A separate Hebrew version of Wikisource (he.wikisource.org) was created in August 2004. The need for a language-specific Hebrew website derived from the difficulty of typing and editing Hebrew texts in a left-to-right environment (Hebrew is written right-to-left). In the ensuing months contributors in other languages including German requested their own wikis but a December vote on the creation of separate language domains was inconclusive. Finally a second vote that ended May 12 2005 supported the adoption of separate language subdomains at Wikisource by a large margin allowing each language to host its texts on its own wiki. An initial wave of 14 languages was set up by Brion Vibber on August 23 2005.7 The new languages did not include English but the code en: was temporarily set to redirect to the main website (wikisource.org). At this point the Wikisource community through a mass project of manually sorting thousands of pages and categories by language prepared for a second wave of page imports to local wikis. On September 11 2005 the wikisource.org wiki was reconfigured to enable the English version along with 8 other languages that were created early that morning and late the night before.8 Three more languages were created on March 29 20069 and then another large wave of 14 language domains was created on June 2 2006.10 Currently there are individual subdomains for Wikisources in more than 50 languages11 besides the additional languages hosted at wikisource.org which serves as an incubator or a home for languages without their own subdomains (31 languages are currently hosted locally) wikisource.org During the move to language subdomains the community requested that the main wikisource.org website remain a functioning wiki in order to serve three purposes: To be a multilingual coordination site for the entire Wikisource project in all languages. In practice use of the website for multilingual coordination has not been heavy since the conversion to language domains. Nevertheless there is some policy activity at the Scriptorium and multilingual updates for news and language milestones at pages such as Wikisource:2007. To be a home for texts in languages without their own subdomains each with its own local main page for self-organization.12 As a language incubator the wiki currently provides a home for over 30 languages that do not presently have their own language subdomains. Some of these are very active and have built libraries with hundreds of texts (such as Esperanto and Volapuk) and one with thousands (Hindi). To provide direct ongoing support by a local wiki community for a dynamic multilingual portal at its Main Page for users who go to http://wikisource.org. The current Main Page portal was created on August 26 2005 by ThomasV who based it upon the Wikipedia portal. The idea of a project-specific coordination wiki first realized at Wikisource also took hold in another Wikimedia project namely at Wikiversity's Beta Wiki. Like wikisource.org it serves Wikiversity coordination in all languages and as a language incubator. But unlike Wikisource its Main Page does not serve as its multilingual portal13 (which is not a wiki page). Logo and slogan The original Wikisource logo Since Wikisource was initially called "Project Sourceberg" its first logo was a picture of an iceberg. Two votes conducted to choose a successor were inconclusive and the original logo remained until 2006. Finally for both legal and technical reasons because the picture's license was inappropriate for a Wikimedia Foundation logo and because a photo cannot scale properly a stylized vector iceberg inspired by the original picture was mandated to serve as the project's logo. The first prominent use of Wikisource's slogan The Free Library was at the project's multilingual portal when it was redesigned based upon the Wikipedia portal on August 27 2005 (historical version).14 As in the Wikipedia portal the Wikisource slogan appears around the logo in the project's ten largest languages. Clicking on the portal's central images (the iceberg logo in the center and the "Wikisource" heading at the top of the page) links to a list of translations for Wikisource and The Free Library in 60 languages. Subsequent milestones On November 27 2005 the English Wikisource passed 20000 text-units in its third month of existence already holding more texts than did the entire project in April (before the move to language subdomains). On February 14 2008 the English Wikisource passed 100000 text-units.15 Special projects English: 1911 Encyclopdia Britannica Easton's Bible Dictionary The New Student's Reference Work (proofreading of scanned texts) Annotated books: The Strange Case Of Dr Jekyll And Mr Hyde Travels with a Donkey in the Cvennes German: All Projects will be proofread by scanned texts. Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie Biographisches Lexikon des Kaiserthums Oesterreich Rechenbuch des Andreas Reinhard Zimmerische Chronik See also Category:Wikisource link templates Category:Wikisource templates References Alexa rank wmf:Mission statement. m:Wikisource oldwikisource:Wikisource:What is Wikisource#What do we exclude. Nostalgia.wikipedia.org Sources.wikipedia.org Wikisource.org Server admin log for August 23 2005; a fifteenth language (sr:) was created on August 25 (above). See the Server admin log for September 11 2005 at 01:20 and below (September 10) at 22:49. Server admin log for March 29 Server admin log for June 2 2006 See the organized lists at Wikisource's Multilingual Portal and Meta's numbered sortable list of Wikisources by size. For an automatic list of local main pages see Category:Main Pages; for a formatted list see the wikisource.org section of the Wikisource portal. Wikiversity.org Wikisource.org Wikisource:Wikisource:Scriptorium#100K External links Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Wikisource Wikisource: English Wikisource Multilingual portal About Wikisource: Danny Wool on Wikisource (Wikimedia Foundation article). A personal perspective on the history of Wikisource by Angela Beesley Early discussions and plans for the project (Meta) v d eProjects of the Wikimedia Foundation Wikibooks  Wikimedia Commons  Wikinews  Wikipedia  Wikiquote  Wikisource  Wikispecies  Wikiversity  Wiktionary