On 03 January 2017 at 14:44 John Levin <anterotesis@gmail.com> wrote:

<snip>

 My user page is: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Technolalia

Hello John - we actually exchanged mails a few years ago

My Phd has involved a lot of digging around for historic statutes, and
this has led to a side project, and one that I hope will work with
Wikipedia. In short, I have OCRd around 80 volumes of various editions
of the Statutes At Large and the Public General Statutes. They cover the
period from Magna Carta, up to 1875 (after which digitized volumes are
scarce). I believe they contain a more or less complete set of public
acts from about 1765 to 1875. Although it is obviously alphanumeric soup
at the moment, I am working on automatic correction of the more obvious
errors, and on producing decent metadata.

Wikisource can host primary rsource material, subject to some caveats.

My aims are to make finding legislation easier, to make it easier to
examine, both by eye and by machine, and to produce reliable metadata
from and for it. My immediate priority is to extract the tables of
contents from the collections, and build a reliable list of acts with
regnal codes and full titles (correctly spelled).

My site for this project:
http://statutes.org.uk
and my github repo:
https://github.com/Anterotesis/statutes

Wikipedia has many useful lists of statutes, some entries on particular
acts, & in wikicommons a few of the texts. I very much want my work to
contribute to wikipedia and improve this aspect of it.

Well, laudable doesn't begin to cover it.

I've been talking with Andrew Gray, mainly with regard to Wikidata, but such is the size
of the task I think more hands will be needed. & of course I don't want
to start making great changes without consultation.

Wikidata is a good place to develop metadata. It can do that in conjunction with Wikisource, but I wouldn't want to imply that is the only way.

Charles

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