[INDOLOGY] Sanskrit Wikisource

Fri Aug 7 04:11:24 UTC 2026

Dear Tyler,

     Congratulations and thanks to your hard work. This is an amazing
resource. With best wishes,

Madhav

Madhav M. Deshpande
Professor Emeritus, Sanskrit and Linguistics
University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan, USA
Senior Fellow, Oxford Center for Hindu Studies
Adjunct Professor, National Institute of Advanced Studies, Bangalore, India

[Residence: Campbell, California, USA]

On Thu, Aug 6, 2026 at 6:00 PM Tyler Neill via INDOLOGY <
indology at list.indology.info> wrote:

> Hi everyone,
>
> I extended and clarified the alternate Sanskrit Wikisource interface I
> mentioned last month. Please note the new name and URL:
>
> https://tylergneill.github.io/sanskrit-wikisource-atlas/
>
> I also wrote about it on my blog:
>
> https://tylerneill.info/blog/sanskrit-wikisource-and-atlas
>
> Headline finding: This collection definitively surpassed GRETIL's size
> between 2015 and 2020 and now appears to be 2–4x as large (see trend
> graphs
> <https://tylergneill.github.io/sanskrit-wikisource-atlas/about.html#data-quantity>).
> We should probably be paying more attention to it for our research.
> Hopefully the improved interface helps you do just that.
>
> Kind regards,
> Tyler
>
>
> On Wed, Jul 1, 2026 at 5:19 PM Tyler Neill <tyler.g.neill at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
>> Hi Harry, hi all,
>>
>> Re: Sanskrit Wikisource, it’s a great question. Here’s what I know.
>>
>> Wikisource, part of Wikimedia, is a complex, crowdsourced project with
>> public revision history. Like the other parts, the Sanskrit part of Wikisource
>> has no individual creator. And while it does have a lot of potentially
>> useful material, it is absolutely abysmal in both its metadata (e.g.,
>> bibliography, contributors) and its navigation features (Devanagari-only,
>> wiki-style traversal of an underlying category tree, no flat list
>> anywhere), making it very hard to get a sense of what’s there. Wikisource
>> was simply not built to host e-text collections, but a number of motivated
>> people have used it to work on and share material they might not have
>> otherwise, which is something to be thankful for.
>>
>> To start to come to grips with the collection, I made the following
>> alternate interface a few months ago. It makes both categorical navigation
>> and title-search more user-friendly, including in multiple
>> transliteration options.
>>
>> https://tylergneill.github.io/sanskrit-wikisource-mirror/
>>
>> For this purpose, I scraped the full content for safekeeping in case of
>> emergencies, and to estimate scope — NOT to re-host, as the collection is
>> still living and growing. That is, this mirror merely points to the
>> originals. The interface shares the conservative scope information, totaling about
>> 260mb of plain-text content in about 4,700 individual web pages. For
>> comparison, GRETIL is roughly 350mb before controlling for duplication,
>> about 175mb after. (see
>> https://tylerneill.info/blog/gretil-past-and-present). In short, it is
>> indeed huge and very interesting.
>>
>> Looking closer, tho, I’ve found that there’s quite a bit of duplication,
>> with digitizations of varying quality left in differing stages of
>> completion, and barely a hint to help make sense of it all. Some material
>> is based on an OCR pipeline internal to Wikisource (using off-the-shelf
>> Tesseract, I believe), most was manually keyed.
>>
>> My overall assessment: On a one-off basis, items should be studied,
>> understood, and improved, most likely involving careful transplantation
>> onto other platforms where they can be better cared for and become part of
>> mainstream academic use. (https://sanskritsahitya.org/naishadhiyacaritam derives
>> from Sanskrit Wikisource, for example). My strong opinion is that it would
>> be unwise to duplicate and ingest the material en masse for
>> presentation elsewhere in its current condition, as doing so would only add
>> to the confusion.
>>
>> Kind regards,
>> Tyler
>>
>>>
>> ---------- Forwarded message ----------
>>> From: Harry Spier <vasishtha.spier at gmail.com>
>>> To: Asko Parpola <aparpola at gmail.com>
>>> Cc: indology at list.indology.info
>>> Bcc:
>>> Date: Tue, 30 Jun 2026 16:45:38 -0400
>>> Subject: Re: [INDOLOGY] śiva-purāṇa from Veṅkaṭeśvara Press
>>> Dear list members,
>>>
>>> Thank you to Asko  Parpola for the bibliographic information.
>>> And thank you to Samyak Modi, who offlist provided me the archive.org
>>> link, which I'm providing here since it was asked for by other members
>>> offlist. This seems to be the same edition though printed in different
>>> years.
>>>
>>> https://archive.org/details/XaaT_shri-shiva-maha-puran-visweswar-samhita-1955-shri-venkateswar-press-mumbai/page/n13/mode/2up
>>>
>>> I have just added a complete  Śiva-Purāṇa   (all 7 books)  to SALSa
>>> (the Searchable Aggregate Library of Sanskrit). and this appears to be the
>>> edition. Previously the collection only had a version with books 1 and 7.
>>>
>>> Charles Li pointed me to "Sanskrit Wikisource"
>>>
>>> https://sa.wikisource.org/wiki/%E0%A4%AE%E0%A5%81%E0%A4%96%E0%A5%8D%E0%A4%AF%E0%A4%AA%E0%A5%83%E0%A4%B7%E0%A5%8D%E0%A4%A0%E0%A4%AE%E0%A5%8D
>>>
>>> and I downloaded the complete Śiva-Purāṇa etext (in devanagari) from
>>> there.
>>>
>>> Does anyone know anything about that wikisource page Charles Li pointed
>>> me to:  संस्कृतविकिस्रोतसि स्वागतम् which has this and many other
>>> sanskrit etexts.  Who created it etc.
>>>
>>> Thanks,
>>> Harry Spier
>>>
>>>
>>> On Tue, Jun 30, 2026 at 12:11 PM Asko Parpola <aparpola at gmail.com>
>>> wrote:
>>>
>>>> Dear Harry, [Śiva-Purāṇa.] Pothi form. Bombay: Venkaṭeśvara
>>>> Press,1906. 7, 488 fol. Reprinted, with an introduction by Pushpendra
>>>> Kumar (xvi pp.) and a śloka index by Nagasarana Sinha (244 p.), Delhi:
>>>> Nag Publishers, 1986. 2 vols. 1504 pp. Set INR 900.
>>>> Best wishes, Asko
>>>>
>>>> On Mon, Jun 29, 2026 at 5:41 AM Harry Spier via INDOLOGY
>>>> <indology at list.indology.info> wrote:
>>>> >
>>>> > Received from a list member.
>>>> > Harry Spier
>>>> >
>>>> >
>>>> > On Sun, Jun 28, 2026 at 9:18 PM Harry Spier <
>>>> vasishtha.spier at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>> >>
>>>> >> Dear list members,
>>>> >>
>>>> >> If anyone has a pdf of the śiva-purāṇa from Veṅkaṭeśvara Press (or
>>>> if it is in archive.org, could point me to it) I would appreciate it.
>>>> >>
>>>> >> Thanks,
>>>> >> Harry Spier
>>>> >
>>>> >
>>>> > _______________________________________________
>>>> > INDOLOGY mailing list
>>>> > INDOLOGY at list.indology.info
>>>> > https://list.indology.info/mailman/listinfo/indology
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> --
>>>> Asko Parpola, aparpola at gmail.com
>>>> http://www.helsinki.academia.edu/AskoParpola
>>>>
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>>
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