Wikisource

From Free net encyclopedia

Wikisource – The Free Library – is a Wikimedia project to build a free, wiki library of source texts, along with translations of source-texts into any language and other supporting materials. It is located at www.wikisource.org.

1 History
2 Logo
3 See also
4 External links

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History

Wikisource had an eventful early history that included several changes of name and location (URL), and the move to language subdomains. The following sections explain these changes as well as the subsequent, more recent history of the project.

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Beginnings

Wikisource was originally called Project Sourceberg during its planning stages (a play on words for Project Gutenberg).

The project began its activity at a mistaken location, when source texts were placed at ps.wikipedia.org. The contributors understood "PS" to mean either "primary sources" or Project Sourceberg, and they erroneously took over the subdomain of the Pashto language's Wikipedia.

Project Sourceberg started officially when it received its own temporary URL on November 24 2003 (http://sources.wikipedia.org); all texts and discussions were moved there from ps.wikipedia.org. A vote on the project's name changed it to Wikisource on December 6 2003. Despite the change in name, the project did not move to its permanent URL (at http://wikisource.org) until July 23 2004.

Within two weeks of the project's official start (at sources.wikipedia.org), over 1000 pages had been created, with approximately 200 of these being designated as actual articles. At the start of 2004, the site had 100 registered users. In early July, 2004 the number of articles exceeded 2400, and more than 500 users had registered. During this period of the project's history, especially notable were the massive contributions to its content and organization in several languages by its bureaucrat, Eclecticology.

On April 30 2005, there were 2667 registered users (including 18 administrators) and almost 19,000 articles. The project passed its 96,000th edit that same day.

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Language subdomains

A separate Hebrew version of Wikisource (he.wikisource.org) was created in August, 2004. The need for a language-specific Hebrew website derived from the difficultly of typing and editing Hebrew texts in a left-to-right environment (Hebrew is written right-to-left). In the ensuing months, contributors in other languages including German requested their own wikis, but a December vote on the creation of separate language domains was inconclusive. Finally, a second vote that ended May 12 2005 supported the adoption of separate language subdomains at Wikisource by a large margin, allowing each language to host its texts on its own wiki.

An initial wave of 15 languages was set up by Brion Vibber on August 26 2005. The new languages did not include English, but the code en: was temporarily set to redirect to the main website (wikisource.org). The wikisource community, through a mass project of manually sorting thousands of pages and categories by language, prepared for a second wave of languages, including the English version, which were created on September 11 2005.

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wikisource.org

The community has requested that the main wikisource.org website remain a functioning wiki, to serve both as a multilingual coordination site for the entire Wikisource project in all languages, as well as a home for languages without their own subdomains. The Main Page at wikisource.org has been turned into a dynamic language portal, created by ThomasV based upon the Wikipedia portal. The new portal, created on August 26 2005, also incorporates Wikisource's new slogan, The Free Library.

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Milestones

The English Wikisource passed 20,000 text-units on November 27 2005 (in its third month of existence), already holding more texts than did the entire project in April (before all languages before move to language subdomains).

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Logo

The current Wikisource logo (shown above) with a picture of an iceberg was selected because of the project's original name (Project Sourceberg). It is used because it is "the whole iceberg" and not just the tip which pokes over the surface of the water. The iceberg logo is also reminiscent of Sigmund Freud's use of an iceberg as an analogy to illustrate his concept of the unconscious mind.

The logo has had a mixed reception since the change of name to "Wikisource", some users greatly enjoy it while others feel it is unsuitable and inconsistent with the other wikiproject logos. There has been a long running debate over whether to keep the current logo or switch to a new one. This has largely been motivated not by dislike for the logo but by the fact that the logo's copyright was held by the designer and had not been released to the Wikimedia Foundation like all other wikimedia logos. This prevented it from being used on advertising or merchandise.

One attempt to choose a new logo was aborted in 2005 before any vote due to a convoluted discussion procedure. In 2006 a new attempt to change the logo was started with the support of the Wikimedia Foundation, however this got off to a poor start when wikisource users, particularly at the English pages did not find out about the new process until after it had begun, the voting process had been decided and discussions of the various proposed logos started. The fact that many of those commenting on the proposed logos were not wikisource users, but wider wikimedia users also created some illwill and a feeling that the move to a new logo was being forced upon them and taking precedence over more urgent functional work needed to improve the project.

On March 5 2006 the copyright holder, Professor Dr. habil. Uwe Kils, made a statement, "I give full copyright to wikimedia foundation to use it for any purpose whatsoever." This statement has generated new support for keeping the logo. Meanwhile, numerous suggestions for alternative logos are being listed and shown at New Wikisource logo, and a decision is expected to be made in the coming weeks or months.

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