Wikisource is a digital library of previously published free-content works. The project’s eligibility criteria are strict; only works that are in the public domain in the United States or are licensed under terms that allow free copying, modification, and reuse (including commercial use) are permitted to be hosted on the site.[1] The requirement of prior publication is intended to ease verification (that is, to make it possible for the site’s geographically far-flung users to confirm that the text posted at the site matches the published original) and to deter misuse of the site for self-publication.[2]
Wikisource’s mission differs from Wikipedia’s in ways that tend to insulate it against some of the criticisms often aimed at its larger sibling. Wikipedia’s stated goal is to describe the world from a neutral point of view[3]—a goal that may be epistemologically unattainable,[4] and at a minimum invites ongoing debate over the “neutrality” of articles published on the site.[5] Wikisource’s polestar, in contrast, is not neutrality, but faithful reproduction of a source text as published.[6] It is easy to imagine users reasonably holding
- ↑ For Wikisource’s complete inclusion policy, see Wikisource: What Wikisource includes, http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Wikisource:What_Wikisource_includes (last visited Feb. 10, 2010) [hereinafter “What Wikisource includes”]. The site also provides guidance as to which non-public domain works are sufficiently “free” to qualify for inclusion; for example, works issued under a simple Creative Commons Attribution license would qualify, but works issued under the more restrictive Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives license would not. See Wikisource: Copyright Policy, http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Wikisource:Copyright_policy (last visited Feb. 10, 2010).
- ↑ See What Wikisource includes, supra note 113.
- ↑ See Wikipedia:Neutral point of view, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Neutral_point_of_view (last visited Feb. 10, 2010); Lessig, supra note 108, at 243–44.
- ↑ See, e.g., Benkler, supra note 4, at 70–71 (“An effort to represent sympathetically all views on a subject, rather than to achieve objectivity, is the core operative characteristic of this effort.”). Wikipedia is a uniquely self-critical work, and lengthy discussions of the practical difficulty of achieving the site’s objective of substantive neutrality are easily located on the site itself. See generally Wikipedia:Why Wikipedia is not so great, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Why_Wikipedia_is_not_so_great (last visited Feb. 10, 2010).
- ↑ At the time of this writing, over 6,500 Wikipedia articles have been flagged as possibly violating the site’s neutrality principle, with most of them flagged as problematic for over a year. See Category:NPOV disputes, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:NPOV_disputes (last visited Feb. 10, 2010).
- ↑ Issues involving “neutrality” do sneak in through the back door at Wikisource under the heading of completeness; that is to say, a user’s faithful reproduction of only a nonrepresentative or misleading excerpt from a work may prompt other users to add the rest of the work to provide necessary context. See Wikisource:What is Wikisource?, http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Wikisource:What_is_Wikisource%3F
different units of measure, the largest; the top ten Wikisource libraries are listed infra Table 2, at 30.
