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Archive 1Archive 2Archive 3

Halfway is better than no way, but all the way is better

DivermanAU than you for the edit to Thomas Jefferson Conant, where you added wstitle, volume and a page number to the template {{EB1911}} (diff).

However although that is a start, to complete the citation, one also need to add in-line citations to meet the requirements of WP:V and the guideline WP:FREECOPYING. The in-line citation can ether be an in-line short citation (as I favour) and have done for that article (diff); or as an in-line long citations as DavidBrooks favours (diff — NB the inline=1 parameter).

I made a subsequent edit to the same article, that did not add or subtract any information (other than attributing a POV to the author of the EB1911 article), but added standard sections for this type of biography (diff).

To check which of the text needs in-line citations the tool Earwig's Copyvio Detector will help spot the text that has been copied (eg earwig 85.6% for Thomas Jefferson Conant.

If the article has yet to be ported to wikisource, and is not available online elsewhere, another technique that may help is to go back to the original copy of the EB1911 text into the Wikipeia article and using the history diff that version against the most recent version. Failing that then I use the version linked to in EB1911#External links at archive.org and use number one eyeball.

Just checking for copied text is not enough, because some or all of the original text may not be a direct copy but is a summary and summaries of EB1911 text can also be supported by an inline citation to EB1911.

Other text may have been added to articles. If it is inserted into a paragraph original copied from the EB1911, then I place a citation to EB1911 before the inserted text then add {{citation needed}} after the inserted text and finally add an citation EB1911 to the end of the paragraph.


-- PBS (talk) 11:56, 5 February 2017 (UTC)

Thanks for the post, I've recently updated the Confarreatio article with EB1911 citations (text wasn't directly copied). I'll try and do more like that in future. I've previously just added parameters to the EB1911 template when doing large numbers of articles with missing EB1911 article names due to time constraints. See a progress table here Category talk:Wikipedia articles incorporating a citation from the 1911 Encyclopaedia Britannica with no article parameter. About 3,400 fewer since I started targeting them early in 2015. Thanks for the "earwig" tip. DivermanAU (talk) 02:01, 10 February 2017 (UTC)
I agree with what PBS has said, but I'd underscore the first half of the subject line of this conversation. I have been known to distinguish shallow edits from deep edits. Putting inline attributions in exactly the right place takes time. As I've said before, if PBS and I are the only one doing this we'll have to live to be 250 years old. Adding a footnote can be quicker, and adds the value that the truly curious reader can easily find the copied text for themselves. That doesn't replace the need for a later deep edit, but it's a valuable step, and the deep editor now at least doesn't have to thumb through the source to find the right page.
I'm now viewing the indexes at the verification project as the master list of pages that have been vetted. I now only tag them when fully sourced to the appropriate level, including "inline" if warranted (or sometimes "not at all"). So, on my next editing pass, I'll change the T2 page to call this one "ok", unless you want to do it first. Unfortunately that wasn't the original purpose of these indices. At first, they meant "there is probably useful material in EB1911 that you can copy into this article", which is rare nowadays. Then it meant "these pages should have a {{EB1911}} or {{Cite EB1911}} footnote." Only in recent years has it been expected that we add inline citations, so some of the older tags (in, e.g., the B's and D's) should probably be reverted.
One other practical tip. For a source page that isn't yet in Wikisource mainspace, I find that Wikisource Page space works just fine with Earwig. Even if the page is not even proofread (it's "red", like this one), the raw scans are usually near enough that Earwig can highlight the matching areas. Check it out. David Brooks (talk) 21:27, 5 February 2017 (UTC)
Thanks for tip of the wikisource, I hadn't thought of using those pages, I am sure I will find it most useful in future. -- PBS (talk) 14:54, 6 February 2017 (UTC)
You're welcome. It helps to know the page number in advance, as page space navigation is slow. I go to the archive.org source first to locate the page, which also gives me the URL parameter. David Brooks (talk) 17:48, 6 February 2017 (UTC)

