As we are slowly wading through the usual swamp that is consensus ;-) towards Mordor, eh, wikipedia release 1.0, I was wondering: Is there any (more or less) organized effort * to find the gape wikipedia has, compared to *other* encyclopediae, and * to fill them Is there a (machine-readable?) list of all entries in Britannica, Encarta, or any other major encyclopedia?
I remember putting lots of possible encyclopedia topics on the 'pedia, but wer'de probably past that stage anyway (had a little more than 100.000 entries, IIRC).
Magnus
on 9/1/03 12:12 PM, Magnus Manske at magnus.manske@web.de wrote:
As we are slowly wading through the usual swamp that is consensus ;-) towards Mordor, eh, wikipedia release 1.0, I was wondering: Is there any (more or less) organized effort
- to find the gape wikipedia has, compared to *other* encyclopediae, and
- to fill them
Is there a (machine-readable?) list of all entries in Britannica, Encarta, or any other major encyclopedia?
I remember putting lots of possible encyclopedia topics on the 'pedia, but wer'de probably past that stage anyway (had a little more than 100.000 entries, IIRC).
Magnus
There are a number of indispensible but mundane topics which because they are not that interesting to research remain undone, or incompletely done.
Fred
Fred Bauder wrote:
on 9/1/03 12:12 PM, Magnus Manske at magnus.manske@web.de wrote:
I remember putting lots of possible encyclopedia topics on the 'pedia, but wer'de probably past that stage anyway (had a little more than 100.000 entries, IIRC).
Magnus
There are a number of indispensible but mundane topics which because they are not that interesting to research remain undone, or incompletely done.
Hmmm. We are very poor on agricultural topics. We have [[Chicken, Alaska]] and [[Chicken Ranch]] but no [[chicken ranching]]. :-)
Ec
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . till we *) . . .
Hi Fred,
on 9/1/03 12:12 PM, Magnus Manske at magnus.manske@web.de wrote:
As we are slowly wading through the usual swamp that is consensus ;-) towards Mordor, eh, wikipedia release 1.0, I was wondering: Is there any (more or less) organized effort
- to find the gape wikipedia has, compared to *other*
encyclopediae, and * to fill them Is there a (machine-readable?) list of all entries in Britannica, Encarta, or any other major encyclopedia?
I remember putting lots of possible encyclopedia topics on the 'pedia, but wer'de probably past that stage anyway (had a little more than 100.000 entries, IIRC).
Magnus
There are a number of indispensible but mundane topics which because they are not that interesting to research remain undone, or incompletely done.
For example, I'd guess that [[List of sociologists]], which is half red at Wikipedia, would be much bluer in the older cousins ...
__ . / / / / ... Till Westermayer - till we *) . . . mailto:till@tillwe.de . www.westermayer.de/till/ . icq 320393072 . Habsburgerstr. 82 . 79104 Freiburg . 0761 55697152 . 0160 96619179 . . . . .
Magnus Manske wrote:
I remember putting lots of possible encyclopedia topics on the 'pedia, but wer'de probably past that stage anyway (had a little more than 100.000 entries, IIRC).
Magnus
[[Requested articles]] has some really obvious stuff listed. I added [[saliva]] there some time ago but I think it's been done.
Magnus-
Is there a (machine-readable?) list of all entries in Britannica, Encarta, or any other major encyclopedia?
While that would be helpful, in many cases we have articles, but they are rather poor. This is especially true for - human anatomy, diseases, neuropsy. (few MDs on Wikipedia, it seems) - third world nations (mostly CIA World Factbook / State Department data and little else, history articles therefore have strong US bias) - social sciences (some good articles, but very basic ones about key figures still missing)
Now, Britannica et al. also have deficits in some of these areas, so we should not just compare ourselves to them but also strive for quality independently. Our strong sides (on en:) currently seem to be:
- US history - western celebrities - pop culture - modern technology, computers in particular - natural sciences - controversial issues - religions (mostly taken care of by their adherents so somewhat biased) - fringe stuff (Grandma's Grand Unified Theory of Physics)
In other words, things Wikipedians predominantly feel strongly about. Unfortunately at present, few Wikipedians feel strongly about, say, the history of Cambodia, which is currently taken directly from the US State Department and mentions "air raids" in one sentence. Maybe we can get them to make a donation for the free propaganda.
Regards,
Erik
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