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Wikisource Community User Group/2015 Report

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Wikisource Birthday contest[edit]

Every year several Wikisources celebrate their birthday on November 24th hosting a "reading contest". Every Wikisource chooses to run the marathon in a different way.

1st Wikisource International Conference[edit]

Group picture

For the first time, an international Wikisource conference was held in Wien, hosted by Wikimedia Austria. For details, please see:

The main goals of the conference were to empower volunteers and to develop a shared understanding and strategy for the future of Wikisource.

  • The conference resulted in a mission statement, which has already been translated into 21 languages.
"Provide an open online universal repository of free texts and primary sources, collaboratively curated by volunteer communities in all languages, integrated with Wikipedia, Wikimedia projects, and other sources, reusable by all."
  • Another result is a prioritized list of important technical needs for the future of Wikisource. Many issues of Wikisource were discussed in this context, which contributed to a broadening of the individual perspectives - participants were enabled to look beyond the requirements of their "home Wikisource": it's worth noting for example, that two out of the three top-priority technical needs were dedicated to Indic languages and "language equity", and not dominantly European languages.
1. Integration of OCR (w:Optical Character Recognition) software third-party services (e.g. from Google), especially for Indic languages existing
2. Full support for RTL (Right To Left) languages
3. Visual Editor in Page namespace



Other highlights of the conference were:

  • All discussions and other outcomes were extensively documented in what we believe is the longest Wikimedia etherpad ever :-).

Moreover:

  • 23 language communities were represented
  • 80% of participants had experience with Wikisource
  • A lot of development was realized during the conference. For example :
  • rewriting the template Author in LUA to use Wikidata (French Wikisource, s:Module:Auteur2)
  • fixing a lot of bugs caused by Right-to-Left (Hebrew Wikisource)
  • fixing the configuration of the templates (Arabic Wikisource, see log of Tpt)
  • deploying new instances of Wsexport in Wikisources still using the old link.

2015 Community Wishlist[edit]

The Wikisource community participated actively in the 2015 Community Wishlist.

The top 10 wishes[edit]

  1. Migrate dead external links to archives (111 support votes) -- notes
  2. Improved diff compare screen (104) -- notes
  3. Central global repository for templates, gadgets and Lua modules (87) -- notes
  4. Cross-wiki watchlist (84) -- notes
  5. Numerical sorting in categories (84) -- notes
  6. Allow categories in Commons in all languages (78) -- notes
  7. Pageview Stats tool (70) -- notes
  8. Global cross-wiki user talk page (66) -- notes
  9. Improve the plagiarism detection bot (63) -- notes
  10. Add a user watchlist (62) -- notes

You can see the whole list with links to all the proposals and Phabricator tickets on this page: 2015 Community Wishlist Survey/Results.

Other[edit]

  • 43893 bytes added to Multilingual Wikisource in Punjabi language by 24 different editors during Wikipedia 15 celebration at Sangrur, Punjab, India.
  • The BUB_upload tool was created by Rohit Dua in 2013 GSoC, with the purpose of uploading books from Google Books (and other digital libraries) to Internet Archive. It was and still is and important block in the pipeline fo digitization that brings content onto Commons and finally Wikisource. The tool was inactive for some months due to bugs, but it has been restored in 2015. You can see the results of the uploading here: 258844 uploaded and counting...

Needs[edit]

  • While the Google OCR is working fine in various languages, it shows Chinese characters when it is used for Punjabi.

Insights[edit]

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