Wikisource:WikiProject DNB
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| WikiProject to add Dictionary of National Biography, 1885-1900, and its public domain supplements. |
Wikipedia makes extensive use of the Dictionary of National Biography (DNB). The Victorian writing style and Point of View in the DNB can make reading some of the material tedious, and more recent publications may have updated the information, but that does not diminish the importance of this work as a comprehensive source of British biographies. The goal of this WikiProject is to make the original sources available in one place where the text may be verified, and links made to other information.
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[edit] Disclaimers
[edit] Copyright status
This project has not been endorsed by the Oxford University Press or any agent, editor, or subsidiary thereof. The Oxford University press has been the publisher of the Dictionary of National Biography since 1917. Modern derivatives and supplements, now known as the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography continue to be protected by copyrights. The 1900 DNB, the first two supplements, and the early reprints are in the public domain because their copyrights have expired.
[edit] Inaccuracies
Wikisource's edition of the DNB is based upon the knowledge available at the time of original publication. Recent research may have rendered its information obsolete or inaccurate. Readers should bear this in mind when using the information.
[edit] Wikipedia's use of DNB
As of September 2008, Wikipedia editors have tagged more than 600 articles that "incorporate text from the DNB." Recently, this activity has become more formalized with the creation of a project: w:Wikipedia:WikiProject Missing encyclopedic articles/DNB. The goal of the Wikipedia project is to add useful information to Wikipedia, while the ultimate goal of our Wikisource project is to transcribe the DNB into a web-friendly form that is easy to use and reference. We hope that participants in the Wikipedia project will use articles that we have already transcribed. We also hope that they will add articles to our Wikisource project when they need to reference an article we do not already have. Going the other way, we link each of our articles to the corresponding Wikipedia article when it exists.
If you are new to our project and wish to help but do not know where to start, please consider transcribing one of the articles that is missing here but that was "incorporated" in Wikipedia. You can get a list of the Wikipedia articles that "incorporate" DNB by looking at "what links to the DNB template".If an article on that list does not have a correxponding DNB article, you have a candidate.
[edit] Structure and points of discussion
The initial structure of this project borrows heavily (i.e., steals shamelessly) from WS:EB1911. Almost any suggestion for change will probably be an improvement.
This is a work in progress, feel free to add to the list of things to consider.
- Organising participants for this mammoth task.
- Addition of persondata WP:DATA Persondata for Project|WP:PDATA.
- Checking processes? When there is a transcription, is there the need for a notation to quickly determine whether a proofread has been undertaken.
[edit] Style Manual
One goal of this project is to capture (within reason) the look and feel of the original text, and, to the extent possible, convert it to Wiki format. We also want to capture all of the information from the original publication, including front matter in each volume. We will add navigational information in headers and footers to replace the navigation achieved with physical volumes and pages.
[edit] Main article
The main article includes a link to each of the 63 volume articles. It also includes links to any front matter or end matter articles that related to the DNB as a whole. In 1911 the entire Dictionary was reprinted with the original volumes combined in groups of three for a total of 21 volumes. The three original volumes of the 1901 first supplement became volume 22. The content remained substantively the same, except that the page numbers were changed, and the modifications in the 1904 errata volume [1], were applied.
The "table of contents" portion of the main article is a Wikisource navigational construct: it is not intended to exactly duplicate any actual content from the original source, but instead to help the reader find his way through this massive publication.
[edit] Volume articles
Each volume article includes a "table of contents" containing links to each biographical article from that volume. This table of content is a Wikisource navigational construct: it is not intended to exactly reproduce any actual content from the original source. It provides links to each Wikisource biographical article that was in the associated original DNB volume. Note that the table of contents is in four columns.There is no correlation whatsoever between the columns and the organizatin of the original DNB volume. This Table of Contents may inluude cross-references to help the reader to find articles based on alternate names. these cross-references may or may not be identical to eh cross-references in the original indexes in the original DNB. Eventually, the project should add exact reproductions of the indexes from the original sources, but the volume TOCs are not intended to fulfill this function.
Each volume article should also have a link to any front or end matter article for the volume. Very short front matter or end matter may be included in the body of the volume article. In putting together the lists, please note that bulletted lists will avoid unnecessary spaces in these long lists.
Use an existing volume article as a worked example for a new volume article. Each table of contents entry should use "pipe" syntax to hide the "(DNB00)" disambiguator, but any required date disambiguator should be visible. (See #Disambiguation below.)
