Wikisource:News/2014-07

Proposal for an automated import of openly licensed scholarly articles

The original proposal is on the Scriptorium (emphasis removed)

The idea of systematically importing openly licensed scholarly articles into Wikisource has popped up from time to time. For instance, it formed the core of WikiProject Academic Papers and is mentioned in the Wikisource vision. However, the Wikiproject relied on human power, never reached its full potential, and eventually became inactive. The vision has yet to materialise. We plan to bridge the gap through automation. We are a subset of WikiProject Open Access (user:Daniel Mietchen, user:Maximilanklein, user:MattSenate), and we have funding from the Open Society Foundations via Wikimedia Deutschland to demo suitable workflows at Wikimania (see project page). Specifically, we plan to import Open Access journal articles into Wikisource when they are cited on Wikipedia. The import would be performed by a group of bots intended to make reference handling more interoperable across Wikimedia sites. Their main tasks are:

(on Wikipedia) signalling which references are openly licensed, and link them to the full text on Wikisource, the media on Commons and the metadata on Wikidata;
(on Commons) importing images and other media associated with the source article;
(on Wikisource) importing the full text of the source article and embedding the media in there;
(on Wikidata) handling the metadata associated with the source article, and signalling that the full text is on Wikisource and the media on Commons.

These Open Access imports on Wikisource will be linked to and from other Wikimedia sister sites. Our first priority though will be linking from English Wikipedia, focusing on the most cited Open Access papers, and the top-100 medical articles. In order to move forward with this, we need

General community approval
Community feedback on workflows and scrutiny on our test imports in specific.
Bot permission. For more technical information read our bot spec on Github.

Request for Comment about developing a disclosure policy

Overview: Disclosure policy

Background

On 16 June, WMF has changed the overarching "Terms of Use" with the change prohibiting paid editing without disclosure at each of the Wikimedia Foundation wikis.

WMF's explanation Making a change to our Terms of Use: Requirements for disclosure

Consultation was undertaken with the community prior to this change with banners utilised at wikis, including English Wikisource, to draw attention to the discussion.

Local impact

The inclusion policy of English Wikisource regulates additions to our repository of published works and historical documents, and would seem to be capable of welcoming and encouraging contributions of works irrespective of the payment status of the contributor. In fact, contributions from employees of numerous institutions could be deemed to be encouraged rather than discouraged. This being the case, the new terms of use requires all such contributors to publicly disclose any such relationship to the English Wikisource community and in our case this may discourage contributions. This issue was raised during the development of the new terms, and terms of use allows for a community to undertake community consultation and adopt a specific alternate disclosure policy.

Tentative proposal

That English Wikisource develops Wikisource:Disclosure policy that allows for paid contributions at our site within the scope of the inclusion policy without requiring that they declare that they are paid for their contributions, nor the institution that they represent. Further that the policy is listed on Wikisource:Policies and guidelines.

Suggested wording:

The English Wikisource community encourages contributions from any contributor where in line with our inclusion policy and does not require users to identify any affiliations with organisations when editing in line with Wikisource's goals.

That English Wikisource develops/expands guidance that encourages declarations of conflict of interest, or vested interest in decision-making processes; and that this ties in any existing guidance that the community has about disclosure.

Collaborations for July 2014

On 28 July 1914 World War I started and over the ensuing 4½ years more than 9 million combatants were killed. Many countries across the world were affected and over 70 million military personnel were mobilised. Wikisource is planning several projects to commemorate this event and those people. The July Proofread of the Month starts with Secrets of Crewe House written by Campbell Stuart in 1921. This book looks at the propaganda aspect of the war and, in particular, the British propaganda used in the countries of their opponents.

The Maintenance of the Month task for July 2014 is Proposed policies and guidelines. The goal is to give an agreed status (policy, guideline, essay, help page, obsolete page) to proposed rules. Some of the current proposed policies and guidelines are about derivative works and are expected to be based upon the relevant request for comment conducted last year.

Administrator confirmations

Four administrators were confirmed in June 2014:

Four administrators are having their confirmation discussion in July 2014:

Milestones

On the language editions of Wikisource that have actively been using the ProofreadPage extension, the percentage of pages backed with scans is increasing. The Polish Wikisource achieved 80% on June 10, having worked since early 2010 on reducing the number of "naked" pages and increasing the number of scan-backed ones. The English Wikisource achieved 30% on June 11. Progress is slower here for two reasons: 1) little work is being done on reducing the number of "naked" pages; and 2) the total number of pages means that a gain of 1% is equivalent to about 3100 pages becoming scan-backed.