedia in their own language does not tempt them to get involved. They do not have the skills even though it would not be that hard for them to learn to read and write their mother tongue. What really helps is that writing the Indic languages is helped in two ways; the scripts are really phonetic and InScript, the dominant keyboard layout for Indic languages, ensures that the same sound is always in the same place.

When our goal is to get more people involved in the Indic languages, we can ask people to transcribe the scans of public domain books. We will be providing them with a keyboard mapping, the fonts that show their language. As these “illiterates” recognise the characters and reproduce them digitally, they learn not only to type their language they may even learn to read. When we recognise their effort in a thank you note accompanying the book, experience teaches us they are likely to help us in future projects.

The project that is already making a big impact in India in this way is the Malayalam Wikisource project.They published a CD with a years worth of sources and distributed it to the schools of Kerala. They produce software that ensures that the content looks really good. The software as well as the content is available on the internet but sadly this full experience can not be had on Wikisource itself.

When a new book becomes available, the Malayalam press mentions this often in their periodicals so much so that Wikisource is mentioned more often in the press than Wikipedia.

Similar projects for other Indic languages have been a popular topic at the WikiConference India; it was discussed at least for Sanskrit and Tamil. The discussion was not only about the organisation of such a project but also about internationalising the software that prepares the final product and about using Kiwix for presenting it. When you consider how much literature is available in the Indic languages that is already in the public domain, this is a project that will run and run.

Preparing sources in Wikibooks or Wikisource in a collaborative way makes sense in a Wiki. Once the work is done however publishing the content can be in all kinds of formats. This is important because we do want it to be read as widely as possible because this is how we optimally realise our objectives.

Jimmy is right when he said in his speech that the Indic language communities can learn from each other and do really well. However these best practices can be applied to any Wikisource or Wikibooks.

Thanks,
Gerard Meijssen
Internationalization / Localization outreach consultant

Wikimédia France recently announced a new partnership with the Palace of Versailles.

This partnership will be the third “Wikimedian residency” and the second time that a Wikimedian will work closely with a cultural institution of world-wide renown. French Wikipedian Benoît Evellin follows in the footsteps of Liam Wyatt who was the first Wikipedian in residence at the British Museum.  Benoît will spend six months at the Palace of Versailles to help produce and include cultural and scientific data on the Wikimedia projects.

The partnership originated at the GLAM-Wiki Paris event in early December 2010 where Adrienne Alix, president of Wikimédia France, met Laurent Gaveau, Deputy Director of Information and Communication of Versailles and started talking about possible ways to bring Versailles cultural riches to the Wikimedia Projects.

Benoît’s residency will focus on:

• Facilitating the exchange of best practice between the Wikimedia contributors and the teams of the Palace of Versailles, including researchers and scientists;
• Developing effective communication and distribution channels to broaden access to cultural and scientific content of the Palace of Versailles through Wikipédia in French, but also in all other languages, as well as through Wikimedia Commons with images and multimedia content;

Laurent Gaveau explains that, “Wikipedia is the second source of information in France on the Palace of Versailles, after the official website, it might even be the first abroad.”

This partnership follows other partnerships secured by Wikimédia France with similar institutions, including partnerships with the City of Toulouse, and the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, which have brought a wealth of high-quality material to Wikimedia Commons and Wikisource, but also a growing number of initiatives around the world with institutions working to make their information available to the general public through the Wikimedia Projects.

As Adrienne Alix puts it:

“This partnership with the Palace of Versailles confirms that something has changed between cultural institutions worldwide and Wikimedia: The World of Culture is starting to understand that criticizing by saying “Wikipedia is not complete” is not as constructive as working with Wikipedia to make it better. This is the result of tireless work from Wikimedians, and I am happy to see that the Wikimedia Projects are now seen by professionals as an essential conduit to the dissemination of culture.”

Delphine Ménard
Member, Wikimédia France

Do people read site notices?

Yes.  Absolutely.  Our users respond to different messages… and we continue to test what messages resonate and drive donations.   Reflect back to my previous post and you’ll see that site notices with the thermometer had much higher click through rates than those without.

We decided that we wanted to test the impact of the meters over a few days (generating several million page views) to see how different notices performed with and without thermometers.  Phase 1a, below, we went down to 3 notices in random cycling.  One had a meter, the other two did not.

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In Phase 1b, we completely reversed the placements of the thermometer from our initial run.  As expected, those with meters had significantly higher clicks and donations.

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Now, over the last few days, we’ve gone with all meters on all notices.  Not only has there been a nice spike in donations, but it seems that people are reading the messages.  In particular, the educational notice, “Wikipedia is a non-profit project” has done significantly better from our initial run.

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We’re now going to focus on improving our conversion rate:  fewer and fewer people are donating after a click-through.  It’s expected as the fundraiser goes on, but we need to find a better way to get people to donate once they’ve shown interest.

Our next steps include testing a new “Learn More” link on all the notices (maybe people need more information before they give) and other Phase 2 notices.   We’re also going to test some different looks and images in an attempt to draw in new and different donors.

Rand Montoya, Head of Community Giving

This week, the German language version of Wikisource started the transcription of a precious manuscript with the title “Bemerkungen über den Feldzug gegen Rußland in den Jahren 1812 und 1813” (Remarks on the campaign against Russia in the years 1812 and 1813).

The manuscript from the early nineteenth century was written by an eye witness of Napoleon’s invasion of Russia. Contrary to other accounts of the march of the Grande Armée on Russia it is focussing on the landscape, places and inhabitants along the itinerary.

The precious and up to now not entirely published manuscript had been digitized by the State and University Library of Göttingen, Germany, and then uploaded to Wikimedia Commons. The travelogue gives new and invaluable insights in the daily life of a Saxon Hussar Regiment on his way to Russia in the years 1812/1813.

Wikisource is a free library of source texts which are in the public domain or legally available for free redistribution. Wikisource is an official project of the Wikimedia Foundation and a sister project of Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

Frank Schulenburg, Head of Public Outreach