Wikisource is an online library A library is a collection of sources, resources, and services, and the structure in which it is housed; it is organized for use and maintained by a public body, an institution, or a private individual. In the more traditional sense, a library is a collection of books. It can mean the collection, the building or room that houses such a collection, of free content Free content, or free information, is any kind of functional work, artwork, or other creative content having no significant legal restriction relative to people's freedom to use, distribute copies, modify, and to distribute derived works of the content. It is distinct from open content in that it can be modified, whereas one might not have that textual sources A source text is a text from which information or ideas are derived. In translation, a source text is the original text that is to be translated into another language, operated by the Wikimedia Foundation The Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. is a non-profit charitable organization headquartered in San Francisco, California, United States, and organized under the laws of the state of Florida, where it was initially based. It operates several online collaborative wiki projects including Wikipedia, Wiktionary, Wikiquote, Wikibooks, Wikisource, Wikimedia. Its aims are to harbour all forms of free text, in many languages. It also provides translation efforts to this end.
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Library contents
Wikisource collects and stores in digital format[vague] previously published texts; including novels, non-fiction works, letters, speeches, constitutional and historical documents, laws and a range of other documents.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 Creative Commons is a non-profit organization headquartered in San Francisco, California, United States devoted to 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. Texts in all languages are welcome, as are translations.
Wikisource does not host "vanity press A vanity press or vanity publisher is a publishing house that publishes books at the author's expense. Publisher Johnathon Clifford claims to have coined the term in 1959" books or documents produced by its contributors.
Early history
[original research?]
Wikisource had an eventful early history (2003–2005) that included several changes of name and location (URL), and the move to language subdomains in 2005.
The project was originally called Project Sourceberg during its planning stages (a play on words for Project Gutenberg Project Gutenberg, abbreviated as PG, is a volunteer effort to digitize and archive cultural works, to "encourage the creation and distribution of eBooks." Founded in 1971 by Michael S. Hart, it is the oldest digital library. Most of the items in its collection are the full texts of public domain books. The project tries to make these as). It then began its activity at a mistaken location, when source texts were placed at ps.wikipedia.org. The contributors understood "PS" to mean either "primary sources" or Project Sourceberg, and they erroneously took over the subdomain of the Pashto language Pashto , also known as Afghani, and Pathani, is an Indo-European language spoken primarily in Afghanistan and western Pakistan. Pashto belongs to the Eastern Iranian branch of the Indo-Iranian language family. The number of Pashto speakers is estimated to be about 40 million.[citation needed] The Constitution of Afghanistan declares that Pashto is's Wikipedia.[citation needed][clarification needed]
Project Sourceberg started officially when it received its own temporary URL on November 24, 2003 (http://sources.wikipedia.org); all texts and discussions were moved there from ps.wikipedia.org. 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.
Within two weeks of the project's official start (at sources.wikipedia.org), over 1000 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 2400, 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.
Language subdomains
A separate Hebrew version of Wikisource (he.wikisource.org) was created in August 2004. The need for a language-specific Hebrew Extinct as a regularly spoken language by the 4th century CE, but survived as a liturgical and literary language; revived in the 1880s website derived from the difficulty of typing and editing Hebrew texts in a left-to-right Bi-directional text is text containing text in both text directionalities, both right-to-left and left-to-right (LTR). It generally involves text containing different types of alphabets, but may also refer to boustrophedon, which is changing text directionality in each row environment (Hebrew is written right-to-left Bi-directional text is text containing text in both text directionalities, both right-to-left and left-to-right (LTR). It generally involves text containing different types of alphabets, but may also refer to boustrophedon, which is changing text directionality in each row). 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.[2] 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.[3]
Three more languages were created on March 29, 2006,[4] and then another large wave of 14 language domains was created on June 2, 2006.[5] Currently, there are individual subdomains for Wikisources in more than 50 languages,[6] besides the additional languages hosted at wikisource.org, which serves as an incubator or a home for languages without their own subdomains (31 languages are currently hosted locally)
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:
- 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.
- To be a home for texts in languages without their own subdomains, each with its own local main page for self-organization.[7] As a language incubator, the wiki currently provides a home for over 30 languages that do not presently have their own language subdomains. Some of these are very active, and have built libraries with hundreds of texts (such as Esperanto and Volapuk), and one with thousands (Hindi).
- 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 Wikiversity is a Wikimedia Foundation project, which supports learning communities, their learning materials, and resulting activities. It differs from more structured projects such as Wikipedia in that it instead offers a series of tutorials, or courses, for the fostering of learning, rather than formal content'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 (which is not a wiki page).
Logo and slogan
The original Wikisource logoSince Wikisource was initially called "Project Sourceberg", its first logo was a picture of an iceberg An iceberg is a large piece of ice from freshwater that has broken off from a snow-formed glacier or ice shelf and is floating in open water. It may subsequently become frozen into pack ice. Alternatively, it may come to rest on the seabed in shallower water, causing ice scour or becoming an ice island. 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 The Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. is a non-profit charitable organization headquartered in San Francisco, California, United States, and organized under the laws of the state of Florida, where it was initially based. It operates several online collaborative wiki projects including Wikipedia, Wiktionary, Wikiquote, Wikibooks, Wikisource, Wikimedia logo and because a photo cannot scale properly – a logo-style 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). 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.
Subsequent milestones
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.[8]
Special projects
English:
- 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica
- Easton's Bible Dictionary
- The New Student's Reference Work (proofreading of scanned texts)
- Annotated Books:
German:
All Projects will be proofread by scanned texts.
- Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie
- Biographisches Lexikon des Kaiserthums Oesterreich
- Rechenbuch des Andreas Reinhard
- Zimmerische Chronik
See also
References
- ^ Alexa rank
- ^ Server admin log for August 23, 2005; a fifteenth language (sr:) was created on August 25 (above).
- ^ See the Server admin log for September 11, 2005, at 01:20 and below (September 10) at 22:49.
- ^ Server admin log for March 29
- ^ Server admin log for June 2, 2006
- ^ See the organized lists at Wikisource's Multilingual Portal and Meta's numbered, sortable list of Wikisources by size.
- ^ For an automatic list of local main pages, see Category:Main Pages; for a formatted list, see the wikisource.org section of the Wikisource portal.
- ^ Wikisource:Wikisource:Scriptorium#100K
External links
| Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Wikisource |
Wikisource:
- English Wikisource
- Multilingual portal
About Wikisource:
- Danny Wool on Wikisource (Wikimedia Foundation article).
- A personal perspective on the history of Wikisource by Angela Beesley Angela Beesley Starling is a British Internet entrepreneur. She is a co-founder of Wikia and its vice president for community relations. Involved in Wikipedia since 2003, Beesley was elected to the Board of Trustees of the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation in 2004, and re-elected in 2005. During this time, she was active in editing content and
- Early discussions and plans for the project (Meta)
Categories: Aggregation-based digital libraries Digital libraries which are primarily based on aggregation or harvesting of other digital libraries or digital repositories | Ebook suppliers | Internet properties established in 2003 Categories: 2003 establishments | Internet properties by year of establishment |
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