Wikisource - Wikipedia

Wikisource - Wikipedia
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From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Free online library on a wiki
For linking to or citing Wikisource, see
Wikipedia:Wikisource
Wikisource
The current Wikisource logo
Screenshot
Detail of the Wikisource multilingual portal main page
Type of site
Digital library
Available in
Multilingual
(83 active sub-domains)
Owner
Wikimedia Foundation
Created by
User-generated
URL
wikisource
.org
Commercial
No
Registration
Optional
Launched
November 24, 2003
; 22 years ago
2003-11-24
Current status
Online
Wikisource
is an online wiki-based
digital library
of
free-content
textual sources
operated by the
Wikimedia Foundation
. Wikisource is the name of the project as a whole; it is also the name for each instance of that project, one for each language. The project's aim is to host all forms of free text, in many languages, and translations. Originally conceived as an archive to store useful or important historical texts, it has expanded to become a general-content library. The project officially began on November 24, 2003, under the name
Project Sourceberg
, a play on
Project Gutenberg
. The name Wikisource was adopted later that year and it received its own
domain name
The project holds works that are either in the
public domain
or
freely licensed
: professionally published works or historical source documents, not
vanity products
. Verification was initially made offline, or by trusting the reliability of other digital libraries. Now works are supported by online scans via the ProofreadPage extension, which ensures the reliability and accuracy of the project's texts.
Some individual Wikisources, each representing a specific language, now only allow works backed up with scans. While the bulk of its collection are texts, Wikisource as a whole hosts other media, from comics to film to
audiobooks
. Some Wikisources allow user-generated annotations, subject to the specific policies of the Wikisource in question. The project has come under criticism for lack of reliability but it is also cited by organisations such as the
National Archives and Records Administration
As of April 2026, there are Wikisource subdomains active for 83 languages
comprising a total of 6,804,453 articles and 3,796 recently active editors.
History
edit
The original concept for Wikisource was as storage for useful or important historical texts. These texts were intended to support
Wikipedia
articles, by providing primary evidence and original source texts, and as an archive in its own right. The collection was initially focused on important historical and cultural material, distinguishing it from other digital archives like Project Gutenberg.
The original Wikisource logo
The project was originally called Project Sourceberg during its planning stages (a play on words for Project Gutenberg).
In 2001, there was a dispute on Wikipedia regarding the addition of primary-source materials, leading to
edit wars
over their inclusion or deletion. Project Sourceberg was suggested as a solution to this. In describing the proposed project, user The Cunctator said, "It would be to Project Gutenberg what Wikipedia is to
Nupedia
",
soon clarifying the statement with "we don't want to try to duplicate Project Gutenberg's efforts; rather, we want to complement them. Perhaps Project Sourceberg can mainly work as an interface for easily linking from Wikipedia to a Project Gutenberg file, and as an interface for people to easily submit new work to PG."
Initial comments were skeptical, with
Larry Sanger
questioning the need for the project, writing "The hard question, I guess, is why we are reinventing the wheel, when Project Gutenberg already exists? We'd want to complement Project Gutenberg—how, exactly?",
and
Jimmy Wales
adding "like Larry, I'm interested that we think it over to see what we can add to Project Gutenberg. It seems unlikely that primary sources should in general be editable by anyone — I mean, Shakespeare is Shakespeare, unlike our commentary on his work, which is whatever we want it to be."
The project began its activity at ps.wikipedia.org. The contributors understood the "PS" subdomain to mean either "primary sources" or Project Sourceberg.
However, this resulted in Project Sourceberg occupying the subdomain of the
Pashto Wikipedia
(the
ISO language code
of the
Pashto language
is "ps").
Project Sourceberg officially launched on November 24, 2003, when it received its own temporary URL, at sources.wikipedia.org, and all texts and discussions hosted on ps.wikipedia.org were moved to the temporary address. 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 URL (
) until July 23, 2004.
Logo and slogan
edit
Since Wikisource was initially called "Project Sourceberg", its first logo was a picture of an
iceberg
Two votes conducted to choose a successor were inconclusive, and the original logo remained until 2006. Finally, for both legal and technical reasons—because the picture's license was inappropriate for a Wikimedia Foundation logo and because a photo cannot scale properly—a stylized vector iceberg inspired by the original picture was mandated to serve as the project's logo.
The first prominent use of Wikisource's slogan—
The Free Library
—was at the project's
multilingual portal
, when it was redesigned based upon the Wikipedia portal on August 27, 2005, (historical version).
10
As in the Wikipedia portal the Wikisource slogan appears around the logo in the project's ten largest languages.
