Wikisource

The next Wikimedia project I checked out was Wikisource. This again had to do with books.

"Wikisource is an online library of free content textual sources, operated by the Wikimedia Foundation. Its aims are to harbour all forms of free text, in many languages. It also provides translation efforts to this end."

Most of the books on Wikisource are free of copyright, meaning the work was published before January 1, 1923 and the author has been deceased for over 100 years, or have been released under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

In looking around I found what is said to be Shakespeare's last will and testament. I have to say I am not sure how correct I believe it is since there is nothing citing its source or how they came across the article. When you look at the history of the page, you can see where people have made edits and changes, and for the most part they appear to be grammar or spelling corrections, but how do we know those edits are correct?

It seems that many of Shakespeare's works cited on Wikisource say doubts have been raised about its source. People are consistently editing the works of Shakespeare, but most likely from several different sources which they are not always citing, so whose to say which one might be a complete and true example?

I know that the works of Shakespeare have been altered by many people outside of Wikisource, so this is not anything new or disturbing. If you go to see an actual production, I am sure it isn't pulled just from one version. But this is where I question how authentic and accurate is the information that is being put out there?

I guess it does go to say that you should always double check the source of information and not take everything you read as absolute. That being said, it is a pretty nifty sight to explore. There are all sorts of books that I would never explore on this site and I look forward to reading some of them - for free!