daniwo59@aol.com wrote:

To me, a major part of the problem is that the material is so out of date. It fails to take into account the past hundred years of archeological research, which is essential. Furthermore, the statistics it gives about places are hopelessly outdated. For example, Anatoth, currently 'Anata, is a fair sized

I think I have a working solution to this sort of problem:

Old texts should be scanned (in facsimile if possible) and put on a read-only website which allows deep linking. For example, the article on the Electric Telegraph from a 19th century Swedish encyclopedia is available on the URL http://www.lysator.liu.se/runeberg/nfad/0192.html (have a look, nice pictures, all public domain).

The URL up to ...runeberg/ is the name of the website and "nf" is for the encyclopedia and "nfad" is the 4th volume of the 1st edition.

Then in the wiki, a rule is added so the shorthand "nf:ad0192" is automatically recognized and converted into a hypertext link, in a fashion similar to ISBN numbers. The example is found on the wiki page http://susning.nu/Telegraf where the wiki text "nf:ad0192" is converted into (my translation)

See [http://www.lysator.liu.se/runeberg/nfad/0192.html the article] in the 1st edition of [[Nordisk familjebok]], volume 4, 1881.

and then into HTML.

So, what you need is a stable and deep-linkable read-only website with the old contents that you want to use, and a shorthand linking scheme in the wiki software. You do not want old text copied into the wiki.

Easton's Bible Dictionary is available in a deep-linkable, stable, read-only website, the Christian Classics Ethereal Library, starting on http://www.ccel.org/e/easton/ebd/

For example, the article on Anatoth is available on the URL http://www.ccel.org/e/easton/ebd/ebd/T0000200.html#T0000233 apparently with 100 articles per HTML page, and this is article 233.

If this is a work that you often want to refer to, add the following pattern rule to the wikipedia source code for the English Wikipedia,

ebd:([0-9]+) e.g. ebd:233

translated into

'See [http://www.ccel.org/e/easton/ebd/ebd/' + sprintf("T%05d00.html#T%07d", $1/100, $1) + ' the article] in [[Easton's Bible Dictionary]] (1897)

Adding this "ebd:" rule to the wikipedia software doesn't hurt anybody, since 99.99% of all articles will not contain the ebd: pattern. But as soon as anybody, who knows EBD and this rule, starts to use it, it saves a lot of time and effort in creating links instead of copying useless text into the wiki.