Factsheet

Author’s note: The Wikisource is a community-based project consisting of various digitisation initiatives for texts and collections that run simultaneously and are carried out by different contributors and teams. The following questionnaire can only hint at the various facets of the project and provide a brief first insight. A detailed and differentiated discussion of the points raised below is offered by the review.

Resource reviewed
Title Wikisource (deutsch)
Editorshelp

Bibliographical description of responsible personnel. Please indicate names as “forename surname”.
Wikimedia Foundation
URI https://de.wikisource.org
Publication Datehelp

Format should be either yyyy, yyyyff. or yyyy-yyyy, e.g. 2007 or 2007-2013
2003-2018
Date of last access 13.02.2018
Reviewer
Surname Haaf
First Name Susanne
Organization Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities
Place Berlin
Email haaf (at) bbaw.de
Personnel
Advisors https://de.wikisource.org/wiki/Wikisource:Administratoren
Designers https://de.wikisource.org/wiki/Wikisource:Impressum
General Information
Bibliographic description
Can the text collection be identified in
terms similar to traditional bibliographic
descriptions (title, responsible editors,
institution, date(s) of publication,
identifier/address)?
yes
Contributors
Are the contributors (editors,
institutions, associates) of the project
documented?
yes
Contacts
Is contact information given?
yes
Aims
Documentation
Is there a description of the aims and
contents of the text collection?
yes
Purposehelp

We assume that the text collection is published to be used in a certain context and that the intended usage scenario can be inferred (if it is not described), so if the purpose of the text collection is not stated explicitly, please answer according to your own impression.
What is the purpose of the text
collection?
Research, General purpose
Kind of researchhelp

In many cases both qualitative and quantitative research will be possible. Please choose the methodological orientation that is prevailing form your point of view.
What kind of research does the collection
allow to conduct primarily?
Qualitative research
Self-classification
How does the text collection classify
itself (e.g. in its title or
documentation)?
Collection
Field of research
To which field(s) of research does the text
collection contribute?
other: various (see https://de.wikisource.org/wiki/Kategorie:Fach)
Content
Erahelp

Classics: before 500 CE.

Medieval: 501 CE until 1500 CE.

Early Modern: 1501 CE until 1800 CE.

Modern: 1801 CE until 1945.

Contemporary: 1945 until today.

What era(s) do the texts belong
to?
Medieval, Early Modern, Modern, Contemporary
Languagehelp

Please choose the language name(s) that correspond(s) best to the language(s) of the texts, e.g. for Old English choose English; for Mexican Spanish choose Spanish. Choose ‘other’ if none of the given language names matches the language(s) in question. If you wish to specify the language(s) further, you can give an additional explanation in the ‘note’ field.
What languages are the texts in?
German
Types of texthelp

Literary works: artistic creations like poems, novels, plays, transmitted in one or several documents.

Private documents: personal or family documents or papers, e.g. letters and diaries.

Essays: formal or informal, argumentative or reflective writings.

Newspaper/journal articles: articles discussing recent news of general interest or a specific topic, published in a newspaper or journal.

Charters: texts documenting a legal fact by using a special form supporting its validity, e.g. the Magna Carta.

Inscriptions: texts on stone, metal, wood, etc., fixed through carving, engraving or embossing.

Files/records: classified collections of documents, e.g. business and trial records, personnel and administration files.

Protocols: written records of meetings.

Scientific papers: (previously published) scientific literature, e.g. articles, monographs or reference works.

Speech transcripts: written records of speech, transcribed orthographically or phonetically, for example.

What kind of texts are in the
collection?
other: various (https://de.wikisource.org/wiki/Kategorie:Textgattung)
Additional informationhelp

Information that is derived from the texts (e.g. analytical data or visualizations) is not considered here.

Commentary: (scholarly) commentary on the content of the documents or regarding other textual phenomena.

Context material: additional (textual) sources which put the texts in the collection into context but are not considered part of the collection itself.

Facsimiles: any copy of historical documents.

What kind of information is published in
addition to the texts?
Facsimile,
other: Bibliographic information; further information (commentary, introduction) depending on the project
Composition
Documentation
Are the principles and decisions regarding
the design of the text collection, its composition
and the selection of texts documented?
yes
Selectionhelp

Selection criteria: factors that guided the selection of texts for the collection and the composition of the text collection.

Language: one or several standard languages or other language varieties (including for example sociolects).

Author: one or several persons or figures that are supposed to have authored the texts.

Country: one or several countries or geographical regions.

