On 10/31/07, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
On 31/10/2007, Brian Salter-Duke b_duke@bigpond.net.au wrote:
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! From spot-checking I'd say we cover maybe 15-20% at best. Similar results can be found if you scan through the _Dictionary of National Biography_ (UK) or, even more strikingly, any of the major German biographical dictionaries. And those are all western examples; our coverage of Indian biographies is even worse---we don't even have articles on all *current* members of India's parliament, let alone those from even as recently as the 1990s. So if you pick the right area, like say "Indian politics", you should find most of the articles still waiting to be written, with the exception of a handful of the top-tier most famous people.
Other areas are scientists. We still are not covering all Fellows of the Royal Society, the US Academy of Sciences or the Australian Academy of Sciences.
Do we have suitable red-link lists?
The entries of the Dictionary of National Biography (1903), complete with partially wikified text now at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Magnus_Manske/Dictionary_of_National_Biogr...
Magnus