In a message dated 8/8/2008 7:30:35 A.M. Pacific Daylight Time, michaeldavid86@comcast.net writes:
My suggestion was to spend more time on improving the quality of the Articles that exist now.>>
--------- I'm doing my part by going through our Category of claims uncited since.... 2006! (yes they exist and there are hundreds of them) Trying to pare them down. In some cases the claims have been fulfilled, just the tag remains. In other cases it's the wrong tag. At any rate.
Wikipedia is heavily heavily weighted toward modern pop culture references. Which probably just shows that the majority of editors are not relying on print sources, but on googley sources. It's a great help that Google Books now exist, but that still represents a very tiny percentage of references.
The other day, just as a few examples. I was looking for references to Eba Anderson Lawton and we have nothing on her. She was an author and socialite at the turn of the century and her father was relatively famous. At any rate, I had to make up my own article on my own site, just to prove to myself that she was someone of some importance in her day.
As another example we have no article on "Richer of Rheims" whose work is quite important in filling the gap we had had (before he was re-discovered) on exactly how the Carolingian era ended. Again I had to write my own article just to inform myself.
It would be instructive for some poor volunteer to go through say the first 50 pages of the DNB and compare the articles there to whether we even have an article or not. The sheer number of biographical articles we now have swamps what the DNB tried to do, so you'd think we'd have most of them, but somehow I think the true answer would be surprising.
Will Johnson
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