This is an archive of past discussions with User:Dsp13. Do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to start a new discussion or revive an old one, please do so on the current talk page.
My best guess is that's an underestimate, and the number is more like 300,000.
My graph was based on figures which are getting on for a year old: since then there has been both growth in the number of articles and possibly a greater proportion categorized by birth/death categories.
In March 2007 Thom Hickey at WorldCat Identities counted the number of biographical articles on Wikipedia by aggregating all individuals in subcategories of Category:Births by year and Category:Deaths by year, and reached the total 283,655.
The Wikipedia:WikiProject Biography page has (as of today) 374,697 biographies, but included in this are collective biographies such as those of musical groups.
Please do not add the hndis tag (or disambig, for that matter) to surname articles, such as McCawley and Haack. These are not disambiguation pages, but articles about the surnames and people bearing those surnames. Jim McCawley and Leon McCawley do not have the same name, and therefore the natural names of their articles are different, so no disambiguation is needed. There has been a good deal of discussion at the talk page for MoS:DP, if you are interested. You may enjoy using the {{surname}} template instead. Happy editing! 19:52, 8 June 2007 User:Chris the speller
Hello, this is a message from an automated bot. A tag has been placed on Giorgi Shengelia, by Nobunaga24, another Wikipedia user, requesting that it be speedily deleted from Wikipedia. The tag claims that it should be speedily deleted because Giorgi Shengelia seems to be about a person, group of people, band, club, company, or web content, but it does not indicate how or why the subject is notable: that is, why an article about that subject should be included in an encyclopedia. Under the criteria for speedy deletion, articles that do not assert the subject's importance or significance may be deleted at any time. Please see the guidelines for what is generally accepted as notable.
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May Ziyadah
A "{{prod}}" template has been added to the article May Ziyadah, suggesting that it be deleted according to the proposed deletion process. All contributions are appreciated, but the article may not satisfy Wikipedia's criteria for inclusion, and the deletion notice explains why (see also "What Wikipedia is not" and Wikipedia's deletion policy). You may contest the proposed deletion by removing the {{dated prod}} notice, but please explain why you disagree with the proposed deletion in your edit summary or on its talk page. Also, please consider improving the article to address the issues raised. Even though removing the deletion notice will prevent deletion through the proposed deletion process, the article may still be deleted if it matches any of the speedy deletion criteria or it can be sent to Articles for Deletion, where it may be deleted if consensus to delete is reached. 172.145.1.1914:59, 1 July 2007 (UTC)
I note that the Internet Archive has scanned copies (including .txt) of most volumes of the 1885-1900 DNB, and I live in hope that Distributed Proofreaders will add the DNB to Project Gutenberg, sooner or later [1].
I'm hoping that we'll continue to see users working though your list. Meanwhile, WikiProject Missing encyclopedic articles is probably a good venue - if you fancy the preparation task - of listing all 55k ODNB entries as wikilinks, so that we can start checking out false positives, and produce a canonical alpha-ordered missing list.
And then we can all have a good old notability debate as to whether Arthur Muggins, Divine, is or is not notable enough for a contemporary encyclopedia. --Tagishsimon(talk)18:47, 14 August 2007 (UTC)
Two JCs. Then the JC article probably conflates the two of them. DNB gave the dates of its JC as 1656-1713 ... I amended them per the national Gallery page on JC. But if there are two ... do you have access to the ODNB text? --Tagishsimon(talk)10:24, 4 September 2007 (UTC)
I've now looked at the JC article on ODNB and made some minor adjustments to John Closterman. I'm still pursuing the question of whether The Marlborough family is by JC or JBC. You can cross JC research of your todo list, unless you have a sudden compulsion to port a great deal more detail across from ODNB. --Tagishsimon(talk)23:19, 10 September 2007 (UTC)
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Otherwise, you are encouraged to rewrite this article in your own original words to avoid any copyright infringement. Thank you. Billy19:17, 4 September 2007 (UTC)
The three-month long Summer Assessment Drive, organized by Psychless, was a huge success! It ran from June 1 – September 1, and reduced the backlog of unassessed articles from 113,385 to 56,237. In all, over 100,000 articles were assessed. Over 60 people contributed in some way.
A barnstar has been created for exceptional work on Wikipedia biographies and for assisting the project. The Biography Barnstar is listed with the other WikiProject awards and can be awarded easily with a template. See the template page for more details.
