Wikisource

The original concept for Wikisource was as storage for useful or important historical texts. These texts were intended to support Wikipedia articles, by providing primary evidence and original source texts, and as an archive in its own right. The collection was initially focused on important historical and cultural material, distinguishing it from other digital archives such as Project Gutenberg.^[2]

The original Wikisource logo

The project was originally called Project Sourceberg during its planning stages (a play on words for Project Gutenberg).^[2]

In 2001, there was a dispute on Wikipedia regarding the addition of primary-source materials, leading to edit wars over their inclusion or deletion. Project Sourceberg was suggested as a solution to this. In describing the proposed project, user The Cunctator said, "It would be to Project Gutenberg what Wikipedia is to Nupedia,"^[5] soon clarifying the statement with "we don't want to try to duplicate Project Gutenberg's efforts; rather, we want to complement them. Perhaps Project Sourceberg can mainly work as an interface for easily linking from Wikipedia to a Project Gutenberg file, and as an interface for people to easily submit new work to PG."^[6] Initial comments were sceptical, with Larry Sanger questioning the need for the project, writing "The hard question, I guess, is why we are reinventing the wheel, when Project Gutenberg already exists? We'd want to complement Project Gutenberg—how, exactly?",^[7] and Jimmy Wales adding "like Larry, I'm interested that we think it over to see what we can add to Project Gutenberg. It seems unlikely that primary sources should in general be editable by anyone — I mean, Shakespeare is Shakespeare, unlike our commentary on his work, which is whatever we want it to be."^[8]

The project began its activity at ps.wikipedia.org. The contributors understood the "PS" subdomain to mean either "primary sources" or Project Sourceberg.^[5] However, this resulted in Project Sourceberg occupying the subdomain of the Pashto Wikipedia (the ISO language code of the Pashto language is "ps").

Project Sourceberg officially launched on November 24, 2003 when it received its own temporary URL, at sources.wikipedia.org, and all texts and discussions hosted on ps.wikipedia.org were moved to the temporary address. A vote on the project's name changed it to Wikisource on December 6, 2003. Despite the change in name, the project did not move to its permanent URL (at http://wikisource.org/) until July 23, 2004.^[9]

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Wikipedia

Wikipedia

Wikipedia is a multilingual free online encyclopedia written and maintained by a community of volunteers, known as Wikipedians, through open collaboration and using a wiki-based editing system called MediaWiki. Wikipedia is the largest and most-read reference work in history. It is consistently one of the 10 most popular websites ranked by Similarweb and formerly Alexa; as of 2023, Wikipedia was ranked the 5th most popular site in the world. It is hosted by the Wikimedia Foundation, an American non-profit organization funded mainly through donations.

Project Gutenberg

Project Gutenberg

Project Gutenberg (PG) is a volunteer effort to digitize and archive cultural works, as well as to "encourage the creation and distribution of eBooks." It was founded in 1971 by American writer Michael S. Hart and is the oldest digital library. Most of the items in its collection are the full texts of books or individual stories in the public domain. All files can be accessed for free under an open format layout, available on almost any computer. As of 3 October 2015, Project Gutenberg had reached 50,000 items in its collection of free eBooks.

Nupedia

Nupedia

Nupedia was an English-language, online encyclopedia whose articles were written by volunteer contributors with appropriate subject matter expertise, reviewed by expert editors before publication, and licensed as free content. It was founded by Jimmy Wales and underwritten by Bomis, with Larry Sanger as editor-in-chief. Nupedia operated from October 1999 until September 2003. It is best known today as the predecessor of Wikipedia. Nupedia had a seven-step approval process to control content of articles before being posted, rather than live wiki-based updating. Nupedia was designed by committee, with experts to predefine the rules, and it had only 21 articles in its first year, compared to Wikipedia posting 200 articles in the first month, and 18,000 in the first year.

