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

Wed Nov 9 17:00:56 UTC 2005

Hm. Good points. I think you are correct. This should be on Commons and we
should work with Distributed Proofreaders on this (no special subdomain; treat
like any other related set of images). Keeping the images and the resulting
proofread ASCII text that will go into Wikisource in the public domain is also
important. 

Oh, and I'm pretty sure that scans of PD work are still PD in the U.S. 

-- mav 

--- 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
> 
> 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
> 
> 
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