That's really exciting - it's relatively easy to work out that a given topic area (in this case notable Victorians) has gaps, but it's wonderful to have something like this that tells us exactly what those gaps are and helps us fill them.
In fact, it's the sort of thing you could build an edit-a-thon around to get people filling in the gaps... Harry Mitchell
Phone: 024 7698 0977 Skype: harry_j_mitchell
________________________________ From: Charles Matthews charles.r.matthews@ntlworld.com To: UK Wikimedia mailing list wikimediauk-l@lists.wikimedia.org Sent: Monday, 11 February 2013, 18:25 Subject: Re: [Wikimediauk-l] Victorian-era Dictionary of National Biography digitised on Wikisource
On 11 February 2013 18:03, rexx rexx@blueyonder.co.uk wrote:
Congratulations indeed.
Putting 29,000+ biographies onto Wikisource is a monumental achievement; Charles and all those who contributed deserve to be told by us how much their efforts are appreciated.
What's next, Charles?
Well, I only got into this project through my so-called friend Dsp13, at the time in 2009 when I wanted some Puritan biographies. Much of the point is to have material that can build up WP, with a really convenient way of linking back to the original. Old text can be used on WP, but you have to be really ruthless in editing it.
So almost as important to me on Wikipedia as WP:DNB (Don't Bite the Newbies) is WP:WP DNB, the WikiProject devoted to quarrying out the good stuff from the DNB, starting articles, and upgrading them. Now at last we'll be able to find how many missing topics there are (I guess 5,000 to 6,000, about 20%), through various routes. The Wikisource category Category:DNB No WP says 13,152 missing today, which is much too high; but Magnus Manske has a way of sorting by rough length and so today I'm working on a WP article that is one of the longest missing (spreads over four DNB pages). Rich Farmbrough has worked on this category in the past.
Charles
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