[WikiEN-l] Is Wikipedia a News Portal (among other things)?

[Andrew Gray]

On 21/09/06, Fastfission <fastfission at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 9/20/06, geni <geniice at gmail.com> wrote:
> > On 9/20/06, Delirium <delirium at hackish.org> wrote:
> > > I guess as a reader I don't see the benefit in *not* covering
> > > everything.  I agree there is a slant towards more coverage of recent
> > > news events, but that's simply because they're easier to cover.  The
> > > solution, IMO, is not to cover recent events less, but to cover older
> > > events more.  I want to know the equivalent of this stuff for other time
> > > periods!  Were there short-lived but at the time massively-covered
> > > events in the 1890s, equivalent to today's frenzies over child
> > > kidnappings?  What about the thousands of political scandals, major and
> > > minor, that have at various times shortened governments' tenures, forced
> > > cabinet reshuffles, etc., etc.?  It's all good info we're missing!
> > >
> > Problem is that a lot of the data that would be useful in answering
> > your question is stored on microfilm and there isn't really a quick
> > way to scan that.
>
> Actually ProQuest has massive microfilm newspaper databases which are
> fulltext searchable that would fit the bill (the entire contents of
> the NY Times, Wash Post, LA Times, Chicago Trib, etc. which go back to
> the 1840s in some cases) as well as the American Periodicals Series
> which goes back to 1740. It's out there, though it helps to have an
> institutional account to get access to it.

Non-institutional UK users have the entire /Times/ archive (1790ish
on) via local libraries, which is a similar situation. Goodness only
knows what you can get if you *pay* for it.

(And then, of course, there's actual printed contemporary sources. I'm
doing a lot of work at the moment by paraphrasing material in old
almanacs, rewriting it to be slightly more comprehensible, slap on a
couple of contextual sentences at the beginning and end... and, bingo,
a biographical stub on a contemporary politican, or a short article
summarising some 1840s law, or the like. No microfilm required...)

-- 
- Andrew Gray
  andrew.gray at dunelm.org.uk