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

[Charles Matthews]

Carcharoth wrote:
> 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?
>   
It was of course a grossly overconfident statement. My latest EB1911 
find was [[William Mure (writer)]], all of nine days ago. We have 
learned (I hope) that the dab factor - i.e. false-positive bluelinks in 
your list of articles - is something that has to be made more central to 
the merging effort. Compare the DNB missing articles project and how it 
is set up . (OK, OK, I know I have mentioned this before.)

As for verifying EB1911 text, it can and should be done piecemeal. I 
found a case today where A. F. Pollard, a very respectable historian, 
seemingly made a slip in the DNB that transmitted to the EB1911; and I 
only noticed it by comparison with another DNB article. My 
"over-checking" theory says:

- Yes, you should try to provide inline references where possible, for 
chunky copy-paste jobs;
- but you should approach this as building up the article with further, 
verifiable facts;
- and what usually happens is that you find errors and inconsistencies 
either because unverifiable facts eventually look like islands in a see 
of footnoted facts, or because the sources for the new facts indicate 
that something strange is going on.

Charles