Short inline citations incorporating editors of encyclopaedias

There is a discussion at Wikipedia talk:Citing sources#Short inline citations incorporating editors of encyclopaedias is (not) wrong which may affect how the EB1911 templates are used in future. -- PBS (talk) 17:44, 9 February 2017 (UTC)

Archived in Archive 41 -- PBS (talk) 22:27, 3 September 2017 (UTC)

WikiProject status

From my talk page (pinging:user:DavidBrooks and User:Compassionate727)

Greetings! I see that you are one of only two members of WikiProject Encyclopedia Britannica. I was wondering if you would agree with my assessment that the project is now defunct. (I have contacted the other to ask him the same question.) —Compassionate727 (T·C) 01:22, 17 May 2018 (UTC)

Copied from User talk:DavidBrooks:

@Compassionate727:On the contrary, I am still plugging away at the EB1911 lists, updating citation tags, and inserting additional source material when needed. You might want to check my alternate account: DavidBrooks-AWB. As far as I am concerned, the work in the project still needs to be done (because most of the existing citations don't meet current WP standards) and if I don't live to be 250 I hope someone will follow the detailed instructions that PBS and I have created. So, it's not defunct, just being addressed slowly.
What's your motivation for asking? David Brooks (talk) 02:59, 17 May 2018 (UTC)
Just been flagging inactive WikiProjects as such for the past couple of hours. One of those WikiGnomish tasks I occasionally jump on to for a few days that probably doesn't actually help all that much, but does kind of need to be done. If you're using the project, that's fine (although if you're the only one, it would probably still be prudent to flag it as inactive, just not defunct). —Compassionate727 (T·C) 03:02, 17 May 2018 (UTC)

@User:Compassionate727 No.

See the categories under Category:Wikipedia articles incorporating a citation from the 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica specifically:

There are also other sub categories require work.

Further there is much work to do in updating information already copied from the original source and lots more information to be copied across for Wikisource as Wikisource:Wikisource:WikiProject 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica delivers more articles in machine readable format. The wording on the project page explains how to reference the text copied so that it does not violate the Plagiarism guideline.

Also Wikisource:Wikisource:WikiProject Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition needs links from the relevant articles here to the articles over on Wikisource and possibly some additional information here gleaned from that source.

-- PBS (talk) 14:58, 21 May 2018 (UTC)

Templates without an article parameter (August 2018)

Over the last couple of days I have been looking at some of the articles at the end of the list in Category:Wikipedia articles incorporating a citation from the 1911 Encyclopaedia Britannica with no article parameter (at time of writing there are 40 entries)

So far all the articles I have checked:

  1. August von Wendland -- The original entry in 2005 had no citation, EB1911 it was added by an IP in 2008, I could find no match on the original 2005 text, so I have removed it
  2. Werecat, text copied from another article on Wikipedia along with the EB1911 citation. I was able to work out where it came from and identify the text on Wikisource
  3. Caroline Yale and Cecile de Wentworth were both created by the same editor (with the templates EB1911 and NIE). The editor is still active on Wikipedia and has removed the templates from the article Caroline Yale and as the addition was very similar in the other article I am hopeful that the editor will make a similar removal.
  4. Sir Owen Wynn, 3rd Baronet Sir Richard Wynn, 2nd Baronet Sir Richard Wynn, 4th Baronet -- These three are more interesting from the point of view of this category. It turns out that the editor who created these articles copied the text from Dictionary of Welsh Biography article "WYNN family, of Gwydir, Caerns." Earwig still shows the copied content of the three 40.5%, 41.9%, 42.2%, so I have put them up for deletion under copyright violation.

I think that numbers (1) and (4) will be quite common in this list. This is because by 2008 it was quite common to demand sources for articles and some editors often using IP addresses added {{EB1911}} just so it looked as if the text was authentic. (4)was particularly popular with people who breached copyright. They hoped that by adding {{EB1911}} that it would throw editors checking for copyright violations off the sent. This is because 10 years ago thanks to OCR errors it was often difficult to find text in the various copies of EB1911 that were then on line at that time.