The newsletter is back! Many things have gone on during the past few months, but many things have not. While the assessment drive helped revitalize the assessment department of the project, many other departments have received no attention. Most notably: peer review and our "workgroups". A day long IRC meeting has been planned for October 13th, with the major focus being which areas of the project are "dead", what should our goals be as a project, and how to "revive" the dead areas of our project. Contribute to the discussion on the the new channel (see below)
We decided to deliver this newsletter to all project members this month but only those with their names down here will get it delivered in the future.
This is your newsletter and you can be involved in the creation of the next issue. Any and all contributions are welcome. Simply let yourself be known to any of the undersigned or post news on the next issue's talk page
New irc channel
Lastly, a new WikiProject Biography channel has been set up on the freenode network:
To receive this newsletter in the future, please list yourself in the appropriate section here. This newsletter was delivered by the automated R Delivery Bot15:31, 7 October 2007 (UTC) .
Apology for serious error.
I just made a series of edits to you home page. I apologize. I lost track of where I was and mistook the list of worldcat authors for a wikiproject page. Please feel free to revert the edits. I would do so myself except that I think they are in the spirit of what you were trying to accomplish, so you may prefer to retain them. -Arch dude03:38, 20 October 2007 (UTC)
No problem: as you suggest it might be a good idea to move these names to a wikiproject page, but meanwhile do feel free. Unfortunately WorldCat Identities seems to have changed the urls of its author pages, so I'll need to make those links work. Dsp1311:28, 20 October 2007 (UTC)
Three things:
You are supposed to be on wikibreak! :-)
As you know, Worldcat as ID numbers. Do you think they are stable? If so, I think we should shift over to using the numbers.
I think a template for use in article would be a good idea, e.g.
Is this reasonable? If so I will create the template. Ideally, we would then apply it to each of the 1500 minus 40 Wikipedia articles in your lists.-Arch dude20:56, 20 October 2007 (UTC)
Re wikibreaks, they're relative ;) Re the ID numbers used, they're mostly the Library of Congress number (if the person has an entry in the name authority file), sometimes another sort of ID (e.g. an id associated with the VIAF, Virtual Name Authority File, project) and in other cases a version of the name (beginning 'np-'). You can see all of these possibilities in the links on my user page. The question of the stability of these ids is a good question: I'll email Thom Hickey at WorldCat to check about this. On the other hand, using a template would help if at some point in the future the links were to be discontinued: Library of Congress name authority numbers pre-exist WorldCat, and are likely to be at least as stable as anything WorldCat does. Re your template idea, I'd definitely welcome it (and incidentally I have far more than 1,500 matches). But (as I know from experience a year or so ago) some pages for famous people are rather zealously maintained, and regard adding links like this to every page as external link spam. Dsp1321:08, 20 October 2007 (UTC)
OK, I'll add the template. As for the great SPAM debate, let's start slowly and then address it separately each time, in hopes of winning a few. -Arch dude21:57, 20 October 2007 (UTC)
I added a "worldcat subject" template and a "worldcat" template. I see that you are already using the "worldcat id" template. Pleae test-drive these two new templates if you wish. We still have almost no comments on this entire worldcat-linkage effort, so I have not yet added links except as experiments. It now seems to me that Wikipedia would benefit from a worldcat link from almost every notable article: not pokemon, not current sports figures, not high schools, but anyh article that has or should have one or more book references. I am making steady but slow progress on my Firefox add-on to semi-automate adding the links: look at User:Arch dude/worldcat to check progress. Should we set up a sub-project of some sort to get help? -Arch dude00:54, 30 October 2007 (UTC)
Thanks for the update. Yes I've used your id template: mostly correcting an earlier form of linking to worldcat id which doesn't now work, & I've tried to stop myself using the template too cavalierly. But it's such a nice template! Re the other templates, I've added a comment on a talk page to your "worldcat" template (and the "worldcat subject" template has a bit of confusion between Jesus Christ and Australia at some point I think). But here are a couple of general thoughts.
All your templates are to worldcat identities rather than to worldcat on which worldcat identities is based. This might make your the name of your "worldcat" template a bit confusing. (For another template, which links to worldcat rather than worldcat identities, see Template:OCLC).
I'm happiest linking to worldcat identities where the link is to a page with a lccn number (or an identity from some form of controlled vocabulary). Partly because this is likely to provide more consistent results at the present time: items matched to a controlled vocabulary by librarians at worldcat's contributing member libraries are likely to have been better cataloged, and otherwise worldcat uses fallible automagic to identify when one John Smith is the same as another. I also think partly that such links are likely to remain much more stable in the future. (As well as being a useful practical research resource, linking between wikipedia pages and identities within a controlled vocabulary is in effect matching two widely used controlled vocabularies, which is useful in its own right). Worldcat identities is evolving. I get the impression that there at the moment a more developed use of controlled vocabularies for personal rather than controlled vocabularies. E.g. searching worldcat identities for Australia yields a load of corporate identities, but none of them are matched to Australia in some controlled vocabulary.