Larry Sanger

Larry Sanger

Lawrence Mark Sanger is an American Internet project developer and philosopher who co-founded the online encyclopedia Wikipedia along with Jimmy Wales. Sanger coined the name 'Wikipedia', and wrote much of Wikipedia's original governing policy, including "Neutral point of view" and "Ignore all rules." Sanger has worked on other online projects, including Nupedia, Encyclopedia of Earth, Citizendium, WatchKnowLearn, Reading Bear, Infobitt, Everipedia, the Knowledge Standards Foundation and the encyclosphere. He also advised blockchain company Phunware and the nonprofit online American political encyclopedia Ballotpedia.

Jimmy Wales

Jimmy Wales

Jimmy Donal Wales, also known on Wikipedia by the pseudonym Jimbo, is an American-British Internet entrepreneur, webmaster, and former financial trader. He is a co-founder of the online non-profit encyclopedia Wikipedia and the for-profit wiki hosting service Fandom. He has worked on other online projects, including Bomis, Nupedia, WikiTribune, and WT Social.

ISO 639-1

ISO 639-1

ISO 639-1:2002, Codes for the representation of names of languages—Part 1: Alpha-2 code, is the first part of the ISO 639 series of international standards for language codes. Part 1 covers the registration of two-letter codes. There are 183 two-letter codes registered as of June 2021. The registered codes cover the world's major languages.

Since Wikisource was initially called "Project Sourceberg", its first logo was a picture of an iceberg.^[2] Two votes conducted to choose a successor were inconclusive, and the original logo remained until 2006. Finally, for both legal and technical reasons—because the picture's license was inappropriate for a Wikimedia Foundation logo and because a photo cannot scale properly—a stylized vector iceberg inspired by the original picture was mandated to serve as the project's logo.

The first prominent use of Wikisource's slogan—The Free Library—was at the project's multilingual portal, when it was redesigned based upon the Wikipedia portal on August 27, 2005, (historical version).^[10] As in the Wikipedia portal the Wikisource slogan appears around the logo in the project's ten largest languages.

Clicking on the portal's central images (the iceberg logo in the center and the "Wikisource" heading at the top of the page) links to a list of translations for Wikisource and The Free Library in 60 languages.

The ProofreadPage extension in action.

A MediaWiki extension called ProofreadPage was developed for Wikisource by developer ThomasV to improve the vetting of transcriptions by the project. This displays pages of scanned works side by side with the text relating to that page, allowing the text to be proofread and its accuracy later verified independently by any other editor.^[11][12][13] Once a book, or other text, has been scanned, the raw images can be modified with image processing software to correct for page rotations and other problems. The retouched images can then be converted into a PDF or DjVu file and uploaded to either Wikisource or Wikimedia Commons.^[11]

This system assists editors in ensuring the accuracy of texts on Wikisource. The original page scans of completed works remain available to any user so that errors may be corrected later and readers may check texts against the originals. ProofreadPage also allows greater participation, since access to a physical copy of the original work is not necessary to be able to contribute to the project once images have been uploaded. Thus it enhances the project's commitment to the Wikimedia principle that anyone can contribute.

ThomasV built other tools as well: when the choice of whether publishing annotations or not was discussed, he made a gadget to offer the choice between texts alone or annotated texts. When the choice of modernizing or not the texts was discussed, he made another gadget to modernize the original text only when it was wished, so that it could be decided then that the texts themselves would be the original ones.

▶ Example: Old ſ (for s) and other old spellings on French Wikisource

Original text

Action of the modernizing tool

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MediaWiki

MediaWiki

MediaWiki is a free and open-source wiki software. It is used on Wikipedia and almost all other Wikimedia websites, including Wiktionary, Wikimedia Commons and Wikidata; these sites define a large part of the requirement set for MediaWiki. It was developed for use on Wikipedia in 2002, and given the name "MediaWiki" in 2003. MediaWiki was originally developed by Magnus Manske and improved by Lee Daniel Crocker. Its development has since then been coordinated by the Wikimedia Foundation.

