Wikisource talk:What is Wikisource?

Linking to other sites
Though I certainly think we should develop an extensive body of source text and material for Wikipedia and other sites to link to, I do not think we should abhor making links to other sites with more extensive material prominent on the pages (as is currently occuring on the page for Prime Numbers and perhaps even in many of the introductory notes. I believe we should be a source of many major and important text documents even if they are available elsewhere on the internet, especially if we can provide some form of useful alternative formats; that we should of course provide links to Wikipedia, and provide a place where many public domain or GFDL documents that are not available or difficult to find on the internet can be provided. (I am at work at providing some text of this sort by George Eliot and some others, but have only been able to apply myself sporadically to formatting and proofreading these, because of other activities and duties.) I think Wikisource, in collaboration with Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects can thus become a primary and preferred Nexus for many people to access many types of information. Kalki 19:59, 17 Dec 2003 (UTC)

Snapshots in time
An idea that I had would be to include in Wikisource snapshots of Wikibook projects after they reach a point that the content reached a "publishable" quality. This could be useful in posting milestones on a Wikibook's life. --Bobwinmill 05:45, 15 September 2005 (UTC)

Exclusion of original works
What's the difference between "Source texts previously published by any author" (which is allowed) and "Original writings by a contributor to the project" (which is not allowed)? They seem to overlap. In other words, if I have written an article and published it on my own web site, and I want to also put it on Wikisource, can I do that? Or do I have to get someone else to do it for me?

Also, under "What do we exclude?" someone asked this question:


 * Question: can original published works be placed under wikisource by a contributor to the project? What if a well-known author wanted to contribute previously published material to wikisource (under the GFDL of course).

I have moved that question here since it basically is the same as what I'm asking. Can someone please clarify what original works are and aren't allowed? &mdash; Mjb 18:08, 27 September 2005 (UTC)

Is adding links to appropriate wikipedia articles encouraged?--66.108.189.241 05:22, 9 November 2005 (UTC)
 * Yes, see Help:Wikification and Wikisource and the lengthy ongoing discussion on Scriptorium Apwoolrich 08:56, 9 November 2005 (UTC)

I am not translation
because I am korean and I am student In the middle school so I don't translation please traslation the korean.. I always use the Korean wikisource Rlagmlrn4u 04:28, 22 July 2008 (UTC)
 * This does not make sense. Please re-ask the question, or ask one of your Korean wikisource collegues to translate your request into English. Thank you. John Vandenberg (chat) 10:29, 22 July 2008 (UTC)
 * Ok. Thank you Rlagmlrn4u 11:13, 22 July 2008 (UTC)

Two Books written in 1880
Have the text (English and Spanish), and pictures of two books: "Archaeological Research in Nicaragua" published in 1881 by Dr. J.F. Bransford, former U.S. Navy assistant surgeon and researcher of the Smithsonian Institution, Washington D.C. 1881. Judd & Detweiler.

and

"Nicaraguan Antiquities" published in 1886 by Professor Carl Bovallius, Member of the Swedish Anthropology and Geography Society. Stockholm 1886. Kongl. Boktryckeriet. P.A. Norstedt & Söner.

Would like to know what is the approach to include them here.

My user name is Gumr51 (sorry I am not logged in)
 * The first step is determining if it meets the inclusion policy. Since your texts were published before 1923, they may be added. Do you have scans of the original books? If so, what format? The preferred method is to upload the scans in djvu format so the text can be proofread and validated. See Help:Side by side image view for proofreading and Help:Beginner's guide to Index: files for more information. If you do not have scans of the original book, you can still add the text and pictures. For more information on that process, see Help:Adding texts. If you have any questions, feel free to ask me or the community in the Scriptorium. Cheers, stephen (talk) 19:27, 5 October 2010 (UTC)
 * This .djvu file, "Nicaraguan Antiquities". from Internet archive will have machine read text, probably very accurate. See Help:Adding images or request someone to help with that. cygnis insignis 23:29, 5 October 2010 (UTC)

Yes, I have scanned the text and pictures, the full text and pictures for "Archaeological Research in Nicaragua" published in 1881 by Dr. J.F. Bransford is about 65 pages (MS Word 2010), "Nicaraguan Antiquities" published in 1886 by Professor Carl Bovallius is about 26 pages.

