Probably, they will claim some kind of copyrights over the digitalisation of the 1911 Encyclopedia.
Well, how could they tell where we got it? We could have typed the stuff in by hand, after all...
More seriously: even if the quality of the scanned text will be improved,
I do hope that nobody will whip together a script to suck the 1911 contents into Wikipedia wholesale.
*If* there's going to be a script, I suggest the following: - Only create entrys that are empty on the wiki; keep the others for manual "prescan" (on existing topics, we might not need the old text at all) - Add some text (in red?) as first and last line of the text, stating where it is from, handle with care etc. - Let the script create a list of these articles as [[links]], then add that list as "wikipedia:1911 conversion" (or something) so we can mark off the entries that were proofread by real living humans.
ALternatively, we could create a read-only "1911" namespace, dump it all there and do the conversion by hand.
Magnus