Page:From documents to datasets - A MediaWiki-based method of annotating and extracting species observations in century-old field notebooks.pdf/6

240 Template:Cleanup for an example) can be moved from one project to another easily, speeding development. The Wikipedia community also carries out software development for Wikisource-specific features; our project relied on the Proofread Page extension to provide side-by-side views of transcriptions and their corresponding scanned images (Figure 1).

An existing community of users, transcribers, and proofreaders. There is an active Wikisource community improving Wikisource’s content and to transcribing newly uploaded texts (see http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Wikisource:Community_collaboration). We hoped to draw some of these community members into our project.

Uploading content

The ideal upload to Wikisource is a Portable Document Format (PDF) or DjVu multipage image file containing the entire scanned document along with its OCRed text (sometimes referred to as a “searchable PDF”). Such files retain their text in Wikisource, making transcription easy. In our case, we uploaded handwritten scans as-is and inserted the transcriptions manually. PDF or DjVu files are uploaded to the Wikimedia Commons using the Upload Wizard and reused in Wikisource. One important note: both the Wikimedia Commons and Wikisource only allow the upload of materials in the public domain or published under liberal open source licenses (such as the Creative Commons Attribution or Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike licenses). Materials that have only been made available for non-commercial use may not be uploaded to the Wikimedia Commons. This means that data from the Biodiversity Heritage Library, which uses a Creative Commons Non-Commercial Share-Alike license, could not be uploaded to Wikisource. For a thorough discussion of the effect of these licenses on biodiversity science, see Hagedorn et al. (2011).

While uploading images to the Commons is simple, reusing them in Wikisource can be tricky (a guide to this process — updated by us — is available on Wikisource: ). After setting up the Index page (Figure 2) and copying the transcriptions into Wikisource manually, we were ready to begin annotation.

Creating annotation templates

In Wikisource, annotations are best made through the use of templates. Templates are a feature of the MediaWiki software that allows one wiki page to be inserted into another. While usually used to embed common design elements across Wikipedia (such as the Unbalanced template, used to warn readers that an article might be unbalanced: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Unbalanced), they can also provide complex functionality, such as creating a standardized citation format (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Cite_journal) or calculating ages from birthdates. We developed our own templates to not only tag the elements of an occurrence record but also create links to other web resources.