On digitize public-domain Chinese books or other resources

Given that the WMF's projected operating budget for this year is about $14 million, this will not happen. :-) The whole grants process is for small grants: on the order of thousands, not millions.

But, you raise a good point. The next step, Mountain, would be to actually put together a proposal and pitch it. You should rope Yu-yu into the conversation. The application deadline is coming soon, so now would be a good time to start thinking about it.

Eekim23:35, 7 April 2010

I rather thought so. The key, however, is the issue of "commercial sponsorships." I would suggest that, even before the strategy package is over, that WMF, on its own volition, and quite speedily, contact Amazon or Google (each of which has vast experience in digitizing books - though with mixed legal results) to ascertain if either would provide seed-money for what are posited to be Chinese books well out of copyright. The amount of money is within either of their budgets, and would likely make world-wide news.

Collect00:04, 8 April 2010

I'd strongly encourage you to read Wikimedia Foundation/Feb 2010 Letter to the Board. I think it's a great idea to pursue these kinds of partnerships, but it's not the role of the Foundation. One of the conversations that didn't happen as successfully as it might have on this wiki is around movement roles: understanding whose role it is to pursue different things. Perhaps this discussion (as well as Michael Snow's recent email to foundation-l) can be a kick-off to have this discussion here.

Eekim17:58, 12 April 2010
 

For example, de:wikisource is getting each year 2000 Euro from the german chapter for digitising. Each digitising project costs between 30 Euro and 100 Euro. Source

Goldzahn05:25, 8 April 2010

With a ballpark estimate of 1 million older Chinese works to be digitized - figure on 30 million Euro?

Collect10:11, 8 April 2010

That is not the point. The problem is to find people who will do the work for free. And there is far more work to do than just place a book on a scanner. I guess that one person is able to proofread not more than 10 pages a day. There is a second problem. I know that there are maybe 50.000 Chinese characters but most people know just a few thousand characters. If you don´t know a character you don´t know if the scan is correct. That means you need high skilled people. Those people don´t like to work for free and there are not much of them.

Goldzahn11:39, 8 April 2010

For the problem of Chinese character, it is not the case, in fact by some input method(for example Wubi method ), you can just input the characters by the structure of characters rather than their pronunciation. And Wubi is popular in China.

We are just at the stage from ideas to concrete plan. I will draft the detail of the plan recently. and I don't think it is a big project.

Mountain12:18, 8 April 2010

Just be sure not to underestimate what is involved - I am sure Amazon and Google have a strong interest here to be sure.

For Goldzahn - I already raised the issue of older words. The Kangxi dictionary has under 50,000 characters - which likely covers most ones to be found in out-of-copyright material. Apparently people are considered proficient with a knowledge of about 7,000 characters (which combine to form a much larger number of words). I therefore would defer to Mountain that the task is doable.

Collect13:09, 8 April 2010