Wikisource:What is Wikisource? - Wikisource
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Important project pages:
What is Wikisource?
Wikisource and Wikibooks
Votes
Copyright policy
Possible copyright violations
Proposed deletions
Cataloging
Wikisource and Project Gutenberg
Language policy
Language domain requests
Language domain requests/Rules for voting
Active tests
List of Wikisource Languages
العربية
català
česky
dansk
Ελληνικά
Gaeilge
galego
עברית
Hrvatski
հայերեն
italiano
한국어
Latina
Nederlands
polski
português
Runa Simi
română
Русский
suomi
Српски / Srpski
svenska
Türkçe
Volapük
中文
Edit
Other languages:
Bahasa Melayu
Tiếng Việt
dansk
norsk bokmål
polski
svenska
ગુજરાતી
ပအိုဝ်ႏဘာႏသာႏ
ဘာသာမန်
မြန်မာဘာသာ
中文
閩東語 / Mìng-dĕ̤ng-ngṳ̄
This page attempts to define what Wikisource is, what it is not, and what distinguishes it from other Wikimedia projects. The descriptions on this page are relatively
brief
. Detailed discussion or debate should happen on the talk page.
History
Wikisource
was originally called "
Project Sourceberg
" during its planning stages (a play on words for "
Project Gutenberg
").
The project began its activity when source texts were placed at
ps.wikipedia.org
. "PS" was taken to mean either
"primary sources"
or "Project Sourceberg" by the contributors, who erroneously took over the subdomain of the
Pashto language
Wikipedia!
Project Sourceberg
started officially when it received its own temporary URL on November 24, 2003 (
); all texts and discussions were moved there from
ps.wikipedia.org
. A vote on the project's name changed it to
Wikisource
on December 6, 2003. Despite the change in name, the project did not move to its permanent domain (at
) until
July 23, 2004
Within two weeks of the project's official start (at sources.wikipedia.org), over 1000 pages had been created, with approximately 200 of these being designated as actual articles. At the start of 2004, the site had 100 registered users. In early July 2004, the number of articles exceeded 2400, and more than 500 users had registered.
vote
that ended May 12, 2005 supported the adoption of separate language subdomains at Wikisource, allowing texts in each language to be hosted on their own wiki. These language subdomains were set up in June 2005. On May 18, shortly after the vote's conclusion, Wikisource reached 20,000 articles.
See also:
Meta's article on Wikisource
(pre-launch discussions)
Wikipedia's article on Wikisource
(should be updated to include a full history)
A personal historical perspective on Wikisource from its very beginnings
(this contains links to many historical documents)
Languages and translations
Wikisource is a multilingual project. Texts and translations of texts are welcome in all languages that have no own subdomain.
It is important to link and classify texts and translations so that they will be as accessible as possible to everybody.
For information on languages and translations, please see:
Language policy
For information on creating a subdomain (xx.wikisource.org) in your language, please see:
Language domain requests
Language domain requests/Rules for voting
Language domain requests/Moving pages to language domains
What do we include?
Some things we
include
are:
Source texts
previously published by any author
Translations
of original texts
Historical documents
of national or international interest
Bibliographies
of authors whose works are in Wikisource
Contributions are not limited to this list, of course.
What do we exclude?
Some basic criteria for texts
excluded
from Wikisource are:
Copyright infringements
Original writings
by a contributor to the project
These are just the most basic, obvious things that are excluded from Wikisource. There may of course be other things excluded by policy or convention.
Wikisource and other Wikimedia projects
Wikisource or Wikibooks?
The distinction between these two projects is relatively easy.
Wiki
source
focuses on material published elsewhere.
Wikisource
can be viewed as a library of public domain works.
Wiki
books
are
instructional materials
written
by the contributors themselves
(e.g. study guides, classroom textbooks, and annotated texts).
See
Wikisource and Wikibooks
for additional information.
Wikisource or Wikipedia?
While Wikipedia is an
encyclopedia
, Wikisource is a
library
. Wikipedia contains articles
about
books, while Wikisource includes the book
itself
. To some extent both may include bibliographical material about the author.
Protecting pages
The wiki pages on most Wikimedia projects are designed to evolve forever. Typical examples are Wikipedia articles or Wikibooks study guides.
By contrast, Wikisource is a library of static texts that have already been published elsewhere. In many or most cases, these texts are not meant to change and evolve, and it would deeply hurt their integrity if they did! Therefore, it has been suggested Wikisource policy to "protect" pages from editing (once they are thought to be correctly formatted and error-free). Comments about needed changes or corrections can always be made on the talk page.
In this way, Wikisource is more similar to Wikinews, which "protects" the pages in its news archives for historical integrity.
NPOV
eutral
oint
iew is a major policy rule applicable to all projects in the Wikimedia family. There is no need for the original texts themselves to reflect a NPOV. As long as we are faithfully reproducing them, and crediting them we are not in violation of NPOV. Nevertheless, putting emphasis on certain parts of the text, or reproducing only certain parts of the text could be seen as acts that express a particular point of view.
Introductory and other explanatory material should always be written with NPOV in mind.
Copyrights
Copyright rules apply to Wikisource as much as to any other Wikimedia project, so they
must
be kept in mind.
For a thorough treatment of copyright, please see:
Wikisource:Copyright
Wikisource:Possible copyright violations
(a place to list suspected violations)
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