On 10/31/07, Delirium delirium@hackish.org wrote:
David Gerard wrote:
I can see something like this working if the area is carefully selected. There's little low-hanging fruit left, as we've noted here before - but any WikiProject will have endless lists of red links just waiting for someone to do the legwork to research and write an article. Someone with university-level research facilities should be able to do a much better job than from a mere Googling, in not much more time.
If you pick the right subject, there are many not-too-obscure areas where the low-hanging fruit will bury you up to your neck. I've been doing some checking of our biography coverage and it's surprisingly weak despite our huge numbers of biographies, I guess because there are an even more huge number of notable people. Browsing through a PD version of _Baker's Biographical Dictionary of Musicians_ (1919), we're missing articles on *almost all* of the people in it!
I have found only the 1st edition as full text (Google edition is searchable only). From that, I ran a quick script and extracted over 4000 names to [1]. I then ran another script to remove "blue links" [2], whicl leaves close to 2700 red links.
That would mean we're missing over 65% of the musicians; however, there are some bogus entries and lots'o' OCR error in there. Feel free to cleanup, redirect, and, of course, write articles!
Magnus
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Magnus_Manske/Baker%27s_Biographical_Dicti... [2] http://tools.wikimedia.de/~magnus/filterdone.php