So as there are relatively few articles left in that category and they tend to be of a type that are tricky to find, I think that editors need to be suspicious of the use of EB1911 templates on these articles particularly if they were added when the article was created 10+ years ago and no matching source can be found, or if an article was created years before someone tacked on a EB1911 template without also adding new text to the article at the same time.

For those like myself who have been working on this project for some time it is fairly easy to recognise the style of EB1911 articles and recognise those that are purport to be copies of EB1911 text when they are not. I think this rum of articles in this category comes down to paraphrasing footnote 6 in WP:V "Zero information is preferred to misleading or false information" (Jimmy Wales).

So what I propose is. That we go through the category and try to match the original text. If that fails but there is no clear reason for retaining it, I suggest that the template is removed and the article is listed here with a note of why the editor removing the template is not 100% certain that it is the correct thing to do. --PBS (talk) 12:12, 18 August 2018 (UTC)

Thanks for the analysis and the heads-up. It never occurred to me that editors used such fakery, although I have deleted it when the EB contains nothing of use to the latest version. I've sometimes converted {{EB1911}} to {{Cite EB1911}} in cases where there is no verbatim, but I feel the EB article can either provide additional insights to the WP article (for example, if it has an academic's POV), without containing additional facts. And sometimes I've used {{Cite EB1911}} to indicate that there are additional incidental facts over there, but I'm too lazy to thread them into the article. BTW, there are nearly 1,000 references to {{1911}} (which are, of course, generally really old); do they get included in your analysis by virtue of the redirect? David Brooks (talk) 12:36, 18 August 2018 (UTC)
Although there are still just under a 1000 articles using the redirect {{1911}} nearly all have title or wstitle parameter. Those are much easier to check. The few remaining articles in the category mentioned above are some of the most difficult to solve because they have been left because there was no obvious quick solution (and in most cases they are probably false entries added with or without malicious intent). All I am saying that once this list numbered many 1,000s those that remain are some of the most tricky. My idea of listing them here is once the complete proof read text is on Wikisource, it will be relatively easy to check if any in the table below actually have an supporting text in EB1911. In the mean time we can take Jimbo's advise and, once checked, if they appear to be false positives remove the templates from those articles.
As an aside I recently came across a about 50 articles that do not use EB1911 templates but have links to versions or archived versions of www.1911encyclopedia.org. It was odd they did not show in AWB when scanning for them in article space but came up as articles when the search was done on all named spaces. I am working my way through that list at the moment. -- PBS (talk) 18:44, 18 August 2018 (UTC)

