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.
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
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@gmail.com>
To: Asko Parpola <aparpola@gmail.com>
Cc: indology@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.
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"
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.
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@list.indology.info> wrote:
>
> Received from a list member.
> Harry Spier
>
>
> On Sun, Jun 28, 2026 at 9:18 PM Harry Spier <vasishtha.spier@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
>
>
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