[Wikipedia-l] Easton's Bible Dictionary (resend)

[Vicki Rosenzweig]

At 06:29 PM 8/7/02 +0100, Neil Harris wrote:
>This is a trimmed-down version of my earlier over-length post.

All in all, a fine thing; below are a couple of specific suggestions for
further improvement.

>I've now added an extra filter, so that entries whose titles  occur in a
>very large list of common words are rejected.

That sounds useful--it'll save us from having to rewrite articles about
spices and such, and provide some useful stuff on less common topics.


>Thus, the script will now not attempt to transfer the entry for "Wheel"
>or "Silk" or other common words, regardless of whether Wikipedia has an
>entry for that word. This is in addition to the check for not clobbering
>existing articles.
>
>I have also eliminated any articles containing the words "modern" or
>"current", which seems to catch a lot of stuff that refers to the
>author's contemporary information.

Again, a good idea: the Easton stuff seems more useful as a source of
information about the Bible as a document than about the contemporary
Middle East.


>I have also pushed the length filter up to 500 characters.
>
>Doing all of these takes the list down to around 640 filtered articles.
>Wiki links to the non-imported topics still remain, inviting Wikipedians
>to write new articles about these topics. These remaning articles are
>almost entirely about obscure figures and places from the Bible.
>
>I intend to add a header to each imported article, reading something like:
>
>     ''This is an entry from Easton's Bible Dictionary. The material in it
>is written from the viewpoint of the 19th century, and may be
>out-of-date or biased. Please review and edit this article to bring it
>up to date''

Maybe that could be expanded to note what sort of 19th century viewpoint:
it's clearly Christian, but if it's a particular denomination, that's 
relevant (I
can tell immediately that it wasn't put together by a 19th-century Jew,
let alone a Buddhist or atheist).


>and a trailer:
>
>     From [[Easton's Bible Dictionary (1897)]]
>
>I intend to drip-feed the finished articles in at a rate of one every 20 
>minutes, allowing lots of time for human review and assimilation, once 
>I  think that there is a consensus that this is OK.
>
>Can anyone suggest any further improvements, short of proof-reading all
>1200 articles?

One practical fix: when I was editing the [[Amon]] article this morning, I 
found that
it linked to itself in a couple of places. Can you tweak the script to not 
create
self-links.

Also, someone's going to have to proofread the articles--and I'd rather it 
be someone
with more of an interest in the matter than I have, if only because such a 
person is
more likely to catch misspellings of names.

And why not resume at Q or something, instead of back at the beginning of the
alphabet?
-- 
Vicki Rosenzweig
vr at redbird.org
http://www.redbird.org