[Foundation-l] Hosting scans of the 1911 Britannica on Wikimedia

Thu Nov 10 20:26:37 UTC 2005

Brian wrote:

> Lars Aronsson wrote:
>
>> Brian wrote:
>>
>>> I recently (today) acquired a DVD containing scans of every page of 
>>> the 1911 Britannica, along with index files for it all, [...]
>>> TimStarling specifically asked me to tell you all that he is 
>>> "confident that the server requirements will be minimal." They would 
>>> set up a domain name, generate some web pages automatically using 
>>> the index files, and host the entire set of 29,700 files totaling 
>>> about 4 GB.
>>
>> What is suddenly wrong with using Wikimedia Commons and Wikisource?  
>> Why do you need a new domain and server just for this book?  Didn't 
>> you see
>> http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_New_Student%27s_Reference_Work 
>
> I think they want this to be on a separate domain because not only is 
> 1911EB a famous encyclopedia, Wikipedia has benefitted greatly from 
> it, and several projects still want its contents. So, they would 
> rather prop it up and give it a separate space specifically designed 
> for making 1911EB's contents easily accessible. 

Like Lars, I don't see the point of a separate domain for this.  I agree 
that Wikipedia has benefitted greatly from it, but it has benefitted 
from many other works as well.  With the scanned pages on Commons they 
will still be easily available to the several projects that you have in 
mind.  Easily editable and Wikified texts will continue to belong on 
Wikisource.

Ec