User talk:Charles Matthews/WikiProject DNBMerge

My method of operation

As you know, there is already a "missing articles/DNB" project. User:Dsp13 created a list of the 189 "missing ODNB" articles of the longest 3000 ODNB articles. That list had become gradually shorter apparently without any concerted effort, as editors added articles for other reasons. I became interested in the project after I set up the Wikisource DNB 1900 project as a place to keep the source of a single DNB article I needed as a basis for a single WP article. Again as you know, the 1900 DNB is the basis for many articles in the ODNB, but there are many newer ODNB articles and many of the oler articles have been updated.

After finding the WP project, I began creating the Wikisources for some of the missing articles and then dumping them into WP, with a small bit of formatting a great deal of linkifying, and not much else. This process results in articles with a lot of really good information, a fair amount of worthless information, a small amount of bad information, and a desperate need for copyediting that I hope others will be inspired to do. I believe that on balence the articles contribute to the value of Wikipedia as they stand, and I hope that they will eventually become much better: that is, I think the advantages outweigh the disadvantages. I have completed about 15 articles, and I intend to continue in thia fashion until I complete all of the remaining 101 articles that have equivalents in the 1900 DNB.

There has been a one-week pause in this effort as another member of the Wikisource project has found all of of the DNB volumes in pagescan format and moved them into Wikisource, and I am assisting in soem related efforts over there. As soon as we get our act together over there, I can resume the transcription and and copying process.

Now, how does this effort mesh with the current effort? There are similarities and differences. I would like to align my effort with whatever we decide to do here. -Arch dude (talk) 01:52, 5 December 2008 (UTC)

order of effort

I think the ideal order in which to add DNB articles is to sort by number of "incoming links." That is, the first article to add is the article that has the largest number of pre-existing incoming links from existing mainspace articles in WP. The problems with this approach are:

• Actual redlinks may not all have the correct name
• Many potential links are not yet redlinks: they are simply unlinked text.

So, this theoretical figure of merit is not easy to actually calculate in practice. If someone can come up with a way to do this, it would be very valuable. The tactical advantage is that our new articles will not be orphans. The strategic advantage is that this criterion is probably a good measure of the actual usefulness of the article. Another reason to use this approach is that the DNB is itself a web of links. True, in their benighted 19th century way, the DNB editors did not use Wiki syntax, but it is fairly straightfowrard to translate Harvey Schmedlap (1682?-1750)[q. v.] into [[Harvey Schmedlap (court jester)|Harvey Schmedlap]]. So, as we add articles in this order, we increase the number of redlinks to other DNB articles and prevent them from becoming orphans. -Arch dude (talk) 02:10, 5 December 2008 (UTC)