Table

Articles where the template was removed but it may be a false positive
article Insertion Note (and signature)
August von Wendland was added by an IP in 2008 Revision as of 23:05, 17 August 2018. The original entry in 2005 had no citation. I could find no match on the original 2005 text. -- PBS (talk) 12:12, 18 August 2018 (UTC)
Jackson's Mill Revision as of 00:49, 12 February 2006 The original entry in 2006 had the attribution but I could find no trace of either "Jackson's Mill" or Cummins Jackson in article or page space on EB1911 -- PBS (talk) 15:57, 10 October 2018 (UTC)
Byzantine–Mongol alliance Revision as of 1 January 2008 (Creation) by User:Per Honor et Gloria.The style of the initial text does not look like an entry in EB1911. The original entry in 2008 had the attribution, but I could not find an article that supported any of this text. -- PBS (talk) 16:39, 10 October 2018 (UTC)
Čučuk Stana Revision as of 13:11, 10 March 2010 (Creation) The style of the initial text does not look like an entry in EB1911. The oritinal entry in 2010 had the attribution, but I could not find an article that supported any of this text. As the editor who created the artilce user:Ajdebre was indefinitely blocked for repeated copyright violations, it is likely that the template {{1911}} was used to disguise the fact. -- PBS (talk) 16:55, 10 October 2018 (UTC)
Cecile de Wentworth Revision as of 08:17, 15 January 2015 (creation) user:Fairgeek added the template at creation. I can find no mention of the man (who died in 1933) in EB1911 so I replaced it with a citition to the article in the modern Britannica Encyclopaedia.
Siba State Revision at 16:22, 4 July 2014 (new page) The template was included in the infobox at the creation of the article by user:Xufanc. I can not find mention of it in EB1911 so I have removed the template. -- PBS (talk) 11:50, 11 October 2018 (UTC)
Rzochów Revision as of 01:11, 25 September 2008, Revision as of 01:14, 25 September 2008 The template was included during the creation of the article by user:Marek69. here is no evidence that this article has text taken from EB1911 so I have removed the template. -- PBS (talk) 11:50, 11 October 2018 (UTC)
Roman fort, Mušov Revision of 03:19, 4 December 2014 (creation) Removed {{EB1911}} placed in the article at its creation in 2014 by user:Jan Sapák,because I could not find any of the text in that revision appearing in EB1911. --PBS (talk) 11:50, 11 October 2018 (UTC)
Questenberg Revision as of 07:27, 23 January 2007 added by user:Arthur Warrington Thomas during the first few edits to the article. I have removed the template because I can find no evidence that the village is mentioned in EB1911. -- PBS (talk) 11:50, 11 October 2018 (UTC)
Elena Asenina of Bulgaria Revision as of 16:00, 5 December 2007 (New article from WP:AFC) The author was 77.77.14.21 13:38, 4 December 2007 (UTC). I have checked the version of EB1911 on Wikisource. I can find the men in EB1911 who are mentioned in this article. But this woman is not mentioned in the articles in which they are, so I have removed the template. --PBS (talk) 11:50, 11 October 2018 (UTC)
John of Denmark (1518–1532) Revision as of 18:39, 19 February 2012 (creation) by user:Alexcoldcasefan Although I can find evidence of his father in EB1911, I find no mention of the subject of this article so I have removed the template. -- PBS (talk) 11:57, 11 October 2018 (UTC)
Georg Franck von Franckenau Revision as of 02:29, 2 May 2009 by an IP address. This article was created by copying the German Wikipedia article. I can fined no evidence of this man in EB1911. I have restored the original reference to Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie (ADB) which covers some of the information in the article and removed 1911. -- PBS (talk) 15:46, 13 October 2018 (UTC)
It seems to me that in some cases a "Cite EB1911" can be used to back up incidental statements in the article, if properly placed. Perhaps that's what the original author meant, although of course there's no way of being sure. For example, Elena Asenina of Bulgaria and John of Denmark (1518–1532) make statements about Theodore II Laskaris and Christian II of Denmark respectively, and EB1911 is one place where they can be corroborated. But if you take this approach, there must be thousands of articles that mention EB1911 subjects incidentally. It remains a judgement call: is it useful to footnote such an incidental claim?
Another interesting set of articles is those that started out as a EB1911 clone, were completely rewritten over time, but never lost the attribution. Does your admirably detailed research unearths those too? No idea how many there are. David Brooks (talk) 13:46, 11 October 2018 (UTC)
Similarly, Jackson's Mill contains a couple of facts about Stonewall Jackson that could be verified in EB1911. I'm just applying AGF here, along with the looser ideas about attribution in the past. But trying to detect the original motivations is beside the point. Each article should be judged on the basis of its current content according to contemporary ideas on attribution, as you're doing. Same applies to every article under Wikipedia:WikiProject Missing encyclopedic articles/1911 verification. David Brooks (talk) 11:38, 12 October 2018 (UTC)
Clones no. The obvious was to check is via a search for text in Wikisource main space and page space for some of the text in the Wikipeida article as it was when the template was added, which is what I did in each case. But these are the rump of the cases (all the obvious ones have long since been processed) and I only found one: , Ontinyent. I have not listed that one here or some others were it was very obvious that it was a mistake or fraudulent. What was more typical was that they were either created with the 1911 template or added later with or without some additional facts eg this addition to Georg Franck von Franckenau. In the case of Franckenau I have put back one of the original sources (a Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie (ADB) article in German) a and removed EB1911.
The whole point of listing these articles here here is that others can check my decisions on those I have removed and restore them if they think that there is text to cover some points. But if that is done then inline and with full attribution please.
-- PBS (talk) 15:46, 13 October 2018 (UTC)
I finally emptied the category—The last one was the article Hohen Neuendorf, its inclusion was a mistake caused by a mix up of page moves and German villages changing names in the last 100 years. I have left a detailed explanation of how in Talk:Hohen Neuendorf. The template with EB1911 article now resides in the article Babelsberg. Removing these legacy articles should make it easier to monitor for new inclusions and hopefully quicker fixes for any that do appear. -- PBS (talk) 13:12, 14 October 2018 (UTC)

