On 9/23/06, David Gerard <dgerard(a)gmail.com> wrote:
We'd try to get the best scans we could. But I
suspect that if you put
up the raw scans and any of it could be turned to an actual use,
volunteers to do the tedious labour would turn up. I'm amazed at the
tedious jobs people do for Wikimedia projects in the cause of getting
information into the public domain.
The scanning itself is pretty tedious labor. If the map is of any size
it means you have to fold it to get the middle sections, which
increases the likelihood that things won't line up later (slightly
different angles, etc., make for very unsightly alignment problems).
Anyway, I've no doubt of the power of Wikipedians to volunteer for
boring tasks -- I've done some pretty dull ones in my day for the
project (like extracting and cropping and formatting hi-res images of
all of the major plates in Vesalius' [[De Humanis Corporis Fabrica]],
which is now at Commons), but having tried to stich together maps and
other large images from scans in the past, I have to admit I'm pretty
skeptical. It is not just boring work, it is boring work where more
often that not one just feels frustrated by it. In my experience.
But again... I'm thrilled if people want to do it! :-)
FF