Grants:IdeaLab/Wikisource training conference or videos

status: idea
project:
Wikisource training conference or videos
idea creator:
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summary:
Hold a conference with training on Wikisource
created on: 09:05, 9 August 2013

Project idea

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Wikisource offers nice services for historical research: it can store original and transcribed versions of historical publications and documents freely, permanently, and collaboratively, with share-able URLs.

But it is not easy and clear for many of us to take scanned images and bring them into the preferred format (djvu) for transclusion, and to crop and arrange images from the original with the text. We need to apprentice to experts, and I think "we" might be a big number in the long run because there are so many historical researchers. An in-person conference would help. One is scheduled in Germany in October 2013.

Let's organize a Wikisource conference in North America and fund interested people to travel to it.

A natural venue would be the WikiConference USA, tentatively planned for NYC on Mar 21-23, 2014. Or a GLAM Boot Camp like the one held in Washington DC area in 2013. There are gigantic libraries in these places so we could well find useful/elegant/free space and scanners and so forth, if we expected to have critical mass and travel funding.

A related approach would be to make how-to videos and put them online.

We might be able to include some presentations or attendees remotely by video.

Comments are really welcome! We need interested people and skills and a location, etc, as well as figuring out if this proposal is worthwhile.

Project goals

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  • expand population of people who find Wikisource useful
  • increase contributions to Wikisource
  • enable broader collaboration globally and across languages on historical documents

Update 2015

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Get involved

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