Within any state, any public library will be able to assist sufficiently on their own state's legislature. Even for those who don't like libraries, GBooks probably will in the next few years scan all local newspapers for pre-1920 (they have quite a lot already), & what information for that period they do not do, other projects will, especially for public records. I deliberately picked Michigan, because of the quality and amount of scanning with free access being done by the University of Michigan. Some other states are almost equally good for local material, such as Texas.
David Goodman, Ph.D, M.L.S. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:DGG
On Mon, Mar 29, 2010 at 2:08 PM, geni geniice@gmail.com wrote:
On 29 March 2010 03:55, David Goodman dgoodmanny@gmail.com wrote:
Even for the US, about 80% of the members of state legislatures historically are not covered. For the current Michigan House of Representatives, only 50% of the current members have articles, and almost none of the earlier ones. this is very low-lying fruit, well within the reach of any beginner.
Attempting to redefine the difficulty in writing any given article won't help. Without access to the back issues of local newspapers writing such articles would be rather dificult and even with them acquiring the level of base knowledge that tends to be required to write about a subject would not be easy.
If the other Wikipedias did similarly full coverage of their home countries and we translated the articles, there would probably be potential for an order of magnitude.
Size of national libiaries and the like says no.
-- geni
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