Wikisource - Reception

Reception

Larry Sanger has criticised Wikisource, and sister project Wiktionary, because the collaborative nature and technology of these projects means there is no oversight by experts and therefore their content is not reliable.

Bart D. Ehrman, a New Testament scholar and professor of religious studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, has criticised the English Wikisource's project to create a user-generated translation of The Bible saying "Democratization isn't necessarily good for scholarship." Richard Elliott Friedman, an Old Testament scholar and professor of Jewish studies at the University of Georgia, has identified errors in the translation of the Book of Genesis.

In 2010, the Wikimedia France signed an agreement with the Bibliothèque nationale de France (National Library of France) to add scans from its own Gallica digital library to French Wikisource. 1,400 public domain French texts were added to the Wikisource library as a result via upload to the Wikimedia Commons. The quality of the transcriptions, previously automatically generated by optical character recognition (OCR), were expected to be improved by Wikisource's human proofreaders.

In 2011, the English Wikisource received many high-quality scans of documents from the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) as part of their efforts "to increase the accessibility and visibility of its holdings." Processing and upload to Commons of these documents, along with many images from the NARA collection, was facilitated by a NARA "Wikimedian in residence", Dominic. Many of these documents have been transcribed and proofread by the Wikisource community and now feature as links on the National Archives' own online catalog.