I'm glad someone is watching my progress! your earlier note inspired me to re-start the effort.I hope to finish the research over the Thanksgiving holiday. After I'm done, I intend to look into starting up a Wikiproject to actually get tyhe linking started. I think a project will give us a venue to get consensus with the spam project that the links are not spam, and perhaps get a consensus as to how to proceed. But I wanted to have the tool first.
One interesting change in the design: it now auto-loads the Firefox searchbar with the (cleaned) article title whenever you browse to a mainspace wikipedia page. For Worldcat, you then click on a Worldcat search addon, but you can also use any other installed search tool (e.g., Google) to do a non-worldcat search. I have found this trick to be extremely useful independent of the Worldcat effort. Now that I think of it, the "back" button will be generally useful also. -Arch dude (talk) 11:18, 19 November 2007 (UTC)
Hi. You added 1940 as a birth year for Helen Bonny a while back. I appreciate your edit, but there seems to be an error here, since she states in her book that she was in her early 40's when she entered the field of music therapy in the early 1960's, and that she had already raised a family by then. I have also heard it mentioned that she is getting on in years and is now in her late 80's. I will try to follow your lead and include a birthdate, but in the meantime, I removed the '1940' from the page. —Preceding unsigned comment added by GeoffreyCH (talk • contribs) 18:58, 12 December 2007 (UTC)
Hello, this is a message from an automated bot. A tag has been placed on Humanities-Ebooks, by another Wikipedia user, requesting that it be speedily deleted from Wikipedia. The tag claims that it should be speedily deleted because Humanities-Ebooks seems to be about a person, group of people, band, club, company, or web content, but it does not indicate how or why the subject is notable: that is, why an article about that subject should be included in an encyclopedia. Under the criteria for speedy deletion, articles that do not assert the subject's importance or significance may be deleted at any time. Please see the guidelines for what is generally accepted as notable.
To contest the tagging and request that administrators wait before possibly deleting Humanities-Ebooks, please affix the template {{hangon}} to the page, and put a note on its talk page. If the article has already been deleted, see the advice and instructions at WP:WMD. Feel free to contact the bot operator if you have any questions about this or any problems with this bot, bearing in mind that this bot is only informing you of the nomination for speedy deletion; it does not perform any nominations or deletions itself. To see the user who deleted the page, click hereCSDWarnBot (talk) 17:30, 14 December 2007 (UTC)
Denis Taaffe
A proposed deletion template has been added to the article Denis Taaffe, suggesting that it be deleted according to the proposed deletion process. All contributions are appreciated, but this article may not satisfy Wikipedia's criteria for inclusion, and the deletion notice should explain why (see also "What Wikipedia is not" and Wikipedia's deletion policy). You may prevent the proposed deletion by removing the {{dated prod}} notice, but please explain why you disagree with the proposed deletion in your edit summary or on its talk page. Also, please consider improving the article to address the issues raised. Even though removing the deletion notice will prevent deletion through the proposed deletion process, the article may still be deleted if it matches any of the speedy deletion criteria or it can be sent to Articles for Deletion, where it may be deleted if consensus to delete is reached. If you agree with the deletion of the article, and you are the only person who has made substantial edits to the page, please add {{db-author}} to the top of Denis Taaffe. Pumpmeup01:59, 21 December 2007 (UTC)
Well, I can't find a source that indicates he is notable or exceptional. There are thousands of political writers, certainly not all worthy for inclusion in an encyclopedia. Could you tell me what makes the subject notable or exceptional? Cheers, Pumpmeup05:10, 21 December 2007 (UTC)
Not sure if this is the place you'd prefer me to reply to you (as your talk page seems to have undergone archival!). My reasons I assumed notability: he's in the Dictionary of National Biography, which only includes about 5 Irish people per year in the C18th (at a time when the Irish population was about 3 million). And he had over ten publications, one of which was a four-volume history of Ireland. Cheers, Dsp13 (talk) 15:39, 21 December 2007 (UTC)
Hey, thanks for your category additions to Edmonton Bulletin. Just so you're aware, the current manual of style on dates frowns on linking to dates unless doing so deepens a reader's understanding of the topic. Accordingly, I've deleted those links from the Bulletin article (while leaving in the categories, of course). Sarcasticidealist (talk) 03:08, 2 January 2008 (UTC)
Edward George Hulton
I guess you're not aware of Google seaching. For an exact search type: "Edward George Hulton" and you will find these:
You mentioned "divergence between written & online sources". I come across them all the time and are often from what most people would accept as "reliable sources." Same thing applies between books where the person's mame or other such information is merely made in passing and it appears the "due diligence" of the author on a particular subject is directly related to its significance within their book. Hate to say it, but I believe the internet, and even a great deal of content currently existing in Wikipedia, is little more than disinformation. Good luck sorting out the Hulton facts. Handicapper (talk) 15:09, 14 January 2008 (UTC)
A tag has been placed on Cheap Magazine requesting that it be speedily deleted from Wikipedia. This has been done under section A1 of the criteria for speedy deletion, because it is a very short article providing little or no context to the reader. Please see Wikipedia:Stub for our minimum information standards for short articles. Also please note that articles must be on notable subjects and should provide references to reliable sources that verify their content.
