[WikiEN-l] Is Wikipedia a News Portal (among other things)?

Mon Sep 25 09:32:27 UTC 2006

On 9/25/06, [[User:Unforgettableid]] <unforgettableid at gmail.com> wrote:
> A while back I heard how Amazon.com scans entire books.
>
> 1. Some books are scanned in North America using, IIRC (foggy memory),
> a homemade page-turning apparatus that somehow works together with a
> scanner. It is fully automatic.

For non-rare books, they actually feed the entire book to a machine
that cuts of the spine of the book and loads the book page by page.
That way they can very rapidly scan large amounts of text.

> 2. Some books are scanned in India. It is cheap to hire manual workers
> there, so they hire people to run the scanners.
>
> It seems that most of the Wikimedia Foundation's budget goes towards
> buying hardware, but I wonder if it'd be practical for us to hire
> people to do either of these things.

WMF is strapped for cash, that money is needed elsewhere. The servers
are very expensive.

Besides, WP has always been about volunteers, for virtually every
aspect of it's operation and for all of it's content creation. It
shouldn't be any different for this, even though this is a lot harder.

--Oskar