Clicking on the portal's central images (the iceberg logo in the center and the "Wikisource" heading at the top of the page) links to a
list of translations
for
Wikisource
and
The Free Library
in 60 languages.
Tools built
edit
The ProofreadPage extension in action
MediaWiki
extension called ProofreadPage was developed for Wikisource by developer ThomasV to improve the vetting of transcriptions by the project. This displays pages of scanned works side by side with the text relating to that page, allowing the text to be
proofread
and its accuracy later verified independently by any other editor.
11
12
13
Once a book, or other text, has been scanned, the raw images can be modified with
image processing
software to correct for page rotations and other problems. The retouched images can then be converted into a
PDF
or
DjVu
file and uploaded to either Wikisource or
Wikimedia Commons
11
This system assists editors in ensuring the accuracy of texts on Wikisource. The original page scans of completed works remain available to any user so that errors may be corrected later and readers may check texts against the originals. ProofreadPage also allows greater participation, since access to a physical copy of the original work is not necessary to be able to contribute to the project once images have been uploaded.
citation needed
Milestones
edit
A student doing proof reading during her
project
at
New Law College
in Pune, India
Within two weeks of the project's official start at sources.wikipedia.org, over 1,000 pages had been created, with approximately 200 of these being designated as actual articles. On January 4, 2004, Wikisource welcomed its 100th registered user. In early July, 2004 the number of articles exceeded 2,400, 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 edit that same day.
citation needed
On November 27, 2005, the
English Wikisource
passed 20,000 text-units in its third month of existence, already holding more texts than did the entire project in April (before the move to language subdomains).
On May 10, 2006, the
first Wikisource Portal
was created.
On February 14, 2008, the English Wikisource passed 100,000 text-units with
Chapter LXXIV
of
Six Months at the White House
, a memoir by painter
Francis Bicknell Carpenter
14
In November, 2011, 250,000 text-units milestone was passed.
Library contents
edit
Wikisource inclusion criteria expressed as a
Venn diagram
. Green indicates the best possible case, where the work satisfies all three primary requirements. Yellow indicates acceptable but not ideal cases.
Wikisource collects and stores in
digital format
previously published texts; including novels, non-fiction works, letters, speeches, constitutional and historical documents, laws and a range of other documents. All texts collected are either free of copyright or released under the
Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License
Texts in all languages are welcomed, as are translations. In addition to texts, Wikisource hosts material such as
comics
films
, recordings and
spoken-word
works.
All texts held by Wikisource must have been previously published; the project does not host "
vanity press
" books or documents produced by its contributors.
15
16
17
18
A scanned source is preferred on many Wikisources and required on some. Most Wikisources will, however, accept works transcribed from offline sources or acquired from
other digital libraries
The requirement for prior publication can also be waived in a small number of cases if the work is a source document of notable historical importance. The legal requirement for works to be licensed or free of copyright remains constant.
Annotations and translations – the difference to Wikibooks
edit
The only original pieces accepted by Wikisource are annotations and translations.
19
Wikisource, and its sister project
Wikibooks
, has the capacity for
annotated editions
of texts. On Wikisource, the annotations are supplementary to the original text, which remains the primary objective of the project. By contrast, on Wikibooks the annotations are primary, with the original text as only a reference or supplement, if present at all.
18
Annotated editions are more popular on the German Wikisource.
18
The project also accommodates translations of texts provided by its users. A significant translation on the English Wikisource is the
Wiki Bible
project, intended to create a new, "laissez-faire translation" of
The Bible
20
Structure
edit
Language subdomains
edit
A separate
Hebrew version
of Wikisource (
he.wikisource.org
) was created in August 2004. The need for a language-specific
Hebrew
website derived from the difficulty of typing and editing Hebrew texts in a
left-to-right
environment (Hebrew is written right-to-left). 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 each language to host its texts on its own wiki.
An initial wave of 14 languages was set up on August 23, 2005.
21
The new languages did not include English, but the code en: was temporarily set to redirect to the main website (
wikisource.org
). At this point the Wikisource community, through a mass project of manually sorting thousands of pages and categories by language, prepared for a second wave of page imports to local wikis. On September 11, 2005, the wikisource.org wiki was reconfigured to enable the
English version
, along with 8 other languages that were created early that morning and late the night before.
22
Three more languages were created on March 29, 2006,
23
and then another large wave of 14 language domains was created on June 2, 2006.
24
Languages without subdomains are locally incubated. As of September 2020
[update]
, 182 languages are
hosted locally
As of April 2026, there are Wikisource subdomains for 85 languages of which 83 are active and 2 are closed.
The active sites have 6,804,453 articles and the closed sites have 13 articles.
There are 5,261,291 registered users of which 3,796 are recently active.
