Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Missing encyclopedic articles/Archive 4

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This is the third archive of the discussion at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Missing encyclopedic articles.

1911 almost done!

1911 Encyclopedia topics is 98.1% complete (280 remaining of 14,707)! Let's knock out the last few and declare victory over Britannica, well at least the 1911 version of it ;) How does one nominate a project for the weekly focus, BTW? I would like to nominate 1911 as the focus for next week so we can finally get it finished! Kaldari 03:50, 9 February 2006 (UTC)

I agree with you. But we should not compromise quality over quantity. The 1911 Encyclopedia topics project will be completed. It is not a matter of when but how it will be completed. Once completed, we should focus our attention on the other main project: General encyclopedic topics. Siva1979 14:00, 9 February 2006 (UTC)

Here are a few of my contributions. Hope they are up to par:

Kaldari 16:41, 9 February 2006 (UTC)

Absolutely they are. Thanks for your hard work! – Quadell ^{(talk) (bounties)} 17:00, 9 February 2006 (UTC)

While I don't control focus of the week, I have been doing the actual changes based on recommendations of other members. If somebody doesn't suggest something, I usually pick whatever Hotlist letter is the least complete. I will choose 1911 for the next week to help focus the attention. --Reflex Reaction (talk)• 18:13, 9 February 2006 (UTC)

Keeping it for one more week since approaching completion. After that to the General list as suggested by others. --Reflex Reaction (talk)• 15:03, 22 February 2006 (UTC)

Great that you are so close to the finish line. But please remind those who collaborate on the 1911 project to please make sure that they care about quality rather than about just being able to knock some more off the list and be able to say it's complete. We in the de-en translation have seen quite a few stubs that would have better been left undone. I've seen this first hand about articles in the category of European geography where the EB1911 can hardly be considered a good source. We've had two World Wars since then that moved things around, not to mention the events of the 80s and 90s. Thanks. --Mmounties 19:57, 9 February 2006 (UTC)

Along the same lines, I sometimes come along 1911-derived stubs in the field of African ethnography. More often than not, they contain glaring errors or just plain outdated statements. So much has changed since then in ethnography/anthropology, ethnolinguistics, and history, that the 1911 content of this area has become virtually useless. People should be warned against that. For an example, take the article Barabra before I cleaned it up. Stubs like that do more harm than good, especially because this area hasn't that many editors who can separate chaff from wheat. — mark ✎ 14:53, 10 February 2006 (UTC)

Except for (perhaps) biographies of historical figures, I'm not sure that any 1911 article should just be imported "as is". It's not good enough just to add a few links and some categories - they need updating. There's nothing left now that's a straightforward import, and most of those that have recently been created should have been left as red links rather than created as they have been - see for example Bozdar or cramp-ring for an example of how not to do it. --OpenToppedBus - Talk to the driver 16:38, 10 February 2006 (UTC)

I agree, a large number of the recent additions have been terrible. Personally, I usually don't use any of the information in the 1911 article unless it can also be cited in a more up to date source. Most of the information in the remaining articles are completely out of date and thus are not appropriate for cut and paste imports. Kaldari 23:51, 14 February 2006 (UTC)

I'm confused. A lot of the recent copy and paste imports seem to have been done by Siva1979, the same person who admonished me to emphasize quality over quantity when importing. Is this an example of "do as I say, not as I do"? Kaldari 23:58, 14 February 2006 (UTC)

Hhhmmm, how bizarre. Martin 00:04, 15 February 2006 (UTC)

I'm all for deleting the recently created straight copies of 1911 content. As I noted on Talk:Bozdar, one recent example of an ethnographic article that was copy-pasted from the 1911 edition: an article in which some statements are true and most others outdated and blatantly false is definitely more harmful than no article at all, especially when we have no easy way to tell the first type of statement from the latter. Remember that our content is copied all over the internet.

