My view is that it would be a good idea to find all such text and
remove it, replacing it by something modern. there are essentially no
fields of study, however static and classical they appear, where the
presentations and even collected facts of the major works mentioned
represent a NPOV comprehensive view. Some articles there are still
very readable, of course. but they are best read within their original
context, in wikisource or elsewhere. If the intention, though, is a
listof topics thant need to be included, that's a good use of them.
But merging text to make articles is like making an encyclopedia by
the traditional monkeys at a keyboard.
On Wed, Oct 8, 2008 at 1:49 PM, Charles Matthews
<charles.r.matthews(a)ntlworld.com> wrote:
Nathan wrote <
How does a mathematician write: "That begs
the question of what happens to
the bluelinks that are taken out of the Red List."
Easily?
Anyway, some comments.
I think the essay could benefit from some more structure - basically, an
architecture designed to comprehensively treat the problem of merging
encyclopedias. There is a lot there, but headers like "More general yet"
with a single sentence make it harder, I think, to use the essay as a
"how-to" sort of resource.
It would then not be an essay, of course.
I was under the (mistaken, I guess) impression
that there wasn't all that
much going on in this area. Can you give us an idea of what the current
activity is at English Wikipedia relative to merging PD reference works?
Not sure anyone can. The whole "missing articles" business seems very
fragmented.
There are three big ones from the early twentieth century:
*EB 1911 - done to pioneer standards (i.e. not actually "done", but missing
topics are probably hidden by dab issues or as sections in long articles).
*Catholic Encyclopedia 1913. This is 90% done, and where I cut my teeth on this issue.
*Jewish Encyclopedia. This is at an early stage, and has less apparent apparatus than the
CE.
These all represent summations of huge mounds of 19th century scholarship.
Another such is:
*(Oxford) Dictionary of National Biography - UK biographies, about 20K from the [[Leslie
Stephen]] era, currently just a long list of summaries with huge numbers of OCR errors.
And then there are other things people work on that are similar. These are all public
domain texts, and so (logically) should go first to Wikisource. Doesn't quite work
like that, and the WS texts can have problems not in the other web forms of the material.
You
cite the issue of losing important history of the project - would it make
more sense to not use the article talkpage to track progression, but instead
to maintain ratings and status information inside the project management
page structure?
Trouble is that it all creates overheads. The idea, also, is that it makes sense to plan
for a transition
track via project pages ---> track on article talk pages
as one way to wind down the article creation effort and move over to an article quality
effort. Both things have their value.
On ratings specifically - one reason it might
make more sense to use a
central resource for all page ratings and other data is the recent
opposition to rating and project templates. I think we've found that the
ratings don't get used much, although it varies from project to project. A
lot of the templates just get removed, and if the page is moved or deleted I
think they often get lost even if the article is later restored.
There seem to be technical fixes with templates that don't display where they are
placed. It's kind of hypothetical at that level.
Good work, I wonder if this could be fleshed out
into a 'pedia merging
guideline instead of an essay?
There are probably other views, too. I mean, you have to be fairly obsessed to want to
merge all of one encyclopedia before looking at another ... an umbrella redlink project is
also good to think about. (As long as it isn't secretly "merge all
encyclopedias", which doesn't make sense to me now.)
Charles
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