[INDOLOGY] Sanskrit Wikisource

[Tyler Neill]

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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