So what are we going to do about this? — mark ✎ 08:36, 15 February 2006 (UTC)

Also, I note that Siva1979 (talk · contribs) has been asked several times on his talk to slow down on the 1911 articles. I have asked him to join the discussion here. — mark ✎ 08:38, 15 February 2006 (UTC)

Well, firstly I wish to state that I had no intention of admonishing Kaldari! I do not know why he/she feels that way. Anyway this user has done a great work on the 1911 articles and I wish to acknowledge this. Secondly, I created some redirects on the 1911 articles and I have been more careful in recent days on just copying straight from the 1911 encyclopedia. I acknowledge that the first couple of days in dealing with the project by myself had been mediocre to say the least. I am trying my very best to improve the quality of some of the articles I have taken from the 1911 encyclopedia. I hope that I have your understanding. S iva1979^{Talk to me} 09:21, 15 February 2006 (UTC)

I didn't really mean admonish, that sounds too harsh. Maybe "suggested" is a better word :) Kaldari 15:03, 15 February 2006 (UTC)

I don't think the new contributions should be deleted automatically. They should be updated, if possible, and deleted if there is no other choice. Besides, there are problems with a large percentage of the articles, regardless of when they were added. I tried unsuccessfully to get some of the articles not to be included, but some of the other editors were adamant about including everything. I added some of the questionable material myself (sorry), just so it would have at least a little bit of cleanup and a tag for updating. Some of the editors were not even correcting the OCR errors, let alone updating the articles. I suggest that the project be finished and then shut down. Then, articles can be added to a list for cleanup or proposed deletion.

All of the articles should be checked, but there are some that are particularly problematic. First, some of the ethnicity articles appear to be accurate and neutral and others are racist or just plain wrong (pseudoscience and such). Second, articles on provinces are often wrong because the province does not exist anymore, has a different boundary or a different name. Provinces in India, Burma, Myanmar and Iran are the worst becuase they have undergone major reorganizations. Third, districts are a problem in just about every country, as they change names, are dissolved or absorbed frequently. Fourth, obsolete British law terms should probably be deleted, unless they are notable for some reason. Fifth, industrial technology articles should frequently be deleted. A few processes may not have changed substantially and some may be useful as historical information, but most of them are useless. Sixth, articles on cities are usually salvageable because they are not frequently abandoned or absorbed, but the name of the city and the landforms, states/provinces and other cities mentioned in the article sometimes have new names. The population also needs to be updated (this was often the hardest part for cities in India and Southeast Asia). The article may have useful history, but the "current" stuff that it talks about needs to be updated or removed. It may seem like it would be easier to delete and start over, and for some articles it probably would be, but it is often very difficult to find information on small to medium size cities outside of the U.S. and Western Europe. The articles usually have useful geographic content, as well, though as I said before, the correct names must be used. There are some articles on ancient cities that don't need that much work.

One problem is that the same users who added the bad content may disrupt the cleanup and deletion process. We must make sure that they do not remove the articles from the list or delete the cleanup tags on the articles. What do you guys think? -- Kjkolb 10:02, 15 February 2006 (UTC)

When I wrote this I was not referring to anyone in particular, and especially not Siva1979, as he/she started working on the project after I had stopped. -- Kjkolb 10:08, 15 February 2006 (UTC)

(indent) When this project is finished, we should then work through the 1911 category, verifying/updating the articles in it, then changing the tag to mark them as verified ({{1911Verified}} for example). The majority of articles that contain 1911 material are perfectly decent, so it wouldnt be an impossibly difficult task. Martin 10:44, 15 February 2006 (UTC)

Here's another cut and paste job that needs to be verified for accuracy: Catauxi. Kaldari 00:55, 18 February 2006 (UTC)

Yeah, what do people think of reorganizing the original list to allow verifying how good our coverage of the same articles is. For example, 1911 may have had a 20kb article and we still have only 1kb. Besides length, relevance and being up to date, what other factor would we like to check for each article that is in EB1911? Maybe a count of how many references our article has? - Taxman ^Talk 19:31, 23 February 2006 (UTC)

I wonder which will happen first: 1 million English articles or 1911 complete? It's going to be close! Kaldari 01:31, 23 February 2006 (UTC)

Unless someone really decides to go to a research library and look for information to hammer out the last 40, 1m articles is going to be within a week or so and will beat 1911. - Taxman ^Talk 19:31, 23 February 2006 (UTC)

It's not that bad; I did a couple today, based on what I could find on the Web and other-language Wikipedias. They could both be expanded (though that's true of most new articles), but they're neither cut-and-pastes of the 1911 B. (at which I didn't look, in fact) nor the product of extensive periods in a library. Is there any way of getting more people involved? --Phronima 20:25, 23 February 2006 (UTC)

The last 30 or so imports by FeanorStar7 have been cut and paste jobs of the worst kind, even ignoring the updated information that people had added on the list to help with research. The article on Nusretabad, for example, is completely wrong on many levels. The first 6 words of the article contain 4 errors:

Its modern spelling is Nosratabad, not Nusretabad
It isn't the capital of anything anymore
Persia is now Iran
Seistan is now the province of Sistan and Baluchistan

Having that article as is is completely unacceptable. A lot of the other articles are just as bad. What should we do about this? Kaldari 07:08, 25 February 2006 (UTC)

I think that we should start a systematic cleanup of the articles. -- Kjkolb 00:22, 26 February 2006 (UTC)

1911xCatholic Encyclopedia crossover done?

