Wikisource is an online
library of free
content textual sources, operated by
the Wikimedia
Foundation
. Its aims are to harbour all forms of free
text, in many languages. It also provides translation efforts to
this end.
Library contents
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speeches, constitutional and historical documents, laws and a range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. Texts in all languages are welcome, as are
translations.
Wikisource does not host "
vanity press"
books or documents produced by its contributors.
Early history
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). 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's
Wikipedia.
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 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. 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.
Three more languages were created on March 29, 2006, and then
another large wave of 14 language domains was created on June 2,
2006. Currently, there are individual subdomains for Wikisources in
more than 50 languages, 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. 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'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 logo
Since Wikisource was initially called "Project Sourceberg", its
first logo was a picture of an
iceberg. 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
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.
Special projects
English:
German:
All Projects will be proofread by scanned texts.
See also
References
- 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
Wikisource:
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