Wikipedia talk:1911 Encyclopedia topics

Are these pages to be pruned of existing articles? RedWolf 17:33, Dec 28, 2004 (UTC)

If you like - depends on whether you think mixed red/blue or all-red is more esthetic. :-) Incremental deletion does take up time that could be spent on content, and easy to see the undone, unlike the untagged images where done/notdone look the same. Stan 22:20, 8 Jan 2005 (UTC)

The deletion could be much easier done by a bot. Bogdan | Talk 23:09, 8 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Dicdefs

As article topics get cleared from the lists, it's clear that 1911EB includes a great many of we would call dictionary definitions - "sciolist" or "scantling" for example. We can choose to make transwikis to wiktionary for these, or just delete from the list of remaining topics. I'm inclined towards the latter, because a little random searching seems to show that these terms don't generally have "red link" references elsewhere in WP, and wiktionarists aren't likely to use 1911EB as a source anyway. Stan 16:19, 1 Feb 2005 (UTC)

Bulk upload Gutenberg version?

Project Gutenberg has proof-read versions of letters a-c... Would it be possible to bulk-upload those that are not yet in WP and wikify later? Tx--J heisenberg 23:35, 4 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Probably not desirable - about 50% of the topics already have WP articles, in some cases better than EB's; the topic titles here are often archaic variants. It would be useful to have a link to best Gutenberg bits - I thought they hadn't finished with "a" yet. Stan 17:43, 28 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Mistakes in standard website

I have found that the [1] website that is used to get information seems to have an error, weisseufel. This should instead be Weissenfels, as shown on [2] website. If there seems to be a mistake in other texts, please use the second website as an alternative resource Magicmonster 05:32, 11 August 2005 (UTC)

JRank

Many articles are also in jrank.org; they seem to be just corrected versions of 1911 material. They also have a copyright mark at the bottom. It is probably not advisable to just copy the material?--J heisenberg 13:09, 6 October 2005 (UTC)

EB1911 on Wikisource

Wikisource is working on a version of EB1911 which aims to produce an accurate text with illustrations for WP editors to use. See [[3]]. The text being posted here has sections missing in the scans, and some of the OCR work is corrupt. It cannot be relied upon for regular WP use. We are working from the Project Gutenburg version. Apwoolrich 14:15, 15 October 2005 (UTC)

The OCR text is always corrected before being put in here, and much is not copied anyway because it is innaccurate for one reason or another. P.s. It was me who pointed out this project at the wikisource talk page. thanks Martin 14:21, 15 October 2005 (UTC)

Updating of articles

I've been seeing quite of few 1911 articles that have been uploaded without bringing them up to date. For example, one city article had population count from 1901. If the uploader isn't going to the work him/herself, then perhaps the {{update}} tag should be used to alert other editors to the problem. -- Kjkolb 18:52, 16 October 2005 (UTC)

Architectural terms

A lot of the architectural terms in the encyclopedia are only a sentence or two long. Perhaps they should be consolidated or go to Wiktionary. -- Kjkolb 21:42, 4 November 2005 (UTC)

• I believe that as long as an encyclopedia considered them worthy at some point, we should consider them worthy now, rather than to stuff them over on Wiktionary where they'll never be noticed. Although, I'm fine with grouping common terms together into a single article, provided that each item is redirected to that article. — BRIAN0918 • 2005-11-4 21:44

• I made a page with all the stub and sub-stub articles: Architectural terms. All 56 terms and variations redirect there. Anybody watching "new pages" must have wondered what the hell I was doing. The bigger ones are regular articles. All the terms identified as architectural on the 1911 EB project are done. -- Kjkolb 09:49, 8 November 2005 (UTC)

Standardising the 1911 reference

People add the {{1911}} tag to articles different ways;

==References==
{{1911}}

or

----
{{1911}}

or simply {{1911}} on its own.

