I’ve been asked what the advantages are of using Wikisource over
simply uploading scanned books to a website. The people who
asked me about this speak languages of India, but my replies
apply to all languages. First, what is Wikisource? It’s a sister
project of Wikipedia, which hosts freely-licensed documents that
were already published elsewhere. The English Wikisource, for
example, hosts many books that passed into the public domain,
such as Alice in Wonderland, the Sherlock Holmes stories and
Gesenius’ Hebrew Grammar (my favorite pet project). It also
hosts many other types of texts, for example speeches by US
presidents from Washington to Obama, because according to the
American law they are all in the public domain. And now to the
main question: Why bother to type the texts letter-by-letter as
digital texts rather than just scanning them? For languages
written in the Latin, Cyrillic and some other scripts this
question is less important, because for these scripts OCR
technology makes the process half-aut