Epoch: one or several (historical) epochs or other kinds of time periods.

Genre: literary (e.g. novella, fabel) or non-literary genres/text types (letter, statute, recipe, chat log, etc.).

Topic: one or several thematic aspects of the texts.

Style: one or several writing styles characteristic for authors, periods, schools, text types, etc. (e.g. romantic or realist novels, satirical texts, Victorian style).

Linguistic characteristics: language properties other than style (e.g. the presence of certain grammatical constructions).

What selection criteria have been chosen
for the text collection?
Language,
other: License/Copyright (public domain or freely licensed); Publication status (preferably originally published texts); Date of origin (preferably historical texts); Desideratum (no easily accessible digital versions already existing)
Sizehelp

If the size of the text collection is not given explicitly but can be inferred, please choose appropriate numbers, otherwise choose ‘unknown’.
Texts/records
How large is the text collection in
number of texts/records?
> 1000
Tokenshelp

Tokens: Sequences of strings delimited by whitespace or punctuation and roughly corresponding to words.
How large is the text collection in
number of tokens?
unknown
Structure
Does the text collection have identifiable
sub-collections or components?
yes
Data acquisition and integration
Text recording
Does the text collection record or
transcribe the textual data for the first
time?
yes
Text integration
What kind of material has been taken over
from other sources?
other: can’t be ruled out, but isn’t encouraged
Quality assurancehelp

Choose ‘yes’ if there has been a quality check for which results are reported, regardless of whether corrections have been made or not.
Has the quality of the data
(transcriptions, metadata, annotations, etc.) been
checked?
yes
Typologyhelp

General purpose collection: a text collection of a very general nature (e.g. Wikisource, Project Gutenberg); often created in a collaborative fashion; with no specific or very loose selection criteria; usually not bound to a certain time frame for its creation and completion.

Corpus: a collection of texts that has been created according to some selection criteria (language, author, country, epoch, genre, topic, style, etc.) which makes it more specific than a general purpose collection; not necessarily aiming at completeness or representativeness; e.g. the ‘Corpus of English Religious Prose’, ‘Letters of 1916’, ‘Corpus of Literary Modernism’.

Collection of records: a collection of texts that are held together out of organisational reasons, e.g. a collection of historical documents that has been kept in the same archive.

Canon: collection of works that is considered most important for a certain period, culture or discipline (e.g. the biblical canon, the canon of English 19th century literature); might be formally approved or authoritative and subject to debate and revision.

Complete works/œuvre: collection of all works by a single author (e.g. complete works of Mark Twain).

Reference corpus: collection of texts that have been selected in order to be representative for a certain genre or language (e.g. reference corpus of New High German Language).

Contrastive corpus: a collection of texts aiming at the systematic comparison of its sub-components, to get to a description of differences and similarities between them (e.g. FinDe, a contrastive corpus of Finnish and German).

Parallel corpus: a collection of texts which are contrasted with other versions, often translations (e.g. the Parallel Bible Corpus). A parallel corpus can be considered a certain kind of contrastive corpus.

Diachronic corpus: a collection of texts that have been selected in order to reflect evolution over time (e.g. the Diachronic Corpus of Present-Day Spoken English (c. 1960-1980)).

Considering aims and methods of the text collection,
how would you classify it further? For definitions please
consider the help-texts.
General purpose collection
Data Modelling
Text treatmenthelp

Normalized transcription: if the orthography has been normalized according to a chosen standard (e.g. ’seyn’ to ’sein’).

Orthographic transcription: a transcription that employs the standard spelling system of each target language (e.g. the surname “Pushkin” in English orthographic transcriptions of the Russian surname “Пу́шкин”).

Phonetic/phonemic transcription: a transcription that is the visual representation of speech sounds or phones (e.g. [ˈpuʂkʲɪn]) or a phonemic transcription (e.g. /ˈpʊʃkɪn/).

Diplomatic transcription: a transcription of the document taking into account features like spelling, punctuation, abbreviations, deletions, insertions, alterations, etc.

Transliteration: A conversion of a text from one script to another (e.g. “Russia” in Cyrillic script, “Россия”, is transliterated as “Rossiya” in Latin script).

Edited text: A reading text as constituted by the editor(s), based on text-critical procedures like recensio, examinatio, emendatio, correction, normalization, modernization etc.

Translated text: Any translations into languages different from that of the original text.

Summarized text: A summary of the source text.

Sampled text transcriptions: parts of texts that have been selected and transcribed to represent whole texts (e.g. out of theoretical considerations or for statistical reasons).

