Recently I lost my Wikisource virginity, becoming not a passive cheerleader for the project but an active contributor. I have to say it's been a more rewarding experience than expected.

I'd heard in a few places that imports from the Internet Archive, or imports of .djvu files, weren't reliable, but my little experience has been fine. Maybe I've been lucky in my choice of files. The whole process of loading in a book and starting transcription went quite smoothly, though it required attention to a lot of little steps and I wouldn't recommend it to non-geeky people.

One surprise was that having entered data about the book into Commons, I had to enter the same data again into Wikisource. Later when I went through Preferences on Wikisource, I saw an option to automatically copy book data from Commons to Wikisource, but for reasons I don't understand it's off by default.

The editing interface is last-century primitive but usable. An advanced toolbar with more buttons would enable me to work more quickly, but this might be possible with custom Javascript.

In my new role as Wikimedian In Residence at the Bodleian Libraries, I'm doing a lot of advocacy for Wikisource to my audience of librarians because it's a great example of how sharing content improves content. It's also a great example of something lay people with computers can do to support research and free knowledge.

There are two projects I'm working on (in volunteer time now and again, not paid work), in case anyone's interested.

Firstly, there's a collection on Wikisource related to Mary Wollstonecraft, a very important philosopher and author of fiction and non-fiction, not to mention the mother of Mary Shelley. https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Author:Mary_Wollstonecraft There are gaps, but with some additional transcription work it's in hailing distance of being an impressive research resource, hopefully enabling more interesting projects such as the Mary Wollstonecraft Twitter: https://twitter.com/1759marywol1797 Her short book about raising daughters had been scanned but not transcribed, so I've been working on that, a quarter of an hour now and again. https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Index:Thoughts_on_the_Education_of_Daughters....

The other project arises from a talk by a historian working with British Library Labs. He is studying the humour of the Victorian era, marking up a joke book to identify individual jokes and lines of dialogue. A fun spin-off from this work is the Mechanical Comedian project http://victorianhumour.tumblr.com/ An ideal starting point for this work would be a checked, validated transcription of the out-of-copyright source book, which the team are gradually working on. So I'm urging them to use Wikisource as a platform, and to demonstrate I'm transcribing a similar book from the same era. https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Index:Everybody%27s_Book_of_English_wit_and_h... Disclaimer: a lot of Victorian jokes are *not funny*, but there are rare gems.

If, like I was, you're a Wiki*edian who's interested in Wikisource but hasn't taken the plunge. I recommend having a go.