If you think that this notice was placed here in error, you may contest the deletion by adding {{hangon}} to the top of the page (just below the existing speedy deletion or "db" tag), coupled with adding a note on the article's talk page explaining your position, but be aware that once tagged for speedy deletion, if the article meets the criterion it may be deleted without delay. Please do not remove the speedy deletion tag yourself, but don't hesitate to add information to the article that would would render it more in conformance with Wikipedia's policies and guidelines. Jdchamp31 (talk) 11:33, 15 January 2008 (UTC)
A note about "Date"/"Place" Categories (re: article page/discussion page)
Since you have such a praiseworthy record of repairing maladjusted categories over thousands of edits, I need to communicate with you regarding the placement of maintenance categories (which, as we know, denote the absence of years, dates and places of birth and death). Nearly a year ago, in late April 2007, following complaints by a few editors that those categories were creating visual clutter at the bottom of biographical article pages, two CfDs dealing with a number of the maintenance categories arrived at a consensus. The ten "Date/Place of birth/death missing/unknown" categories were repurposed to the discussion pages, where a small group of specialized editors, with a penchant for research, such as ourselves, could continue to complete the missing information (dates and places were described as containing needed, but non-essential, or "defining", data). Only the absence of the years of birth and death (five "Year categories"—Category:Year of birth missing, etc.) was noted as "defining", thus entitling those "Year categories" to remain on article pages. The wholesale transfer of the ten "non-defining" (Date/Place) categories was completed by COBot on June 132007 (as an example: the final entry COBot transferred on June 13, Talk:Zoran Vraneš, can be seen in that page's revision history). A number of recent Date/Place categories can, of course, be spotted on article pages and some editors still continue to place all maintenance categories there, but, in the eleven months that it has been observed, the primary intent of the consensus on the article page/discussion page category dichotomy has not been challenged at CfD. It is a subject I have been discussing numerous times over the past couple of years, so please feel free to contact me regarding any additional details.—Roman Spinner(talk)03:30, 22 March 2008 (UTC)
Whoops! I had somehow completely missed those CfDs & the discussion around date / place of birth / death - thanks very much for bringing me back up to speed! Dsp13 (talk) 10:22, 22 March 2008 (UTC)
Thanks for adding the category to this article, but Annie emailed me to ask that her DOB be kept out of the article for professional reasons, and per WP:BLP, we should comply with that request. Most sourceable DOBs for her are wrong anyway. No criticism of you, just a heads up. --Rodhullandemu (Talk) 20:38, 8 April 2008 (UTC)
Thanks very much. At the moment WP:BLP generally seems to recommend leaving out DOB while supplying year of birth, though it ight be good to have a general solution to the problem of living people who have a further preference for their year of birth not to be included on their page. (I'll leave this page alone from now on but if bios like this are just left untagged, there may be recurrent efforts to supply the information). Two possible solutions:
Categorise them merely as Category:20th century births, with some comment <-- Please do not specify in more detail, as etc. -->>
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Are you sure that he became professor of ecclesiastical history at King’s College in 1906? When I wrote article about him in Russian Wikipedia, I used among others the obituary notice in The American Historical Review (Vol. 45, №2, (Jan. 1940), p. 502). According to this notice, it was in 1908. But logically the year of 1906 is better, because if it took place in 1908, we don’t know what he actually did from 1906 to 1908. May be there was a misprint. I hope you clarify me it. — Albert Krantz (talk) 13:53, 3 June 2008 (UTC).
