Grants:IEG/Elaborate Wikisource strategic vision/Renewal


The "Wikisource Vision Development" project is poised to continue growing and achieving its goals. We are excitedly requesting a 6-month extension for phase 2 of the project.

Scope

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The scope of this second phase is focused on 3 goals:

  1. Wikidata and interproject integration
  2. Metadata system
  3. Community building

The goals are intertwined and seen as a framework: working on one will help reaching the other.

Wikidata and interproject integration

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This goal has for objective to make Wikidata really useful for Wikisourcian, improve collaboration with others project, and, by the way, help the build of an international Wikisource community per these commons project.

We have found three specific points where some low hanging fruits would really improve Wikisource:

Make the chosen representation for work/edition usable with some easy to use tools.
This is really needed as the current representation does not fit well with current Wikidata interface and so leads to important difficulties in his adoption. A possible realization may be to create a widget that would allow to easily create the work and the edition items at the same time.
Improve the connection between projects.
A specific action is maybe to add to the Wikibase extension a way to output an "Other project" section in the navigation panel based on Wikidata data as its currently done by a JavaScript hack in dozens of projects like itwikipedia or enwikisource. It would require a bit of refactoring in the Wikibase code with the help of the Wikidata development team but should be pretty easily doable. Moreover, we plan to ask the help of Multimedia team, which just released and interesting Multimedia Vision which integrated better Wikimedia content. in the first part of this IEG, we also set up a RfC for this topic: Requests_for_comment/Interproject_links_interface. There are other prototypes too to develop and discuss (see for example the proposed layout of Wikipedia Redefined, partly incorporated on Magnus's tool, and also Brandon Harris' Winter). As this is a very wide and important task, Google Summer of Code could be used to develop some different small parts of the final solution.
Make reuse of Wikidata data more easy.
We plan to develop two simple things:
  1. an external tool based on OAuth that would allow to easily clone Module pages between wikis in order to help people to build a basic set of cross-wiki modules.
  2. a set of Lua modules (presented as a MediaWiki extension) that would provide a nice and standardized way to manipulate Wikibase DataValues (date, coordinate…) in order to help the build of Modules manipulating such complicated data. Tpt is currently working on a prototype.

Metadata system

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This part goal is to build a powerful metadata system for Wikisource, basing on existing systems (mostly Proofread Page, BookManager, Wikidata and the possible future storage of Commons file metadata based on Wikibase system) that would allows to avoid as most as possible duplication, to have easy to use edit interfaces and to have powerful reuse system in order to help Wikisource integration in the library world.

Community building

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The team will continue in the work of building and fostering community coordination, both

  • between different language Wikisource communities
  • between different Wikimedia project communities

For example, the integration with Wikidata requires a lot of communication and knowledge exchange between differen communities (the growing Wikidata community, and the diverse Wikisource ones). We plan a budget of 2500 for scholarships for a Wikisource workshop at the Zurich Hackathon this year. We would like to host a meeting for Wikisourcerors, to coordinate and boost the Wikisource User Group.

Keep outreach efforts

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During the first IEG several contacts were initiated with other organizations. We'll keep building on this relationships and hopefully we can reach the point where Wikisource materials are interlinked/reused by other significant partners.


Budget

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This project might involve a big deal of traveling expenses to organize in-person meeting with external organizations and the presentation in Wikimania. All proponents reside in Europe. To cover these expenses, we request the allocation of 2000EUR per participant in a common fund that would be used as suited, and the remainders would be given back to the WMF once the project is over. We plan to use the travel funds to go to the Zurich Wikimedia Hackathon and London Wikimania, plus potential additional events.

Expense Approved amount Actual funds spent Difference
project leadership, to be divided equally among 3 grantees 6000 EUR
travel 4500 EUR
Scholarship funds for Wikisource event 2500 EUR
Total 13000 EUR


Rationale

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We need more time and work to grow community to the point that the Wikisource User Group can sustain beyond our own work. Moreover, we need time to finish various projects regarding Wikidata integration and the metadata system. Many things we started in the previous round were not implemented (see the BookManager extension) and we'll try to push them into implementation. Wikidata, for one, started the Wikisource integration in January 14th, after phase 1 was finished. Phase 2 will let us have time to follow this important step.

Measures of success

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  • At least 10 attendants at the Zurich Hackathon
  • The integration with Wikidata will be succesfull in at least 3 projects (meaning that we will push and coordinate to make all the communities stay on the same page).
  • The Wikisource Community User Group will be able to work and get funds on its own, outside the IEG..

Community comments

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WMF welcomes community input on renewal requests. Grantees, please notify your target community and post a link and date of this notification. Community members, please share your thoughts and feedback here, or on the talk page.

Endorsement by Wikimedia CH

next May, Wikimedia CH is organizing the Wikimedia Hackathon in Zurich. We are really enthusiastic to see a strong delegation of the Wikisource joining the event, in Switzerland we are building collaboration with the Swiss National Library, as well as with Human Digitalities Professor. We believe the Hackathon can be a major step for Wikisource Outreach in the academic world, and for once not only at the "user level" (academics uplaoding data) but really at the "maker level", by reaching people who area actively building open source platform. --Charles Andrès (WMCH) 09:29, 3 March 2014 (UTC)