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
WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l