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Wikipedia:WikiProject Missing encyclopedic articles/DNB lists discussion

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Needs updating. Charles Matthews (talk) 13:13, 19 June 2009 (UTC)[reply]

In order to progress the Dictionary of National Biography merge project, I'm going to create some basic lists, and invite others to do the same. The scale of the task means these will have to be put together in stages.

Starting with the 15 lists accessible from User:Magnus Manske/Dictionary of National Biography, the idea is to create 63 cleaned up and manageable lists, one for each original DNB volume. These lists should be of individual biographies, leaving out the several kinds of redirects.[1] Over at Wikisource[2] there are parallel pages in course of development, and the pages here naturally should link to the relevant index page over there.

There is a sample list at User:Charles Matthews/DNB Working List 63.

The scheme should go in this fashion:

  1. Clean up the list of names from the relevant sections of the Magnus Manske pages.[3][4]
  2. Create the page as a bulleted list – tabulation can come later.[5]
  3. Check for order and completeness against the original DNB. Note that the scanning process has introduced some quite serious transpositions of order, and probably some names have got lost.
  4. List maintenance, first pass. Add {{tick}}, {{dn}} and {{mnl}} templates, respectively for correct bluelinks, bluelinks needing disambiguation and bluelinks that are definitely wrong.
  5. Where there are {{dn}} and {{mnl}} templates, it will be a help to add the summary biographies; or at least a summary of the summary.
  6. List maintenance, second pass: redirecting redlinks. Go through creating redirects and adding {{tick}} to new bluelinks.
  7. At this point the list should be ready for the creation of required new articles. So a further stage of annotation should identify available Wikisource DNB text that could be used.
  8. From now on, table format is probably required. The incorrect bluelinks should be turned into redlinks and the {{dn}} and {{mnl}} removed in favour of some other annotation templates.
  9. In line with discussion[6] the aim should be to make the page history of the lists adequate documentation of the merge effort. For this reason, it is a good idea to operate by adding and changing templates for list maintenance, and to put everything in a table.

Auxiliary lists by topic are undoubtedly a good way to get people interested in the actual article creation process. They will come separately. Lists created in userspace will be moved out as project pages once everything is a little more respectable. Announcement at WP:MISSING will be a good idea, once the project looks organised and with a clear method set out.

Notes

[edit]
  1. ^ There are “redirects” for related surnames, for spellings of individual names, for titles of nobility, and for some families. These are worth working over, but there is quite enough to do with the individual names alone.
  2. ^ Indexed at s: Dictionary of National Biography, 1885-1900
  3. ^ The required information is in the Concise Dictionary of National Biography (which has other summaries, not quite the same order, and a few different choices for spellings). Or you can look at the volume from which the scans came.
  4. ^ It seems best to clean up the MM list, preserving the syntax with the "nowikis".
  5. ^ What turns out to be easy is to put the text between "nowiki" tags simply between "ref" tags, so the summaries are all in footnotes. The redirects to titles can just be indented.
  6. ^ Wikipedia:Merging encyclopedias
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