I want to standardise the way it is referenced, I will do it with a bot so it won't require much effort, the problem is deciding which is the best way. My personal choice is under a references heading, as it looks neater and it more accurate, after all it is a reference. What do you think? Martin 19:35, 10 November 2005 (UTC)

I agree with you that the ==References== solution is the best.David Björklund 10:04, 14 November 2005 (UTC)

Check chemical formulas with hardcopy

Could someone check the safranine article against a hardcopy of the encyclopedia? There were OCR errors in both online versions and I was unable to correct them by searching through Google. Also, some of the chemicals appear to be unique to the encyclopedia. -- Kjkolb 04:45, 13 November 2005 (UTC)

Same thing with phthalazine. -- Kjkolb 06:22, 13 November 2005 (UTC)

Also, naphthylamines. All of the chemicals from the science section have been added except pyrones, which seems to have the same definition as pyran.

• You can now find them yourself, as all of the pages are now available online (although this is a demo):

  http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/User:Tim_Starling (I recommend getting the AlternaTIFF plugin). — BRIAN0918 • 2005-11-13 07:42

• Thanks, Brian. I finished all of them, but I had to remove some stuff because it turned out to be drawings of chemical structures. -- Kjkolb 05:31, 14 November 2005 (UTC)

Obsolete and law articles

I separated the potentially obsolete articles from the potentially obsolete articles and put them in the section for considering non-inclusion. Only a few of them appear to be salvageable and it was odd having them in the law section. I'm going to be working on the few that can be made into articles and I suggest that the rest not be included. Almost all of the law articles are also probably obsolete. I suggest that we get someone knowledgeable about them to tell us. I don't think that they should be included if they are obsolete, unless they are very important for some reason. Perhaps we should stop work on the law articles until we decide what is worth saving. -- Kjkolb 16:36, 14 November 2005 (UTC)

• I am more likely to include most of them if they make any sense or at least applied to a specific time. They were important enough to include in an encyclopedia at one time, and the only reason they were not included in later encyclopedias was most likely the size limit on a paper encyclopedia. If we can say that "X used to be a law term" then I would rather do that than to ignore it altogether. We should help make Wikipedia mildly useful to historians. — BRIAN0918 • 2005-11-15 04:03
  • I understand and I hate to discard potentially useful information. However, I think these articles were only included because they are about English law and the encyclopedia was written by the English. Most of them don't apply to other countries, even those with similar legal systems. Also, a lot of them don't seem to be very important. It seems inappropriate to have articles about minor, obsolete legal concepts that only apply to England, unless we intend to include similar articles about other countries. I don't think we should include such articles about England or other countries unless they had a broad impact or were notable for some other reason. The encyclopedia is being posted online in its entirety by other projects, so the information will still be available. Anyway, if they are included, we should make it clear that the articles are obsolete. -- Kjkolb 04:51, 15 November 2005 (UTC)

Many missing topics

I recently glanced through some 1911 articles and the ones here and found something interesting. Some topics like textileprinting (aka Textile-printing or Textile printing) are entirely missing with the reason stated as : obsolete. I don't think it's entirely obsolete as it is still used in India and many parts of the developing world. I'm not a garments expert but I've seen and bought some myself, so this is confusing. Even if it is outdated as per the listing here, I think it deserves a mention. Should i start the article and incorporate relevant portions here.

Another thing is that some articles like Lakhimpur was a sub-stub that had 3 lines stating its geographical location. An article in the 1911 had paragraphs and interesting history to list which I've promptly added to Wikipedia. I then found that Yusuf Adil Shah could be culled from 1911 article on Bijapur and lo I had created a new article (using other sources too). So the question remains, how many of these stubs in Wikipedia have been ignored for expansion since they are tucked away. A non existant article can be created from 1911 but something that exists or is closely relevant is ignored in the assumption that there is info existing in the article when it could be just a few lines. I hope I haven't confused anyone, but this is quite an interesting situation. Idleguy 06:55, 15 November 2005 (UTC)

I think I follow you. I've found a few articles listed here that had been created independently without using the 1911 EB and were only a few sentences long, or less. I just added the 1911 content to the articles, updated as possible. We don't know how many were missed, especially the articles created before the project started.

Some of the articles in the "not included" category can be salvaged (I've been working on them), but some are so out of date or irrelevant that it doesn't make sense, at least to me, to include them. The negro article is perhaps the most extreme example (the "village communities" article in the not included category also contains at least one racist comment). Some articles in the category are only a sentence or two long. Some articles are worthy subjects, but the information needs extreme updating, perhaps so much that there's no usable content. We can probably do something with a lot of the articles, but it'll require some consideration.

