Wikisource talk:Community collaboration/2018


 * See also the Archive Index.

Sikhism
Looking at Portal:Sikhism and Category:Sikhism we have almost nothing on the world's fifth largest religion. Is there community interest in adding texts, and do we have members with enough knowledge and drive to locate suitable texts for inclusion? If we can assemble a better list of works at the Portal, with links to quality scans at IA, then this looks like a good subject area to tackle. --EncycloPetey (talk) 17:11, 3 October 2017 (UTC)


 * I could be interested in this, though I know nothing about Sikhism and Sikh texts. —Beleg Tâl (talk) 03:38, 4 January 2018 (UTC)
 * I know little myself, but did find some scans of histories, which are linked at the Portal. --EncycloPetey (talk) 03:41, 4 January 2018 (UTC)
 * I've started a small list at User:Beleg Tâl/Sandbox/Sikh. It looks like The Sikh Religion is the most important English work on the subject. —Beleg Tâl (talk) 15:12, 4 January 2018 (UTC)
 * Given that it is six volumes long, we might select just that one work for the Community Collab. --EncycloPetey (talk) 15:18, 4 January 2018 (UTC)
 * Agreed. —Beleg Tâl (talk) 15:43, 4 January 2018 (UTC)
 * I've had a chance to look through some of this and am very disappointed by the poor quality of the scans. The images in particular would be almost worthless. Unless we can find better scans, I'm not sure it's worth proceeding with The Sikh Religion. --EncycloPetey (talk) 02:03, 28 April 2018 (UTC)


 * Volume I
 * Volume II
 * Volume III
 * Volume IV
 * Volume V
 * Volume VI
 * The scans look fine to me, though I only sampled a few pages. The Img page on vol 1 and vol 6 both look sufficient for our purposes. Are there examples of problems, such as worthless images, that would make these scans unusable? —Beleg Tâl (talk) 11:05, 28 April 2018 (UTC)
 * I think the scans are sufficient, readable, and the images no better or worse than other projects—unless I have overlooked something. I would be willing to help out some, time permitting. Londonjackbooks (talk) 11:55, 28 April 2018 (UTC)
 * The new scans are much better than the ones proposed before. I think this 6-volume work will go up next month unless someone objects. --EncycloPetey (talk) 14:58, 28 April 2018 (UTC)
 * It's too bad this didn't get more effort. It looks like it was up a few months with little done. Unfortunately, some of the objections above misunderstand the point of community collaboration, it's precisely to work on things like finding scans, finding better scans, image work, etc.
 * In any case, I'm closing this 6 year old discussion and archiving it.--DeirdreAnne(talk • contribs) 00:42, 24 June 2024 (UTC)

Karl Marx
2018 is the 200th birthday of Author:Karl Marx, whose writings became hugely influential in 20th century philosophy and politics. Yet we are missing many of his well-known works, and those we do have are cut-and-paste from other websites.

Three questions: (a) Is there enough community interest in transcribing his works? (b) If not, would we want to try a short run in the hopes of attracting newcomers to help? (c) Are there enough available scans to support transcription? I had trouble locating scans even through IA. --EncycloPetey (talk) 00:16, 4 January 2018 (UTC)


 * I'd support this as a community collab, but I'm not likely to contribute as his works don't interest me. If there are a couple of very short works, I could probably take care of those. —Beleg Tâl (talk) 03:37, 4 January 2018 (UTC)
 * Scan backing The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon using would be an option. MarkLSteadman (talk) 00:49, 24 June 2024 (UTC)
 * Wow, a comment replying after 6-1/2 years!
 * My concern would be that most of Marx's works are available from marxism.org. They don't have scans backing them there but it's not like they're not generally available for anyone looking. Getting some scans to back the works we have is not a bad idea though. But let's close this thread rather than doing necromancy here and start a new one. I was just going through archiving some of these old discussions. DeirdreAnne(talk • contribs) 01:09, 24 June 2024 (UTC)

Banned books
Looking a long time into the future here, but maybe in conjunction with Banned Books Week in September, we might see if we could add a few more banned or challenged works in the PD here and make them a collaboration. Maybe. There are books listing those works which have been banned or challenged somewhere that I could consult if anyone thought the idea a good one. John Carter (talk) 20:42, 24 February 2018 (UTC)
 * It's an interesting idea, but we've always lacked a suitable list from which to pick. More often, we've selected just one such work for PotM. --EncycloPetey (talk) 20:47, 24 February 2018 (UTC)
 * I will try to get together a list. I forgotten initially about the Vatican's index, but if I can get a listing of everything in it and books challenged elsewhere I think it might well wind up really, really long. John Carter (talk) 22:14, 24 February 2018 (UTC)
 * One could potentially tackle this by choosing an existing list (preferably one that we could host directly, such as the Vatican index), and then collect works on that index. —Beleg Tâl (talk) 22:43, 24 February 2018 (UTC)
 * I contacted the National Library of Norway which has a searchable database of 50,000 entries in several languages for their list of PD English works. If anyone wanted to contact the WMF and see if it might have interest in taking this on across languages and publicizing an at least theoretical attempt to do this, that might draw more interest and activity here.John Carter (talk) 16:20, 26 February 2018 (UTC)

George Sand
I've noted before (elsewhere) that we have nothing at all by George Sand. We don't have any of her novels, nor a biography. In fact our coverage of French literature in general is very poor, but we have to start somewhere.

We have other proposals above, but most of them need more work to become feasible, and I'd want to hold off on doing yet more biographies, injecting a variety into the Community Collab. We've also had our current collaboration for six months now, so it feels like it's time to push on. People can still work on the Eminent Women Series, but I think we ought to change our front page advertising at this point. --EncycloPetey (talk) 02:37, 26 March 2018 (UTC).

Probably flawed idea
I think most of the people who consider coming here to edit come from wikipedia. Over there, you can generally take something from nonexistent to a high standard of quality on just a few days, and make substantive improvements to a finished product on your own in hours or less. It is rather harder to do the same thing here. Maybe one way we might be able to be seen as more appealing to that somewhat ADD crowd might be to make a future collaboration be a combination of full books and shorter works, like encyclopedia and journal articles and other shorter works, possibly all relating to a single sort of broad topic. It might be useful if we could maybe get the main page to feature more works, maybe something along the lines of a wikipedia portal, which could feature poems or essays or articles as well as full books, possibly with all of them relating to a specific topic. Like maybe a particular writer. Of course, that would involve a lot more work on main page maintenance, and that might be problematic, but it might be possible to preselect some texts in advance, like I did with some of the content of some wikipedia portals, and maybe set up a rotation which could have new items included by having the next higher number. That would be a hell of a lot of work, but it might get more people involved. John Carter (talk) 18:58, 6 April 2018 (UTC)
 * We tried that. It worked well once (see Thoreau), but has failed miserably other times we tried it (see King Edw. VII). Any collaborations depend on people staying active in them, and even over there, most of the collaborations that happened years ago have disappeared, except in very small, highly specialized communities with active membership.


 * I question your assertion about how most people come here, and about making substantive improvements there, but not here, but that's a separate discussion. I'm also not sure whether you're talking about Featured works, or the Monthly collaboration, or this Community collaboration. I'm also not sure why a change would be needed. Our current collaboration has been very successful. --EncycloPetey (talk) 20:17, 6 April 2018 (UTC)