Wikisource itself were to ever go offline (for example, if WMF were ever to become insolvent), the content of the site (except for the most recent edits) could be swiftly restored by anyone with a mirror copy of the most recent database dump.[1] A citator of sorts is available from the “What Links Here” link on every page of any WMF wiki, and the entire project is open to public development and maintenance.[2]
For the purpose of assessing its potential value as a possible open-access repository for legal source texts, Wikisource’s strengths include: (1) a well-developed and stable architecture that enables contributions by any user familiar with the standardized MediaWiki editing syntax (which is much easier to learn than HTML); (2) the openness of its database, which any user may edit or expand; (3) the relative sophistication and user-friendliness of the site’s user interface; (4) the existence of a community of users within the site who are interested in legal topics and have already made several legal source texts available; and (5) the ease of authentication provided by the site’s use and preservation of scanned page images from the original published sources. Wikisource’s most evident weaknesses stem from the comparatively small community of users of the site: by any measure, Wikisource is a tiny project compared with Wikipedia or Distributed Proofreaders.[3] The smaller number of users at the site translates into substantially greater time required to complete any given proofreading project and has also limited the number of texts that have been added to the site. Thus, Wikisource remains very far from approaching Professor Gallacher’s ideal of completeness for an open-access repository. Nevertheless, Wikisource offers an interesting alternative to Distributed Proofreaders as a platform for mass collaboration in making a variety of works freely available to the
- ↑ The contents of all WMF wikis, including Wikisource and Wikipedia, are available for download at http://download.wikimedia.org/ (last visited Feb. 12, 2010).
- ↑ See supra notes 140–141 and accompanying text.
- ↑ See Table 1, infra, at 29; compare supra note 104 and accompanying text. Measured by the number of users who have participated at each project during the last thirty days, Wikisource is approximately one-tenth the size of Distributed Proofreaders, and barely one five-hundredth the size of Wikipedia. Wikisource’s small size and the relatively recent redesign of the site’s architecture to facilitate proofreading have also meant restricted throughput of works. As noted above, Distributed Proofreaders has completed over 17,000 texts, while the comparable statistic for Wikisource (consisting of those works that have achieved a quality level of “Validated” on all their pages) is only slightly over 100 texts at the time of this writing. See Category:Index Validated, at http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Category:Index_Validated (last visited Feb. 12, 2010).