I took a look at the Lakhimpur article and it has some of the same problems as the "not included" articles, but less severe. First, it looks like the EB and the original Wikipedia article aren't talking about exactly the same region. The current district has an area of 2,277 square km, but in the EB it is 11,729 square km (4,529 square miles), 5 times bigger. Also, the 1901 population is still given (the current population is given in the original Wikipedia article at the top, though). Finally, someone unfamiliar with Indian/British history may think that the district is still under British rule, as that's where the history ends. You caught most of the scanning errors, but I'd suggest doing a spell check and reading the article slowly to make sure it makes sense, as there were still a couple of misspelled words and a date of "5840". -- Kjkolb 06:50, 16 November 2005 (UTC)

I'll look into lakhimpur article and update it. I'm starting the textile printing article from 1911 if there's no problem. As i've stated it's still continued in many areas. Tx Idleguy 07:19, 16 November 2005 (UTC)

Copyright violation?

The primary online sources listed for the 1911 EB have prominent copyright notices on their pages. Isn't there a danger of getting sued for copyright violation? Here's the notice from the Love-to-Know license page:

This website is © 2000-2003 by LoveToKnow Corp. Inc. All rights reserved.

...
LoveToKnow Corp. has reformatted, published and in many cases, edited, updated and added to entries from a 1911 edition of an encyclopedia.

Here's the notice you'll see on each page from jrank.org:

Site content, images, and layout Copyright © 2005 - Net Industries, worldwide.

Do not copy, download, transfer, or otherwise replicate the site content in whole or in part.

I enjoyed working on the Nuttall project, and I'd like to work on the 1911 project, but I think these sources are "tainted" and cannot be considered public domain. I didn't think that Jimbo needed to pull the EB2004 and Encarta lists, but he thought that they presented a legal "grey area" in terms of copyright and he decided to err on the safe side. If he pulled those lists, what do you think he'd say about using entire encyclopedia articles with a copyright of 2005 ? Womble 16:38, 16 November 2005 (UTC)

• Anyone can stick a copyright notice on anything they want, whether it is public domain or not. Their only argument would be that the typos added by their OCR software have somehow made the text "unique" and therefore coyrightable. Considering that I correct those typos before submitting, I am not submitting potentially copyrighted material. These copyright notices can almost certainly be ignored. — BRIAN0918 • 2005-11-16 17:06
• You can't copyright a public domain source, or a derivative (AFAIK). Plus, these lists are very old, they would have been removed if they weren't ok, see Wikipedia:1911 Encyclopaedia Britannica for a bit more info. Martin 17:14, 16 November 2005 (UTC)
  • IANAL, but I think I have a basic grasp of copyright law. Let's try to break this down and touch on each point:

1. "You can't copyright a public domain source, or a derivative (AFAIK)" -- First off, you can certainly copyright a derivative work of a public domain source. Ever seen a Disney movie?  ;-) Second, you can put a copyright notice on any derivative work based on PD material. The issue is that if you do not add or modify the original work substantively, then the courts may not view your work as different enough to merit a copyright. Have these lists been modified "enough"? We don't know -- which should be enough for us to be wary.
2. "Plus, these lists are very old, they would have been removed if they weren't ok" -- Ummmmmm. Just because someone hasn't pointed the issue out yet doesn't mean that it's okay. If I host an mp3 of a single by 50 Cent on my webserver for 180 days (without permission), it's just as illegal on the 181st day as the 1st -- just because the lawyers haven't pressed charges doesn't mean anything.
3. "..only argument...typos added by their OCR software...[are] coyrightable." -- Sure, if all they did was OCR the text. But seeing as how most people don't have a copy of EB1911, they don't know if half of the article was rewritten by the proprietors of the new website (and thus still under copyright).
4. "see Wikipedia:1911 Encyclopaedia Britannica for a bit more info" -- Sure, I read the page, and here's an excerpt:

   Care is needed to distinguish between such "trivial" changes which don't create a copyright and the possibility that there's a new article of some sort involved, for any new original article could be copyrighted.

