Africa Growth Pilot/Online self-paced course/Module 2/What is Wikisource?

Let's talk about Wikisource: This is another way in which absolutely anyone can contribute. And Wikisource, I remind you, is a digital library. It contains whole texts, whole books, that are either public domain because their copyright has expired -- they are old books -- or they have somehow been released under a free license. For example, some academic works are available under a free license, even when they're from 2023. Some government works, like the US federal government's, are public domain to begin with.

And the way this library works is that you take the text, the source text, the book or the document; You scan it, meaning you create images from the pages; Then these scans are converted to text, converted from graphics, from pixels, to text, to characters, using software called OCR -- Optical Character Recognition -- which generates a text, with mistakes.

Then, because there are mistakes, we have humans, human volunteers -- that's us -- proofread the results of the optical character recognition and correct anything that the computer got wrong. That's the job. That's the work in Wikisource. Plus a little bit of organizing like categorizing, etc.

This is what Wikisource looks like. Let's take a live tour. This is the main page of Wikisource, and you can see that it has a featured text, like Wikipedia has a featured article, and it has a box that mentions a bunch of new texts. I wanted to show that you can browse Wikisource, for example, by period. If you're especially interested in texts from the Middle Ages -- the European Middle Ages -- you can click there. You can also browse by genre. If you're interested in horror stories, you can click the picture of Edgar Allan Poe and look for some horror stories, specifically. So it's a library, right? You can browse the library in a number of ways. You can search it.

Of course, once you click on some particular author, you get a list of their works, in this case the Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw. And if you click on one of the works, like Pygmalion, you have the actual full text of, in this case, the play Pygmalion.

It's just a text repository. This is the reader's experience. This is how someone interested in reading the texts in the library can browse Wikisource.