EB1911 is no longer a mystery

In the section User talk:DivermanAU#EB1911 is no longer a mystery there has been a brief conversation about a mile stone on this project: all the EB1911 templates now include an article name. Thank you to all those who has contributed to this achievement. -- PBS (talk) 09:43, 4 November 2018 (UTC)

Articles citing EB1911 using the dead encyclopedia.jrank.org website

Hi all, I've found over 200 articles using a reference for EB1911 to the now defunct website "http://encyclopedia.jrank.org". Some articles use the {{cite encyclopedia}} template, others use {{cite web}} or another method. I've been finding them using a search — insource:"http://encyclopedia.jrank.org" "1911"

There were 239 articles found with that search on 2 August 2019, now down to 209 at time of writing. I've been fixing up some recently including Polyp (zoology), Noah Webster, Kaffir (racial term), Hrotsvitha ... etc. So if you you feel like it, there's some Wikipedia articles that can edited to refer to the Wikisource article instead of the the dead jrank.org article.

There's also some more articles that refer to the dead jrank.org site for references other than EB1911 (search using —insource:"http://encyclopedia.jrank.org". I've used archive.org to find an archived copy for one or two of those articles, but been concentrating on the EB1911 ones.

@PBS: @DavidBrooks: @Suslindisambiguator: @Library Guy: @Slowking4: @Mike s: @Jan.Kamenicek: — DivermanAU (talk) 04:04, 5 August 2019 (UTC)

Thanks for the heads-up. I hope I haven't missed any such during my editing, but I'll continue to be aware. Did you tackle them by hand or with AWB? There are probably also some that refer to Hathi and Studylight; they are deprecated as reference sources but still active last I checked. They're not such a high priority but they should be altered if they come up, as they could be inaccurate renditions (although not intentionally modified as in some other old mirror sites). David Brooks (talk) 12:07, 5 August 2019 (UTC) ETA: it may not be so bad. The first two I picked at random contain a different jrank reference (neither link goes to the cited page) and the "1911" text elsewhere. But still worth checking them all of course. David Brooks (talk) 12:49, 5 August 2019 (UTC)
Theodora has currently 71 references also: use insource:"www.theodora.com/encyclopedia". Again, lower priority because it's still active. David Brooks (talk) 00:35, 19 September 2019 (UTC)

Connecting Wikipedia articles to reliable sources through new template

Hi All,

Please have a look at my proposal and contribute with your opinions: Wikipedia:Village_pump_(proposals)#Connecting_Wikipedia_articles_to_reliable_sources_through_new_template

Thanks, Adam Harangozó (talk) 14:16, 23 February 2020 (UTC)

As of writing this Category:Wikipedia articles incorporating a citation from the 1911 Encyclopaedia Britannica without Wikisource reference now has 9 entriesone entry (as of 18 March 2021). To remove them it will be necessary to copy edit the pages on Wikisource. Most of them are quite large articles and have tables, or images or foreign scripts or a combination of two or more of those, which makes it more difficult to create articles that are not so full of OCR errors that they they would be incomprehensible if transluded from the raw pages without additional editing.