   That's exactly my point: most of the content is probably ripped right out of 1911, but the problem is that users can't determine what content is "clean", and so to be safe we must regard the entire body as "tainted" or risk tainting Wikipedia.

Not tainting Wikipedia is more important than importing text from EB1911 -- I think we can all agree on that. Womble 19:39, 16 November 2005 (UTC)

• We can verify any of the text used from 1911EB by using the page scans. Also, I think it's pretty pointless debating something that has been thoroughly debated before, at least as far as this is concerned. — BRIAN0918 • 2005-11-16 20:10
  • Great! I'd asked about full-page scans before, but never heard that we had them. I just updated the 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica page to include a link to them. Can we put a link to those scans on the front page of the 1911 Encyclopedia topics so they're more visible to people working on the project? Womble 21:05, 16 November 2005 (UTC)
    • They're not going to remain on that page, and it's only a demo until all the bugs are fixed. — BRIAN0918 • 2005-11-16 21:54
• I don't want to get into a war of words, which is all it would be as none of us know the exact technicalities of the law but... I know you can slap a copyright tag on anything, but i believe it is a matter of creativity, i.e. disney films have an element of creativity, even if they are based on public domain stories. Scanning in some text and introducing some typos is certainly not creative. If you want to pursue this further I suggest you run it throught the mailing list. Martin 20:13, 16 November 2005 (UTC)

Short articles

What should we do with articles like the following (one sentence articles):

"ENGYON, an ancient town of the interior of Sicily, a Cretan colony, according to legend, and famous for an ancient temple of the Matres which aroused the greed of Verres. Its site is uncertain; some topographers have identified it with Gangi, a town 20 m. S.S.E. of Cefalu, but only on the ground of the similarity of the two names."

It seems to me that it might be worth doing the same thing we did with the architectural terms with these one-liners; create a page for town names, and a separate page for dicdefs and redirect the terms; and so on. What do people think?

On a related topic: a lot of the leftover missing articles are place names, some of which may no longer exist or have been renamed; should we create separate articles for these or put them on one page? --FeanorStar7 10:27, 18 November 2005 (UTC)

• It makes sense for Architectural terms to all be on the same page. It doesn't make sense to stick random towns from around the world on the same page. If the 1911 article is short, you'll simply have to look up more information on the town and make the article longer. If the town goes by a new name, then the link should be created as a redirect to the new name (unless the 1911 article is talking about a historic site). The main article should mention that the town used to go by that old name. — BRIAN0918 • 2005-11-18 13:26

I made the architectural page for tiny articles, but I don't think small city articles are as much of a problem, as they can be expanded, while many of the others can't. I would try searching Google or the new Britannica (if you have a subscription) to try to squeeze a few more sentences in.

As for the cities not existing anymore, I think that's rare. Quite a few of them have changed their names, though, so I make sure to find out what it is currently called. Also, many of the city articles already exist under accented names, but nobody bothered to make a redirect. If the city doesn't exist anymore or has been incorporated into a larger city, you should be able to find that out, too. Perhaps we should add a note that the articles should be researched before adding them to Wikipedia. -- Kjkolb 01:16, 20 November 2005 (UTC)

The end of the project

This project shouldn't end with the adding of the last article. There are a lot of articles that have been added without any updating or even OCR error correcting. The updating should be done systematically. Also, it might be good to have guidelines for specific types of articles.

For example, city articles should have the current population and the name should be correctly accented with redirects for old names and unaccented names. The other cities and states mentioned in the article should be checked as well. What the city is known for should be checked for accuracy or deleted, as a lot has changed since 1911 (some of the city information is from even earlier). The history of the town should be updated with significant events in the city's history since 1911.

Other articles won't need as much work, like biographies of people who died before the encyclopedia was written or ancient towns. However, I strongly feel that the articles should not be left "as is", like many of them have been. -- Kjkolb 01:17, 20 November 2005 (UTC)

Listing in categories?