Proofreading

Proofreading

Proofreading is an iterative process of comparing galley proofs against the original manuscripts or graphic artworks to identify transcription errors in the typesetting process. In the past, proofreaders would place corrections or proofreading marks along the margins. In modern publishing, material is generally provided in electronic form, traditional typesetting is no longer used and thus this kind of transcription no longer occurs. Consequently the part played by pure proofreaders in the process has almost vanished: the role has been absorbed into copy editing to such an extent that their names have become interchangeable. Modern copy-editors may check layout alongside their traditional checks on grammar, punctuation and readability.

DjVu

DjVu

DjVu is a computer file format designed primarily to store scanned documents, especially those containing a combination of text, line drawings, indexed color images, and photographs. It uses technologies such as image layer separation of text and background/images, progressive loading, arithmetic coding, and lossy compression for bitonal (monochrome) images. This allows high-quality, readable images to be stored in a minimum of space, so that they can be made available on the web.

Wikimedia Commons

Wikimedia Commons

Wikimedia Commons is a media repository of free-to-use images, sounds, videos and other media. It is a project of the Wikimedia Foundation.

Long s

Long s

The long s ⟨ſ⟩, also known as the medial s or initial s, is an archaic form of the lowercase letter ⟨s⟩. It replaced the single s, or one or both of the letters s in a 'double s' sequence. The modern ⟨s⟩ letterform is known as the 'short', 'terminal', or 'round' s. In typography, it is known as a type of swash letter, commonly referred to as a "swash s". The long s is the basis of the first half of the grapheme of the German alphabet ligature letter ⟨ß⟩,.

A student doing proof reading during her project at New Law College (Pune) India

Within two weeks of the project's official start at sources.wikipedia.org, over 1,000 pages had been created, with approximately 200 of these being designated as actual articles. On January 4, 2004, Wikisource welcomed its 100th registered user. In early July, 2004 the number of articles exceeded 2,400, and more than 500 users had registered. On April 30, 2005, there were 2667 registered users (including 18 administrators) and almost 19,000 articles. The project passed its 96,000th edit that same day.

On November 27, 2005, the English Wikisource passed 20,000 text-units in its third month of existence, already holding more texts than did the entire project in April (before the move to language subdomains). On February 14, 2008, the English Wikisource passed 100,000 text-units with Chapter LXXIV of Six Months at the White House, a memoir by painter Francis Bicknell Carpenter.^[14] In November, 2011, 250,000 text-units milestone was passed. But counting was difficult because what constitutes a text-unit could not be clearly defined.

On May 10, 2006, the first Wikisource Portal was created.

Wikisource inclusion criteria expressed as a Venn diagram. Green indicates the best possible case, where the work satisfies all three primary requirements. Yellow indicates acceptable but not ideal cases.

Wikisource collects and stores in digital format previously published texts; including novels, non-fiction works, letters, speeches, constitutional and historical documents, laws and a range of other documents. All texts collected are either free of copyright or released under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.^[2] Texts in all languages are welcome, as are translations. In addition to texts, Wikisource hosts material such as comics, films, recordings and spoken-word works.^[2] All texts held by Wikisource must have been previously published; the project does not host "vanity press" books or documents produced by its contributors.^{[2][15][16][17][18]}

A scanned source is preferred on many Wikisources and required on some. Most Wikisources will, however, accept works transcribed from offline sources or acquired from other digital libraries.^[2] The requirement for prior publication can also be waived in a small number of cases if the work is a source document of notable historical importance. The legal requirement for works to be licensed or free of copyright remains constant.

Annotations and translations – the difference to Wikibooks

The only original pieces accepted by Wikisource are annotations and translations.^[19] Wikisource, and its sister project Wikibooks, has the capacity for annotated editions of texts. On Wikisource, the annotations are supplementary to the original text, which remains the primary objective of the project. By contrast, on Wikibooks the annotations are primary, with the original text as only a reference or supplement, if present at all.^[18] Annotated editions are more popular on the German Wikisource.^[18] The project also accommodates translations of texts provided by its users. A significant translation on the English Wikisource is the Wiki Bible project, intended to create a new, "laissez-faire translation" of The Bible.^[20]

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Venn diagram

Venn diagram

A Venn diagram is a widely used diagram style that shows the logical relation between sets, popularized by John Venn (1834–1923) in the 1880s. The diagrams are used to teach elementary set theory, and to illustrate simple set relationships in probability, logic, statistics, linguistics and computer science. A Venn diagram uses simple closed curves drawn on a plane to represent sets. Very often, these curves are circles or ellipses.