Top ten Wikisource language projects by mainspace article count:
No.
Language
Wiki
Good
Total
Edits
Admins
Users
Active users
Files
Polish
pl
1,290,114
1,330,783
4,087,034
14
41,543
78
127
en
1,100,639
4,744,575
15,897,110
19
3,256,587
868
16,623
French
fr
665,950
4,688,893
15,752,818
17
162,086
332
4,202
German
de
633,071
689,995
4,885,302
16
90,034
117
6,932
Russian
ru
621,096
1,134,691
5,707,233
133,751
91
33,205
Chinese
zh
506,389
1,202,790
2,680,894
120,283
277
230
Ukrainian
uk
375,743
538,998
1,047,667
21,596
129
136
Hebrew
he
253,939
1,666,607
3,006,292
16
45,242
145
575
Italian
it
219,148
867,682
3,668,847
80,134
84
676
10
Arabic
ar
93,769
286,825
607,815
71,921
61
4,025
wikisource.org
edit
During the move to language subdomains, the community requested that the main
wikisource.org
website remain a functioning wiki, in order to serve three purposes:
To be a multilingual coordination site for the entire Wikisource project in all languages.
In practice, use of the website for multilingual coordination has not been heavy since the conversion to language domains. Nevertheless, there is some policy activity at the
Scriptorium
, and multilingual updates for news and language milestones at pages such as
Wikisource:2007
To be a home for texts in languages without their own subdomains, each with its own local main page for self-organization.
25
As a language incubator, the wiki currently provides a home for over 30 languages that do not yet have their own language subdomains. Some of these are very active, and have built libraries with hundreds of texts (such as
Volapük
).
To provide direct, ongoing support by a local wiki community for a dynamic multilingual portal at its Main Page, for users who go to
The current
Main Page portal
was created on August 26, 2005, by
ThomasV
, who based it upon the Wikipedia portal.
The idea of a project-specific coordination wiki, first realized at Wikisource, also took hold in another Wikimedia project, namely at
Wikiversity
's
Beta Wiki
. Like wikisource.org, it serves Wikiversity coordination in all languages, and as a language incubator, but unlike Wikisource, its
Main Page
does not serve as its multilingual portal.
26
Reception
edit
Personal explanation of Wikisource from a project participant
Wikipedia co-founder
Larry Sanger
criticised Wikisource and sister project
Wiktionary
in 2011, after he left the project, saying that their collaborative nature and technology means that there is no oversight by experts, and alleging that their content is therefore not reliable.
27
Bart D. Ehrman
, a New Testament scholar and professor of religious studies at the
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
, has criticised the English Wikisource's project to create a user-generated translation of the Bible saying "Democratization isn't necessarily good for scholarship."
20
Richard Elliott Friedman
, an Old Testament scholar and professor of Jewish studies at the
University of Georgia
, identified errors in the translation of the
Book of Genesis
as of 2008.
20
In 2010, Wikimedia France signed an agreement with the
Bibliothèque nationale de France
(National Library of France) to add scans from its own
Gallica
digital library to French Wikisource. Fourteen hundred public domain French texts were added to the Wikisource library as a result via upload to the
Wikimedia Commons
. The quality of the transcriptions, previously automatically generated by
optical character recognition
(OCR), was expected to be improved by Wikisource's human proofreaders.
28
29
30
Wikisource has original works on the topic:
National Archives and Records Administration Collection
In 2011, the English Wikisource received many high-quality scans of documents from the US
National Archives and Records Administration
(NARA) as part of their efforts "to increase the accessibility and visibility of its holdings." Processing and upload to Commons of these documents, along with many images from the NARA collection, was facilitated by a NARA
Wikimedian in residence
, Dominic McDevitt-Parks. Many of these documents have been transcribed and proofread by the Wikisource community and are featured as links in the National Archives' own online catalog.
31
See also
edit
Internet Archive
– non-profit digital library
Open Library
– an online database and repository of books, created by the Internet Archive
References
edit
Wikimedia
's
MediaWiki
API:Sitematrix
. Retrieved April 2026 from
Data:Wikipedia statistics/meta.tab
Ayers, Phoebe; Matthews, Charles; Yates, Ben (2008).
How Wikipedia Works
. No Starch Press. pp.
435–436
ISBN
978-1-59327-176-3
"Transcribe | Citizen Archivist"
Archived
from the original on October 31, 2013
. Retrieved
October 4,
2013
Wikimedia
's
MediaWiki
API:Siteinfo
. Retrieved April 2026 from
Data:Wikipedia statistics/data.tab
The Cunctator (October 16, 2001).
"Primary sources Pedia, or Project Sourceberg"
Wikipedia
Archived
from the original on March 14, 2016
. Retrieved
July 5,
2011
The Cunctator (October 16, 2001).
