Misplaced Pages

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Archives

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New list: Antiquarians

See Misplaced Pages:WikiProject Dictionary of National Biography/Antiquarians for a new topical list. Antiquarians are one of the DNB's strengths, but are various, and not always easy to fit in to WP. One way is to find them as authors, of many of the older local history books cited. Charles Matthews (talk) 17:50, 5 April 2014 (UTC)

Importing articles

I will be creating draft article in my userspace on Wikisource. Anyone can feel free to let me know of issues, or to import the articles to Misplaced Pages, as they are of course, copyright free and attributed. If you have the rights you might consider an export-import solution.

If issues are brought to my attention and I can deal with them , I will make permanent improvements to the conversion process.

Since I am not even allowed to make lists of articles on en:WP, unless I type them all in, full lists will be on Wikisource.

Known issues

The DNB author transclusion from my en:WP user-space ideally will be substituted when the article is brought over.

• this can be resolved.  Done (I think!)

Parenthetical references () are also used

• This may be "too hard" in general, but it might be worth picking up, e.g. Notes and Queries, and Gentleman's Magazine.

• Comment The way I handle these is to turn then into ref tag pairs and add the DNB citation per WP:SAYWHEREYOUREADIT see for example Murrough O'Brien, 1st Earl of Inchiquin(although more recently I use {{harvnb}} for the DNB inline entries(. -- PBS (talk) 09:14, 20 August 2014 (UTC)

Links

• Not quite as many WP articles are linked as I would like - investigating this

Bracketed references

• Need to be picked up, as small bracketed refs are. Should be simple.  Done (I think!)

• Comment The way I handle these is to place an "endnotes" at the end of the {{DNB}} and append then as a list using "**" in indent them. I also do limited formatting by placing the titles in italics -- PBS (talk) 09:14, 20 August 2014 (UTC)

Lists of writings

• Should be converted to a wiki numbered list. Can probably catch most of these.

Improvements I can fairly easily make

• Outdated language
• Abbreviations to full words or phrases

Example: "graduated M.A." to "graduated with an MA"

• Comment please leave as M.A. (but strip spaces eg M. A. to M.A.) but please expand all dates from the three letters eg "Feb." to "February". Please place all dates in the format MMDDYYYY and strip out the "st, "nd" and "th" from dates.-- PBS (talk) 09:14, 20 August 2014 (UTC)

• • The months should already be happening.
  • The articles are tagged with {{Use DMY dates}} so the conversion should happen if any are left in other formats, but I will investigate what the system does now. I'll also check ordinal handling.
    • ] shows the difficulties of re-ordering dates. In this case we have the sentence "In the following year he published 'Observations on the Report of the Earl of Sheffield to the Meeting at Lewes Wool Fair, July 20, 1820'." and the date is part of a title. It's still eminently do-able, of course, just a little more complex.
  • The MoS deprecates using stops in degree abbreviations.
  • All the best: Rich Farmbrough, 22:58, 22 August 2014 (UTC).
    

Index

The index is here.

Notes on process

• Whenever a draft is moved to WP, if the DNB article is updated to link to the WP article, it should no longer be in the Wikisource category "DNB no WP". This means the conversion process will never look at it again. The draft on Wikisource can be speedy deleted to keep things tidy.
• Do not fix up the drafts on Wikisource, they are liable to be over-written.

All the best: Rich Farmbrough, 00:07, 16 August 2014 (UTC).

Per article issues

• Arundell of Cornwall being a family the name does not parse the same as for a person.

Comments

Hi Rich. One thing that occurs to me is that the topical lists (Misplaced Pages:WikiProject Dictionary of National Biography#Missing article topical lists) could benefit greatly from some rough-cut material on enWS. A good list of this kind has a couple of hundred entries only: that means we might be looking at about 40 more to do. They are labour-intensive, the way I have done them so far, so there are only half-a-dozen up now.

We can discuss this and other things via talk pages on Wikisource. When I have finished the current pass of DNB checking, with seven volumes to do right now, I'm going to get myself involved in the ODNB effort on Wikisource; which is having interesting repercussions now, in particular in the direction of Your Paintings. The mix'n'match tool by Magnus M. is key there. Plenty to talk about. Charles Matthews (talk) 10:52, 19 August 2014 (UTC)

@Rich Farmbrough: I have placed my thoughts on specific points inside your posting it seems the easiest and least verbose way to make such comments. In some ways my methods are different from Charles Matthews, for example I do not believe that Charles places the endnotes from a DNB article on Misplaced Pages articles. -- PBS (talk) 09:14, 20 August 2014 (UTC)

PBS Thanks for that I have commented there where appropriate. All the best: Rich Farmbrough, 23:19, 22 August 2014 (UTC).

Charles Matthews I have a little coding to sort out before the "rough cut" is something I am satisfied with (and of course there will still be crazy stuff like The Arundells) - I have a few (identified) bugs that have moved things backwards - but some of your antiquaries at least exist in draft form now. All the best: Rich Farmbrough, 23:19, 22 August 2014 (UTC).

