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Wikisource, The Free Library, is a Wikimedia project to build a free wiki library of primary source texts, along with translations of source-texts into any language and other supporting materials.
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History
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. "PS" was taken to mean either "primary sources" or "Project Sourceberg" by the contributors, who 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 domain (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 that same day.
Language subdomains
A separate Hebrew version of Wikisource (he.wikisource.org) was created in August, 2004. The need for a Hebrew website derived from the difficultly of typing and ing Hebrew texts in a left-to-right environment (Hebrew is a right-to-left language). 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 texts in each language to be hosted on their own wiki.
An initial wave of 15 languages was set up by Brion Vibber on August 26, 2005. The new languages did not include English, but the code "en:" was set to redirect to the main website (wikisource.org). The wikisource community prepared itself, through a mass project of sorting pages and categories by language, for a second wave of languages, including en:, which were created in September.
The community has requested that the main wikisource.org website remain a functioning wiki, to serve both as a multilingual coordination site for the entire Wikisource project in all languages, and well as a home for languages without their own subdomains. The Main Page at wikisource.org has been turned into a dynamic language portal, created by ThomasV based upon the Wikipedia portal. The new portal, created on August 26, 2005, also incorporates Wikisource's new slogan, The Free Library.
Logo
The current Wikisource logo (shown above) with a picture of an iceberg was selected because of the project's original name ("Project Sourceberg"). It has not attracted much enthusiasm since the change of name to "Wikisource." It is used because it is "the whole iceberg" and not just the tip which pokes over the surface of the water.
The iceberg logo is reminiscent of Sigmund Freud's use of an iceberg as an analogy to illustrate his concept of the unconscious mind.
Numerous suggestions for alternative logos were listed and shown at Wikisource:Logo, and a selection is expected to be made in the coming weeks or months.
See also
You can set an interwikimedia link through Metawikipedia like this m:wikisource:Main Page.
External links
- Multilingual Main Page Portal
- Current English Main Page
- Early discussions about the project
- A personal perspective on the History of Wikisource