Wikisource talk:WikiProject DNB/Archive 4

Please do not post any new comments on this page. This is a discussion archive first created in , although the comments contained were likely posted before and after this date. See current discussion.

DNB00 main subjects

All now filled in, on Wikidata. That means that various possibilities for automatic checking are now open. I intend to spell things out on the Wikidata DNB wikiproject shortly. The one that will have the most impact here is to find the matching Wikipedia articles, as they have Wikidata articles created for them. Charles Matthews (talk) 05:52, 13 July 2016 (UTC)

Suggested edit for DNB footer initials

Hi, I thought I'd suggest here an edit for the DNB footer initials to make the initials appear on the same line as the last line of text (as the printed book has it). I made the edit on the 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica version "Template:EB1911 footer initials" a while back to achieve this — use:
 style="float:right;" instead of
 style="clear:both; text-align:right;"
to get the initials on the same line. I don't have rights to edit the source of Template:DNB footer initials. An example of the EB1911 footer initials template in use in EB1911 is here: https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Page:EB1911_-_Volume_01.djvu/97
DivermanAU (talk) 19:04, 17 October 2016 (UTC)

A couple of issues. Some here may prefer the template after a newline. And what happens in the book does vary. We need a consensus on what would be best. Charles Matthews (talk) 05:28, 20 October 2016 (UTC)

We tried that initially, however, it was problematic in some situations. What can happen is that it can word wrap the last word(s), and leave the template sitting above the last word. In the end we made the decision to just have it terminate on a new line. Space isn't the issue for us, we didn't need to blindly follow the style of the work. — billinghurst sDrewth 01:23, 21 October 2016 (UTC)

Scanned index pages

I've proofed Page:Dictionary_of_National_Biography_volume_01.djvu/493 and Page:Dictionary_of_National_Biography_volume_01.djvu/494. Each was several hours of quite handraulic cut/paste work, given the poor OCR. Eventually, though, it came to a repetitive routine that I think should be possible to bot-assist.

1. Set up the headers and footers. 2. For each entry indexed on the page, paste one of two template forms as follows: 2a: For a "See so-and-so" use the form: {{Template:Dotted TOC page listing||Aboyne, second Viscount (''d''.1649). See [[Gordon, James (d.1649) (DNB00)|Gordon, James]].|}} 2b: For a regular entry use: {{Template:Dotted TOC page listing||Abraham, Robert (1778-1850)|[[Abraham, Robert (DNB00)|66]]|5}} 3. In a separate browser tab, find the target page, either by searching for "Abraham, Robert DNB00" or by clicking the link to the next entry in sequence, for instance as found in the page header at Abney, Thomas (d.1750) (DNB00), which targets e.g. Abraham, Robert (DNB00). Either way, select and copy the target page title e.g. "Abraham, Robert (DNB00)". 4. In the pasted template form, select the part identifying the target page and Ctrl-V to paste the correct title. 5. Repeat for the human-readable first template parameter, "Abraham, Robert". As appropriate repeat the copy/paste for Abraham's lifespan dates "(1773–1850)", from the target page onto the template. Markup italics as needed for b, d, or fl. 6. Edit the page number to match the scan, as confirmed on the target page's left margin. 7. Visually check that the entered data matches the scan image. 8. Repeat 2 through 7 as required.

The page layout isn't a perfect match, but it suffices. The effort involved doing this manually for four pages each of sixty volumes would be substantial, but not impossible. A bot assistant could make it quite tractable. Is it worth doing? LeadSongDog (talk) 21:13, 8 February 2017 (UTC)

Could be helpful, in checking the article creation, and giving a key to the various "see articles", which we are probably going to create some day. The volume listings haven't reached a definitive form; and these index pages complement them. Thank you for looking at this issue. Charles Matthews (talk) 05:18, 10 February 2017 (UTC)

Botting standard formatted text is pretty easy. Get the text right, and I can run a bot through. — billinghurst sDrewth 09:07, 10 February 2017 (UTC)

@Billinghurst: Thank you. Could we bot or bot-assist the harvest of page titles and lifespans? That would go a long way. A big part of the problem is that the OCR on these index pages is just terrible. The good news is that the entries are in alpha order, so about 90% of the job for one index page is just harvesting all DNB00 entries in a specific alpha range. Only the "See so-and-so" entries vary from this. LeadSongDog (talk) 16:19, 10 February 2017 (UTC)

@LeadSongDog: first step would be see if our local and improved OCR function (you may need to turn the gadget on to get the button) can do a better job? We may also be able to see if there are other volumes with better scans are available, each volume seems to have variability in its scan quality throughout. So we may be able to scrape text from another copy of the index page, paste and work with that. Running a bot to fix poor OCR is a variable process. — billinghurst sDrewth 00:34, 11 February 2017 (UTC)

Our OCR is worse on those pages. :-/ — billinghurst sDrewth 01:33, 11 February 2017 (UTC)

Index page hovertext

Pages such as Index:Dictionary_of_National_Biography_volume_01.djvu could be significantly improved by some small changes. When one points at "200" on that page, the hovertext/tooltip pops up saying "Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 01.djvu/214". This is useful, but it omits the key information that that page is Airay-Airay, which could be mined from the header of that page. Similarly, pointing at v.30 on the index page one sees the hovertext "Index:Dictionary_of_National_Biography_volume_30.djvu" rather than the more useful "Dictionary of National Biography, 1885-1900, Vol 30 Johnes - Kenneth". Is there any chance this could be easily fixed? LeadSongDog (talk) 22:45, 10 February 2017 (UTC)

The page links point to the underlsying scanpage to edit. The id is a hard page link primarily based on the <pagefile> data on the corresponding Index: ns page. To pull the text from the page of the running header would be a complex task, and in many DNB pages that information is not there (early style issue). Also it sits within a <noinclude> tag, so its availability is problematic. What were you trying to achieve through the hover?