Thanks very much indeed: I think I just made a stupid mistake. According to the ODNB he returned to Cambridge as chaplain of St Edward's Church from 1906 to 1908 (also lecturing in Cambridge as Hulsean lecturer in 1906). Well spotted, & thanks again. Dsp13 (talk) 14:03, 3 June 2008 (UTC)
Hi there Dsp13. Noting your long-standing activities and expertise wrt biographical sourcing on wikipedia, thought I would bring to your attention and review a template ({{cite linked authority file}}) I'd created, intended for use in providing a citation for information (such as author DOBs) that may be obtained/validated from Library of Congress Authorities records.
I was motivated to do so since there seemed to be no such facility, but I often encountered situations where either (a) the supplied date info was uncited and it was quite unclear where it came from, and (b) the date info was difficult or impossible to track down from any other readily available source in the first place. Quite often, say for living notable academics, unless they deign to cough up their DOB on their faculty page or online CV (most unusual), or they've had some substantial biographical piece written about them during their lifetime, you'd otherwise have to wait until obituaries start appearing before establishing the full date, if not the year, of birth. Other info (name variants, institutions, etc) may also be usefully sourced from these records.
In part inspired by Arch dude's {{Worldcat id}} template, it seemed more practical to use the WorldCat Identities Linked Authority File (LAF) window into this data, since that provides a tidy and logical URL (supposed to be permalinked). By contrast, the direct interface to LOC's Authorities database seems rather clunky, and generates lengthy URLs not easily accessed from template calls.
I realise the LOC Authorities records are not infallible, but in the absence of some other source I'd say using these as cites is a reasonable approach. Since I gather you know a fair bit about Worldcat and cataloging systems in general, would appreciate any insights or suggestions that may occur to you; there may FIAK be some other resource or methodology that could improve this. Cheers, --cjllwʘTALK08:30, 10 June 2008 (UTC)
what a nice template! I agree with all you say: here are my random thoughts. I've often used LOC Authorities for birth dates etc., but not generally cited them (only mentioning the source in the edit summary) precisely because entering the citation was so fiddly. A template sorts that (though the name at present seems a bit long for convenience). A further advantage of handling citations with a template like this is that (should at some future time WorldCat links not prove so permanent, or LoC provide their own permalinks, or LoC records be merged into some larger & more international name authority system like the VIAF project) simply amending the template may be enough to update the citations as needed.
In the case of living people, I often respected the sensitivities mentioned in WP:BLP about their full DOB being prominently displayed, so only entered their year of birth even if the full date of birth was actually there in the Authority File. Dsp13 (talk) 13:23, 11 June 2008 (UTC)
Thanks. I did consider abbreviating the template name, but thought an acronym like LOC or LAF would be too obscure. In any case, I did set up a couple of shortcut template names that would work as well, such as {{cite LAF}}.
And thanks for the timely BLP reminder, I must admit that I hadn't thought too much about that aspect. I will be more cautious in future, and also expand the template instructions to include a reminder to that effect. Thanks for the advice, and cheers. --cjllwʘTALK03:05, 12 June 2008 (UTC)
Another (unimportant) thought: maybe the text which the template produces needn't include the word date, since then it can be used for other sorts of info (& inline citation will fix what the relevant info is) Dsp13 (talk) 11:50, 12 June 2008 (UTC)
OK, will consider it. At the moment, "date" can be overridden by using the |text= field; but perhaps plain ol' "Information" will suffice. Will think on it, thanks again.--cjllwʘTALK02:31, 13 June 2008 (UTC)
A proposed deletion template has been added to the article Robert the Lotharingian, suggesting that it be deleted according to the proposed deletion process. All contributions are appreciated, but this article may not satisfy Wikipedia's criteria for inclusion, and the deletion notice should explain why (see also "What Wikipedia is not" and Wikipedia's deletion policy). You may prevent the proposed deletion by removing the {{dated prod}} notice, but please explain why you disagree with the proposed deletion in your edit summary or on its talk page.
