Wikisource:WikiProject DNB

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WS:DNB
WikiProject to add Dictionary of National Biography, 1885-1900, containing over 27,000 biographies related to the current territories of the United Kingdom and Ireland, and to former British colonies; together with its public domain supplements.

Contents

Welcome to WikiProject DNB.

The Dictionary of National Biography (DNB) is a standard work of reference on notable figures from British history, "from earliest times to the present," i.e. up until the time it was published, from 1885 to 1900. It is a massive work, comprising 63 volumes and encompassing over 27,000 biographies. Even though it is now more than a century old, the original edition remains an important reference work; and is the best secondary source for many of the subjects or aspects of their biographies. Our project aims to make this work available online in an accessible form.

[edit] Why the old Dictionary of National Biography?

... a successful reference work which is more than the sum of its articles

The Victorian writing style and Point of View in the Dictionary of National Biography (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. For many of the minor figures, the DNB's information is still the basis of academic work published up to a century later, as can be seen surprisingly often.

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. If for no other reason, Wikipedia makes extensive use of the DNB as a reference. By posting a pair of articles with interwiki links, one here that is the original, and another at Wikipedia that is lighter on some of the detail and citations of primary sources, but also updated and corrected, we can add reading value to both articles, and give real help to those with a serious interest.

There are some thousands of DNB articles here without WP equivalent. See Category:DNB No WP.

There are hundreds of WP biographical articles that could use a DNB article here. See the Wikipedia category w:Category:Articles incorporating DNB text without Wikisource reference.

[edit] The Wikipedia sister project

The need for cross-wiki collaboration has led to the creation of a sister project: w:Wikipedia:WikiProject Dictionary of National Biography. 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.

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. 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 is already incorporated into Wikipedia or used there. For more in this direction consult /WP referencing.

[edit] Wikisource end

Another motivation is to get the DNB properly indexed and wikified, making the text much more useful. A couple of points about this: obviously articles created here will be found by search engines, and so will be read (more often and in a much more readable form than in text dumps from bad scans full of typos), and links from Wikipedia will help the prominence; and wikification onsite here of the articles can make the [q. v.] structure into hyperlinks. Wikification is not restricted to that type of hyperlink, either (see /Wikification); putting it in place is currently a secondary part of the project, perhaps, but will come into its own when a higher proportion of the articles exists.

The existence of a DNB article on the same topic as others created here by other projects (Catholic Encyclopedia, Britannica 1911 for example) will also promote and one day lead to a consolidation of reference material on this site. Exactly how that will take place is still an interesting and open discussion site-wide.

[edit] Comparison with the ODNB

We are not the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, the modern version of the DNB that is a magnificent subscription site of over 50,000 updated biographies and a total number of words around 65,000,000. We can rival the ODNB in various worthwhile ways:

  • by being free, evidently;
  • by linking to a WP article that is kept updated, so that anyone reading articles in WP/WS pairs will get a very fair view of what is known;
  • by being hypertext.

The last point is worth plenty, in fact: the DNB text mentions thousands of place names, for example, often enough in obsolete spellings, and we can link those. For all its virtues, the ODNB has hardly entered the hypertext age.

[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. Research continued as new sources were discovered. These new sources, reflected in later editions, were initially captured in the 1904 Errata. Readers should bear this in mind when using the information and verify the absence of applicable errata for these articles prior to use.

[edit] Structure and points of discussion

The initial structure of this project borrowed heavily from WS:EB1911. Various suggestions for piecemeal change have since been adopted. There is room for further improvements in the ways of working.

This is a work in progress, and you should feel free to add to the list of things to consider. Some of them are:

  • Meeting, greeting and helping: welcoming participants for this mammoth task, and providing practical assistance.
  • Checking processes. There are two systems currently in use: the # symbol on the volume ToCs for single articles, and the coding in the Page namespace that can be read from the bar below some of the article titles.

