Wikisource:WikiProject Geographic Portals

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This project aims to improve Wikisource's structure of geographic portals, especially where more local jurisdictions (like counties, cities, towns, etc.) are concerned.

Traditionally, Wikisource portals have focused on larger geographic entities (countries or primary jurisdictions of countries), for example Portal:Germany, Portal:United States, Portal:Ohio, Portal:California, etc. But, the purpose of this project (as it exists now) is to create portals en masse for smaller jurisdictions such as counties and cities.

For now, I want to focus on counties in the United States, and some of their more populous cities and towns.

Justification for those skeptical of the process

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Some editors may believe that the amount of works available for most US counties and small towns is too miniscule for them to deserve a portal of their own. But I vehemently disagree. To this I only need to respond with the inherent insane abundance of public-domain materials associated with most local areas.

Communities in the US (such as counties) usually have local newspapers, which generally have issues dating back hundreds of years. So, (at least in theory), there is usually somewhere around 100-200 years worth of newspapers for us to transcribe, which may encapsulate tens of thousands of individual issues, and hundreds of thousands of total articles to transcribe. This is definitely no small number of works to be associated with a particular local area, then...

Then we have county/city ordinances and legal materials, most of which are in the public domain simply due to being edicts of governments. These materials may also include meeting minutes and other meeting-related materials, due to recent legal findings. Given that these local governments have existed since their inception (generally 100+ years ago also, depending on the state), this would theoretically be yet another rabbithole of at minimum tens of thousands of individual works to transcribe. We're talking about town laws that could in some cases date back to the 1700s (if they were on the East Coast and colonial).

Structure of these portals

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(Assuming counties, since that's what we're gonna do first)

Every county portal will have {{US county portal}} attached to it, which will be

This is an outline of what the sections will look like.

  • County government
  • Ordinances
  • [[<county name>/Ordinances|Complete list of ordinances]]
  • Meeting minutes
  • [[<county name>/Meeting minutes|Complete list of meeting minutes]]
  • Local media
  • Newspapers
  • Periodicals
  • [etc]
  • Encyclopedia articles
  • Fiction [works set in the county, generally]
  • [etc]

At the bottom: {{Counties of <state>}}

Preparation for transcription

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I generally want to provide an {{External scan link}} to some sources where an abundance of certain legal materials (such as ordinances, meeting minutes) can be found on the web. This will usually be somewhere at the jurisdiction's official website (but not always). These external archive links will (hopefully) be used later by someone interested in scraping public-domain materials from the sites.

The materials will mostly be in the public domain, so the ordinances/minutes/etc. should eventually be downloaded, reviewed for potential copyrighted material, uploaded to Wikimedia Commons, and comprehensively listed at subpages of the county portal (as mentioned above).

Goals

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  • Create portals for all counties in a state.
  • Create portals for major US cities by state.
  • Create portals for all county seats in US.
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