... are much appreciated. Because my job seems to be getting in the way a bit (long hours and overtime) the last three months I am a little behind on my schedule of stuff I wanted to add and repair.... Once more, thank you for your feedback! Robertsch55 (talk) 09:48, 23 June 2008 (UTC)
DNB
Interesting analysis, thanks; though as you'll appreciate, many of the women have only ONDB entries which are not quite the low hanging fruit of a DNB entry. I'll keep pegging away slowly; and I see that User:45ossington is also making strides through DNB. --Tagishsimon(talk)21:27, 26 June 2008 (UTC)
That drawing is based on the total size of the articles in a certain class, not on the number of articles. To classify the articles, I used a regex search on the content of the articles. For example, for movies, the regex was /\[\[Category:.*films]]/, and for locations, I looked for a {{coords}} template. I ran my script again this evening for the May 24 database dump. This is the output (class, total size in bytes, number of articles):
A tag has been placed on Peter Du Cane requesting that it be speedily deleted from Wikipedia. This has been done under section A1 of the criteria for speedy deletion, because it is a very short article providing little or no context to the reader. Please see Wikipedia:Stub for our minimum information standards for short articles. Also please note that articles must be on notable subjects and should provide references to reliable sources that verify their content.
If you think that this notice was placed here in error, you may contest the deletion by adding {{hangon}} to the top of the page that has been nominated for deletion (just below the existing speedy deletion or "db" tag), coupled with adding a note on the talk page explaining your position, but be aware that once tagged for speedy deletion, if the article meets the criterion it may be deleted without delay. Please do not remove the speedy deletion tag yourself, but don't hesitate to add information to the article that would would render it more in conformance with Wikipedia's policies and guidelines. Lastly, please note that if the article does get deleted, you can contact one of these admins to request that a copy be emailed to you. Leonard(Bloom)15:25, 7 July 2008 (UTC)
NRA template
I noticed you cahngin various articles on my watchlist. Good idea. I should remember to look people up in there more often, though given my affiliation I could be accused of COI or spamming I suppose. David Underdown (talk) 14:54, 6 August 2008 (UTC)
Spotted this on one of my watchlist - looks very useful, a good idea: providing access to sources of further info on a topic. I've just created a rather similar pair of templates for links to the Charity Commission and Office of the Scottish Charity Regulator - {{UK charity}} and {{Scottish charity}}. PamD (talk) 08:24, 7 August 2008 (UTC)
You scared the hell out of me with an edit summary "nra link." To prevent more elderly American Wikipedians having heart attacks, could you perhaps use a slightly different abbreviation? :-) Geogre (talk) 12:34, 12 August 2008 (UTC)
... in contrast to the (US) person who referred to a household as having an IRA, in the article on Millionaire! Two nations separated by a common language, or at least by an uncommon set of initialisms. PamD (talk) 13:37, 12 August 2008 (UTC)
I agree it's good to think through these issues. I'm not sure that the aim should be a merge which 'completely covers' (keeps every detail) in EV. That is (especially if EV is preserved in wikisource, though previous experience suggests incorporation of EV in enWiki tends to happen much faster than preservation in wikisource!), I don't much mind 80:20 trimming (or even 20:80 paraphrase) at all. Partly this is because older encyclopaedias can be outdated: as problematic as factual mistakes are systemic (less localisable) biases in the way they present the topic. One achievement of even a very meagre stub is to have a seed which can grow like a crystal, without having the way in which this happens overly determined by the longest single GFDL source.
On comparing encyclopedias, have you read Alexander Halavais & Derek Lackaff 'An Analysis of Topical Coverage in Wikipedia'(online ref 174 at WP:ACST). Biographical encyclopaedias are in one way an easy case: the way in which people are individuated is pretty uncontentious since no biographical encyclopedia has an entry for the person commposed of my legs and your arms. Anthropologists like Marilyn Strathern argue the way people are individuated like this is not entirely universal - conceivably the Melanesian WP might do things differently - but the problem of topics which are carved up differently in different encyclopedias is evidently more acute in other domains! Dsp13 (talk) 23:45, 26 August 2008 (UTC)
