On 07/20/11 4:23 AM, Carcharoth wrote:
On Wed, Jul 20, 2011 at 10:17 AM, Ray
Saintonge<saintonge(a)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