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There are lots of sources from a couple of years ago trumpeting the WDL. Currently it has only a small number of items, something that doesn't appear to have been foreseen in the those sources. A sourced explanation of why this is the case would be be very useful. Stuartyeates (talk) 19:46, 1 June 2013 (UTC)Reply

I have no clue. We'll have to wait for staff to reply to this one. Perhaps User:Chris Adams has some insight. SarahStierch (talk) 19:54, 1 June 2013 (UTC)Reply

Oh, and it might be good to clarify what you're referring too a little bit more. I'm confused - do you mean that the WDL doesn't seem to have as many items as people thought it would? It's confusing to understand the "item" numbers on WDL. They actually have over 7,000 "things" on WDL - 7,000 images, etc. But staff are better at clarifying it than I am. SarahStierch (talk) 19:55, 1 June 2013 (UTC)Reply

I think the underlying issue was simply confusion over the project goals: WDL was never intended to place millions of items online but rather the most significant documents with consistent, high-quality metadata, translations and presentation. This approach is sometimes contrasted with other projects which are trying to include everything but are thus limited to whatever metadata and presentation each participant offers, which is often rudimentary. Comparisons between such projects are tempting but ultimately unfair because they're simply different goals, neither of which is wrong. The other thing which is important to remember is that as a digital library, WDL is limited to material which has already been digitized: one of the project goals is helping some partners build the capacity to perform preservation-grade scanning in–house — a very important process which takes non–trivial amounts of time before producing visible results. Chris Adams (talk) 14:55, 3 June 2013 (UTC)Reply

"... but rather the most significant documents with consistent, high-quality metadata, translations and presentation." care to comment on the items relating to New Zealand? These are not significant documents; the metadata is almost entirely collection level (Tāwhiao and Māori are spelt wrong, too); and the presentation is pretty average. I'm unable to comment on the quality of the translation, since the translation isn't into any of the languages relevant to the subjects. Compare [1] and [2] for example (yes, Te Papa doesn't support macrons either). This is by Josiah Martin (teacher) and appears to be a Charles Chusseau-Flaviens-distributed press photo. Whatever the answers are to these particular questions, the fact that all of this isn't obvious from the World Digital Library is the crux of the issue. Stuartyeates (talk) 21:17, 3 June 2013 (UTC)Reply

Added updated information to the article. Current item tally is 9,900 as of Feb 2014, which is an eightfold improvement in slightly less than five years, and about a 40% increase since last June.   — C M B J   12:25, 27 February 2014 (UTC)Reply

I've made a userbox for the project. You can put it on your userpage by inputting {{User WP WDL}}. Thoughts? Soffredo (talk) 16:46, 22 June 2013 (UTC)Reply

This user is a member of WikiProject World Digital Library.