 Done I have prioritised the missing items lists there should be something usable for most of them pretty soon, about 370 of 861 are done now. All the best: Rich Farmbrough, 02:23, 23 August 2014 (UTC).

Restrictions

For those of you who wouldn't be aware of it, Rich Farmbrough has a number of Misplaced Pages:Editing restrictions on Misplaced Pages (not on Wikisource), including one on using automation and one on mass creating pages in any namespace. Avoiding these by doing both these things on a sister project and then asking others to import them here doesn't seem like a very wise move. Even less so when a cursory glance of the drafts shows that many of the original problems are still present (from poor transcriptions to very poor scripts resulting in very badly formatted drafts, going so far as to introduce typos not present in the original wikisource transcription). Importing these as they are will probably reflect badly on both Rich Farmbrough and the importer. His statement at the start that "If you have the rights you might consider an export-import solution." seems especially ill-advised. Fram (talk) 08:12, 23 August 2014 (UTC)

I am not "asking" anyone to do anything. I am simply making a resource available. As you know I was planning on doing these a few at a time, manually fixing them and gradually improving the conversion process. Strangely this seemed to offend you, just as changing asteroids to redirects did (which hasn't stopped you doing it yourself). I also notice that strangely you were importing articles from a coevalDictionary of Painters. And that you have been mass editing articles to add unreferenced tags, another task I used to do. Others might draw interesting conclusions from this, I couldn't possibly comment.

As to issues with the drafts, both the Project Team and I are well aware of those. As to importing, of course they would not be bulk imported to article space, but to my user namespace by default, or the project namespace by choice, which would create no issues for anyone, except to make mass updating difficult.

Without your interference, of course, in two years we would have addressed many of the issues by now.

You are still welcome to proof-read or validate any of the pages in DNB, and if you let me know I will re-create their drafts, where appropriate. And you can add here any issues you discover which appear to be new. I had a nice system for logging these sorts of things, but, again thanks to your interference, it has been dismembered.

All the best: Rich Farmbrough, 11:50, 23 August 2014 (UTC).

Possible reorganization

I wonder what the rest of you might think about maybe merging this in to maybe the Missing encyclopedic articles project as maybe a task force/work group. Specifically, I'm thinking we might maybe be able to establish some joint subprojects and groups with specific topical WikiProjects here to maybe set up both lists of relevant articles in other reference sources like those I created at Category:WikiProject lists of encyclopedic articles and additional lists of articles which are at least available theoretically for use in wikisource. I know it would be a great deal of work and consume a lot of time to create lists of relevant biographies in the DNB for the various projects here but I have already spent a lot of time setting up a lot of the projects here anyway and I'm kinda used to such tasks. John Carter (talk) 14:38, 20 August 2014 (UTC)

John, I would be quite happy for that to happen, though that project seems very quiet itself. "Reaching out" to other subject wikiprojects might well help. All the best: Rich Farmbrough, 23:07, 22 August 2014 (UTC).

I was thinking of the merger primarily so other PD sources like Encyclopedia Britannica and maybe the Hastings Encyclopedia of Religion and Ethics and others might eventually be included as well. Maybe the best place to try a first attempt at a joint subproject would be MILHIST and maybe if I broke up the relevant lists the religion projects. Any objections to giving them a try? If we do I will probably need to do the relevant lists myself and that might take awhile. I think we might want to have the list up before officially "starting up" a task force. John Carter (talk) 23:32, 22 August 2014 (UTC)

The "missing articles" part of this project should really be very quick, now I am creating drafts on WS. I have asked the Gender Gap task force to look at the "Missing women", they should all have drafts by the morning -or by tea time if I go to bed now. I thought the Britannica project was complete? All the best: Rich Farmbrough, 02:20, 23 August 2014 (UTC).

The articles exist but haven't necessary been compared with the EB article. Ideally I'd like to have some sort of table indicating that articles here and at wikisource are both created and compared against each other for all the major topics. That would be a lot of work but might wind up being worth it in the long run.John Carter (talk) 16:55, 23 August 2014 (UTC)

It would certainly be valuable to know which sources have been "mined dry" on a a particular topic. Of course there is no guarantee the information will remain in the Misplaced Pages article. All the best: Rich Farmbrough, 13:56, 25 August 2014 (UTC).

granted information can be removed but the link to the wikisource page would still be intact for information recovery or use in subarticles. Also and here I am speaking somewhat hypothetically I have myself recently finished proofreading A Dictionary of the book of Mormon" for wikisource and am now in the process of adding interarticle links where the effective equivalent appears in the PD text. For many similar reference works including articles on more obscure topics I have a feeling that like many of those I have a feeling those pages in wikisource might appear in a Google search in the top ten or so results on their own given the interpage links. And of course such material could also potentially be added to relevant wikibooks, wikiversity and other sister sites much more easily.John Carter (talk) 16:26, 25 August 2014 (UTC)