What does it do?

“Libraries are about freedom. Freedom to read, freedom of ideas, freedom of communication. They are about education (which is not a process that finishes the day we leave school or university), about entertainment, about making safe spaces, and about access to information.” (Neil Gaiman, 2013)

So it’s not what you do…it’s what it does to you.

“Quotations or images from centuries ago can still touch or inspire, and as readers share this reaction online, the interested audience grows. The Wikimedia projects make it easy for people to enjoy and share out-of-copyright text, creating and satisfying a modern curiosity about past authors.”(Martin Poulter, 2015)

1. Wikisource is a free human-curated online digital library. It hosts out-of-copyright & public domain texts (also CC-Zero, CC-BY and CC-BY-SA licensed texts).
2. Wikisource is a treasure trove of novels, short stories, plays, poems, songs, letters, travel writing, non-fiction texts, speeches, news articles, constitutional documents, court rulings, obituaries, eulogies and much more besides.
3. Pdf or Djvu page scans are uploaded first to Wikimedia Commons, the free media repository, before being transcribed through Optical Character Recognition software (OCR) onto Wikisource in a searchable HTML format which is then proofread by 2 different Wikisource users for quality assurance.
4. The result is an online text library which is free to anyone to read with the added benefits that the text is quality assured, completely searchable AND downloadable (pdf, epub & mobi formats).

TIMELINE

• 1971 Project Gutenberg founded: the first digital library.
• 2001 Wikipedia, the free online encyclopedia, is founded.
• 2003 “Old Wikisource” is founded at http://wikisource.org
• 2005 Development of c.15 Wikisource language versions.
• c.2008 Proofread Page extension adopted.
• 2012 Wikidata founded, Wikisource data items created there.

On Robert Louis Stevenson’s page on Wikipedia, you will find

1. A link to his out of copyright texts on Wikisource.
2. A link to open-licensed images of Robert Louis Stevenson hosted on Wikimedia Commons.
3. A link in the left hand menu to Robert Louis Stevenson’s Wikidata page, where structured linked open data is stored about him.

Click to visit Robert Louis Stevenson’s page on Wikipedia to have a look.

More reading

1. Shiver-inducing contacts with the past – Martin Poulter, University of Oxford on Wikisource in CILIP Update November 2015

NEXT PAGE – Wikisource as a hyper library.

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