[WikiEN-l] EB1911 in Wikipedia

[John Vandenberg]

Hi,

I've been told that a large percentage of the EB1911 sits within the
history of English Wikipedia, and a during a recent discussion about
EB1911 here few checks indicate that this is possibly true, and that
the EB1911 text imported into Wikipedia is from a decent
transcription.  In the following very long discussion, there are a two
tables consisting of five Wikipedia articles starting with "A" and
"B", a link to the Wikipedia revision consisting of the EB1911 text, a
link to the copy now on Wikisource, and a link to the pagescan (set up
by Tim Starling):

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Plagiarism

I am interested in piecing together the history of the EB1911 import,
because if this was as extensive as some claim, hidden in Wikipedia is
possibly the best and most complete available transcription of EB1911,
and I would like to work out a good algorithm to pull it out and put
it on Wikisource, which has slowly been building an online copy that
is true to the original.  Or maybe we can find whoever imported it,
and re-use the import files.

This will benefit Wikipedia, as it will allow readers and editors to
determine what parts of those Wikipedia article have not been altered
since 1911, which will act as a caution flag for readers, and a todo
item for editors.  There is a WikiProject to go back and verify all of
the articles imported from EB1911; this task can be better distributed
if the task if the reader can see the original text without a degree
in wiki-archeology.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:EB1911

The relevant Wikisource pages people may way to look at are:

http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/EB1911

  and the "project page" for that effort is at

http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/WS:EB1911

  and the complete set of scans in TIFF and PNG; I recommend
installing the TIFF plugin, as those images are a joy to view and the
plugin has a nice zoom interface.

http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/User:Tim_Starling

Enjoy,
John