How are the textual sources represented in the digital collection?
Diplomatic transcription
Basic formathelp

Plain text: a pure sequence of character codes supported by the underlying standard (ASCII, Unicode).

XML: Extensible Markup Language, a general markup language that defines a set of rules for encoding documents.

HTML: Hypertext Markup Language, a standard markup language for web pages.

In which basic format are the texts
encoded?
other: Wiki syntax; various derivatives (HTML, TXT, PDF, …)
Annotations
Annotation typehelp

Semantic annotations: e.g. key words, links to (controlled) vocabularies, norm data.

Linguistic annotations: additional information about linguistic characteristics of the texts, e.g. lemmata or PoS-tags.

Editorial annotations: e.g. editorial comments and/or text-critical components such as the apparatus criticus.

Structural information: e.g. markup to capture the textual structure (e.g. headings, chapters) and layout information (e.g. paragraphs, indents).

With what information are the texts further enriched?
Structural information,
other: editorial annotations are applied occasionally
Annotation integrationhelp

Please choose ‘not applicable’ if there are no annotations.
How are the annotations linked to the
texts themselves?
Embedded
Metadata
Metadata typehelp

Descriptive: to describe and identify a resource, e.g. unique identifier, physical, bibliographic and content related attributes (such as medium, dimensions, author, title, publication year, genre, topic).

Structural: information about the internal structure of a resource (such as parts, volumes, chapters, sections, pages).

Administrative: for example technical details, access rights, history of changes.

What kind of metadata are included in the
text collection?
Descriptive, Administrative
Metadata level
On which level are the metadata
included?
Collection parts/components, Individual texts
Data schemas and standards
Schemashelp

General standardized schema: TEI All, TEI Lite, TCF, EAD, etc.

Customized standard schema: a project specific customization of a standardized schema, e.g. a certain RDFS(chema) or the DTABf.

Project specific schema: a schema that does not conform to any standard vocabulary, e.g. a custom XML dialect.

What kind of data/metadata/annotation
schemas are used for the text
collection?
Customized standard schema
Standardshelp

TEI: Text Encoding Initiative, cf. http://www.tei-c.org

CEI: Charters Encoding Initiative, cf. https://www.cei.lmu.de

EAD: Encoded Archival Description, cf. https://www.loc.gov/ead/

(X)CES: Corpus Encoding Standard (in XML), cf. https://www.cs.vassar.edu/CES/ and http://www.xces.org/

Dublin Core: a set of vocabulary terms for the description of web resources; cf. http://dublincore.org/

EDM: Europeana Data Model, cf. http://pro.europeana.eu/page/edm-documentation

METS: Metadata Encoding and Transmission Standard, cf. http://www.loc.gov/standards/mets/

MODS: Metadata Object Description Schema, cf. www.loc.gov/mods/

SKOS: Simple Knowledge Organization System, cf. https://www.w3.org/2004/02/skos/

OWL: Web Ontology Language, cf. https://www.w3.org/OWL/

IMDI: Isle Metadata Initiative, cf. https://tla.mpi.nl/imdi-metadata/

CMDI: Component Metadata Infrastructure, cf. https://www.clarin.eu/content/component-metadata

TCF: Text Corpus Format, cf. https://weblicht.sfs.uni-tuebingen.de/weblichtwiki/index.php/The_TCF_Format

OLAC: Open Language Archive Metadata, cf. http://www.language-archives.org/OLAC/metadata-20080531.html

EAGLES: Guidelines of the Expert Advisory Group on Language Engineering Standards, cf. http://www.ilc.cnr.it/EAGLES/browse.html

standardized PoS tagset(s): Part-of-Speech tagsets that have been standardized, for example the ‘Part-of-Speech Tagging Guidelines for the Penn Treebank Project’.

Which standards for text encoding,
metadata and annotation are used in the text
collection?
other: Wiki syntax and project-specific templates
Provision
Accessability of the basic data
Is the textual data accessible in a source
format (e.g. XML, TXT)?
yes
Download
Can the entire raw data of the project be
downloaded (as a whole)?
yes
Technical interfaceshelp

OAI-PMH: Protocol for Metadata Harvesting; a protocol for harvesting metadata descriptions of items in a collection.

REST: Representational State Transfer; a paradigm for the architecture of so-called RESTful web services.

SPARQL endpoint: a SPARQL Protocol and RDF Query Language endpoint to retrieve data stored in the RDF format.