There is only one more item on the list- for a town of Saxony that has a reasonable article. However, the comment on the project page seems to demand that it be nearly as fleshed out as its excellent de.wikipedia counterpart. Do we have to wait for someone to translate over all de's data, or can we mark it (and by extension, the 1911xCE crossoever list) as done? --maru (talk) contribs 07:22, 10 February 2006 (UTC)

Slap it with an {{Expansion}} request and put a descriptive comment in talk. Then put a fork in that list - it's done! – Quadell ^{(talk) (bounties)} 12:53, 10 February 2006 (UTC)

Done. --maru (talk) contribs 17:08, 10 February 2006 (UTC)

Reviewing 1911

In our rush to complete 1911, we did a lot of inappropriate cut and paste jobs. Many of them should have been obvious redirects, but no one took the time to even check to see if we already had articles for them or not. I have been going through and correcting these as I have found them. For example Goramy should have been redirected to Gourami, Koreshan Ecclesia should have been redirected to Koreshan Unity, and Marghelan should have been redirected to Margilan. Those were just some of the more obvious ones. I'm sure there are dozens, if not hundreds of others that need to be fixed. And many of those for which redirects were not possible need to be checked for accuracy and updated. At the very least, all the cut and paste jobs need to be marked with an update template. Perhaps someone could set up a new project called 1911 Encyclopedia topics review. Kaldari 21:02, 26 February 2006 (UTC)

Verfication of 1911

A full list of items with the {{1911}} reference template is now available for verfication Wikipedia:WikiProject Missing encyclopedic articles/1911 verification. Guidelines for removal should also be discussed before any pruning begins, including usage of another template, or removal of the old template if the wikipedia text is sufficiently different from the 1911 text. --Reflex Reaction (talk)• 16:24, 27 February 2006 (UTC)

The ones tagged with 1911 are the safe ones. Shouldn't it be a higher priority to check all 1911 articles without the tag, as they the ones that are more likely to get forgotten about as time goes on? Pcb21 Pete 17:56, 27 February 2006 (UTC)

I'm not sure all of those are safe. I checked through some of the problematic items mentioned above and it looked like that they had the {{1911}} tag even if it was a direct copy and paste job. I also don't know how to easily find the "bad entries" that weren't tagged without having to slag through the ~30,000 articles that EB1911 where we already have decent coverage like Einstein, Achilles that were never based on the 1911. I'm open to suggestion. --Reflex Reaction (talk)• 18:59, 27 February 2006 (UTC)

I think the tagged articles are safer than the untagged ones, simply because someone who had bothered to tag the article would probably also have done a decent job of writing the article. Is there a record of the first 1911 list posted by this project? Possibly that should be used as the list for checking. It could be cross-referenced with the list of tagged articles to produce a list of untagged articles created (mostly) through this project. Is that feasible?--Cherry blossom tree 23:35, 27 February 2006 (UTC)

Sorry, I should have been clearer. Yes I agree, there will be some tagged 1911 that are problematc, but at least they are tagged so we can find them, examine them, re-tag at leisure. A next step is to go back to the original pruned list as posted by Bogdan see e.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Undelete&target=Wikipedia%3A1911_Encyclopedia_topics%2F3&timestamp=20041205174119. Because they are pruned, the really obvious stuff such as Achilles doesn't appear and they would be not too bad to check. Admittedly these leaves a hole for stuff that was copied before the official project was started but I guess we can live with that. Pcb21 Pete 09:06, 28 February 2006 (UTC)

Can I assume that no one would anyone object to combining the two lists ({{1911}} and the original 14K list). That way we can get the untagged items tagged items and false negatives excluded from the original list that were later tagged with 1911. It would also eliminate duplicates from both lists. This would also elimate the double duty of going over the original list, then going over it again with the tagged items. The drawback is that this new list may be longer than 15K because of different naming conventions between Britannica and Wikipedia. --Reflex Reaction (talk)• 20:41, 28 February 2006 (UTC)

