   #copyright

Wikisource

2007 Schools Wikipedia Selection. Related subjects: Websites and the Internet

   CAPTION: Wikisource

   The current Wikisource logo
       URL      http://www.wikisource.org/
   Commercial?  No
   Type of site Source text repository
   Registration Optional
      Owner     Wikimedia Foundation
    Created by  the Wikimedia Community
   The original Wikisource logo.
   Enlarge
   The original Wikisource logo.

   Wikisource — The Free Library — is a Wikimedia project to build a free,
   wiki library of source texts, along with translations into any language
   and other supporting materials. It is located at Wikisource.org.

Library contents

   Wikisource 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   constitutional and historical documents, laws and a range of other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 free of copyright, either because
   this has expired or because the text has been released under a 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.

History

   Wikisource had an eventful early history that included several changes
   of name and location (URL), and the move to language subdomains. The
   following sections explain these changes as well as the subsequent,
   more recent history of the project.

Beginnings

   Wikisource was originally called Project Sourceberg during its planning
   stages (a play on words for Project Gutenberg).

   The project 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. 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.

   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 subdomains

   A 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. The new languages did not include English, but the code en:
   was temporarily set to redirect to the main website ( wikisource.org).
   The wikisource community, through a mass project of manually sorting
   thousands of pages and categories by language, prepared for a second
   wave of languages, including the English version, which were created on
   September 11, 2005.

Milestones

   4 January 2004
          Wikisource welcomes its 100th user.

   27 November 2005
          The English Wikisource passed 20,000 text-units in its third
          month of existence, already holding more texts than did the
          entire project in April (before the move to language
          subdomains).

   Retrieved from " http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikisource"
   This reference article is mainly selected from the English Wikipedia
   with only minor checks and changes (see www.wikipedia.org for details
   of authors and sources) and is available under the GNU Free
   Documentation License. See also our Disclaimer.