[edit] Biographical articles
A biographical article must preserve the content and should preserve the look of the original as much as possible. It is not acceptable to modify or otherwise "improve" the wording or spelling of the original. Paragraph lengths are retained, even if they seem long to the modern reader.
The following are acceptable alterations:
- Curved single quotes may be replaced by straight single quotes (apostrophes: <'>.) Many OCR conversions of the original text perform this change .
- When the original article crosses a page boundary, this is completely ignored in our version.
- When a hyphen is used to break a word across a line boundary, the hyphen is removed and the word is re-joined. Where that word is a compound word normally written with a hyphen, the hyphen should be retained. In cases of uncertainty about this it is safer to retain the hyphen.
- The last paragraph of most articles is a list of "authorities" and is in smaller font enclosed in brackets in the original. We retain the brackets, and the smaller font.
- When the original uses italics, an accented character, or a ligature, we use the identical italics, accented character, or ligature.
- Small capitals must be retained: you may use the {{sc}} template for this. Thus {{sc|John Smith}} will give John Smith.
- Links to other articles, sister Wiki projects, or even outside sites may be made providing that the text seen remains unchanged from the original except for the changed colour. Use a pipe in the link to reconcile the link with the displayed text.
- The final line of each article in the source is the right-justified initials of the author of the article. We retain this last line with the use of the appropriate author footer template. For example, if the source article's last line is (right justified) "G.C.B" then our article should end in {{DNB GCB}} which yields:
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- If you create an article for an author for which we do not yet have an author template, then please use your best guess at a template (e.g. {{DNB XYZ}} and then report the problem at the Wikisource talk:WikiProject DNB page
- Of the 600 or so distinct author footer initials, 23 are ambiguous. If you create an article with an ambiguous footer template (e.g., {{DNB MB}}) the template will generate instructions on how to create the correct template. please preview you edit to check for this.
[edit] Disambiguation
Often, two or more persons with articles in the Dictionary of National Biography have the same name. This requires a "disambiguation" process to distinguish the articles from each other (and from any other person that may appear in other works yet to be included in Wikisource).
We have chosen to use birth and death years for disambiguation, as used in the DNB. It is conceivable that two persons with the same name will also have the same birth and death years: we will address this if it ever arises.
As an example, the original DNB included three persons named John Holt, and we distinguish them as follows:
Please note:
- The disambiguator which distinguishes persons of the same name precedes the disambiguator which distinguishes articles about the same person in different works. At this point we do not need to be too concerned about the latter since for our purposes the only other ones we need to define are (DNB01) for the first (1901) supplement and (DNB12) for the second (1912) supplement. Later supplements have unresolved copyright issues.
- There is a space between the two disambiguators. Such a detail may seem like a trivial point, but it is essential to insuring that links work.
- There is a space between the name and the disambiguator.
- The dates used should be exactly the ones used in parentheses after the name in the DNB, even if the further text suggests something different. If different dates are provided in a different reference source that is a problem that will need to be solved later on an ad hoc basis.
- Where both birth and death dates are available they are separated by an ordinary hyphen and no spaces.
- If we only know one of the dates, or the general dates when the person was active the "d." or "fl." includes the period and is followed by a space. If these terms are italicized in the source article text they should be italicized in our Wiksource article text, but they should not be italicized in the article title.
- Unfortunately, you will not be able to use the "short pipe" shortcut to hide the (DNB00) disambiguation when there is also a date disambiguation, because the "short pipe" creates the display text by trimming from the first parenthesis. Therefore, use the full pipe syntax if you create a link using a disambiguated article name.
- desired result: Holt, John (d.1418)
- (failed) short pipe: [[Holt, John (d.1418) (DNB00)|]] yields Holt, John
- (successful) long pipe:[[Holt, John (d.1418) (DNB00)|Holt, John (d.1418)]] yields Holt, John (d.1418)
[edit] Participants
Add your name here with ~~~~ if you wish to join the team!
- created stub project -Arch dude 02:44, 17 June 2008 (UTC)
- created several entries before it became a project. Eclecticology 08:43, 17 June 2008 (UTC)
- happy to type and reference, and done bits already. Would suggest that we would at least want to add WP:PDATA components Billinghurst 15:35, 28 July 2008 (UTC)
- Well done you guys... I don't know I'll be as active as you but I'll definitely try to lend a hand Dsp13 (talk) 04:57, 27 October 2008 (UTC)
- Charles Matthews (talk) 12:36, 20 June 2009 (UTC)