An example of this problem is the Wikipedia:List of 2007 Macropædia articles, a sub-project of the "missing articles" project. We actual;y have fairly good coverage of every topic covered in the Macropædia, but our articles are not sliced the same way. The remaining redlinks are instructive: many of them show that Wikipedia has a more global view than the Britannica view. One risk of attempting a merge is that we implicitly allow the external source to impose its taxonomy on us. we need to find a way to avoid this. Fortunaately, Wikipedia is not paper, so we can create multiple taxonomies if we feel the urge to do so, by creating multiple "overview" articles to accomodate the different taxonomies. For example, the "missing" article Western dance could be created as an overview that has links to our existing articles that cover this subject. It is clear tha we can do this, but it is not clear that we should do this. -Arch dude (talk) 00:48, 27 August 2008 (UTC)
Interesting, thanks. Of course, you can't tell which encyclopaedia is more global by looking at the titles without looking at the content: global sensitivity can in fact encourage being explicit about geographical scope (retitling 'History of X' as 'History of Western X', etc.). Dsp13 (talk) 14:58, 27 August 2008 (UTC)
People seem not to mind about the day, so I'm nominating Saturday. I haven't been there for a while, and from what I'm reading about the management, a good understanding of our requirements is probably in need of communication. As in a booking reserving table space for around 10, upstairs, from 2 pm or 2.30, until early evening, and people ordering for themselves as they come in. Basically we want to tell them we'll fit into a non-busy time and order some stuff, but this isn't a big joint meal, and is a social event. Charles Matthews (talk) 20:41, 2 October 2008 (UTC)
Sounds about right to me. Didn't manage to make it there today, but I'll be going in tomorrow morning and will see if we can make that sort of booking. Dsp13 (talk) 23:06, 2 October 2008 (UTC)
Good stuff. I'm just going through people with a Cantabrigian userbox as a way to find more locals (quite a number), orthogonal to the Cambridgeshire category. And then that might suffice. Charles Matthews (talk) 12:08, 3 October 2008 (UTC)
Thanks for organizing the meetup in Cambridge. Shame I've already left the country, but wish you all the best of luck for the meetup. --Cruccone (talk) 11:08, 7 October 2008 (UTC)
Nice! It reads a little staccato at the moment to my mind, though; when I've got a bit of time I'll see if I can pitch in. It's not a period I know anything about at all so it would take me a while to get up to speed. If you don't know it I think you'd enjoy, btw, Peter Milward's Religious Controversies of the Elizabethan Age (Scolar Press, 1978), a bibliographic survey of controversial literature. The most enjoyable list of bios to write from scratch which I've used recently has been a list I made of those with lots of archival material about them. Dsp13 (talk) 21:05, 5 October 2008 (UTC)
Staccato - yes, people tell me that all the time, can't think why. (Well, I can, but it's an old debate about inline refs.) I've now added the really juicy Bilson stuff from the court of King James. I got distracted by Henry Parker (writer), which was a total porker. Then by Virgilio Malvezzi, just because it was a redlink from Parker to fill. Still these are all fine people to add, I think. Charles Matthews (talk) 16:27, 7 October 2008 (UTC)
Couple of points about Saturday. We should get a list of people attending (by username). Do you have a camera? Photos are good (of those who don't mind). Charles Matthews (talk) 19:22, 13 October 2008 (UTC)
hahah sorry it was a typo. no objections to change - but i notice that while there is another 'william andrews' - there's no other 'william h andrews' so do we need to add (Communist)? Paki.tv (talk) 13:38, 10 October 2008 (UTC)
I don't mind either way: at the moment William H. Andrews redirects to William Andrews page lists a William H. Andrews, biologist, founder of Sierra Sciences & a William Henry Andrews(1846-1919), American politician - so if we didn't add (Communist) or whatever we'd need a hatnote to the American Henry. See you at the camb meetup btw! Dsp13 (talk)
Ah I didn't realise there was so many ! That's tricky - if its Wikipedia protocol to have the brackets, although I reckon a disambiguation page and then links to 'William Henry' and 'William H' is better (it would be helpful to know what his H stands for but i don't ...) see u next week! Paki.tv (talk) 16:02, 10 October 2008 (UTC)
Hi: I came across your user page and subpage about categorizing living people on the living people cat delete discussion page. I want to help you categorize those people. I have a good working knowledge of the LC authority file and how to use it. I'm planning on starting on batch 10 if that's ok with you.
