On 07/20/11 4:23 AM, Carcharoth wrote:
On Wed, Jul 20, 2011 at 10:17 AM, Ray Saintongesaintonge@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.
"Level of selectivity" too easily becomes an excuse for exclusion. Some of us feel that comprehensiveness is closer to the core values of Wikipedia.
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.
Some are indeed too short to warrant individual articles. Perhaps the entire content of an issue's obituary (The publication uses the singular to refer to the entire collection of death notices in an issue.) needs to be added to Wikisource. I am looking at the October 1801 issue where there are many such stubs, as with an entry for August 16: "A poor old man, named Threadaway belonging to the workhouse at Newington, Surrey, employed in brewing beer for the use of the house, by some accident fell into the boiling liquor, and was scalded to death." This one is not likely to ever be expanded, but others easily have more useful information.
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.
Corroboration from other sources should not always be such a necessity. When we are dealing with 200-year old information that corroboration is not such an easy task. Even when it exists it is not easily accessible, or will take a great deal of effort to track down. Sometimes you just need to trust your single source on the basis of your experience with the reliability of the source. Corroboration can wait for some other day, though our one source still needs to be fully identified.
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).
I would be less interested in the reviews than the books themselves. It is the books themselves that need articles.
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.
Absolutely! We can always easily find missing articles on an individual basis. It's the scope that's overwhelming.
Ec