Creative Commons

Creative Commons

Creative Commons (CC) is an American non-profit organization and international network devoted to educational access and expanding the range of creative works available for others to build upon legally and to share. The organization has released several copyright licenses, known as Creative Commons licenses, free of charge to the public. These licenses allow authors of creative works to communicate which rights they reserve and which rights they waive for the benefit of recipients or other creators. An easy-to-understand one-page explanation of rights, with associated visual symbols, explains the specifics of each Creative Commons license. Content owners still maintain their copyright, but Creative Commons licenses give standard releases that replace the individual negotiations for specific rights between copyright owner (licensor) and licensee, that are necessary under an "all rights reserved" copyright management.

Vanity press

Vanity press

A vanity press or vanity publisher, sometimes also subsidy publisher, is a publishing house where anyone can pay to have a book published. The term "vanity press" is often used pejoratively, implying that an author who uses such a service is publishing out of vanity.

List of digital library projects

List of digital library projects

This is a list of digital library projects.

Wikibooks

Wikibooks

Wikibooks is a wiki-based Wikimedia project hosted by the Wikimedia Foundation for the creation of free content digital textbooks and annotated texts that anyone can edit.

Language subdomains

A separate Hebrew version of Wikisource (he.wikisource.org) was created in August 2004. The need for a language-specific Hebrew website derived from the difficulty of typing and editing Hebrew texts in a left-to-right environment (Hebrew is written right-to-left). In the ensuing months, contributors in other languages including German requested their own wikis, but a December vote on the creation of separate language domains was inconclusive. Finally, a second vote that ended May 12, 2005, supported the adoption of separate language subdomains at Wikisource by a large margin, allowing each language to host its texts on its own wiki.

An initial wave of 14 languages was set up by Brion Vibber on August 23, 2005.^[21] The new languages did not include English, but the code en: was temporarily set to redirect to the main website (wikisource.org). At this point the Wikisource community, through a mass project of manually sorting thousands of pages and categories by language, prepared for a second wave of page imports to local wikis. On September 11, 2005, the wikisource.org wiki was reconfigured to enable the English version, along with 8 other languages that were created early that morning and late the night before.^[22] Three more languages were created on March 29, 2006,^[23] and then another large wave of 14 language domains was created on June 2, 2006.^[24]

Languages without subdomains are locally incubated. As of September 2020^[update], 182 languages are hosted locally.

As of March 2023, there are Wikisource subdomains for 75 languages of which 73 are active and 2 are closed.^[1] The active sites have 5,639,161 articles and the closed sites have 13 articles.^[4] There are 4,692,777 registered users of which 2,385 are recently active.^[4]

The top ten Wikisource language projects by mainspace article count:^[4]

For a complete list with totals see Wikimedia Statistics:^[25]

wikisource.org

During the move to language subdomains, the community requested that the main wikisource.org website remain a functioning wiki, in order to serve three purposes:

1. To be a multilingual coordination site for the entire Wikisource project in all languages. In practice, use of the website for multilingual coordination has not been heavy since the conversion to language domains. Nevertheless, there is some policy activity at the Scriptorium, and multilingual updates for news and language milestones at pages such as Wikisource:2007.
2. To be a home for texts in languages without their own subdomains, each with its own local main page for self-organization.^[26] As a language incubator, the wiki currently provides a home for over 30 languages that do not yet have their own language subdomains. Some of these are very active, and have built libraries with hundreds of texts (such as Esperanto and Volapuk).
3. To provide direct, ongoing support by a local wiki community for a dynamic multilingual portal at its Main Page, for users who go to http://wikisource.org. The current Main Page portal was created on August 26, 2005, by ThomasV, who based it upon the Wikipedia portal.

