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

Wed Nov 9 17:57:02 UTC 2005

On 11/9/05, Robert Scott Horning <robert_horning at netzero.net> wrote:
>
> Anthony DiPierro wrote:
> > 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.
> >
> No, this is still the same issue. I'm not exactly sure where the best
> place for scanned pages of historical text ought to go in this case.
> The images themselves should be in commons, and perhaps as a temporary
> "Wikiproject" within commons to extract those images might be useful to
> have the full scanned pages available. Wikisource also has an image
> repository independent of commons, so that may be more appropriate, but
> that is something that ought to be decided within the Wikisource
> community itself. Figures and engravings do need to go to Commons.

 I think we're probably all in agreement that the processed images should go
in the Commons. And the processed text should go into Wikisource. In the
mean time, well, I don't think it really matters that much.

> > 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.
>
> It is not that difficult to get the raw image scans from Distributed
> Proofreaders if you really want them.

 How? I've looked for this before and couldn't find them. I just looked
again a half hour ago and couldn't find them. If they're easy to get from
DP, well, then I don't see the point in hosting them somewhere else. I guess
there's the index files, which apparently DP doesn't have?

They are not of the best quality
> (DP has other goals in mind) but they are usable for the purpose of
> transcription of the text. I also fail to see how using a Wiki for
> proofreading is going to be any better than what DP is doing.

 There's a much lower threshold for editing on a wiki. You don't even have
to create an account. It might not be better, but I think it would be much
faster.
 I've used DP before and it seems to be a very closed project compared to
Wikipedia. Like I said, I can't even find out where I can download a dump of
all the data.