[edit] Overview

What the project does is to process scanned text into Wikisource pages, and support this activity with necessary auxiliary pages.

Several mass scanning projects have scanned the original 63 volumes of the DNB. We have attempted to find the "best" scan for each volume, and these have been copied into the Wikisource "page space" to use as the basis for this project. However, none of the scans is perfect, and in many cases some pages of the "best" scan are not as good as the same page of an alternate scan. As the project has evolved, our methods of tracking the original scans have changed. As of 2011-12-10, you can find all 63 scans in wikisource page space. You can access the page space scan for a particular volume as follows:

This link also provides information about any alternate sources we have found. If you find additional alternate scans on the Internet, feel free to edit the relevant "access" page to add the new source. As a last resort, some team members have access to the original hard-copy DNB and can scan the pages. Add a request to the talk page if this proves necessary. (So far, we have found online alternates for each request.)

Editors are free to create articles in any order, and many articles have been created because they were needed in Wikipedia. Therefore, completions initially formed a patchwork. Subsequently, other editors have taken a more systematic approach and are choosing to work linearly on specific volumes or sections, but if you choose to create a particular article, you are under no obligation to create the surrounding articles.

Before the scans were available in page space, many articles were created by directly adding the text to the article either from an OCR version on the internet or by manual transcription. However, we now strongly encourage the use of "transclusion" instead. The older articles should eventually be converted to use transclusion, but most editors prefer to work on creating missing articles first.

The full story about what scanned text to use, and where to find it, is not (sadly) completely straightforward. See /Raw materials for a detailed discussion. In an ideal world the text you need to create a given article would be present in the text layer of the djvus posted here, and accessible from the Index page for the volume. Where a page has not already been created, the text layer can be accessed by using the "create" tab, or in general by using the "OCR" button at the top of the edit box. There are issues for the project that are being gradually being logged and addressed, but (roughly speaking) all imaginable problems with the ideal scenario occur somewhere within the 63 volumes. If you click for the text layer you may get the "wrong scan" or the wrong page, or both, and in the worst case you get gibberish. This is why participants currently have to know how to go shopping for the right pages of the right scan, until such time as it all works more smoothly.

Given all that, work has been done in adding the "best" scan by the correct pages, ahead of article creation. This work is useful in itself.

Once the scanned text you need is by the djvu, the proof-reading task is conventional, with some standard format and markup conventions. The proofed text can be advanced in status (pink to yellow to green) using the radio buttons at the bottom of the editing box.

Articles in the main namespace can be created from "pink" text. Where they are created by transclusion, any subsequent proof-reader finding errors can navigate back to the djvu and parallel text, using the left-margin figures or the transclusion data accessible via the "edit" tab, and can fix them in the pagespace version. These corrections (caching permitting) then will be found in the article.

To complete the picture, the auxiliary pages divide into those that provide listings, and templates: firstly

  • listings by volume (the volume ToCs);
  • listings by author, on each Author page for a contributor.

Each single biography should be listed in both those places, as it is created. Initial efforts by the project mean that most of the pages for contributors have been created, though not quite all. See Dictionary of National Biography, 1885-1900/List of Contributors for how things stand, and a reference for the abbreviations.

As of 2011-12-10, There is a template for each contributor, such as {{DNB AA}}. Use the correct template at the end of each article (a small proportion of unsigned articles exist in the DNB). We think that all contributor templates have been created. If you find a missing one, ask on the talk page.

[edit] Style Manual

We aim for a "letter-perfect copy" of the original DNB. but what exactly does this mean when we transform a set of 63 nineteenth-century books into pages on Wikisource? The project members have found a reasonable way to do this, and we have documented it. See Wikisource:WikiProject DNB/Style Manual. If you encounter a problem that is not covered on the style manual, use its talk page to discuss your problem. We can then add the solution to the style manual.

