[WikiEN-l] Scale of online resources, was Re: Rating the English wikipedia

[Carcharoth]

On Wed, Jul 20, 2011 at 10:17 AM, Ray Saintonge <saintonge at telus.net> wrote:

> I missed reading this thread when it was active, but my own estimate of
> what still needs to be done in historical biographies alone is quite
> high.

I agree, but some level of selectivity is needed. I now try and
maintain a list of articles I failed to find when looking for
information, and also of articles that are on other language
Wikipedias but not the English one. I'll post some of those at the
end.

> For most of its 177 years of publication "The Gentleman's
> Magazine". provided a steady diet of obituaries. If it averaged 1000
> pages a year that's well over 170,000 pages of material.

A good start would be a listing along with how long the obituaries
are. You might find some are very short. The obvious thing to focus on
is ones where other sources exist, and keep the others as a project
list for now.

<snip>

> What do we do with such things
> as the drawings of the proposed new gaol at Bury-St. Edmonds in the
> August 1801 issue of "The Gentleman's Magazine"? (Does it even still
> exist?)

You would first look for it in other sources, and then add it to the
history section or article for Bury-St. Edmonds. Not all material will
lend itself to a new article, and corroboration with other sources is
important.

> Then there's the endless stream of books that were reviewed in
> a wide range of 19th century periodicals.  The reviews themselves are as
> worth reading as the books, because they often contrasted a number of
> publications around a chosen theme.

Eh. I'm less enthusiastic about book reviews. I'd transcribe them into
Wikisource and link them from the books they review (if the books have
articles, and if not, then move on).

> An estimate of 20,000,000 English
> Wikipedia articles seems increasingly conservative.  The amount of work
> to be done is enormous even without having to fight with the notability
> police.

Sometimes other sites are better suited to some material. I would
start with Wikisource for some of the material you have mentioned.

Anyway, a few examples of missing articles:

Gunnarea capensis (marine polychaete worm)
Laboratoire Souterrain à Bas Bruit (LSBB, French research )
Giovanni da Vigo (1450-1525, Italian surgeon)

The latter two have articles on the French (fr) and Italian (it)
Wikipedia, so could be dealt with by translation efforts, but nothing
on the first example. Some of the more obscure branches of the tree of
life are replete with redlinks.

Carcharoth