I have made a draft version of what the new verification list could look like. To get at tagged/untagged/orginal list issues, I have marked some entry with a * +. See the page for more details. Wikipedia:WikiProject Missing encyclopedic articles/1911 verification/draft. Hopefully that will be helpful. These of course can be changed modified or worked with to make the list easier to work with. --Reflex Reaction (talk)• 22:56, 28 February 2006 (UTC)

Looks like you have done some great work Reflex Reaction, thank you very much. Looks like that list will be very useful. Pcb21 Pete 10:49, 1 March 2006 (UTC)

Looks like a good plan to me.... I'm not too terribly concerned. Do we have any idea how many 1911 articles got copied over before systemization began, and have evaded either editing or WP:Cleanup to date? I doubt it could be more than a few hundred... Alba 01:25, 2 March 2006 (UTC)

I didn't see this before I commented on the verification talk page. The gist is I think if we're going to go back through all of them we should also note on the WP article's talk page if the EB article was a lot longer or more comprehensive, either overall or in particular subtopics. What good does it do for use to say we have all the articles if many of ours are much less comprehensive. - Taxman ^Talk 23:31, 28 February 2006 (UTC)

That's kind of a fuzzy thing, Taxman. I was working on the last really long 1911 article, Variation and Selection; it was "more comprehensive" in some areas but was also much more out of date. If we didn't merge in "more comprehensive" material from 1911, it probably was for good reason... do you want a quality control check on our transfer work in this second pass? Or just to check for updating needs? Alba 01:25, 2 March 2006 (UTC)

My feeling is we should do both while we're at it. At least note where our article is missing information. And of course you did the right thing in not including the out of date information, but then we should note that our article is less comprehensive because it doesn't include x,y,z information that the EB article did. Either at that time or later people can use that information as a guide in improving the article. There are also times where EB just rambles and the information isn't all that relevant, in that case, note that too, and if people agree, don't bother with it. If they disagree, it again may add highlight useful material our articles can cover. Our goal is to be comprehensive and accurate, not just have a stub for every topic covered in EB. - Taxman ^Talk 20:45, 2 March 2006 (UTC)

Ready to go ?....

I think that the new list is ready to go, but removal criteria should be discussed before any more edits are done. Since I wasn't much involved with the list, I will leave it to others to discuss, but my "recommendations" are on the page as it now stands. Primarily, updated coverage and comperable coverage as others have suggested. --Reflex Reaction (talk)• 17:41, 1 March 2006 (UTC)

I think we should at the very least make sure that the article covers the 1911>2006 period. Also, if we're going to have people going through xx000 articles, most of which on fairly core topics, then I think this would be an efficient time to do a more thorough review to make sure we're making best use of the 1911 material. Attempting to classify each article as featured/a class/b class/c class and so on as we went would be good but possibly a bit optimistic.--Cherry blossom tree 17:57, 1 March 2006 (UTC)

Great work, thanks. I think though instead of removing entries that are verified we should leave comments in the lists. That would create a useful spreadsheet if you will of the overall status of the articles and allow looking through for articles that need updating or are much less comprehensive than the 1911 article. The downside is it takes looking through the whole list to find them, but I think it's better than having to dig up the data from every article's talk page. Maybe to make it easier we can use color coding or acronyms, such as verified up to date (VUD), more comprehensive than EB (MC), less comprehensive than EB (LC), etc which would allow grepping or using control F to search the page. Also, I guess I'm surprised at the number of redlinks that are still there. - Taxman ^Talk 19:05, 1 March 2006 (UTC)

The "re-appearance" of red links was always going to look like a problem. This why on the hotlist I introduced the concept of "suggestions for non-inclusion" - so we only ignore topics if several people agree. The 1911 project will have missed a few valid topics because just one person decided they weren't valid - but I don't think it is a huge problem. Pcb21 Pete 08:46, 3 March 2006 (UTC)

I just addressed one origin of the redlinks in the next section down (maybe that screed should have come here instead. I'm out of practice.) David Brooks 00:14, 5 March 2006 (UTC)

Hello. Can we start yet? Have we agreed on retention of entries and perhaps ~~scoring out~~ those which have been verified? Should there be a more detailed verification checklist? Is anyone out there? --Tagishsimon (talk)

1911 initialisms

Just looking at the very first page, the first thirty-odd redlinks are of unredirected initialisms. I suspect all twenty-six letters will have these; I also suspect that they are all bogus. I'm just now starting to redirect them as needed; but what do we do with these entries? They ought to be probably starred (the first, A. A. von Werner == Anton Alexander von Werner had {{1911}}). Do we delete them, auto-interpret them, or what? Right now I am ***only*** redirecting them, I am ***not*** verifying them. Please don't attack me for starting work on a nonapproved list.

