On Wed, Oct 31, 2007 at 03:07:53PM +0000, David Gerard wrote:
On 31/10/2007, Brian Salter-Duke b_duke@bigpond.net.au wrote:
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! From spot-checking I'd say we cover maybe 15-20% at best. Similar results can be found if you scan through the _Dictionary of National Biography_ (UK) or, even more strikingly, any of the major German biographical dictionaries. And those are all western examples; our coverage of Indian biographies is even worse---we don't even have articles on all *current* members of India's parliament, let alone those from even as recently as the 1990s. So if you pick the right area, like say "Indian politics", you should find most of the articles still waiting to be written, with the exception of a handful of the top-tier most famous people.
Other areas are scientists. We still are not covering all Fellows of the Royal Society, the US Academy of Sciences or the Australian Academy of Sciences.
Do we have suitable red-link lists?
Some. I think [[List of Fellows of the Royal Society]] is incomplete and it only has 8 redlinks, 7 of them interestingly in the "A"s.
[[List of members of the National Academy of Sciences]] lists current members only and is full of redlinks. The members who have died must also have a lot of people with no articles.
[[List of Fellows of the Australian Academy of Science]] is, I think, complete and is full of redlinks. That is a real mine for Australian educators to use.
I have been working through the list in [[International Academy of Quantum Molecular Science]] and there are still lots of redlinks there.
I find it rare for BLP issues to come up with biographies of not massively known scientists. Mind you, it is a good job [[Antoine Lavoisier]] is not alive as I and others are reverting vandalism on that article all the time. [[Louis de Broglie]] attracts more than one would think too.
Brian.
- d.