Summary. edit

The process for uploading field notes requires doing three relatively painless steps: 1) You upload a PDF to Wikimedia Commons. 2) You create an index page on Wikisource that allows anyone to access pages for transcription or proofreading. 3) You create a summary page that shows all the transcribed data and provides a handy table of contents.

In more depth: edit

So you have scanned field notebooks. What now? First, do you have a single large, paginated file? If yes, the best thing you can do is read this guide to creating index files. So now you have your PDF stored in Wikimedia Commons and you have an index page on Wikisource. The index page points to the stored copy in the Commons, and provides a mechanism for transcribers and proofreaders to pull up individual pages and begin adding or proofing transcribed text.

Creating an index page is an essential first step. You also probably want to create another page that shows all the content from transcriptions in one place. An example page can be found here for Junius Henderson's first notebook. You can think of this page as a summary document of all transcriptions that can be formatted to also include a table of contents. It is something of a summary output. So, if you are working on "Index:Field_Notes_of_Junius_Henderson,_Notebook_2.pdf", you will probably want to create a page entitled "Field_Notes_of_Junius_Henderson/Notebook_2" to contain the actual transcribed text from this file. The content of this "summary" page should include header information and a Table of Contents. For those of you unfamiliar with {{header}} content or how to assemble a Table of Contents, bear with us. It is easy to do this.

The {{header }} template is described in detail here but all you need to do is copy and paste this template into the top of the page and then fill in what you know:

{{header
 | title      = 
 | author     = 
 | translator = 
 | section    = 
 | previous   = 
 | next       = 
 | year       = 
 | notes      = 
}}

Once done, you create a Table of Content for your content. The format for this is also simple. Just add __TOC__ right underneath your header and then give a title for your first entry as so "==<FIRST ENTRY TITLE>== and then underneath that you include a location in your page index. The syntax is <pages index="<page index location>" from=<starting page> to=<ending page> />".

See some examples of this by clicking 'edit' on "Field_Notes_of_Junius_Henderson/Notebook_2".

Now that you can do these operations, you can set up all that is needed for uploading a text, indexing an uploaded text, and providing a summary page showing transcriptions and status of pages.