Wikisource:WikiProject Recruitment

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One of the major problems with Wikisource's community is a lack of a diverse contributor base, instead having only a tiny community of active contributors.

We do have some specializing contributors: some examples include Jan.Kamenicek, known for submitting works related to the Czech lands; EncycloPetey and Chrisguise for their contributions in the area of classical literature; TE(æ)A,ea. for usually modern US court cases and acts of law; 廣九直通車 for Hong Kong and UK ordinances usually modern; Akme for short stories in periodicals; and SnowyCinema and M-le-mot-dit for film transcriptions.[1] Quite a lot of our active members also share impressive levels of technical expertise, and are behind improvements to the site's appearance and functionality.

But, something we lack, that Wikipedia and even Wiktionary have much more of, is a pool of active users with specialized interest areas. Wiktionary has specific people interested in the linguistics of just about any language or language family you can think of, and Wikipedia has pretty much everything going for them for obvious popularity reasons. Imagine if we were like that! Imagine if we had a Kameníček for every country in Europe, Asia, Africa, and North and South America. Imagine if we had a 廣九直通車 or a TE(æ)A,ea. for the ordinances of all sorts of countries and jurisdictions.

So, the intention of this project is to try and facilitate connection to specific niche communities both inside and outside the Wikimedia sphere. By appealing to folks interested specifically in these topics across the Internet,[2] we can recruit more contributors and ultimately get closer to our goal of having a comprehensive and diverse collection of digitized source texts.

If you want to join in on this effort, just put your name down below. If you have any ideas on how to get contributors with specific interests or hobbies, put some resources down below somewhere too!

Members

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General recruitment sources (unsorted)

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  • Subreddits could be a useful tool to pull contributors from
  • Creating social media accounts that spread hypothetical "memes", etc. related to Wikisource (suggested by SpikeShroom)
  • Project Gutenberg, our primary competition
  • Distributed Proofreaders, competition (and major source of proofread texts for Project Gutenberg)
  • FadedPages, another bit of competition
  • LibriVox, an audiobook site closely linked to ours
  • Public Domain Super Heroes, a wiki for enthusiasts for many forms of media mentioned below
  • LostMediaWiki, any lost media, mostly films though
  • Open-source communities
  • People interested in Creative Commons, etc. may also find the public domain interesting
  • They may also know of CC-licensed material that meets our requirements
  • Genealogical communities (to be listed), since most public-domain print materials are directly useful to genealogical research
  • Existing GLAM digitisation efforts, such as Trove, NLS, Boston Public Library and others.

Types of media

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Academic papers

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Lots of academic papers are in the public domain, in fact (and many people don't know this) most from before 1989 are PD—and some modern ones are released with a free license. These are extremely useful reference works.

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  • Various areas of Wikipedia itself, since academic papers are often used for citation
  • Wikiversity!

Biography

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Broadcasting

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Radio, and works (periodical articles, etc.) about them...

Comics

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We have almost nothing in the area of comics, and how to improve our comic transcriptions...which really should be transcriptions of the dialogue etc., but most are currently just pictures of the comics themselves...

Usually, comics were just strips that were published in newspapers, so really this effort may go along nicely with #Newspapers. Ideally, these comic strips would be included with the newspapers they're a part of.

Existing efforts

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Film

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This has been a hot scene on Wikisource lately, but it's always better to have more.

We especially want to find people interested in classic movies, silent films, film history, animation history, etc.

While transcriptions of the films themselves are an active project, film-related magazines and newspapers are also an essential resource for film enthusiasts. We need to find people interested in working on these.

Existing efforts

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  • Active WikiProject
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  • w:Wikipedia:WikiProject Film
  • Wikimedia Commons doesn't have a WikiProject Film or any recognizable community around video, but there are several users there who dedicate lots of time to the very films we work with
  • NitrateVille - a forum centered around vintage film preservation
  • Classic Horror Film Board - a forum for classic horror enthusiasts
  • Lost Media Wiki - General lost media wiki, but mostly focused on film preservation

Music

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Sheet music, lyrics, transcriptions of song performances in records.

Existing efforts

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Newspapers

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Extremely lacking here because of the huge amount of effort newspapers take.

Existing efforts

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  • Various areas of Wikipedia itself, since newspaper articles (even old ones) are often used as primary-source citations
  • Genealogical communities (to be listed)

Patents

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Patents are almost universally in the PD in the US, but are barely ever transcribed here

Existing efforts

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Poetry

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Video games

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There isn't much to say here, since most of video game history is very much not freely licensed. But maybe something to keep in mind anyway, since the gaming industry is today one of the most lucrative industries worldwide.

Existing efforts

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  • Category:Video games, works about video games—mostly just trivial stuff like laws and the like
  • WS:WikiProject Video Games, not even really a "project" at all yet, but a proposal page SnowyCinema made a few years ago laying out ideas for how video games could be transcribed theoretically

Sciences

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Biology

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Chemistry

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Mathematics

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Technology

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Social sciences

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Geography

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To have a wide range of geographic representation on WS would be really nice.

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  • Wikivoyage!
  • w:Wikipedia:WikiProject Geography
  • Any number of WikiProjects on specific countries or jurisdictions (like US states or Canadian/Australian provinces)
  • Communities focused on the local history of one particular area? Or local history in general?

Law

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Linguistics

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We have a good number of dictionary projects lingering around here unfinished. They're particularly difficult to format, and lots of dedicated contributors are needed to keep these running.

People interested in specific languages will probably find these transcriptions useful and interesting.

Existing efforts

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Religion

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We are severely lacking in the exhaustiveness and appeal of our religious texts, such as our versions of the Bible, the Koran, etc.

Existing efforts

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Philosophy

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Psychology

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Footnotes

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  1. ↑ We're probably missing some users, so please don't be offended if you weren't listed here. This is meant to give a general idea of what dedicated interest looks like, in relation to crafting a general-purpose text repository.
  2. ↑ ...this along with some significant technical improvements to the site, which is another huge issue with our community's presentation.

See also

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