Talk:Members of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences

Progress

I have just created list articles containing every known member (past and present) of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences. This is intended as the master page, allowing for navigation between the sub-pages.

The structure of the initial sub-pages is alphabetical and an artefact of the three sources of data that I have used to compile these pages. Those sources are:

1. The "database" (basically, a hyperlinked index) of deceased members (full, corresponding and foreign) called the KNAW Historisch Ledenbestand produced by the Digitaal Wetenschapshistorisch Centrum. This says it is correct up the "present day", but in fact appears to be up-to-date only to 2014. It is arranged alphabetically.
2. The "database" (as above, an index of profiles) of current members on the academy's website. This is split into full, corresponding and foreign sections. It is arranged alphabetically and up to date as of 2020.
3. In order to fill in the "gap" of fellows who died after c. 2013 and 2020, I have extracted names from the annual book of obituaries the academy produces (Levensberichten en herdenkingen). I copied every name from the issues between 2011 and 2019. I do not know how comprehensive these books are.

As such, I have imported what appears to be a full index of people who have been members of the Royal Netherlands Academy. The only caveat on comprehensiveness is that I don't know whether every member who died between 2011 and 2020 has had an obituary published in the academy's annual book of obituaries. If they have, then this is as complete as it can be.

There are a few problems that have emerged out this. Because the names come from three different sources which only allowed me to copy names and which were sorted alphabetically, the index is alphabetical. While sensible, this will require yearly maintenance across the 26 pages. A list by year of appointment avoids this practical issue. However, in order to produce a year-of-appointment set of lists, we will need to extract the year from the individual profiles cited against each name. This will take time and cannot be automated.

Similarly, the type of membership for each deceased member is also recorded in their linked profiles, but cannot be extracted. This will need to be added manually for each person.

In addition to these problems, for the sake of expediency each "letter" (except A and Z) has tables living members stored separately below the table of deceased members. They will therefore need to be merged and ordered alphabetically. This is also likely to be a tedious process.

Finally, all of these pages will need links, including red-links, added to them: the vast majority of people on these lists will be notable and many already have articles. Cheers, —Noswall59 (talk) 14:48, 3 May 2020 (UTC).

Update

Tables left to merge: K, L, M, P, R, S, T. —Noswall59 (talk) 11:26, 12 May 2020 (UTC).