On Tue, Oct 30, 2007 at 11:33:49PM -0700, Delirium 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! 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.
Brian.
-Mark
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Brian Salter-Duke b_duke(a)bigpond.net.au
[[User:Bduke]] mainly on en:Wikipedia.
Also on fr: Wikipedia, Meta-Wiki and Wikiversity