The Founder: Ottoman Çevrimiçi May 2026

The precipitating moment occurred in 2004. Ersoy watched a student in Amsterdam instantly access a digitized medieval Dutch manuscript via a university portal. "Here," Ersoy later wrote in his blog, Bilişim Tarihçisi (The IT Historian), "the Dutch farmer's tax record is a click away, while the Ottoman Sultan’s imperial decree remains locked in a filing cabinet. This is not preservation; this is archival imprisonment."

Furthermore, the founder insisted on : Arabic (original), Latin (transliteration), and English (translation). This tri-lingual approach broke the nationalist frame; a Greek historian could search for ihtida (conversion to Islam) without knowing Ottoman script, while a Serbian economist could find tekâlif-i örfiyye (customary levies) instantly. Ethical Challenges: The Founder’s Stand The founder faced two existential threats. The first came from the Turkish state . In 2010, the Directorate of State Archives claimed that Ersoy’s high-resolution scans of 19th-century court records violated "cultural patrimony laws." The founder fought back in court, arguing that the documents were created by a defunct empire (dissolved in 1922) and that the Turkish Republic had no copyright claim over Ottoman-era tapu (land deeds). He famously stated, "The Sultan is dead. The knowledge belongs to the living." He won the case in 2013 on the grounds that the documents predated the 1951 copyright convention. the founder: ottoman çevrimiçi

His platform allowed volunteers in Tokyo, Berlin, or Chicago to view a scanned line of text and type its modern Latin-script equivalent (e.g., converting اشجع to eşcâ’ ). The founder’s genius lay in gamification: he turned transcription into a ranking system. Users earned "Pasha Points" for accuracy, reviewed by automated consensus algorithms. By 2012, 15,000 volunteers had transcribed over 2.3 million belgeler (documents)—a feat no state institution could match. The precipitating moment occurred in 2004

Thus, the concept of Osmanlı Çevrimiçi was born. Unlike the official state project Devlet Arşivleri , which focused on high-resolution scans for academics, Ersoy envisioned a crowdsourced, open-access, transliterated database. He founded the platform in 2006 from a two-room flat in Kadıköy, using three second-hand servers and a scanner he bought by selling his car. The founder’s core innovation was not the database but the OTR (Ottoman Transliteration Renderer) . Ottoman Turkish is notoriously difficult to OCR (Optical Character Recognition) due to its cursive, contextual nature (the letter kef changes shape depending on its neighbors). Ersoy rejected the industry standard of perfect OCR, which had a 40% error rate on divani script. Instead, he built a "human-in-the-loop" system. This is not preservation; this is archival imprisonment