"David Goodman" wrote
>
> My view is that it would be a good idea to find all such text and
> remove it, replacing it by something modern.
It is actually more wiki-like to proceed piecemeal, editing old encyclopedia text into shape in numerous passes. There is certainly a serious process of "digestion" to be done. My experience of the typical old article - say a biography - is that the basic steps are
- create sections and address logical flow;
- tighten up where verbose (a common issue for old material);
- correct obvious POV;
- use more contemporary language.
This gives a good base. Then, if possible, update quite lightly - a recent book as reference, some links to contemporary scholarship. The combined effect is usually to give an acceptable article.
For reasons of scale - there are thousands upon thousands of missing topics for which an acceptable article is what is required first - I'm an eventualist about replacing the old stuff. And as usual, one should remember that creating an article that is well linked in to the rest of WP promotes people's interest, leading to others working on the text.
Charles
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"David Goodman" wrote
> Doing it part by part is certainly OK, as long as it gets done;,
> though I wouldn't oppose an effort to mark such text if a bot could do
> it.
It is standard to have a template on the page noting EB1911 text, or whatever. Of course the discussion in the essay about follow-up is aimed at getting a practical implementation and logging of how this updating is going. It is always the worst 10% that should be in our sights.
> The attitude I really protest against is when people defend the
> keeping of superseded sources instead of modern ones, even when good
> ones are proposed, or naively use such sources to add to existing
> articles. I regard the start of a new article by carrying over old EB
> text just like I would from a web home page that happened to be
> PD--the text is equally unlikely to be suitable for an encyclopedia.
I think you mean for referencing, in the first point there. Indeed, there seems not to be a clear idea of when to strip out obsolescent sources.
But I would argue that taking in public domain text and making it into useful reference material is very much a business Wikipedia should be in. We have the right technology, the personnel, and the economics of it is also right. I mean that the initial editorial work, for someone who knows how to do it, comes in at only around 10% of writing from scratch. (And the percentage would be lower for obscure topics, which is where we are heading.) It is essentially pushing on an open door, and that needs some recognition. Various things seem to be shifting in the community vibe, and have been for 18 months. I hope we stick to our model of filtering out poor material gradually, because it has served surprisingly well.
Charles
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In a message dated 10/4/2008 10:47:04 AM Pacific Daylight Time,
rory096(a)gmail.com writes:
> Now what? Evidently he isn't insane or a crack-pot too much anymore.
>
Nope, he is.
http://consumerist.com/assets/resources/2008/03/overstockwiki.jpg>>
-----------
This jpg doesn't strike me as insane or crack-pot.
Many authors have opined that WP is an instrument of mass mind-control. For
that matter the NYT is as well. No news there.
The PS is just a bit of silly-talk. Not a sign of insanity.
I knew insanity. I grew up with insanity. And you're no insanity! (loose
paraphrase for those who remember back 20 years)
Will Johnson
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In a message dated 10/8/2008 4:14:45 PM Pacific Daylight Time,
michaeldavid86(a)comcast.net writes:
existing Article that has the dates linked,
should they be routinely de-linked?>>
delinking dates means the flag that we put in to allow standard viewing of
the dates in British or American format ceases to work
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In a message dated 10/8/2008 3:37:10 PM Pacific Daylight Time,
geniice(a)gmail.com writes:
At various times US law has required one or both.>>
I do not believe this is true.
I do not believe that "US law" has ever "required" copyright registration.
You can. You don't have to.
You have a source for your belief that the law used to require copyright
registration?
(Remembering that we are talking about registration, not "a notice within
the work")
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I just want to say, before we even go there, that *when* you link a exact
day and month, you allow our Flag for "American" or "British" presentation to be
activated. That is "May 5" or "5 May"
If you don't link the date, then the Brits, and those Americans who prefer
that format, cannot use that flag, which is annoying.
Will Johnson
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quiddity wrote
> 1 link per line is recommended because we're trying to find the
> article that the reader meant. Disambig pages are never an intended
> target (except via the hatnotes), but instead are signposts, pointing
> to actual articles, and usually with a wiktionary template.