There may or may not be enough of these to justify a bot to fix all the redirects. Alba 20:10, 3 March 2006 (UTC)

Please look over my first burst of work at Wikipedia:WikiProject Missing encyclopedic articles/1911 verification/A. How do we handle this? Move these to some "ambiguous" list? Alba 22:36, 3 March 2006 (UTC)

I'm on extended (indefinite) wikibreak, but I just noticed this by idly checking my watchlist :-). Here's the story with some, maybe many, of the redlinks. Early in the history of the 1911 and 2004 projects, the consensus, with which I agreed, was that we could count a 1911/2004/Nuttall article "done", and delete it from the list, so long as there was a WP article already in place that covered the same subject. We also agreed that any new WP article should use WP article title conventions, even if it was transcribed from 1911/Nuttall. Since the convention for WP biographies is to use full name as the article title, many of them differed from the 1911 and Nuttall titles, hence the redlinks. Some people, and I thought Pete was one of them, argued strongly for adding redirects to link the 1911/2004/Nuttall titles. That argument won and I modified the how-to accordingly. Its upside is now evident.

So, for each of those redlinks, particularly in the A's, you are very likely to find an existing WP article on the same topic, named according to WP conventions. The proper response is to add a redirect - and update the article as necessary, of course. David Brooks 00:12, 5 March 2006 (UTC)

Done for the first page, A1. Am I the only one working on this? Alba 17:53, 6 March 2006 (UTC)

How to resolve 1911 verification redlinks

FeanorStar7 wrote: If you can tell me a quick way to do redirects, I can try to work on them.

Here's the process I've been following. You may decide for yourself if it's too much for you.

Find the next redlink.
Observe if it is an obvious typo or if the obvious name is nearby on the list. If so, redirect immediately.
For instance, on list A2, Agustin Moreto Y Cavana and Agustín Moreto y Cavana are obviously the same.
If not, click on "1911" to search LoveToKnow. The exact title should have at least two hits: the page itself and its listing in the index.
Check the page itself. Usually you'll find it a simple typo or an initialism of a complete name. You may not find the entry.
1. If an initialism: do a Google Wikipedia search with the full name. You'll probably find the correct Wikipedia entry, in which case, redirect there.
2. If a typo, don't redirect but simply note as a typo on the list and move on.
If not found:
1. Click forward and back a couple of pages -- it may simply be not copied over correctly by LoveToKnow's scanning software.
2. If that fails, look at the LoveToKnow index -- again, it may be a typo.
3. Look at entries on the page with multiple names; you may have a synonym on your hands.
If all else fails, mark as "ambiguous" (i.e., needs more examination) and move on!

Submitted for critiquing. Alba 00:56, 7 March 2006 (UTC)

You give two ways of dealing with typos. I would say: if the name is an obvious transcription error, move the redlink to a "non-inclusion" list at the end of the sub-subpage, along with the reason. Let's not legitimize OCR errors, even with a redirect. If we find an actual (gasp) 1911 error, I'd do the same, although there could be an argument for creating a small article saying "Fue was the name mistakenly given in EB1911 to the town of Foo, but was never the correct spelling". Whatever.
There are some other possible ways of handling the missing links. We may need a complete article (for example because someone fat-fingered and deleted the link in round 1). Or we may need to add "The town of Spoon was known as Fork in the early 20th century" to the Spoon article, and redirect Fork to it.

And, I would add, never delete an entry from the list entirely. In round 1 some of us had a habit of notating an entry with a reason not to include it, and then later deleting it from the list (this also happened a lot with Nuttall). Yes, the reason for deleting is buried somewhere in the page history (cutely referred to as an "audit trail"), but who's going to search that?

