2019:Meetups/Wikisource

This is the meetup for everyone interested in Wikisource or already active on the project!

Note : 2019:Transcription (where there will be a lot of Wikisource related talks) is the day after on Sunday 18 August.

• When? Friday, 16 August, 2019 - 22:00 to 23:00
• Where? Room Etta

Minutes

The main goal of the meetup was to discuss with each other (maybe in small groups for the second half of the hour depending on the subjects: technical, WCUG, Wikisource Conference, etc.).

1. Suggestion: There is a bug, existing since January, that prevents creation of new wiki's (This affects the entire foundation, as no new wiki's can be created until this bug is solved, but we also now have two language Wikisources waiting nearly a year to be created). I suggest our representatives raise awareness for this issue (that affects the entire foundation) at the meetup, and at Wikimania in general.
   • This is general issue for the movement, but was not considered all that relevant for the Wikisource community at the moment.
2. LA2 (Lars) asked the question of what we actually need works on Wikisource for. What is the utility? What direction are we heading for?
   • General discussion followed with multiple examples of usages, such as providing annotated editions, spreading knowledge about under-represented groups (women, minorities), etc.
3. Discussion about the effectiveness of Tesseract as an OCR tool on Wikisource.
   • One of the problems is that there is there is no active workflows for providing feedback from proofread text to develop software to improve its output. One of the issues is that some Latin-script languages have seen more orthographic change than others over time (English and German have changed less; Swedish and Polish have changed more). Tesseract overall also does a worse job of reading Latin Fraktur script, and has problems with non-Latin scripts.
4. Asaf volunteered to contact TECH PEOPLE to start up a tech committee to start developing tools for Wikisource.
5. Question about whether .dvju or PDF was the most relevant source file format for working with texts.
   • General discussion that indicated that there are still different practices on various projects, and that there are still weaknesses with either format.
6. Satdeep Gill (Punjabi Wikisource) volunteered to start a list of the various gadgets that are used on different Wikisource. General agreement that there has been a lot of insularity regarding the tech tools used on different Wikisource versions.
7. LA2 informed everyone about a tool for comparing translations in multiple languages.
   • At the Wikimedia CEE (Central and Eastern Europe) meeting in September 2017 in Warszaw, LA2 presented how he used Wikisource texts for example sentences in Wiktionary. Video and text are found at m:User:LA2/Corpus.
8. Satdeep made a general request to everyone to inform him about Wikisource-related activities that they've worked on, for example GLAM outreach, projects, campaigns, etc.

Agenda points not discussed

• Communication: what? how? who? which channel? (mail list, Telegram, the new Wikimedia Space?)

Interested Participants

• VIGNERON (talk)
• Ankry (talk)
• Bodhisattwa (talk) 18:23, 21 July 2019 (UTC)
• Mardetanha (talk) 18:46, 21 July 2019 (UTC)
• Balajijagadesh (talk)
• Atudu (talk) 08:43, 23 July 2019 (UTC)
• LA2 (talk)
• Jon Harald Søby (talk) 10:52, 31 July 2019 (UTC)
• Peter Isotalo (talk) 18:30, 10 August 2019 (UTC)
• Pmlineditor (talk) 18:36, 13 August 2019 (UTC)
• Asaf (WMF) (talk) 14:08, 16 August 2019 (UTC)
• Rich Farmbrough (talk)
• Ruthven (talk)