[edit] Using transclusion

Few (normal) people read a volume of a long biographical dictionary from cover to cover. It is a reference work, and the natural unit for the reader is the article. To do the two things at once (reproduce the paginated text, produce single articles) is quite possible, using the transclusion of whole or partial pages into other pages. For one fundamental aspect of the activity of the project, checking the text against the image of the original in our djvu files, this has a clear advantage: correction of an error found with the text next to the image will propagate into the free-standing article. And then anyone can go and verify a spelling or date (say), and make a change if one is needed.

The technical requirements to do the transclusion are twofold: markup in the Page: namespace, which is simple and something of which the reader will not be aware; and the transclusion syntax applied by the article creator, which lives on the article page.

The current position is that the project uses two styles of transclusion, and there are numerous pages created simply by article text plus header only. Therefore there are three types of pages that you will see if you go to the edit tab on a DNB article. The project does not prescribe which way is "correct". For more details see /Transclusion.

[edit] Reporting and requesting

Scale is an issue for this project, and the need for collaboration on the creation from rough raw materials of approximately 30,000 articles hardly needs stating. We are developing structures to ensure that anyone who becomes aware of issues relating to the work of the project can report them.

  • Category:Problematic is used across Wikisource for tagging pages that are obviously defective; we now use its DNB subcategories systematically. Defective pages in the Page should be categorised, to aid cleanup of djvus and text. For example, for the notorious "interleaved text", for example, where the two-column format has defeated the scanner which has read across the whole page, please report bad cases of this text problem by adding Category:Problematic DNB pages, text.
  • /Progress has tabulated information relating to the 63 volumes and their issues. This is the place to leave reports of "bot hiccups" or other problems with the initial postings of djvus.
  • /Most wanted articles is the contact page for requesting that particular articles be given priority for creation. You certainly don't have to be a participant to file a request here.
  • /Data capture is really an automated version of "Most wanted" designed to pick up needy Wikipedia articles, those that could use article creation here to provide a good Web reference. This page now carries links to Wikipedia pages that track the template use.

[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)
  • working on volume 11 sporadically --Magnus Manske (talk) 11:42, 3 August 2009 (UTC)
  • Working on a small part of volume 34 initially. Mark.s.shaw (talk) 10:41, 3 September 2009 (UTC)
  • I'll do a bit, Magna Carta leaders led me here Innotata (talk) 00:13, 10 December 2009 (UTC)
  • Starting at the beginning. Jan1naD (talk • contrib) 23:19, 25 January 2010 (UTC)
  • Would like to give it a go. Daytrivia (talk) 19:06, 6 March 2010 (UTC)
  • Stumbled here by accident. Looks like fun...I'll spend time on volume 28.JamAKiska (talk) 13:05, 21 March 2010 (UTC)
  • I'm de facto working on it, might as well list meself here. MLauba (talk) 10:46, 7 April 2010 (UTC)
  • P. S. Burton (talk) 20:54, 25 May 2010 (UTC)
  • If it's helpful, I can cut and paste from an electronic version of the DNB, which should save transcription from images.--Longfellow (talk) 17:17, 29 May 2010 (UTC)
  • Tommy Jantarek (talk) 00:59, 23 June 2010 (UTC)
  • Senra (talk • contribs) I have referenced this project in my wiki editing without realising it. Met the nice Charles Matthews (talk • contribs) at the recent Cambridge 8 meet-up. I would be glad to help --Senra (talk) 12:44, 25 July 2010 (UTC)
  • George Burgess (talk)
  • Bob Burkhardt (talk) 17:59, 20 April 2011 (UTC)
  • Guess I've been in for some time ... Rich Farmbrough, 23:11 9 October 2011 (GMT)

[edit] Index of project internal links

[edit] External links

  • Wikisource DNB links to Magnus Manske's statistics and maintenance tool. (The detailed readout is now more complicated than in the past, because the /DNB author subpages are causing some unproblematic pages to register in both of the main cleanup lists.)
  • Articles requiring a direct DNB link at Wikipedia

[edit] Finding aids

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