The idea of a project-specific coordination wiki, first realized at Wikisource, also took hold in another Wikimedia project, namely at Wikiversity's Beta Wiki. Like wikisource.org, it serves Wikiversity coordination in all languages, and as a language incubator. But unlike Wikisource, its Main Page does not serve as its multilingual portal^[27] (which is not a wiki page).

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Hebrew language

Hebrew language

Hebrew is a Northwest Semitic language within the Afroasiatic language family. It was natively spoken by the Israelites and remained in regular use as a spoken language by their longest-surviving descendants, the Jews and Samaritans, before dying out after 200 CE. However, it was largely preserved as a liturgical language, featuring prominently in Judaism and Samaritanism. Having ceased to be a dead language in the 19th century, today's Hebrew serves as the only successful large-scale example of linguistic revival. It is the only non-extinct Canaanite language, and is also one of only two Northwest Semitic languages still spoken, with the other being Aramaic.

German language

German language

German, or more precisely High German, is a West Germanic language mainly spoken in Western Europe and Central Europe. It is the most widely spoken and official or co-official language in Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Liechtenstein, and the Italian province of South Tyrol. It is also a co-official language of Luxembourg and Belgium, as well as a recognized national language in Namibia. Outside Germany, it is also spoken by German communities in France (Bas-Rhin), Czech Republic, Poland, Slovakia, and Hungary (Sopron).

Wikiversity

Wikiversity

Wikiversity is a Wikimedia Foundation project that supports learning communities, their learning materials, and resulting activities. It differs from Wikipedia in that it offers tutorials and other materials for the fostering of learning, rather than an encyclopedia. Like Wikipedia, it is available in many languages.

Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger has criticised Wikisource, and sister project Wiktionary, because the collaborative nature and technology of these projects means there is no oversight by experts and therefore their content is not reliable.^[28]

Bart D. Ehrman, a New Testament scholar and professor of religious studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, has criticised the English Wikisource's project to create a user-generated translation of the Bible saying "Democratization isn't necessarily good for scholarship."^[20] Richard Elliott Friedman, an Old Testament scholar and professor of Jewish studies at the University of Georgia, identified errors in the translation of the Book of Genesis as of 2008.^[20]

In 2010, Wikimedia France signed an agreement with the Bibliothèque nationale de France (National Library of France) to add scans from its own Gallica digital library to French Wikisource. Fourteen hundred public domain French texts were added to the Wikisource library as a result via upload to the Wikimedia Commons. The quality of the transcriptions, previously automatically generated by optical character recognition (OCR), was expected to be improved by Wikisource's human proofreaders.^[29][30][31]

Wikisource has original works on the topic: National Archives and Records Administration Collection

In 2011, the English Wikisource received many high-quality scans of documents from the US National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) as part of their efforts "to increase the accessibility and visibility of its holdings." Processing and upload to Commons of these documents, along with many images from the NARA collection, was facilitated by a NARA Wikimedian in residence, Dominic McDevitt-Parks. Many of these documents have been transcribed and proofread by the Wikisource community and are featured as links in the National Archives' own online catalog.^[32]

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Larry Sanger

Larry Sanger

Lawrence Mark Sanger is an American Internet project developer and philosopher who co-founded the online encyclopedia Wikipedia along with Jimmy Wales. Sanger coined the name 'Wikipedia', and wrote much of Wikipedia's original governing policy, including "Neutral point of view" and "Ignore all rules." Sanger has worked on other online projects, including Nupedia, Encyclopedia of Earth, Citizendium, WatchKnowLearn, Reading Bear, Infobitt, Everipedia, the Knowledge Standards Foundation and the encyclosphere. He also advised blockchain company Phunware and the nonprofit online American political encyclopedia Ballotpedia.

