Are you looking for a voluntary task that can be done from your computer? One that can take just a couple of minutes? Are you a user of Wikipedia, or one of its sister projects, who would like to put something back?
Wikimedia Commons, the open media repository which is used to host images, video and audio for Wikipedia and for re-use by anyone, has thousands of images with small amounts of text, which need transcription. These include foundation stones, gravestones, various signs, and others.
For example, I took this picture in Worcester a few years ago:
and recently transcribed the text:
This foundation stone
was laid by
Cosmo Gordon Lang
Archbishop of Canterbury
25th March 1939
WE Moone EDE MD JP – Mayor
CH Digby-Seymour MA – Town Clerk
which you can now see on the images’s page on Wikimedia Commons.
There are more images in Category:Foundation stones, Category:Signs by materials, Category:Gravestones, and and we’ll be adding others to Category:Needing transcription shortly. (We may subdivide the latter by language, as it grows). Experienced Wikimedians can help by adding the {{Transcribe here}} template to suitable image pages; and by categorising foundation stone images by year.
If you’d like to help, first sign up for a new account (if you don’t already have one there or on Wikipedia). Your username is personal to you (not your organisation or employer) and will work on Wikipedia and the other projects. You can use a pseudonym, if you wish to remain anonymous.
Then, pick an image from one of the above categories, or their linked subcategories, and check it hasn’t already been transcribed. By selecting from a subcategory relating to a specific country, you can find images with text in languages other than English. Transcribe the text in a text editor or word processor (this allows you to have the image window and text editor open side by side). Use sentence case, for readability, even if the original is all in upper case, and match the line breaks in the original. When you’re done, copy the text to your clipboard.
Next, click “edit” on the image page, and paste the text below the description fields. Don’t worry if you aren’t sure how to format it, as another editor will soon oblige (or you can drop me a note here or on Twitter — I’m @pigsonthewing — and I will do so), but I used the {{inscription}} template, like this:
The inscription reads (all in upper case):
{{inscription |1=
This foundation stone
was laid by
Cosmo Gordon Lang
Archbishop of Canterbury
25th March 1939
WE Moone EDE MD JP – Mayor
CH Digby-Seymour MA – Town Clerk
| language=en }}
Note that the template ends with | language=en }} to show that the text is in English.
If you can see the template code {{Transcribe here}} in the page, you can now delete it.
Finally, enter an edit summary, such as “transcribed the text” and hit “save”. And that’s it. Easy, wasn’t it? Why not do another one?
Updated: to use a better template.