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

Wed Nov 9 16:54:17 UTC 2005

On 11/9/05, Robert Scott Horning <robert_horning at netzero.net> wrote:
>
> 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

 Wikimedia Commons is the best place for images of text? If that's what
you're saying, I disagree. I think maybe we were talking about two different
things, though.

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.

 AFAIK Distributed Proofreaders hasn't released the raw images out to the
public. If that's still the case, I'd say *that* is the reason for the slow
going. The wiki process would be much more efficient.

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

 I thought scans of 2D public domain images were public domain. I've
certainly read that on Wikipedia somewhere.

Anthony