With regard to volume information, the (linked) volume data is at the top of the page. When I hover over that I get the pop-up data that shows the vol, and through the redirect the SURNAME to SURNAME. I suppose we could consider the presentation of the surname components within the header, though I am not sure that the extra detail is always relevant to present, and may be busy/noisy on the page. — billinghurst sDrewth 00:48, 11 February 2017 (UTC)

Oh, on the _Index_ pages. We can amend the template:DNB indexes to get hover information for the volumes. That would just take some time, though could be done incrementally.

There is no way to populate the pagelist with names.

If there is a separate list then we can add those below the pagelist, though I am not certain of the value. As a sort of test, I have added the compiled list to the bottom of Index:Dictionary of National Biography volume 56.djvu — billinghurst sDrewth 01:02, 11 February 2017 (UTC)

The issue (that I neglected to clearly specify) was that the current scheme requires the reader to go on an Easter Egg hunt to find the article they're after. A list of volume numbers or of page numbers conveys little to the user. The "through the redirect the SURNAME to SURNAME" approach to finding a volume works only after clicking to follow the link, so requiring attempts on several volumes. That is why, on the physical bound books, the spine showed not just vol number but also the first and last SURNAME. A hovertext/tooltip/popup would allow them to know which page they are after before opening it. While wear and tear on the spines isn't a problem, there are still places where bandwidth is scarce or expensive. Users familiar with the project's scheme may know that they can a)search for the name; b)open the article; c)find the scan page link as a page number on the left side of the displayed article; and d)follow that link to get the scan page. As something of a newbie on s:, however, I certainly took a while to figure it out. That transclusion on the v.56 index page certainly seems to me to be a step forward: a human-readable list of names that are linked to the corresponding articles. It does not, though, make it obvious what the proofing status of the target article is (as does the colour-coded numeric scanpage map). LeadSongDog (talk) 16:30, 13 February 2017 (UTC)

Maintenance of WP links

Big advance via Wikidata: Petscan queries on d:User:Charles Matthews/Queries#Petscan allow one to find rapidly the English Wikipedia articles corresponding to a DNB article here, but not yet linked. This is done separately for DNB00, DNB01 and DNB12; takes just a couple of seconds each time.

Caveat: this approach does of course depend on data being in Wikidata. So English Wikipedia articles have to have a Wikidata item; and item must be the one to which the data item of the DNB article points under "main subject". If an English Wikipedia article A has an item D1, while the article B here that corresponds has its data item pointing to D2 which is different, the query will only pick it up as and when D1 and D2 are merged.

A few misidentifications of "main subject" are showing up.

All this said, these long-sought one-click queries (to which User:Jheald helped me) are going to be really helpful. Other works here can be treated the same way, if the essential infrastructure is put in place, analogous to Category:DNB No WP here, and a set of "main subject" links. The special situation is that the ODNB property on Wikidata has been maxed out.

Charles Matthews (talk) 05:42, 21 February 2017 (UTC)

Authors here in DNB lacking enWP article

This is quite a neat use of SPARQL: query here. Today it brings up 76 authors with pages here, not having enWP article (according to Wikidata), but being DNB people. Charles Matthews (talk) 16:12, 1 March 2017 (UTC)

Hi. I'm new to this but happy to help. SiHol (talk) 13:49, 8 August 2017 (UTC)

Time for a FAQ?

I see much of this page has been archived. That may make sense, given that the project is still active, but discussions are no longer so frequent as in the past. Consolidation of conclusions as a FAQ would make sense. Charles Matthews (talk) 04:06, 31 March 2017 (UTC)

I am not against that; or if it is easier, I am not against bringing back pertinent conversations and marking them not to be archived. We could also pretty easily build a central ToC for the archives and paste it into a top section. Examples of ToC are WS:Scriptorium/Archives. — billinghurst sDrewth 04:31, 31 March 2017 (UTC)

So I'm now revising Wikisource:WikiProject DNB/FAQ. One format point: do we want the author templates to be on a new line? Charles Matthews (talk) 09:48, 3 April 2017 (UTC)

Do you mean the article footer initials templates? If so, I have been doing so, it just makes them more eye readable IMNSHO. — billinghurst sDrewth 12:28, 3 April 2017 (UTC)

Yes, I noticed that, which is why I asked. Should this be adopted for our Manual of Style? Charles Matthews (talk) 04:24, 4 April 2017 (UTC)

Time to talk DNB redirect articles

In the early years we transcluded the DNB article redirects, though we stopped that after the first couple of years, nd said that we would review this down the track. So we are a little in and a little out. Currently there are 800+ of these DNB redirect articles (count from WD). Which are somewhat populated and characterised, and quite inconsistently. Probably time to have the conversation on whether they should be in and complete the missing — or they should be out, delete them from here and WD.

