Wikimedian in Residence

Using Wikisource with Library and University Collections

The role that Wikisource can play in improving awareness of and engagement with collections within Library and University Collections is significant. Discover the ways in which the University can increase the reach of its collections nationally, and globally.

Libraries are about freedom. Freedom to read, freedom of ideas, freedom of communication. They are about education (which is not a process that finishes the day we leave school or university), about entertainment, about making safe spaces, and about access to information.

Neil Gaiman, 2013

Wikisource resources from the National Library of Scotland

 

Scanning texts

The material on Wikisource should ideally be proofread from a scan of the original, physical text: a book, magazine, newspaper, etc. The first step in this process is therefore scanning and digitising the text in the first place.

Image extraction

Advice for texts containing images.

Wikipedia and Libraries - Interview with Digital Curator, Gavin Willshaw

Video: Wikipedia and Libraries - Interview with Digital Curator, Gavin Willshaw
Gavin Willshaw is the Digital Curator of the University of Edinburgh. In March 2018, he was interviewed about his experiences editing Wikipedia, adding image collections to Wikimedia Commons, adding openly-licensed texts to Wikisource, and running his own editing event in his spare time at his local library in Portobello. Wikipedia page for Dr Thomas John Jehu FRSE FGS (1871 – 18 July 1943) who was a British physician and geologist. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_John_Jehu PhD thesis by Dr Thomas John Jehu added to Wikisource, Wikipedia's sister project, the free digital hyper library. https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Some_problems_in_variation_and_heredity

Wikisource and Wikibooks: Open education on Wikipedia's sister projects - Martin Poulter at OER16 

Video: Wikisource and Wikibooks: Open education on Wikipedia’s sister projects - Martin Poulter at OER16
This presentation by Martin Poulter, Wikimedian in Residence at the Bodleian Library, is a critical look inside some of Wikipedia’s sister projects. Wikipedia is successful as a highly-used open resource and as a productive community, but its format restricts it to a narrow concept of educational resource. An enormous amount of research has been published about Wikipedia, but the other Wikimedia projects, are less well-known. We will look at Wikibooks as a platform and community for creating open textbooks, Wikidata as a source of open data for educational resources and Wikisource as a way to add educational value to historic texts. All these sites have “Edit” buttons and depend on users to build, evaluate, and repurpose open content. Like Wikipedia, Wikibooks has been used in formal education as a platform for students to create their own textbooks (Kidd (2008), Lin (2009)). Each of these sites/communities has identifiable strengths and weaknesses, and each can be adapted by its users for an educational purpose. OER16: Open Culture 19th & 20th April 2016, University of Edinburgh, UK The 7th Open Educational Resources Conference, OER16: Open Culture, was held on the 19th-20th April 2016 at the University of Edinburgh.

Presentation by Martin Poulter on Wikibooks and Wikisource.

 

© Ewan McAndrew and Erin Boyle, University of Edinburgh, 2021, CC BY-SA 4.0, unless otherwise indicated.