Front cover image for Wikisource : the free library that anyone can edit

Wikisource : the free library that anyone can edit

Computer Program, English, 2003-
Wikimedia Foundation, St. Petersburg, Fla., 2003-
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Title from main page (viewed September 14, 2007)
Wikisource: Historical documents
Wikisource (en.wikisource.org/) is a Free Library of source texts (use back button in your browser if you read that link to return to Wikisource) which are in the public domain or legally available for free redistribution. Wikisource is an official project of the Wikimedia Foundation and a sister project of Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia
What do we include and exclude at Wikisource? Some things we include are: 1. Source texts previously published by any author 2. Translations of original texts 3. Historical documents of national or international interest 4. Bibliographies of authors whose works are in Wikisource Contributions are not limited to this list, of course. Some basic criteria for texts excluded from Wikisource are: 1. Copyright infringements 2. Original writings by a contributor to the project 3. Mathematical data, formulas, and tables 4. Source code (for computers) that is in the public domain or compatible with the GFDL 5. Statistical source data (such as election results) These are just the most basic, obvious things that are excluded from Wikisource. There may of course be other things excluded by policy or convention. Wikisource is a multilingual project. Texts and translations of texts are welcome in all languages at the appropriate subdomains and at the general wikisource.org wiki. Wikisource is a library of static texts that have already been published elsewhere. In many or most cases, these texts are not meant to change and evolve, and it would deeply hurt their integrity if they did! Therefore, Wikisource has adopted a policy of noting text quality and "protecting" pages from editing once they are thought to be correctly formatted and error-free. Comments about needed changes or corrections can always be made on the talk page and if necessary the page can be unprotected. Neutral Point of View is a major policy rule applicable to all projects in the Wikimedia family. There is no need for the original texts themselves to reflect a NPOV. As long as we are faithfully reproducing them, and crediting them we are not in violation of NPOV. Nevertheless, putting emphasis on certain parts of the text, or reproducing only certain parts of the text could be seen as acts that express a particular point of view. Introductory and other explanatory material should always be written with NPOV in mind
Last seen July 26, 2006.