Wiktionary

Wiktionary

Wiktionary is a multilingual, web-based project to create a free content dictionary of terms in all natural languages and in a number of artificial languages. These entries may contain definitions, images for illustration, pronunciations, etymologies, inflections, usage examples, quotations, related terms, and translations of terms into other languages, among other features. It is collaboratively edited via a wiki. Its name is a portmanteau of the words wiki and dictionary. It is available in 187 languages and in Simple English. Like its sister project Wikipedia, Wiktionary is run by the Wikimedia Foundation, and is written collaboratively by volunteers, dubbed "Wiktionarians". Its wiki software, MediaWiki, allows almost anyone with access to the website to create and edit entries.

Bart D. Ehrman

Bart D. Ehrman

Bart Denton Ehrman is an American New Testament scholar focusing on textual criticism of the New Testament, the historical Jesus, and the origins and development of early Christianity. He has written and edited 30 books, including three college textbooks. He has also authored six New York Times bestsellers. He is the James A. Gray Distinguished Professor of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill is a public research university in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. It is the flagship of the University of North Carolina system and is considered to be one of the "Public Ivys". After being chartered in 1789, the university first began enrolling students in 1795, making it one of the oldest public universities in the United States. Among the claimants, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill is the only one to have held classes and graduated students as a public university in the eighteenth century.

Richard Elliott Friedman

Richard Elliott Friedman

Richard Elliott Friedman is a biblical scholar and the Ann and Jay Davis Professor of Jewish Studies at the University of Georgia.

University of Georgia

University of Georgia

The University of Georgia is a public land-grant research university with its main campus in Athens, Georgia. Founded in 1785, it is one of the oldest public universities in the United States. The flagship school of the University System of Georgia, it has been ranked by major institutional rankings among the best public universities in the United States.

Book of Genesis

Book of Genesis

The Book of Genesis is the first book of the Hebrew Bible and the Christian Old Testament. Its Hebrew name is the same as its first word, Bereshit. Genesis is an account of the creation of the world, the early history of humanity, and of Israel's ancestors and the origins of the Jewish people.

Bibliothèque nationale de France

Bibliothèque nationale de France

The Bibliothèque nationale de France is the national library of France, located in Paris on two main sites known respectively as Richelieu and François-Mitterrand. It is the national repository of all that is published in France. Some of its extensive collections, including books and manuscripts but also precious objects and artworks, are on display at the BnF Museum on the Richelieu site.

Optical character recognition

Optical character recognition

A process called Optical Character Recognition (OCR) converts printed texts into digital image files. It is a digital copier that uses automation to convert scanned documents into editable, shareable PDFs that are machine-readable. OCR may be seen in action when you use your computer to scan a receipt. The scan is then saved as a picture on your computer. The words in the image cannot be searched, edited, or counted, but you may use OCR to convert the image to a text document with the content stored as text. OCR software can extract data from scanned documents, camera photos, and image-only PDFs. It makes static material editable and does away with the necessity for human data entry.

United States

United States

The United States of America, commonly known as the United States or America, is a country primarily located in North America. It consists of 50 states, a federal district, five major unincorporated territories, nine Minor Outlying Islands, and 326 Indian reservations. The United States is also in free association with three Pacific Island sovereign states: the Federated States of Micronesia, the Marshall Islands, and the Republic of Palau. It is the world's third-largest country by both land and total area. It shares land borders with Canada to its north and with Mexico to its south and has maritime borders with the Bahamas, Cuba, Russia, and other nations. With a population of over 333 million, it is the most populous country in the Americas and the third most populous in the world. The national capital of the United States is Washington, D.C. and its most populous city and principal financial center is New York City.

National Archives and Records Administration

National Archives and Records Administration

The National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) is an "independent federal agency of the United States government within the executive branch", charged with the preservation and documentation of government and historical records. It is also tasked with increasing public access to those documents which make up the National Archive. NARA is officially responsible for maintaining and publishing the legally authentic and authoritative copies of acts of Congress, presidential directives, and federal regulations. NARA also transmits votes of the Electoral College to Congress. It also examines Electoral College and constitutional amendment ratification documents for prima facie legal sufficiency and an authenticating signature.