Wikisource:WikiProject DNB

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WS:DNB
WikiProject to add Dictionary of National Biography, 1885-1900, and its public domain supplements.

Contents

Welcome to WikiProject DNB.

[edit] Why the old Dictionary of National Biography?

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 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. For many of the minor figures, the DNB's information is still the basis of academic work published almost a century later, as can be seen surprisingly often.

[edit] The Wikipedia sister project

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. As things stand, there are a few hundred DNB articles here without WP equivalent, and a rather larger number of WP biographical articles that could use a DNB article here.

By late 2009, Wikipedia editors had tagged more than 1000 articles that "incorporate text from the DNB." Recently, this activity has become more formalized with the creation of a sister 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.

[edit] Supporting the Wikipedia end

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 corresponding DNB article, you have a candidate. A more systematic listing of the work to be done is being developed at Wikisource:WikiProject DNB/Data capture.

[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; 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. Recent research may have rendered its information obsolete or inaccurate. Readers should bear this in mind when using the information.

[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:

  • Bringing in 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? (There are two systems now in use: the # symbol on the volume ToCs for single articles, and the coding in the Page namespace.)

[edit] Overview

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

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 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.

There are templates for each contributor, such as {{DNB AA}}, and they need to be used at the end of almost all articles (there is a small proportion of unsigned articles in the DNB). Some of these templates are still to be created, even when the Author page is already there: just substitute name and initials in an existing example if you encounter one. There are other templates, naturally. See Category:DNB for the full story.

[edit] Style Manual

See Wikisource:WikiProject DNB/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 currently used for tagging pages that are obviously defective, and at some point we'll use subcategories more systematically. At present defective pages should be categorised and a note left on the Talk page.
  • /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. You can add to the listings, which refer to one moment in time (hence the title); just please leave a date by any new entry so we can keep track (five-tilde signature will do fine).

One more type of page is perhaps needed, to report particular issues that can hold up work (the notorious "interleaved text", for example, where the two-column format has defeated the scanner which has read across the whole page). For the moment please report bad cases of text problems on Wikisource talk:WikiProject DNB/Raw materials.

[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)

[edit] Index of project internal links

[edit] External links

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