If anyone's still reading, why not promote these instructions to the subproject page? And, on the sub-sub-pages, where it says "Articles with + were on both lists" - both which lists? I'm still on sort-of-wikibreak, but it seems a shame to let the project fizzle out at this stage. David Brooks 19:46, 12 April 2006 (UTC)

I'm still reading. I don't know the answer about "both lists".

I strongly agree with not deleting ever from a list. Better to end up with a "SNFI"/concrete audit trail.

Yes let's promote the instructions to the subpage.

I also don't want the project to die but am personally concentrating on the hotlist. Pcb21 Pete 08:04, 13 April 2006 (UTC)

New template for verification

Here's a template that may help: {{ni-eb}}. Sometimes you'll find a Wikipedia article that is obviously deficient, and it has a decent 1911 article. If the 1911 info should be included into the Wikipedia article, and you don't feel like doing it right now, just put {{ni-eb|url of eb article}} on the talk page, and that adds the article to Category:Articles needing improvement from EB1911. Then someone who feels like it can go through those and add 1911 info to the article. What do you think? Useful? – Quadell ^{(talk) (bounties)} 13:34, 22 March 2006 (UTC)

I think there are likely more problems with WP articles insufficiently updating 1911 articles than 1911 articles not being pasted into WP articles. So I'm not sure how useful this is. zafiroblue05 | Talk 23:11, 27 March 2006 (UTC)

Just wondering, has anything been going on here recently or it the project in a standby mode? --Ton e 13:21, 11 June 2006 (UTC)

I've created new templates {{Update-eb}} and {{Include-eb}}. See the verification main page for a description of their usage, as well as {{ni-eb}} and {{1911POV}}. And, of course, feel free to change them. David Brooks 06:33, 15 July 2006 (UTC)

The Jewish Virtual Library

Why not make a list of the articles in the Jewish Virtual Library for this project?--Carabinieri 21:36, 27 February 2006 (UTC)

I just a quick look over the contents of the list and it looks like incorporating the JVL would not be appropriate or easy for a WP:MEA list. First the contents are copyrighted, and the topic listing is a bit specific. There is good information to incorporate for individual articles but I'm not sure how it could compiled into a list well. Any suggestions you have would be appreciated though. --Reflex Reaction (talk)• 22:05, 27 February 2006 (UTC)

Question and comment

Thanks to everyone for setting up the verification list. Looks good. My question is, if someone finds an error on the list (such as a duplicate), should it be reported here or on the verification talk page? My example is: on the first page of the A list, numbers 402 and 403: Aethelred of Mercia, followed by Aethelred of Mercla; I am fairly confident the second one is a misspelling for the first one. Please advise. Also, a comment: I think this is going to be a great help to verify the 1911 information to help update and improve Wikipedia. I am one of the people who was responsible for some of the quick cut and paste jobs at the end of the project referred to by Kaldari. I hope I can redeem myself by offering to check the print version of the 1911 EB for problems which crop up as we progress (I have access to it at my job). Thanks again, --FeanorStar7 00:41, 2 March 2006 (UTC)

1911

Hi, guys. Working on Wikisource, I found a bunch of EB1911 articles that do not have a Wikipedia article. This and (Latin author) this are two examples. Worth a careful check. Danny 01:45, 5 March 2006 (UTC)

Described at, respectively, Zheleznovodsk and Gaius Julius Hyginus. These probably date from the time when we didn't have a rule to create redirects for every EB1911/Nuttall title when they were archaic spellings or nonstandard bio titles. See my comments above on initialisms. Now back to my wikibreak. David Brooks 02:55, 5 March 2006 (UTC)

Gaius Julius Hyginus is a different Hyginus. I am also looking for this. Danny 04:06, 7 March 2006 (UTC)

Schneeberg is another example. None of Wikipedia's Schneebergs match the town referred to in the EB1911, which is in Saxony. I have to wonder how many other similar cases there are, where identically titled WP and EB1911 articles were assumed to cover the same subject, but actually don't. Opie 00:11, 12 April 2006 (UTC)

When we started the project, it was a reasonable decision at the time to ignore the 1911 article titles that were already blue links, so that we could focus on the red links. We did recognize the danger of assuming the article with the same name was on the same topic. Now it is in the verification phase, it would be most reasonable to take the time and verify "same topic" for each blue link. In theory, that should only be necessary for articles that were not created as part of the project. I suppose checking articles that are not tagged as 1911 and not redirects would be close enough. David Brooks 19:24, 12 April 2006 (UTC)

