What is Wikisource?

Wikisource, Wikipedia’s sister project, is a free human-curated online digital library. It hosts out-of-copyright & public domain texts, and also CC-Zero, CC-BY and CC-BY-SA licensed texts.

Wikipedia, the free online encyclopedia is the 5th most popular website in the world, but there are a number of other Open Knowledge projects supported by Wikimedia.

Wikisource is a free human-curated online digital library. It hosts out-of-copyright & public domain texts (also CC-Zero, CC-BY and CC-BY-SA licensed texts).

Wikisource is a digital repository of novels, short stories, plays, poems, songs, letters, travel writing, non-fiction texts, speeches, news articles, constitutional documents, court rulings, obituaries, eulogies and various other texts.

How does it work?

Pdf or Djvu page scans are uploaded first to Wikimedia Commons, the free media repository, before being transcribed through Optical Character Recognition software (OCR) onto Wikisource in a searchable HTML format which is then proofread by two different Wikisource users for quality assurance.

The result is an online text library which is free to anyone to read with the added benefits that the text is quality assured, completely searchable and downloadable (pdf, epub & mobi formats available).

Linked Open Data

On Robert Louis Stevenson’s page  on Wikipedia, you will find

1. A link to his out of copyright texts on Wikisource.
2. A link to open-licensed images of Robert Louis Stevenson hosted on Wikimedia Commons.
3. A link in the left hand menu to Robert Louis Stevenson’s Wikidata page, where structured linked open data is stored about him.

Further Reading

Shiver-inducing contacts with the past – Martin Poulter, University of Oxford on Wikisource in CILIP Update November 2015 (338.37 KB PDF)