Stan Shebs wrote:
As an interesting data point relating to quality vs EB, I've been going through 1911EB articles thought not to be in WP (about half just need a redir), and cross-checking with present-day EB at the same time - it's remarkable how some present-day EB articles are nearly word-for-word identical with their 1911 versions, except for being shortened by leaving out detail, references, and citations, tsk tsk.
I've long felt that the 1911EB should be carried in its entirety on Wikisource, as should the 1921 12th edition. (The 12th was just a repeat of the 11th edition with 3 supplementary volumes, which probably explains why it is so seldom mentioned.) That would be an enormous task. Aside from the first volume which is in Project Guttenberg, the "Love to know" version that is now on line is bloody awful. The people who put that project together appear to have forgotten about proofreading. Their creative content to support any copyright claims lies primarily in their massive collection of OCR typos, and in their random selection of excluded pages.
It also needs to be remarked that the original 1911EB was full of illustrations which the present online version omits, and mathematical and chemical expressions that are totally garbled by treating them as ordinary text. The 1911EB also had many interesting maps, including many on fold-out pages which would be a particular challenge. This is in part because of the way that maps were drawn in 1911. Their way of showing mountainous territory combined with a desire to show as vany small hamlets as possible often gives a cluttered appearance to these maps.
In brief if we were ever to take this on seriously, we could have a much better product than what is already on line.
Ec