Charles Matthews wrote:
I ought to be used to this by now; but I have just
found a 1911
Britannica article we have not imported or covered (see [[William
Stewart of Houston]]). These almost always crop up when the
disambiguation of common names, such as "William Stewart", was not
exhaustive in the checking.
Anyway, this might be a moment to mention ongoing work with another
merge, that of the old Dictionary of National Biography (DNB). I have
just reached the half-way point in doing a complete listing (with
summaries); see on [[User:Charles Matthews]]. The "raw material" for
that is in Magnus Manske's user space; I wouldn't mind help at all, but
the various types of corruption of scanned text make it a bit daunting
even with the "Concise Dictionary of National Biography" (CDNB) to hand.
In effect the 63 pages I'm producing are the content of the CDNB
summaries, restricted to the first edition (1900 and before) of the DNB.
Do ask if this seems of interest as a project.
It will all be moved into project space when it's looking more complete.
There is an ambitious Wikisource project to get the original DNB
articles posted: unlike the 1911EB, and some others we use, this work is
_not_ yet conveniently available online. (And it is a huge resource.)
Speaking as a participant in the Wikisource project, I do make use of
the Internet Archive version as a starting place, and proofread based on
a hard copy in an OUP reprint. There are differences between the two,
for which I have tried to account. Many of these take into account the
1906 volume of errata, others take into account new information, and
still others rewrite an article as a consequence of the previous two to
provide space to avoid having changes spill onto another page. Since
the reprint combined each three volumes into one there was significant
rewrite where the first and second, and second and third volumes of a
group came together so as to present an appearance of seamless continuity.
The 1911 Britannica is only one stopping place in that spectrum. I very
much support the more ambitious notion that we should host all allowable
editions of the EB, up to and including the early 14th editions, whose
copyright was never renewed. I have looked at early and late 14th
editions, and have noted considerable differences between the versions.
Many entire biographical articles that were originally included were
excised from later printings. One might draw interesting inferences from
such facts. When is a reprint really a new edition?
Ec