Fremantle
· Wikisource · Wikimedia · anniversaries ·
English Wikisource turns 20 today; there's going to be a (virtual) birthday party this afternoon.
I've been contributing to Wikisource since January 2008, when I started adding Joris-Karl Huysmans' The Cathedral, which I was reading as a paper-book at the time. I copy and pasted it from Project Gutenberg, and mostly wasn't really sure why I was bothering.
However, I then realised that you could add and transcribe books from scans, and I'd been reading a book that mentioned 'Golgotha' as Oxford University slang to refer to the offices of the heads of colleges, so I thought I'd add that to Wiktionary and the source citation to Wikisource. So I found Terræ-filius: or, the Secret History of the University of Oxford and added it, along with this passage:
[…]here is that famous apartment, by idle wits and buffoons nick-named Golgotha, i.e. the place of Sculls or Heads of colleges and halls, where they meet and debate upon all extraordinary affairs, which occur within the precincts of their juriſdiction
To get those scans I skived off work one morning on my way to Tuggeranong and stopped at the NLA, where I could get access to Gale's Eighteenth Century Collections Online, and I downloaded the whole work (page-by-page, if I remember correctly, because it would only give access to a single image at a time).
Since then I've added a bunch of things, and tried to proofread more than I add (not always possible, especially when building tools such as IA Upload). Not everyone understands why people would want to painstakingly transcribe text documents (I remember once being told off by my brother for wasting time on Wikisource when I should've been studying for university exams!). I think the best reason I can give is that it's about making texts available in different formats (for reading on different devices or reformatting however you want) and fully searchable and linkable (these two aspects being absolutely amazing for reference works). For languages that are less supported by the existing institutions or technologies it's also pretty great: Wikimedia projects in general are available in more languages than anything else in the world (both the content languages, and the languages that you can use for the interface elements).
Wikisource is a great project, and I hope it carries on for another twenty years (at least)!