Wikisource is an online wiki-based digital library of free-content textual sources operated by the Wikimedia Foundation.

Originally conceived as an archive to store useful or important historical texts, it has expanded to become a general-content library.

Now works are supported by online scans via the ProofreadPage extension, which ensures the reliability and accuracy of the project's texts.

The collection was initially focused on important historical and cultural material, distinguishing it from other digital archives like Project Gutenberg.

[2] In 2001, there was a dispute on Wikipedia regarding the addition of primary-source materials, leading to edit wars over their inclusion or deletion.

[10] As in the Wikipedia portal the Wikisource slogan appears around the logo in the project's ten largest languages.

ProofreadPage also allows greater participation, since access to a physical copy of the original work is not necessary to be able to contribute to the project once images have been uploaded.

[citation needed] Within two weeks of the project's official start at sources.wikipedia.org, over 1,000 pages had been created, with approximately 200 of these being designated as actual articles.

[citation needed] On November 27, 2005, the English Wikisource passed 20,000 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 100,000 text-units with Chapter LXXIV of Six Months at the White House, a memoir by painter Francis Bicknell Carpenter.

[2] All texts held by Wikisource must have been previously published; the project does not host "vanity press" books or documents produced by its contributors.

[2] The requirement for prior publication can also be waived in a small number of cases if the work is a source document of notable historical importance.

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.

[28] 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.

"[20] Richard Elliott Friedman, an Old Testament scholar and professor of Jewish studies at the University of Georgia, identified errors in the translation of the Book of Genesis as of 2008.

Fourteen hundred 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), was expected to be improved by Wikisource's human proofreaders.

[29][30][31] In 2011, the English Wikisource received many high-quality scans of documents from the US National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) as part of their efforts "to increase the accessibility and visibility of its holdings."

Many of these documents have been transcribed and proofread by the Wikisource community and are featured as links in the National Archives' own online catalog.