[Foundation-l] Black market science

Sat Jul 9 01:58:47 UTC 2011

On Jul 7, 2011, at 2:50 AM, Andrea Zanni <zanni.andrea84 at gmail.com> wrote:

> 2011/7/7 Ting Chen <wing.philopp at gmx.de>
> 
>> On de.wikisource.org they scan every page of the original text, upload
>> the scan on Commons and show the scan on the right part of every page as
>> an image. It is even obligatory to have the original scan of the text.
>> 
>> The following page is an example:
>> http://de.wikisource.org/wiki/Seite:Oberamt_Tettnang_231.jpg (I just hit
>> the random page)
>> 
> 
> I know - in fact, it was exactly what I wanted to explain :-)
> I think this system is perfect for digitized documents, aka paper documents
> which has been scanned and need transcription.
> 
> MVHO is that the same system is redundant for born-digital documents.
> If we use the Proofread Extension (that's how it's called), you need to
> re-transcribe the whole text, or at least have it formatted. Then you
> transclude the text in ns0.
> The text is reliable, but it is a lot of work, and lot of it is just
> redundant (why write by hand something tha has just benn written in a good
> pdf?).
> 
> If we use the simple ns0 (many wikisources are not so sctrict as de.source
> in this regard) you need to do the same (transform in wikitext, format). So
> the issues remain.
> 
> Now, I was wondering if we can find another (technical? organizational?
> political?)solution for born-digital documents, as pdf, scientific articles
> etc.

You hardly need to re-transcribe the digital document.  You just need to re-format the images and special text within the paste, edit in appropriate wikilinks, and proofread it to ensure nothing was misplaced.  Proofreading is not at all redundant for documents that have been re-formatted with only the  lightest editing. I am certain you will find something to correct in any document of length, no matter how little editing you feel you have done.  Having a corpus with some depth on Wikisource will open up a much different reading experience than an index of PDFs, even though the words all match. Just look at what is being done with the SCOTUS documents,  Wikis simply offer a richer study environment for documents that are properly linked together than other sorts of digital libraries. For all that born digital documents emphasize the "digital" they often treat the text as if printed on a page by regularly using hypertext only in footnoted references. It is worth putting such things on Wikisource, if you can anticipate being able to get a decent sized corpus of scholarship of some field under a free license.  And that will vary by field and maybe even sub-specialty.

BirgitteSB 