Wikisource Community User Group

The Wikisource Community User Group (WCUG) is a Wikimedia user group to support the Wikisource community and its vision both online and offline.

The Wikisource Community User Group focus is to support the Wikisource community in international communication tasks, outreach to external groups, coordination of software tools development, and facilitate fundraising according to its member needs.

• Outreach – attracting more active community members and raising awareness of Wikisource, collaborating with GLAM Wiki groups and their activities as much as possible
• Community support - supporting volunteer editors in order to contribute more effectively
• Communication - facilitate discussions and flow of information between Wikisource communities and the Wikimedia movement
• Software development - supporting the development of MediaWiki features to accommodate the specific needs of the Wikisource community
• Fundraising - raise funds both from the Wikimedia movement and from external and partner organizations to conduct its activities.

The need for a Wikisource supporting organization became clear after the Wikimania 2012 meeting when Aubrey and other involved wikimedians drafted a roadmap for Wikisource, and then the question about who would implement that roadmap arose. A dedicated group of volunteers coordinated at international level can accomplish a lot, and even if they don't have the knowledge or the resources to do it by themselves, they can find ways to get things done.

The "Elaborate Wikisource strategic vision" project led by Aubrey and Micru, with assistance of Tpt, continued that community building task and it proposed to create the WCUG as a long term strategy to coordinate efforts internationally, set priorities and manage funds whenever needed.

Members have been conducting Wikisource activities independently, among them we can point out to:

• Elaborate Wikisource vision, internal effort to enhance cross-language and cross-community coordination, pave the way for future developments, and establish contacts with external organizations.
• GLAM wiki boot camp: tutorial in editing Wikisource, which was entirely new to all but three people, generated a large amount of interest and led to the partial transcription of The Yellow Wall Paper.
• Wikimedia Sweden: Use of public books libraries scanners.
• State Library of Queensland transcriptions
• Sundanese dictionary transcription competition
• Wikisource Conference in Wien (Austria), from 20 to 22 November 2015.
• Wikisource mission statement

Currently there are no restrictions for becoming a WCUG member, anyone that participates frequently in any local Wikisource and wants to contribute to make Wikisource a more internationally coordinated community is welcome to join the mailing list and sign up below.

Once a year the group will be promoted to the most active members of all local Wikisource communities and the accomplishments of the WCUG members will be summarized.

Regular communication will happen on the already existing wikisource mailing list: wikisource-l. Whenever IRC meetings are needed, they will happen on #wikisource ^connect .

In this initial phase, anyone can become a promoter and/or take the lead as "community liason" for their local wikisource, communicating their local Wikisource news to the international Wikisource mailing list, and importing the international news into their local community. All initiatives will be at individual level, or consensuated in the mailing list whenever needed.

As the group grows, the transition towards a thematic organization will be considered. In a possible scenario, we can set 100 members as a threshold: at this point some members will be elected as a board for a 2 years period, to either continue coordinating activities as user group or to start the transition towards incorporation.

In order to transforming the wishes and ideas of the WCUG members (and the Wikisource users in general) into action, the group counts on several tools:

• User involvement to accomplish tasks by themselves or to find consensus in their local community about topics brought up in the international mailing list. For important issues members will be contacted individually by the promoters.
• Coding grants (Google summer of code, Outreach Program for Women), for those projects that need development time that cannot be provided by volunteers alone.
• Wikimedia grants for those projects that need monetary support
• Calls for Action, when all the above fails or the task is too big to be handled by the WCUG members alone, the group will issue a Call for Action to the Wikimedia movement organizations.

For communication, we'd like to use the already existing wikisource-l. As the Wikisource UG would support all Wikisource projects, we think that the list would have a major impact than a dedicated, brand-new mailing list, and the scope of the list and the group perfectly match.

Whenever IRC meetings are needed, they will happen on #wikisource ^connect .

And there is also the Facebook page (Aubrey has admin rights there).

• target of 30-50 core members, reaching out to 100 people plus the general public
• support possible workshops about Wikisource
• propose technical developments and implement them through several sources (Google Summer of Code, grants, etc.)
• offer an interface for the Wikisource community with other related institutions
• coordinate and support Wikisource-related projects from Wikimedia Chapters and other groups

See the full 2013 Report .

• Invitation to the User Group: On 25 July 2013, this invitation was sent to the most active members of the Wikisource communities in order to raise awareness about the existence of the effort to create an international group that would help to "get things done" and foster participation in the Wikisource mailing list. This message was sent as a one-off and users who received it will not get more personal messages unless they register in the mailing list.
• Wikisource community survey: in order to get to know what the community considers prioritary for Wikisource and its user group, everybody is invited to take this survey. The idea of the survey started on the Wikisource mailing list on Sept 19 (see initial message by Aubrey) and after a lengthy discussion and it being translated into 11 languages by volunteers, it went public on Oct 14 2013 for 2 weeks (see message). For the results see: Wikisource survey report
• Wikisource 10th anniversary proofreading contest, run by volunteers in it-ws, ca-ws and en-ws, from 24th Nov 2013. More information in this blog post.

See the full 2014 Report .

• WMCON '14: On 12th April Micru and Aubrey were at Wikimedia Conference 2014 representing the WCUG. See report.
• Preparations for Wikimania 2014: invitation sent to all Wikisource communities to the Wikisource Meetup.

See the full 2015 Report .

• WMCON '15: On May 16-17th Micru and Aubrey were at Wikimedia Conference 2015 representing the WCUG. See report.
• Wikisource survey 2015: preparations for the Wikisource community survey 2015.
• Wikisource Conference 2015: see report.

See the full 2016 Report .

See the 2017 Report .

• January 2017 Hangout
• February 2017 Hangout
• March 2017 Hangout
• April 2017 Hangout (canceled)
• November 2017 Hangout
• December 2017 Hangout

See the full 2018 Report .

• Wikimania 2018: Wikisource Meetup at Wikimania

See the full 2019 Report .

See the full 2020 Report .

See the full 2021 Report.

See the full 2022 Report.

See the full 2023 Report.

See the full 2024 Report.

• Wikisource proofreading contests
• Wikimedia Digitization User Group
• Wikimedia Etherpad notes from Katowice, August 2024

• Wikisource Community User Group
• Wikimedia User Groups
• Wikisource
• Wikimedia User Groups - Thematic
• Annual affiliate report due November
• Wikimedia affiliates in good standing
• Annual report submitted