Wikisource Community User Group/2014 Report

• WMCON '14: On 12th April Micru and Aubrey were at Wikimedia Conference 2014 representing the WCUG. See report.

• Preparations for Wikimania 2014: invitation sent to all Wikisource communities to the Wikisource Meetup.
• Wikimania meeting:
• Wikimania talks: Tpt, Charles Matthews, OA signalling
• Wikisource representation in Wikimania Hackathon as part of scholarship application of Billinghurst
• Wikisource Birthday proofreading contests [2]
• We helped Siko in evaluating the IEG proposals related to Wikisource (I did).
• We are maintaining the migration of WS related tickets from Bugzilla to Phabricator (thanks Billinghurst!), and looking to create a project ns to support the user group and aligned developments
• We are discussing the perennial problem of structured data on WS (thanks all!)
• The hidden but precious work of Phe, Tpt, Ricordisamoa and other coders who maintain the Proofread Extensions, do Wikidata things and more.
• The creation of the "other project sidebar" beta feature
• Progressing the updating of the patrol function of pywikibot-core
• Re-implemented the webfonts on English Wikisource as a trial for Wikisources
• Undertaking permissions clean-up as part of global project
• Identified Wikisource-specific desired updates to Indexing tool and coordinated update
• Working with Open Access project for Wikimedia-wide implementation of references (WPs), reference text (WSes), text images (Commons) and metadata (WD)
• Created Oriya Wikisource
• enWS prototyped an update to CirrusSearch to give emphasis to other namespaces as we utilise content namespaces in a broader sense than the WPs and a direct outcome of discussions at WM2014; this is available for all WSes.
• Created BUB:book uploader bot tool for uploading books: Google Books (+other libraries) -> archive.org -> Commons uploads.
  • total books uploaded by bub to archive (link)

Needs

• Development assistance in the development of Visual Editor for Wikisource (see T93525)
• Review of the plan to standardise and reserve namespace configuration to a default set, and the migration of existing WSes to meet this standard

Insights

• Some developments depend on other projects (Wikidata, Commons), so there has been a constant tracking on the needed features.
• The growth of the Wikisource community is mainly volunteer-based, and as such we have relied mostly on GsoC projects for additional features.
• In-person communication during Wikimania helped to develop trust and understanding between different language communities.

Suggestions

• Continue tracking needed features
• If possible organize a new WS meetup on Wikimania '15, or try to obtain help from any Chapter for a WS-specific meetup
• Continue with the GsoC program
• Plan the migration to Wikidata as soon as the needed features are ready (unconnected item access)
• Ask the WMF for a dedicated developer (or even better, a team) helping volunteer devs in their work.