Hi everyone,
Rabbi Dan Be'eri of Jerusalem is well-known in Israel as the creator of the בקראי educational method, which is meant to help school children learn most or all of the Tanakh and Mishnah from a young age (partially through singing the texts).
Rav Be'eri has recently released some incredibly valuable texts that should be of supreme interest to both Sefaria and Open Siddur. Each file is a full chapter of Bavli or Yerushalmi, carefully edited and vowelized (based upon the best extant scholarship) and then formatted through division into lines to facilitate study. This is project he has been working on for more than a decade, and he continues to issue more chapters as he finishes them.
I have uploaded the current files here at the Wikimedia Commons. More chapters will be added God willing as they appear. They can of course be downloaded and used within other projects under a free license. The PDF files at the Commons contain word-processor files within them, and can be opened for editing like any other <.doc> file by using LibreOffice. But for convenience I have attached them here too as .doc files.
A first sample chapter has been formatted as online text at Hebrew Wikisource:
There might be a very particular benefit in this for Sefaria specifically: Instead of translating the Talmud to match the Vilna lines, which are highly problematic for the purpose, the line-division in this edition would be absolutely perfect to both motivate and facilitate a collaborative translation of the Gemara into English.
I would like to
personally thank Rav Be'eri for making this work, in which he has invested many years of labor, available to the public under a free and open license.
Shabbat Shalom