[Foundation-l] Re: Hosting scans of the 1911 Britannica onWikimedia

Wed Nov 9 16:19:24 UTC 2005

Anthony DiPierro wrote:

>On 11/9/05, Poe, Marshall <MPoe at theatlantic.com> wrote:
>  
>
>>--- Tim Starling <t.starling at physics.unimelb.edu.au> wrote:
>>    
>>
>>>...
>>>The only question in my mind is the domain: should this be under
>>>eb1911.wikipedia.org <http://eb1911.wikipedia.org>? We could make it
>>>      
>>>
>>visually distinct, to avoid
>>    
>>
>>>confusion with Wikipedia itself. Or would eb1911.wikimedia.org<http://eb1911.wikimedia.org>be
>>>better? Or eb1911.wikisource.org <http://eb1911.wikisource.org>?
>>>      
>>>
>>It absolutely should *not* be on a Wikipedia subdomain. Wikisource is
>>the place for this.
>>
>>-- mav
>>
>>This is exactly right. An encyclopedia from 1911 is a primary source of
>>historical interest; it's data, not metadata. If it goes anywhere, it's
>>Wikisource.
>>
>>--Marshall Poe
>>    
>>
>
> Wikisource is the place for the text, maybe. For the images themselves I
>don't see the disadvantage of just using bittorrent, maybe by volume.
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>  
>
What???  Wikimedia Commons is the best place for images, and indeed 
there have already been several scans of this encyclopedia that have 
been put into Wikimedia projects.  We don't need to use bit torrents 
unless this is a move to do bit torrents for all Wikimedia projects 
(perhaps a good idea but a seperate discussion).  There is also a 
license tag that has been specifically established on commons just for 
content from the 1911 Encyclopaedia Brittanica because of the large 
number of potential images that can come from this source.  Look them up 
right now with the associated categories at 
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Template%3APD-Britannica

One thing I see missing from this discussion is working in cooperation 
with Distributed Proofreaders, who is not only transcribing the contents 
of this encyclopedia into plain ASCII text (and XML markup as well), but 
is also providing scans of the figures and images from within the 
volumes and making them available with a public domain license.  What 
more do we want here?  The slow going on that project with Distributed 
Proofreaders is something that goes to show how large of a project it is.

That trying to organize the content onto a Wiki has been difficult, yes. 
 It may also be a good idea to access a direct scan of the image to 
compare against the transcribed text.  The real question is if the 
contents of a whole DVD ought to be moved to commons or not, especially 
if the source of the scans is in the public domain.

That is the real issue here, because you can copyright a scan of an 
image.  Weak copyright protection at best, but you can copyright the 
scan itself which would in turn force you to have to find the original 
materials and do the scan seperately.  In the case of the 1911 
Encyclopaedia Brittanica, however, that is much easier to do than some 
other older works.  Again, working with the Distributed Proofreaders on 
something like this is going to make life much easier because they have 
done the scans themselves and are granting explicitly the scanned images 
and content into the public domain.  It also avoids duplication of labor 
with a huge project like this.

-- 
Robert Scott Horning