[WikiEN-l] Ars Technica: Prof replaces term papers with Wikipedia contributions, suffering ensues

[Magnus Manske]

On 10/31/07, Delirium <delirium at hackish.org> wrote:
> David Gerard wrote:
> > I can see something like this working if the area is carefully
> > selected. There's little low-hanging fruit left, as we've noted here
> > before - but any WikiProject will have endless lists of red links just
> > waiting for someone to do the legwork to research and write an
> > article. Someone with university-level research facilities should be
> > able to do a much better job than from a mere Googling, in not much
> > more time.
> >
>
> If you pick the right subject, there are many not-too-obscure areas
> where the low-hanging fruit will bury you up to your neck. I've been
> doing some checking of our biography coverage and it's surprisingly weak
> despite our huge numbers of biographies, I guess because there are an
> even more huge number of notable people. Browsing through a PD version
> of _Baker's Biographical Dictionary of Musicians_ (1919), we're missing
> articles on *almost all* of the people in it!

I have found only the 1st edition as full text (Google edition is
searchable only). From that, I ran a quick script and extracted over
4000 names to [1]. I then ran another script to remove "blue links"
[2], whicl leaves close to 2700 red links.

That would mean we're missing over 65% of the musicians; however,
there are some bogus entries and lots'o' OCR error in there. Feel free
to cleanup, redirect, and, of course, write articles!

Magnus


[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Magnus_Manske/Baker%27s_Biographical_Dictionary_of_Musicians
[2] http://tools.wikimedia.de/~magnus/filterdone.php