I will read the links you suggest and then go to your user page and start a dialogue there, to see how can I get this done. Thank you. Raúl Gutiérrez (talk) 15:40, 6 October 2010 (UTC)

"WikisourceLeaks"
That was the name of a workshop that did NOT happen at Wikimania 2012 (and it explicitly was about reusing "public information published by the public authorities.”) Still, I have been wondering what would happen if someone tried to a) upload material available from the Wikileaks site, perhaps related documents on some topic or other or B) upload 400 cablegrams or emails or documents leaked from some private or government source, especially if there wasn't any copy right or proprietary notice on it. I guess there's no reason to comment on it in this project page unless suddenly a bunch of people started trying to do it. But it may be a question people have or want to discuss here. Carolmooredc (talk) 01:14, 27 July 2012 (UTC)


 * As for B, copyright notices don't matter for modern material; in the US, anything published since 1989 has not needed one. That's published, also, so older unpublished documents not from the US federal government are under copyright for life+70.
 * Being on Wikileaks is not an absolute bar to publishing on Wikisource, but I believe there's a rough consensus that we should not be mass-uploading material, even US government material, from Wikileaks to Wikisource.--Prosfilaes (talk) 09:59, 27 July 2012 (UTC)
 * This was also brought up on a mailing list and I am copying the relevant bits of my response. Also the attached page is sort of an intro or an about page, the real policy page for inclusion is What Wikisource includes fondly refered to by the shortcut WWI.

Here is the main archived discussion:

http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Wikisource:Scriptorium/Archives/2011-01#Wikileaks_collection_of_cables

The Scriptorium also has a search tool for the archives near the top of the main page if you want look for more.

Without re-reading any of the discussion (and therefore I could only be remembering my personal thoughts here), I recall that the main issue was less philosophical than practical. Do you plan on actually curating the the XYZ documents that you wish to see on en.WS? Will you arrange them, add contextual links, watchlist them, and stick around? Or do you think just they should exist on en.WS and wish to arrange a duplicate dump of them and the rest of the cables into someone else's lap?

Discussing this as the "Wikileaks cables" tends to end up with en.WS, or at least myself, balking at being treated as if it were a dumping ground *yet again*. It carries the baggage of all the energy spent (still to be spent) cleaning the bot assisted dumps from en.WP back-in-the-day, the energy spent resisting those who wanted to insist that someone-besides-themselves kept and curated n digits of Pi, the energy spent going researching the copyright of grey area bulk content that was uploaded and abandoned. It tends to be a negative discussion.

However if you find some documents that you want to raise up on en.WS. Texts that inspire you to stick around, are free content, and otherwise fit the inclusion guidelines. I don't think the fact that the document happened to be a "Wikileaks cable" should be deal-breaker. But I would frame the discussion with *that* focus, about a small group of documents that you want to work on which happen to have this affiliation. No guarantees, but that is how I would approach it if I was interested in working on that sort of thing.


 * Anyways those are my thoughts.--Birgitte SB  18:01, 2 August 2012 (UTC)

texts excluded from Wikisource...suggestions and guidance as to where they should go
Stating what should NOT be posted to WikiSource is a baby step. Let's expand upon this and provide some direction as to where materials of this type should be posted. Some basic criteria for texts excluded from Wikisource are:
 * 1) Copyright infringements
 * 2) Original writings by a contributor to the project
 * 3) Mathematical data, formulae, and tables
 * 4) Source code (for computers)
 * 5) Statistical source data (such as election results)

Or perhaps it's time to provide more detail to these descriptions. CmdrDan (talk) 21:36, 25 February 2018 (UTC)

Are current year articles from free news-sites in scope of Wikisources?
Is article content from w:List of major Creative Commons licensed works sites and other formal publishing websites suitable for an entry in Wikisources? Currently Category:Newspapers do not list many pages. Vis M (talk) 09:58, 10 September 2021 (UTC)

Page needs improvement
Compare this page to w:Wikipedia:About and wikt:Wiktionary:About. I feel like we should talk a little more about what Wikisource actually is, in the basic introductory sense, rather than listing some policies and principles (and not even all of the important ones) in a somewhat scattered manner.

I think the protection and NPOV sections should be moved elsewhere, since they don't feel like they belong with the rest (the protection one also seems outdated). "What do we include and exclude at Wikisource?" feels too much like a red-tape list of rules than a welcoming introduction, and just listing what we do include would be enough here. The exclusions are important to editors but should be put in a page more related to editing guidance.

On this page, I think we should casually introduce transcriptions, author pages, portals, the transcription process, exports, etc. Another thing I'd love to be thrown in there are some practical use cases for Wikisource, since this is a fundamental question that I oddly enough even ask myself at times, even to this day.

I feel like the main focus of this page should be defining what we host and do in a friendly manner, comparing us to similar communities, etc. A lot of the content feels irrelevant to this end. See also Welcome, a page I had no idea about until just now. Do you have any thoughts on this? SnowyCinema (talk) 17:44, 15 April 2024 (UTC)