{"id":1105,"date":"2009-08-06T20:01:34","date_gmt":"2009-08-07T00:01:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.law.harvard.edu\/sj\/?p=1105"},"modified":"2009-08-20T02:32:47","modified_gmt":"2009-08-20T06:32:47","slug":"apprentices-and-wikisourcerors","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sj\/2009\/08\/06\/apprentices-and-wikisourcerors\/","title":{"rendered":"Apprentices and Wikisourcerors"},"content":{"rendered":"

As with being a Wikipedian, being a Wikisourceror <\/strong>is a mindset, a view of the world: a compulsion to make source materials freely available for cleaning up, review, annotation and translation, a sense of how they would be used in other educational works.<\/p>\n

I have this bug, for databases and for books.\u00a0 But I haven’t indulged it much — I have contributed sporadically to Wikisource, mainly tiny works in English and Nahuatl<\/strong><\/a>, but nothing significant.\u00a0 The largest work I’ve gotten copyright release for, the Whole Earth Catalog<\/strong>, I haven’t managed to digitize.\u00a0 So I am still an apprentice, and can not speak definitively about what it means to be a wikisourceror.\u00a0 But I want to share a story about someone I met who clearly has this spirit, and has gotten his students to work together on wiki-style projects to make their classroom work available to the rest of the world.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Greg Crane<\/strong> is a Classicist.\u00a0 He oversees a major digital classics project<\/a> at Tufts, and works as scribe and researcher, poring over, transcribing, translating, cross-referencing, annotating and discussing Greek, Latin, and Arabic texts from antiquity.\u00a0 Two months ago he organized a “Wikipedia portal workshop<\/a>” with Maura Marx<\/strong> of the Open Knowledge Commons to discuss how to make the digital scans of public domain works, available through the Million Book Project<\/strong>, more useful to Wikipedia.\u00a0 Mathias<\/a> was invited to present, and I joined the discussion.<\/p>\n

Greg makes some strong points about public collaboration on source materials being a natural extension of academic research — but one that hasn’t been realized through cramped private work areas and a narrow view of who should be able to participate in such work.\u00a0 Despite this, undergraduate and graduate classics students have been doing detailed work for a long time, many of them wishing they could work on a ‘real’ project that would be reused, not just an assignment.\u00a0 [The same could be said about most fields, I reckon.]<\/p>\n

Combining this broad collection of apprentice scholars with broad tasks that seem difficult for any small group to accomplish is rewarding for everyone involved.\u00a0 This isn’t “using people’s shirk-y time<\/a>” for a productive end – it means providing a learning environment in which the work you do to practice your art is available and vaulable to others who might chip in.<\/p>\n

I transcribed<\/a> the day-long workshop.\u00a0 Some good ideas and quotes <\/strong>came out of it – worth a browse, though it’s long.<\/p>\n

Some of the ideas surfaced on the wikisource<\/a> and openlibrary<\/a> mailing lists in a recent thread (1<\/a>, 2<\/a>).<\/p>\n

And Greg and Maura visited the Wikimedia offices earlier this week (I happened to be there later that day); I’ll be interested to see what comes of those conversations as well.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

As with being a Wikipedian, being a Wikisourceror is a mindset, a view of the world: a compulsion to make source materials freely available for cleaning up, review, annotation and translation, a sense of how they would be used in other educational works. I have this bug, for databases and for books.\u00a0 But I haven’t […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1202,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1105","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p7iVvB-hP","jetpack-related-posts":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1105","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1202"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1105"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1105\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1114,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1105\/revisions\/1114"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1105"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1105"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1105"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}