If you have time please consider working on these before working on other EB1911 articles on Wikisource. Once this list is down to 0 it will be able to use the category to provide EB1911 articles that will be useful for Wikipedia. -- PBS (talk) 15:16, 27 June 2020 (UTC)

Wikipedia article EB1911 article name location notes
Psalms of Solomon "Solomon, Psalms of", 25, pp. 365–366. Vol 25:5 index, first OCR page Done checkY
Temperature measurement "Thermometry", 26, pp. 821–836. Vol 26:9 index, first OCR page Done checkY However s:1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Thermometry is a long article with lots of mathematical formulas and embedded images and it still need more work.
Ural–Altaic languages "Ural-Altaic", 27 pp. 784–786. Vol 27:8 index, first OCR page Done checkY
Water supply "Water Supply", 28, pp. 387–409 Vol 28:7 index, first OCR page Done checkY however "s:1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Water Supply" is a long article some pages towards the end have had no manual proof reading which means there are still a lot of OCR errors and throughout the article many of the images and tables need more work.
Weighing scale "Weighing Machines", 28, pp. 468–477 Vol 28:8 index, first OCR page User:Francois-Pier fixed this in October 2020checkY
William Dent Priestman "Oil Engine", 20, pp. 35-43 Vol 20:1 inex, first OCR page Done checkY however many of the images and tables need more work.
Worsted "Wool, Worsted and Woollen Manufactures", 28, pp. 805–816 Vol 28:13 index, first OCR page Done checkY however many of the images and tables need more work.

As of today these remain and with the exception of "Ural-Altaic" (27, pp. 784–786) will take quite a lot of work to bring them up to ,or close to, proofread. It is very possible that other articles will be added to the category (for example "Midleton, William St. John Fremantle Brodrick, 1st Earl of" was added recently and once found in EB1922 it was relatively easy to create an article as it was a short article and the checking of the page had already been done. -- PBS (talk) 13:00, 29 July 2020 (UTC)

I see you started on Psalms of Solomon. In the case of Hebrew text, I've found it hard to visually transcribe, without knowing Hebrew, because of the visual close similarity between sets of glyphs (dalet and resh for example). But in this case the Hebrew text may be online somewhere, not that I've tried yet. And the image on p. 366 should be easy to screencap. I think I just volunteered :-( David Brooks (talk) 14:28, 10 August 2020 (UTC) ETA: Actually, {{Tree chart}}, which is also available in WS, could handle this image. But the orientation wouldn't exactly match. David Brooks (talk) 15:04, 10 August 2020 (UTC)
Attempted. It's not a great facsimile, although I could compress it a little more. @PBS: How do you feel about it? David Brooks (talk) 18:37, 10 August 2020 (UTC)
Psalms of Solomon done. The Hebrew may still be off. David Brooks (talk) 20:31, 12 August 2020 (UTC)

As of this post Category:Wikipedia articles incorporating a citation from the 1911 Encyclopaedia Britannica without Wikisource reference is empty. -- PBS (talk) 18:35, 2 April 2021 (UTC)

As of this writing this post the following search

returns 371 pages which have a url link to EB1911 pages on Wikisource rather than using the template {{cite EB1911}}. So if you have a few spare minutes please spend it rewriting one of more of these citations to use the appropriate template. -- PBS (talk) 17:34, 27 June 2020 (UTC)

Done checkY -- PBS (talk) 18:36, 25 July 2020 (UTC)

Remember Tim Starling's "ScanSet TIFF demo", now long gone? There were 22 links still mentioning it. I fixed 2 Pallas, although the relevance of the link is dubious. Here are the rest. I'm putting the fixes in my medium-priority bucket, but if you have spare time... David Brooks (talk) 20:00, 4 March 2021 (UTC)

 Done -- PBS (talk) 15:58, 11 March 2021 (UTC)
Thanks for the help. A significant number of them seem to have been added in April 2008 to various ship-related articles :-) David Brooks (talk) 23:06, 11 March 2021 (UTC)
There was a cluster of Wikipedia articles used ship related pages from the EB1911 articles "Ship", "Navigation","Pytheas" and "Petroleum". The Tim_Starling links seem to have been added around February 2008 (All now included in Wikisource as standard EB1911 articles). Another cluster used the Literature section of the "Switzerland" EB1911 article also now on Wikisource and added as Tim_Starling links in 2008 -- PBS (talk) 13:56, 12 March 2021 (UTC)
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