[WikiEN-l] Looking for thoughts on statistics

[David Goodman]

Within any state, any public library will be able to assist
sufficiently on their  own state's legislature.
Even for those who don't like libraries, GBooks probably will in the
next few years scan all local newspapers for pre-1920 (they have quite
a lot already), & what information for that period they do not do,
other projects will, especially for public records.
I deliberately picked Michigan, because of the quality and amount of
scanning with free access being done by the University of Michigan.
Some other states are almost equally good for local material, such as
Texas.

David Goodman, Ph.D, M.L.S.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:DGG



On Mon, Mar 29, 2010 at 2:08 PM, geni <geniice at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 29 March 2010 03:55, David Goodman <dgoodmanny at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Even for the US, about 80% of the members of state legislatures
>> historically are not covered. For the current Michigan House of
>> Representatives, only 50% of the current members have articles, and
>> almost none of the earlier ones.
>> this is very low-lying fruit, well within the reach of any beginner.
>
> Attempting to redefine the difficulty in writing any given article
> won't help. Without access to the back issues of local newspapers
> writing such articles would be rather dificult and even with them
> acquiring the level of base knowledge that tends to be required to
> write about a subject would not be easy.
>
>
>> If the other Wikipedias did similarly full coverage of their home
>> countries and we translated the articles, there would probably be
>> potential for an order of magnitude.
>
> Size of national libiaries and the like says no.
>
>
>
> --
> geni
>
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