Wikisource
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Categories: Articles lacking reliable references from June 2007 | All articles lacking sources | Internet properties established in 2003 | Digital libraries | Wikimedia projects | Wikis
Wikisource is a Wikimedia project to build a free, wiki library of source texts, along with translations into any language and other supporting materials.
Library contentsWikisource collects and stores in digital format previously published texts; including novels, non-fiction works, letters, speeches, constitutional and historical documents, laws and a range of other documents. All texts collected are either free of copyright or released under the GNU Free Documentation License. Texts in all languages are welcome, as are translations. Wikisource does not host "vanity press" books or documents produced by its contributors. Early historyWikisource had an eventful early history (2003-2005) that included several changes of name and location (URL), and the move to language subdomains in 2005. The project was originally called Project Sourceberg during its planning stages (a play on words for Project Gutenberg). It then began its activity at a mistaken location, when source texts were placed at ps.wikipedia.org. The contributors understood "PS" to mean either "primary sources" or Project Sourceberg, and they erroneously took over the subdomain of the Pashto language's Wikipedia. Project Sourceberg started officially when it received its own temporary URL on November 24 2003 (http://sources.wikipedia.org); 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 URL (at http://wikisource.org) 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. On January 4, 2004, Wikisource welcomed its 100th registered user. In early July, 2004 the number of articles exceeded 2400, and more than 500 users had registered. On April 30 2005, there were 2667 registered users (including 18 administrators) and almost 19,000 articles. The project passed its 96,000th edit that same day. Language subdomainsA separate Hebrew version of Wikisource (he.wikisource.org) was created in August 2004. The need for a language-specific Hebrew website derived from the difficulty of typing and editing Hebrew texts in a left-to-right environment (Hebrew is written right-to-left). In the ensuing months, contributors in other languages including German requested their own wikis, but a December vote on the creation of separate language domains was inconclusive. Finally, a second vote that ended May 12 2005 supported the adoption of separate language subdomains at Wikisource by a large margin, allowing each language to host its texts on its own wiki. An initial wave of 14 languages was set up by Brion Vibber on August 23 2005[1]. The new languages did not include English, but the code en: was temporarily set to redirect to the main website (wikisource.org). At this point the Wikisource community, through a mass project of manually sorting thousands of pages and categories by language, prepared for a second wave of page imports to local wikis. On September 11, 2005 the wikisource.org wiki was reconfigured to enable the English version, along with 8 other languages that were created early that morning and late the night before.[2] Three more languages were created on March 29, 2006,[3] and then another large wave of 14 language domains was created on June 2, 2006.[4] Currently, there are individual subdomains for Wikisources in 50 languages,[5] besides the additional languages hosted at wikisource.org, which serves as an incubator or a home for languages without their own subdomains (31 languages are currently hosted locally) wikisource.orgDuring the move to language subdomains, the community requested that the main wikisource.org website remain a functioning wiki, in order to serve three purposes:
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