[WikiEN-l] semi-new essay

[Charles Matthews]

Nathan wrote <

> How does a mathematician write: "That begs the question of what happens to
> the bluelinks that are taken out of the Red List."

Easily?

> Anyway, some comments.
> 
> I think the essay could benefit from some more structure - basically, an
> architecture designed to comprehensively treat the problem of merging
> encyclopedias. There is a lot there, but headers like "More general yet"
> with a single sentence  make it harder, I think, to use the essay as a
> "how-to" sort of resource.

It would then not be an essay, of course. 

> I was under the (mistaken, I guess) impression that there wasn't all that
> much going on in this area. Can you give us an idea of what the current
> activity is at English Wikipedia relative to merging PD reference works? 

Not sure anyone can. The whole "missing articles" business seems very fragmented.

There are three big ones from the early twentieth century:

*EB 1911 - done to pioneer standards (i.e. not actually "done", but missing topics are probably hidden by dab issues or as sections in long articles).

*Catholic Encyclopedia 1913. This is 90% done, and where I cut my teeth on this issue. 

*Jewish Encyclopedia. This is at an early stage, and has less apparent apparatus than the CE.

These all represent summations of huge mounds of 19th century scholarship.

Another such is:

*(Oxford) Dictionary of National Biography - UK biographies, about 20K from the [[Leslie Stephen]] era, currently just a long list of summaries with huge numbers of OCR errors.

And then there are other things people work on that are similar. These are all public domain texts, and so (logically) should go first to Wikisource. Doesn't quite work like that, and the WS texts can have problems not in the other web forms of the material. 

>You
> cite the issue of losing important history of the project - would it make
> more sense to not use the article talkpage to track progression, but instead
> to maintain ratings and status information inside the project management
> page structure?

Trouble is that it all creates overheads. The idea, also, is that it makes sense to plan for a transition

  track via project pages ---> track on article talk pages

as one way to wind down the article creation effort and move over to an article quality effort. Both things have their value.

> On ratings specifically - one reason it might make more sense to use a
> central resource for all page ratings and other data is the recent
> opposition to rating and project templates. I think we've found that the
> ratings don't get used much, although it varies from project to project. A
> lot of the templates just get removed, and if the page is moved or deleted I
> think they often get lost even if the article is later restored.

There seem to be technical fixes with templates that don't display where they are placed. It's kind of hypothetical at that level.

> Good work, I wonder if this could be fleshed out into a 'pedia merging
> guideline instead of an essay?

There are probably other views, too. I mean, you have to be fairly obsessed to want to merge all of one encyclopedia before looking at another ... an umbrella redlink project is also good to think about. (As long as it isn't secretly "merge all encyclopedias", which doesn't make sense to me now.)

Charles

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