Stan Shebs wrote:
As an interesting data point relating to quality vs
EB, I've been
going through 1911EB articles thought not to be in WP (about half
just need a redir), and cross-checking with present-day EB at the
same time - it's remarkable how some present-day EB articles are
nearly word-for-word identical with their 1911 versions, except
for being shortened by leaving out detail, references, and
citations, tsk tsk.
I've long felt that the 1911EB should be carried in its entirety on
Wikisource, as should the 1921 12th edition. (The 12th was just a
repeat of the 11th edition with 3 supplementary volumes, which probably
explains why it is so seldom mentioned.) That would be an enormous
task. Aside from the first volume which is in Project Guttenberg, the
"Love to know" version that is now on line is bloody awful. The people
who put that project together appear to have forgotten about
proofreading. Their creative content to support any copyright claims
lies primarily in their massive collection of OCR typos, and in their
random selection of excluded pages.
It also needs to be remarked that the original 1911EB was full of
illustrations which the present online version omits, and mathematical
and chemical expressions that are totally garbled by treating them as
ordinary text. The 1911EB also had many interesting maps, including
many on fold-out pages which would be a particular challenge. This is
in part because of the way that maps were drawn in 1911. Their way of
showing mountainous territory combined with a desire to show as vany
small hamlets as possible often gives a cluttered appearance to these maps.
In brief if we were ever to take this on seriously, we could have a much
better product than what is already on line.
Ec