General API: an Application Programming Interface other than OAI-PMH or REST.

Are there technical interfaces which allow
the reuse of the data of the text collection in
other contexts?
other: regular database dumps are provided as well as downloads for each text or individual collections in different formats
Analytical data
Besides the textual data, does the project
provide analytical data (e.g. statistics) to
download or harvest?
no
Reuse
Can you use the data with other tools
useful for this kind of content?
yes
User Interface
Interface provisionhelp

For example, a website created for the presentation of the texts or a software developed for the display and usage of the text collection in question is considered a dedicated user interface, while a general repository (e.g. a library publication server), versioning platform (e.g. GitHub) or archive (e.g. Zenodo) is not.
Does the text collection have a dedicated
user interface designed for the collection at hand
in which the texts of the collection are
represented and/or in which the data is
analyzable?
yes
User Interface questions
Usability
From your point of view, is the interface
of the text collection clearly arranged and easy to navigate so that
the user can quickly identify the purpose, the
content and the main access methods of the
resource?
yes
Acces modes
Browsing
Does the project offer the possibility to
browse the contents by simple browsing options or advanced structured access
via indices (e.g. by author, year,
genre)?
yes
Fulltext search
Does the project offer a fulltext
search?
yes
Advanced searchhelp

Does the project offer an advanced
search?
yes
Analysis
Tools
Does the text collection integrate tools
for analyses of the data?
no
Customization
Can the user alter the interface in order
to affect the outcomes of representation and
analysis of the text collection (besides basic
search functionalities), e.g. by applying his or
her own queries or by choosing analysis
parameters?
no
Visualization
Does the text collection provide
particular visualizations of the data?
no visualization
Personalization
Is there a personalisation mode that
enables the users e.g. to create their own
sub-collections of the existing text
collection?
yes
Preservation
Documentation
Does the text collection provide sufficient documentation about the project in
general as well as about the aims, contents and methods of the text collection?
yes
Open Accesshelp

Are the contents of the presentation freely accessible without subscription fee?
Is the text collection Open Access?
yes
Rights
Declared
Are the rights to (re)use the content declared?
yes
Licensehelp

CC0: Creative Commons license CC0 applied.

CC-BY: Creative Commons license CC-BY applied.

CC-BY-ND: Creative Commons license CC-BY-ND applied.

CC-BY-NC: Creative Commons license CC-BY-NC applied.

CC-BY-SA: Creative Commons license CC-BY-SA applied.

CC-BY-NC-ND: Creative Commons license CC-BY-NC-ND applied.

CC-BY-NC-SA: Creative Commons license CC-BY-NC-SA applied.

PDM: Work is in the Public Domain.

Under what license are the contents released?
CC-BY, CC-BY-SA,
other: GNU Free Documentation License; public domain
Persistent identification and addressinghelp

DOI: Digital Object Identifier according to the definition of The International DOI Foundation. The DOIs should be resolvable through http://doi.org/.

ARK: Archival Resource Key according to the definition of the California Digital Library. An ARK URL contains the label: ‘ark’ after the URL’s hostname.

URN: Uniform Resource Name using the urn: scheme. URNs always start with the label ’urn:’.

PURL.ORG: Persistent Uniform Resource Locator using the PURL concept and administered by the Online Computer Library Centre.

other service: Choose this if an external service other than the above options is used.

Persistent URLs: Choose this if the project promises permanent URLs or uses a local resolving system between URLs and underlying technical addresses but does not use any of the external services mentioned in the options.

none: Choose this if no persistent identifiers and addressing system are used at all.

Are there persistent identifiers and an addressing system for the text
collection and/or parts/objects of it and which mechanism is used to that
end?
Persistent URLs
Citation
Does the text collection supply citation guidelines?
yes
Archiving of the datahelp

Choose yes if you have reason to believe that the archiving and long term sustainability of the data is cared for (e.g. because the data is part of a platform that cares for these aspects), even if the documentation makes no explicit statement about it.
Does the documentation include information about the long term sustainability
of the basic data (archiving of the data)?
no
Institutional curationhelp

Select yes, if there is either an explicit claim that continuous maintenance for the project is provided by some institution or you have strong reason to believe that this is the case, even if it is not explicitly claimed, otherwise select no.
Does the project provide information about institutional support for the
curation and sustainability of the project?
yes
Completionhelp

Choose ‘yes’ if you consider the collection complete. Choose ‘no’ if further additions and modifications are promised for the text collection to be completed.
Is the text collection completed?
no