Should we consider listing the articles in categories as is done on the requested articles section, as well as alphabetically? I'm quite keen to help out with geographical and political articles for instance, and it would be easier all links to towns etc were on the same page, rather than trawling through searching for them. Grunners 12:43, 30 November 2005 (UTC)

I was thinking the same thing. I would like to create several of the town articles, for example, and it would be easier if they were all on the same page. — BRIAN0918 • 2005-11-30 12:44

Right, I'm on it. Grunners 17:17, 30 November 2005 (UTC)

Ok, this is a mammoth task due to the sheer number of links to sort. Should have it up and running within the next few days. Grunners 18:51, 30 November 2005 (UTC)

Don't remove any French articles without checking for 1911 content!

Almost every blue link French article has not had any 1911 content added to it and there are a lot of them. I had to revert all my edits on almost every page because I removed what I thought were finished articles. -- Kjkolb 16:45, 2 December 2005 (UTC)

IMHO a modern stub is sufficient, no need to try to track or rework 1911EB content. Any person expanding, for instance, a French town, will almost certainly see the Google hit in 1911EB and can then decide if it has anything worthwhile. The purpose of this list is to ensure WP coverage, not to try to extract every last possible bit of info out of the old encyclopedia. Stan 18:29, 2 December 2005 (UTC)

I disagree. The articles that have been created are usually one sentence long and some of the 1911 EB articles have useful information that could fill them up. When I transfer an article, I remove anything outdated and get modern population figures and place names. I've tried to get some articles not to be included as they are completely obsolete, but when an article has good information, it doesn't make sense to not make use of it. Also, it can be very difficult to get information on some foreign towns, especially in English.

As for finding it later, many of the articles will not show up in Google for many pages and quite a few don't show up at all, due to incomplete indexing or problems with the 1911 sites (which I've experienced frequently). They can go directly to one of the sites, but a person who just comes along is unlikely to think about whether the 1911 EB has information on a topic. Even if the content is found later, why wait until then to expand the article? -- Kjkolb 19:41, 2 December 2005 (UTC)

All of the articles have been deleted by subsequent editors. Oh well. -- Kjkolb 17:17, 9 January 2006 (UTC)

India chapter

The Indian chapter has been populated. Thanks for creating the list for us. Regards, =Nichalp «Talk»= 09:59, 15 January 2006 (UTC)

Alternate lists

How or who does one ask for a Wikipedia:1911 Encyclopedia topics/Australia list? Is there a bot to generate same? -- Ian ≡ talk 12:08, 15 January 2006 (UTC)

Moving all of them on one page?

Now that there are only 500 left, I think there's no reason to have them spread over 10 pages. bogdan 18:05, 1 February 2006 (UTC)

I consolidated and deleted the remaining pages (1,9,10) into this single page. --Reflex Reaction (talk)• 19:40, 3 February 2006 (UTC)

Articles for provinces, states, districts and other political divisions

Please be careful when working on articles like these. They often no longer exist, have different boundaries or have different names. Articles about Persia, Burma and India are particularly bad. -- Kjkolb 05:54, 3 February 2006 (UTC)

Edits

I have done more than 2000 edits, perhaps 3000 edits, but most of these were EB 1911 edits. What remains are more than 1500 edits. I really did edit EB 1911 more than 1000 times (but wiki has abolished these edits, as the 1911 EB project is done), and so my count is less.

I recognize many of these remainders as my own comments.--FourthAve 06:46, 20 February 2006 (UTC)

There is a tool that keeps track of edits including deleted edits. Your edit count is ~ 2300 with about 500 deleted edits. http://tools.wikimedia.de/~interiot/cgi-bin/count_edits?user=FourthAve&dbname=enwiki_p Just remember though editcountitis can be a real problem. --Reflex Reaction (talk)• 18:11, 1 March 2006 (UTC)

Missing articles

Here are a couple: s:EB1911:Aesopus and s:EB1911:Adra. Danny 02:10, 17 March 2006 (UTC)

Tireless Contributor Barnstar for the Encyclopædia Britannica

		The Tireless Contributor Barnstar
		Helped contribute to 12,181 articles so far. The Encyclopædia Britannica (Eleventh Edition) definitely deserves this. Emmette Hernandez Coleman (talk) 12:20, 27 September 2012 (UTC)