[WikiEN-l] Scale of online resources, was Re: Rating the English wikipedia

[Ray Saintonge]

On 07/20/11 4:23 AM, Carcharoth wrote:
> On Wed, Jul 20, 2011 at 10:17 AM, Ray Saintonge<saintonge at telus.net>  wrote:
>> I missed reading this thread when it was active, but my own estimate of
>> what still needs to be done in historical biographies alone is quite
>> high.
> I agree, but some level of selectivity is needed. I now try and
> maintain a list of articles I failed to find when looking for
> information, and also of articles that are on other language
> Wikipedias but not the English one. I'll post some of those at the
> end.

"Level of selectivity" too easily becomes an excuse for exclusion. Some 
of us feel that comprehensiveness is closer to the core values of 
Wikipedia.
>> For most of its 177 years of publication "The Gentleman's
>> Magazine". provided a steady diet of obituaries. If it averaged 1000
>> pages a year that's well over 170,000 pages of material.
> A good start would be a listing along with how long the obituaries
> are. You might find some are very short. The obvious thing to focus on
> is ones where other sources exist, and keep the others as a project
> list for now.

Some are indeed too short to warrant individual articles.  Perhaps the 
entire content of an issue's obituary (The publication uses the singular 
to refer to the entire collection of death notices in an issue.) needs 
to be added to Wikisource.  I am looking at the October 1801 issue where 
there are many such stubs, as with an entry for August 16: "A poor old 
man, named Threadaway belonging to the workhouse at Newington, Surrey, 
employed in brewing beer for the use of the house, by some accident fell 
into the boiling liquor, and was scalded to death."  This one is not 
likely to ever be expanded, but others easily have more useful information.
>> What do we do with such things
>> as the drawings of the proposed new gaol at Bury-St. Edmonds in the
>> August 1801 issue of "The Gentleman's Magazine"? (Does it even still
>> exist?)
> You would first look for it in other sources, and then add it to the
> history section or article for Bury-St. Edmonds. Not all material will
> lend itself to a new article, and corroboration with other sources is
> important.

Corroboration from other sources should not always be such a necessity. 
When we are dealing with 200-year old information that corroboration is 
not such an easy task.  Even when it exists it is not easily accessible, 
or will take a great deal of effort to track down.  Sometimes you just 
need to trust your single source on the basis of your experience with 
the reliability of the source. Corroboration can wait for some other 
day, though our one source still needs to be fully identified.

>> Then there's the endless stream of books that were reviewed in
>> a wide range of 19th century periodicals.  The reviews themselves are as
>> worth reading as the books, because they often contrasted a number of
>> publications around a chosen theme.
> Eh. I'm less enthusiastic about book reviews. I'd transcribe them into
> Wikisource and link them from the books they review (if the books have
> articles, and if not, then move on).

I would be less interested in the reviews than the books themselves.  It 
is the books themselves that need articles.

>> An estimate of 20,000,000 English
>> Wikipedia articles seems increasingly conservative.  The amount of work
>> to be done is enormous even without having to fight with the notability
>> police.
> Sometimes other sites are better suited to some material. I would
> start with Wikisource for some of the material you have mentioned.
>
> Anyway, a few examples of missing articles:
>
> Gunnarea capensis (marine polychaete worm)
> Laboratoire Souterrain à Bas Bruit (LSBB, French research )
> Giovanni da Vigo (1450-1525, Italian surgeon)
>
> The latter two have articles on the French (fr) and Italian (it)
> Wikipedia, so could be dealt with by translation efforts, but nothing
> on the first example. Some of the more obscure branches of the tree of
> life are replete with redlinks.
>
Absolutely! We can always easily find missing articles on an individual 
basis. It's the scope that's overwhelming.

Ec