Or turn Alfred Hall into a hndis page pointing to Alf & Alfred Daniel? Nice village pump suggestions, btw. To get a quantitative sense of how widespread bad links were, I checked the links of a few random pages. At the moment the most efficient way to do link maintenance is definitely the other way round, via What links here: anomalies are often immediately apparent from the page titles alone - e.g. a comics page, a football page, or whatever Dsp13 (talk) 09:47, 21 October 2008 (UTC)
As you know, I've added several articles from the 1900 DNB to Wikipedia. Thanks for cleaning them up: this is what I hoped would happen. My thought is that the old-fashioned language and layout is still a lot better than no article at all, and linking is a powerful way to overcome much of the century of missing context for the reader. Do you think this is a reasonable approach? I hope you do not feel that I am making a mess and that you are forced to waste time cleaning up after me. Unless someone objects, I intend to slowly work my way through the "missing articles" list from the top down. It takes about an hour to create the Wikisource article, and another hour to create the Wikipedia article.If the name is ambiguous, there is yet another hour or so of disambiguation to do. -Arch dude (talk) 18:26, 26 October 2008 (UTC)
Yes, I can see you've been doing some great work - thank you! From my perspective, I think the effort is particularly well-spent in producing the Wikisource text. I'm not totally sure that reproducing the text on wikipedia verbatim is the best way to go. It's a similar situation to that with the 1911 Encyc. Brit, or the Catholic Encyc, except that Leslie Stephen's DNB was such a thoroughly achieved effort that it's difficult to see how to update a substantial bio away from the organization and rhythms of all that C19th prose. So I wonder whether a more inviting prospect for future editors would be a more stubby article which only paraphrased & linked to the wikisourced DNB - allowing the wikipedia article to integrate other sources of info more gracefully. But as you say the links once correctly identified do tie the text into wikipedia & make it possible for both readers & active editors to browse through. So I haven't totally made up my mind about this.Dsp13 (talk) 20:07, 26 October 2008 (UTC)
Agreed. this stuff may intimidate an editor who otherwise would start with a fresh perspective. On balance, I still think the DNB version is a lot better than nothing and probably better than a stub. Maybe we should come up with some guidance on a project page inviting editors to be especialy bold when upgrading these articles, with hints and examples, and then put a pointer on the talk page of each article to reference that page? I think that I could not bear to stubbify one of these immediately after carefully reading and transcribing over at wikisource, as it would be too much like undoing the work I just did. -Arch dude (talk) 20:36, 26 October 2008 (UTC)
Hi Dsp13. Just spotted your merge tag on V. V. Beloussov / Vladimir Belousov. Good call. I'd not spotted the latter article when I created the former. In part because of the surname spelling. Do we know which one is correct / most appropriate for English language WP? I've just checked the source I cited in the former, and it's definitely Beloussov. But it may well be wrong (that certainly seems more likely than the Great Soviet Encyclopaedia being wrong!). Anyway, I'll merge the content of the former into the latter in a few days time. I've already tried to incorporate information from the latter that's not present in the former. Cheers, --PLUMBAGO13:51, 27 October 2008 (UTC)
Quote: "If you're using this list it would be great if you removed batches you've gone through adding cats to, so that it's clear what's been done."
Thanks for your message; I wasn't sure how to go about doing this; should I remove both the ones I have added birth cats (e.g. 1950 births) as well as the ones I have added year of birth missing (living people) cats? The red links I am leaving in.
PS: the preferred form of Belousov used by the Library of Congress is Belousov, V. V. (Vladimir Vladimirovich), 1907- ; he died in 1990; the heading has not yet been updated; the spelling with two ss is a variant. Hope this is helpful--FeanorStar7 (talk) 23:51, 27 October 2008 (UTC)
Ok, thanks for your response. So far, I've deleted the ones that have definite birthdates; I left the ones with year of birth missing because I wasn't sure at the time. I might have questions down the line about completeness of categorization.--FeanorStar7 (talk) 10:34, 28 October 2008 (UTC)
In one sense categorizing people as year of birth missing isn't completely categorizing them - but at least people who want to tackle that category can simply go to it. Thanks again for your encouragement, & do make any suggestions etc. which occur to you Dsp13 (talk) 10:46, 28 October 2008 (UTC)
If you do want to leave them, maybe when you get to the end of a batch you could mark the ones left as having been categorised in this way - e.g. Batch XX 'only year of birth missing (living people) remaining' or whatever - just so people who come to the page will know the status of the different batches there. What do you think? Dsp13 (talk) 23:35, 28 October 2008 (UTC)
Thanks! That should stop us wasting effort by going over the same material. I'm afraid I'd quite like to continue simply deleting the batches which I've gone through - it's a bit quicker, and the backlog is so huge that I just want to attack it as quickly as possible. If you've got strong objections to that, then do let me know, & I'll fall into line! Dsp13 (talk) 23:48, 30 October 2008 (UTC)
I agree with what EmanWilm said on his talk page about leaving the ones with year of birth missing in place because otherwise they might slip thru the net; on the other hand that category is there and if someone is working thru that list they will see it. If the person is not in the LC authority file, I don't do much more searching since there are so many; but there are times when I think it will be likely the birth date will be in the file (if the person is a published writer or musician) and usually I can get a birth year and thus can improve the page; so I don't have strong feelings, just observations. Anyway, my 2 pennies. -- FeanorStar7 (talk) 06:43, 31 October 2008 (UTC)