"Primary sources Pedia, or Project Sourceberg"
Wikipedia
Archived
from the original on November 20, 2018
. Retrieved
March 24,
2012
Sanger, Larry
(October 17, 2001).
"Primary sources Pedia, or Project Sourceberg"
Wikipedia
Archived
from the original on April 9, 2022
. Retrieved
March 24,
2012
Wales, Jimmy
(October 17, 2001).
"Primary sources Pedia, or Project Sourceberg"
Wikipedia
Archived
from the original on April 9, 2022
. Retrieved
March 24,
2012
Starling, Tim (July 23, 2004).
"Scriptorium"
. Wikisource.
Archived
from the original on October 15, 2013
. Retrieved
July 5,
2011
"Wikisource.org"
. Wikisource.org. August 27, 2005.
Archived
from the original on November 10, 2013
. Retrieved
July 5,
2011
Bernier, Alex; Burger, Dominique; Marmol, Bruno (2010). "Wiki, a New Way to Produce Accessible Documents". In Miesenberger, Klaus; Klaus, Joachim; Zagler, Wolfgang; Karshmer, Arthur (eds.).
Computers Helping People with Special Needs
. Springer. pp.
22–
24.
ISBN
978-3-642-14096-9
Proofread Page extension
at MediaWiki. Retrieved 2011-09-29.
ProofreadPage
at Wikisource.org. Retrieved 2011-09-29.
"100K"
discussion on Scriptorium.
English Wikisource
. 14 February 2008. Retrieved 2011-09-29.
"Mission statement"
Wikimedia Foundation
Archived
from the original on January 17, 2008
. Retrieved
July 8,
2011
"Wikisource"
Wikimedia.org
Wikimedia Foundation
Archived
from the original on July 13, 2011
. Retrieved
July 8,
2011
"What is Wikisource?—What do we exclude?"
Wikisource.org
. Wikisource.
Archived
from the original on July 9, 2011
. Retrieved
July 8,
2011
Boot, Peter (2009).
Mesotext
. Amsterdam University Press. pp.
34–
35.
ISBN
978-90-8555-052-5
Broughton, John (2008).
Wikipedia Reader's Guide: The Missing Manual
. O'Reilly Media, Inc. p.
23
ISBN
978-0-596-52174-5
Philips, Matthew (June 14, 2008).
"God's Word, According to Wikipedia"
Newsweek
Archived
from the original on April 16, 2009
. Retrieved
September 29,
2011
Server admin log for August 23, 2005
; a fifteenth language (sr:) was created on August 25 (above).
See the
Server admin log for September 11, 2005, at 01:20 and below (September 10) at 22:49.
"Server Admin Log/Archive 7 - March 29"
. Wikitech.
Archived
from the original on April 2, 2015
. Retrieved
July 5,
2011
"Server Admin Log/Archive 7 - June 2"
. Wikitech.
Archived
from the original on April 2, 2015
. Retrieved
July 5,
2011
For an automatic list of local main pages, see
Category:Main Pages
; for a formatted list, see the
wikisource.org
section of the
Wikisource portal
"Wikiversity.org"
. Wikiversity.org.
Archived
from the original on August 12, 2010
. Retrieved
July 5,
2011
Anderson, Jennifer Joline (2011).
Wikipedia: The Company and Its Founders
. ABDO. pp.
92–93
ISBN
978-1-61714-812-5
"La BNF prend un virage collaboratif avec Wikisource"
[BNF takes a collaborative turn with Wikisource].
ITespresso
(in French). NetMediaEurope. April 8, 2010.
Archived
from the original on October 8, 2011
. Retrieved
September 29,
2011
"Wikimédia France signe un partenariat avec la BnF"
[Wikimedia France sign a partnership with the BnF].
Wikimédia France
(in French). April 7, 2010. Archived from
the original
on September 29, 2011
. Retrieved
September 29,
2011
"French National Library to cooperate with Wikisource"
Wikipedia Signpost
. 2010-04-12.
McDevitt-Parks, Dominic; Waldman, Robin (July 25, 2011).
"Wikimedia and the new collaborative digital archives"
The Text Message
National Archives and Records Administration
Archived
from the original on September 13, 2011
. Retrieved
September 29,
2011
External links
edit
Wikimedia Commons has media related to
Wikisource
Wikiquote has quotations related to
Wikisource
Wikisource
Official website
Wikipedia:List of Wikisources
Wikisource:For Wikipedians
About Wikisource
Danny Wool on Wikisource
Wikimedia Foundation
article).
A personal perspective on the history of Wikisource
by Angela Beesley
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