On 11/23/2014 02:55 AM, Wiki Billinghurst wrote:
What do we see as the next components for Wikisource?
What are our major hurdles for system development?
If we were offered development help where do people think that we
should be making use of that help? Is it incremental fixes,
transactional changes, or are we wanting transformational changes,
completely new features, and new opportunities?
Ten years ago, Wikipedia was already a given success, and
we started to branch out into projects like Wikisource,
Wikinews and what not. That was also when Google Book
Search started, and when the Internet Archive got its
current practices for book scanning (with the "Scribe"
scanning stations) in place. Ten years earlier, in the mid
90s, the first large-scale book scanning projects appeared.
In the two decades 1990-2010, several books were published
on the future of digital libraries. But what has happened
in the last decade? What is new, really? Has anything
changed in Google Book Search or the Internet Archive
in the five years 2010-2014? Yes, more books have been
digitized, but are they presented or used differently?
I think a lot more can be done, e.g. algorithmic improvement
of OCR engines. Wikisource hasn't looked into that, neither
has the Internet Archive, and nobody knows much about
what Google does internally. This isn't necessarily "wiki",
so it's not clear that it's a task for WMF and its projects.
Another thing could be "gamification" of proofreading or
mark-up / categorization / analysis of scanned books.
As for new kinds of content, the digitization of entire
newspapers is still a new area, where the Australian
national library was a pioneer some years ago, but what
has happened since then? Potentially, it could become
a cross-over between Wikisource and Wikinews, where
each event can be found on the same day in many
different newspapers. How to link them together?
The problem: If we get scanned images + OCR text
of 10 different newspapers, 10 years, 10 pages each
day, that is 365 × 10 × 10 × 10 = 365,000 large pages
to proofread, before we can do any serious analysis.
How do we proofread so many pages in any reasonable
time? We don't have enough volunteers for that.
--
Lars Aronsson (lars(a)aronsson.se)
Aronsson Datateknik -
http://aronsson.se