[WikiEN-l] Policies, notability et al, was Request to Wikipedians for BBC Documentary

[Carcharoth]

On Wed, Aug 19, 2009 at 2:21 AM, David Gerard<dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
> 2009/8/19  <wjhonson at aol.com>:
>
>> Well get busy I still once-in-a-while encounter articles whose only
>> source is EB1911.  I would submit that if you actually put these up for
>> AfD you'd get a lot of backflack for SNOW.  Sure the articles could be
>> fixed, but the previous point was that a single tertiary source isn't
>> sufficient for an article and I think it probably is.. depending.
>
>
> I remember copyediting one article on a now-obscure 18th century
> British parliamentarian. Basically I just rewrote for style. And,
> y'know, I'm pretty sure it'd be a reasonable start on the article, and
> certainly not a deletion candidate just for having 1911EB as its sole
> source.

The big problem with 1911EB articles used to seed articles is that the
phrases and text used often survive through to later versions, and
when trying to critically assess an article, it is very difficult to
tell which bits were from the 1911EB article, and which bits were
added later (precise footnoting and referencing would help here).
Sometimes a comparison in page history, or with a wikisource page, can
help. Sometimes not.

There is a project that tries to clean these articles up, and lots of guidance.

The guidance:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:1911_Encyclopaedia_Britannica

"The 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica is out of copyright and can in some
cases be used as a source of material for the English Wikipedia.
However, it is now quite old, and there are many problems with this
material in a modern encyclopedia. Even in 1917 it was seen as an
unreliable source when Willard Huntington Wright published his
scathing Misinforming a Nation, a 200+ page critical examination of
the problems with the encyclopedia. The "myth" of the EB1911 being the
best and greatest Encyclopedia is a testament to a successful
marketing campaign which usually doesn't hold up under critical
examination."

All those 10 points on that page are good, but how often are they followed?

As a brief aside, I loved Brion's comment on the talk page:

"Well, even if the edit histories on the live server get cleared
again, I for one intend to have a century's worth of backups in my
petabyte storage crystal library when the times comes. :) --Brion
03:52 Sep 12, 2002 (UTC)"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:1911_Encyclopedia_topics

"The only remaining task on Variation and selection is integrating
references, probably to their own authors' pages. That page is still
up for historical interest and to finish small amounts, but for all
intents and purposes, this article is merged. I'm taking it off the
1911 list, and thus declaring the 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica to be,
at first draft level, merged into Wikipedia. Ladies, gentlemen, and
algorithms, it's been an honor. Alba 15:24, 27 February 2006 (UTC)"

Impressive! How long did that take, I wonder?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Missing_encyclopedic_articles/1911_verification

"Please verify that each of the articles is free of such errors, and
has updated coverage, before removing the item from the list. Also, if
the article does derive from the encyclopedia, make sure it has the
{{1911}} tag in its References section. It may be helpful to note on
the article's talk page any significant differences in the
comprehensiveness of our article as compared to the 1911 article.

New guideline June 2008: If the article is in the Wikisource
repository of EB1911, include a {{Wikisource1911Enc}} tag as the first
line of the References section."

Unfortunately: 4.5% complete.

So it looks like it will be slow progress there.

Carcharoth