>
> Nobody expects the Spanish (disambiguation)! So we only highlight
> (link) the words that they might have meant.
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish
OK, but it doesn't answer the point I made. There may well be a limited need to link out of dab pages to give access to terms not within a general reader's vocabulary.
And this all seems to be being applied to {{geodis}}, too. It seems to me to be perverse. Take [[Springfield]], under "Michigan" (there are three). The [[Springfield, Michigan]] entry is said to be in Calhoun County, but I'm not "allowed" to link [[Calhoun County]]? Put that on another continent, and you should be able to see that this is inconvenient: there are articles with maps to clarify rough and more precise locations, and you're saying it's better not to allow the reader access to them, when they're trying to pin down a place?
The formulation "trying to find the article that the reader meant" has the problem, that it narrows the purpose of a navigational page to exclude the case where the reader is not so well briefed.
Charles
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In a message dated 10/8/2008 12:11:23 PM Pacific Daylight Time,
geniice(a)gmail.com writes:
Wrong tense. We are talking about events in the past so the correct
tense would be " registration was not required" which in the US isn't
true. US law has also in the past required copyright notices.>>
---------------
Registration. Not notice.
A copyright notice appears in the work.
Registration appears in some official government office.
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Nathan wrote <
> How does a mathematician write: "That begs the question of what happens to
> the bluelinks that are taken out of the Red List."
Easily?
> Anyway, some comments.
>
> I think the essay could benefit from some more structure - basically, an
> architecture designed to comprehensively treat the problem of merging
> encyclopedias. There is a lot there, but headers like "More general yet"
> with a single sentence make it harder, I think, to use the essay as a
> "how-to" sort of resource.
It would then not be an essay, of course.
> I was under the (mistaken, I guess) impression that there wasn't all that
> much going on in this area. Can you give us an idea of what the current
> activity is at English Wikipedia relative to merging PD reference works?
Not sure anyone can. The whole "missing articles" business seems very fragmented.
There are three big ones from the early twentieth century:
*EB 1911 - done to pioneer standards (i.e. not actually "done", but missing topics are probably hidden by dab issues or as sections in long articles).
*Catholic Encyclopedia 1913. This is 90% done, and where I cut my teeth on this issue.
*Jewish Encyclopedia. This is at an early stage, and has less apparent apparatus than the CE.
These all represent summations of huge mounds of 19th century scholarship.
Another such is:
*(Oxford) Dictionary of National Biography - UK biographies, about 20K from the [[Leslie Stephen]] era, currently just a long list of summaries with huge numbers of OCR errors.
And then there are other things people work on that are similar. These are all public domain texts, and so (logically) should go first to Wikisource. Doesn't quite work like that, and the WS texts can have problems not in the other web forms of the material.
>You
> cite the issue of losing important history of the project - would it make
> more sense to not use the article talkpage to track progression, but instead
> to maintain ratings and status information inside the project management
> page structure?
Trouble is that it all creates overheads. The idea, also, is that it makes sense to plan for a transition
track via project pages ---> track on article talk pages
as one way to wind down the article creation effort and move over to an article quality effort. Both things have their value.
> On ratings specifically - one reason it might make more sense to use a
> central resource for all page ratings and other data is the recent
> opposition to rating and project templates. I think we've found that the
> ratings don't get used much, although it varies from project to project. A
> lot of the templates just get removed, and if the page is moved or deleted I
> think they often get lost even if the article is later restored.
There seem to be technical fixes with templates that don't display where they are placed. It's kind of hypothetical at that level.
> Good work, I wonder if this could be fleshed out into a 'pedia merging
> guideline instead of an essay?
There are probably other views, too. I mean, you have to be fairly obsessed to want to merge all of one encyclopedia before looking at another ... an umbrella redlink project is also good to think about. (As long as it isn't secretly "merge all encyclopedias", which doesn't make sense to me now.)
Charles
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