Wikisources

Wikisource – ''The Free Library'' – is a '''.

LIBRARY CONTENTS

Wikisource collects digital editions of previously published texts. All varieties of texts in all languages are welcome, as are translations of them.

Wikisource does not host original books or documents produced by its contributors.

HISTORY

Wikisource had an eventful early history that included several changes of name and location (URL), and the move to language subdomains. The following sections explain these changes as well as the subsequent, more recent history of the project.

Beginnings

Wikisource was originally called 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 .

Project Sourceberg started officially when it received its own temporary URL on 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. During this period of the project's history, especially notable were the massive contributions to its content and organization in several languages by its bureaucrat, .

On April 30 2005 , there were 2667 registered users (including 18 administrators) and almost 19,000 articles. The project passed its 96,000th edit that same day.

Language subdomains

A separate that ended May 12 2005 supported the adoption of separate language subdomains at Wikisource by a large margin, allowing each language to host its texts on its own wiki.

An initial wave of 15 languages was set up by , which were created on September 11 2005 .

wikisource.org

The community has requested that the main ''' 2005 , also incorporates Wikisource's new slogan, ''The Free Library''.

Milestones

The passed 20,000 text-units on November 27 2005 (in its third month of existence), already holding more texts than did the entire project in April (before the move to language subdomains).

LOGO

The current Wikisource logo (shown above) with a picture of an ). 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 also reminiscent of Sigmund Freud 's use of an iceberg as an analogy to illustrate his concept of the Unconscious Mind .

The logo has had a mixed reception since the change of name to "Wikisource", some users greatly enjoy it while others feel it is unsuitable and inconsistent with the other wikiproject logos. There has been a long running debate over whether to keep the current logo or switch to a new one. This has largely been motivated not by dislike for the logo but by the fact that the logo's copyright was held by the designer and had not been released to the Wikimedia Foundation like all other wikimedia logos. This prevented it from being used on advertising or merchandise .

was aborted in 2005 before any vote due to a convoluted discussion procedure. In 2006 a new attempt to change the logo was started with the support of the Wikimedia Foundation, however this got off to a poor start when wikisource users, particularly at the English pages did not find out about the new process until after it had begun, the voting process had been decided and discussions of the various proposed logos started. The fact that many of those commenting on the proposed logos were not wikisource users, but wider wikimedia users also created some illwill and a feeling that the move to a new logo was being forced upon them and taking precedence over more urgent functional work needed to improve the project.

On , and a decision is expected to be made in the coming weeks or months.

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Wikisources