I suppose the implication of the above is that we should check the entire content list of 1911, not just Bogdan's pruned list. In either case, though, aren't we revisiting the potential copyright concerns that originally generated the "merged" lists. Does anyone else see a problem here? David Brooks 03:28, 13 April 2006 (UTC)

The 1911 is PD, so there aren't copyright concerns are there? Pcb21 Pete 07:58, 13 April 2006 (UTC)

D'oh. I was confusing with the 2004 situation. My first statement (question really) is still germane. David Brooks 17:15, 13 April 2006 (UTC)

Well it sounds like a bot could do some useful work here: Get a list of 1911 titles. Then sort into three categories according to their Wikipedia status. Red links, Blue links without an {{1911}} tag and Blue links with such a tag. That much is pure bot work. Then the reds are highest priority, uncatted second, catted third...? Pcb21 Pete 21:44, 13 April 2006 (UTC)

Congrats

Unverified Bluelinks?

I've made some redirects for some of the missing articles which actually had a corresponding wikipedia article already. So I assume that these articles will now go to the "unverified bluelinks" section where someone will check them all to see that they really make sense. Is this necessary, or should I just remove them from the main list myself after I make them? --Xyzzyplugh 23:45, 14 March 2006 (UTC)

I have decided to answer my own question, and remove my own bluelinks. Never mind. --Xyzzyplugh 14:05, 15 March 2006 (UTC)

Google Booksearch

Full texts of many more PD reference works are coming available online as a result of the Google Books Library Project - for example, A New General Biographical Dictionary, published by Hugh James Rose in 1857. Should we start to compile a list of possible reference works that we might eventually want to work our way through? --OpenToppedBus - Talk to the driver 18:01, 22 March 2006 (UTC)

While I think that might be useful, I'm really not sure how useful. We can have a wishlist of reference texts along with their status on Gutenberg project, but don't know how useful unorganized, non-OCR images of text are for spotting missing coverage areas. Brian0918 proposed a distributed indexing which, while I didn't oppose really didn't endorse, though having a tracked wishlist might be beneficial. Again, I'm not going to oppose, but I really don't think it's our "job" but will be nice to have. --Reflex Reaction (talk)• 22:57, 22 March 2006 (UTC)

Non-English reference works

There are a bunch of non-English reference works available online. These may be a bit more difficult to use. One can't just take text wholesale, as it needs to be translated and adapted. It requires more work to check whether the topics exist on the English Wikipedia (and it requires someone who has at least a reading knowledge of the language).

It is easiest to compile topic lists with proper nouns, as will be found in purely topographical or biographical dictionaries. There almost anything can, at the very least, be a valid redirect to an article. A while ago, I made a list of articles in a Swedish biographical handbook from 1908 (Svenskt biografiskt handlexikon), based on the index at the Project Runeberg website. See: Wikipedia:Swedish Wikipedians' notice board/Biography.

There is also a public domain Danish dictionary of biography available online, the Dansk biografisk lexikon. It also covers early modern Norway (then under Danish rule). The German Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie is available in facsimile online, and searchable along with its successor Neue Deutsche Biographie here. Some articles from ADB are available in on Wikisource.

General encyclopedias online include the German Meyers Konversationslexikon (1888), the Swedish Nordisk familjebok (2nd ed., 1904-1926) and the Danish Salmonsens konversationsleksikon (2nd ed., 1915-1930, here, but not yet completed).

I don't know about other languages. French and Spanish would for instance be useful, but I don't know of any similar projects to put old public domain resources online for those languages. It should be noted that my impression is that the Swedish Nordisk familjebok is better for e.g. German topics than EB1911. Uppland 20:26, 12 April 2006 (UTC)

That's great research. I presume the relevant language Wikipedias know about these works? Ideally they would have a project similar to this one. And then ideally we work on having everything in other Wikipedias, so then we get all these topics too eventually ;). Pcb21 Pete 09:49, 16 April 2006 (UTC)

Yes, those are being used. See Einarr Skúlason, for example, and the Swedish interwiki link there. First I dumped the text into sv (wikifying and updating the spelling) and then I translated it to en. We even have a template for Ugglan. Haukur 15:35, 5 May 2006 (UTC)

Addendum: There is also the Russian Brockhaus and Efron Encyclopedic Dictionary (1906) which is available online. I have seen User:Ghirlandajo taking articles from that one. Uppland 17:07, 5 May 2006 (UTC)