Personal opinion is that they don't bring a lot to our article space, and we can fix look to add the appropriate redirections from the head pages of the volumes, and we can appropriate link from any reproduced indices. Having the transcluded articles is not particularly required in the web format, and the redirects are an artefact of the printed book. They can be proofread and validated in the Page: ns and we don't need to transclude to the main ns.

In summary: I believe that we should delete the main ns transclusions, and fix links to pages either side to skip them; and that we have the corresponding items deleted at Wikidata. — billinghurst sDrewth 03:59, 7 May 2017 (UTC)

I think I understand the case for deleting them here. Putting the case on the other side: such short articles can be useful content. See for example Page:Dictionary_of_National_Biography_volume_55.djvu/35 for a short list of Viscounts Strangford. Or they could be to a spouse or other close relation, making useful connections. It is possible that enWP will pick up the wives, at least, in time, I suppose.

There is also the precedent. Alumni Oxonienses, on which I'm working right now, has similar redirect articles. Charles Matthews (talk) 18:11, 10 May 2017 (UTC)

Well, we are either pregnant or not; half-pregnant doesn't work. — billinghurst sDrewth 22:34, 10 May 2017 (UTC)

So, how would this look as a general guideline? Nutshell summary:

"Certain free-standing portions of reference works do not contain enough to be identified as valid sources. They may with consistency be omitted in the mainspace presentation of the digitised work."

With implementation details by way of explanation:

Such material may, indeed, contain useful information: e.g. aliases, family relationships, business connections, and series ordinals for titles of nobility. These matters may well be covered in Wikidata. It would not be a suitable use of the Wikimedia system as a whole, however, for the Wikidata property "described by source" to be applied to them, on the basis of the Wikisource entry."

Is this formulation at least capturing a general argument? Charles Matthews (talk) 04:08, 12 May 2017 (UTC)

There is a proposal to alter the template wikipedia template to work around not having redirects for ndash in date ranges. See W:Template talk:Cite DNB#Hyphens and dashes again -- PBS (talk) 06:47, 26 September 2017 (UTC) Struck out.-- now in a section down below -- PBS (talk) 12:51, 24 October 2017 (UTC)

I think that you misunderstand this discussion. This is about those redirecting articles in the DNB that redirect you to the biography. This is not about wikimedia redirects. — billinghurst sDrewth 21:31, 26 September 2017 (UTC)

John Poyntz

At the end of the article Poyntz, Sydenham (DNB00). There is a short biography on am older brother of Sydenham. However it appears that the ODNB has decided that the DNB has mixed up several different people in the sources, the DNB lists. The ODNB has an article called

• John Poyntz (1629/30–1712) that includes "Another John Poyntz (fl. 1639–1665),"

The ODNB states that John Poyntz (1629/30–1712) "was probably the third son of Sydenham Poyntz's youngest brother Newdigate (bap. 1608, d. 1643), a royalist killed at Gainsborough" He is this one who was probably involved with the expedition to Tobago.

"Another John Poyntz (fl. 1639–1665)," "may have been a kinsman of Sydenham Poyntz, who was governor of the Leeward Islands (1650–51)"

Given this information in the ODNB I have not created an article based on the description of John Poyntz at the end of the article Poyntz, Sydenham (DNB00). -- PBS (talk) 23:02, 23 September 2017 (UTC)

John Poyntz (fl. 1639–1665) is a co-subject (subarticle) in the ODNB, and so there is no automatic assumption of notability. On what the ODNB currently has, he would be marginally notable, at best. There may be some other sources. Charles Matthews (talk) 06:59, 25 September 2017 (UTC)

Hyphens, en dashes and redirects

There is a conversation taking place at Wikisource talk:WikiProject DNB/Style Manual#Hyphens, en dashes, but as its not proposed to change the content of an article (ie its style), I think this is the more appropriate place to hold the conversation.

1. - a hyphen/dash
2. – an ndash
3. — an mdash (not pertinent to this discussion)

Pinging the participants of the conversation to date SMcCandlish and billinghurst.

Neve-selbert started a thread on Wikipedia at w:Template talk:Cite DNB#Hyphens and dashes again wishing to change the link style so that it display ndash in the dab extensions where daterange has been used. Trappist the monk wrote some code to display the daterange extensions with ndashs on wikipedia but still allowing the link to the dash version on Wikisource. billinghurst reverted that change stating on the talk page "The articles at English Wikisource use a hyphen in their name and that should be respected. ...".

There are some articles that already have redirects from ndash versions, (usually existing because they were created with ndash and then move to dash/hyphen), is there any reason for not creating such redirects? -- PBS (talk) 09:56, 23 October 2017 (UTC)

Not quite true what I did. The code that I wrote allowed an editor at en.wiki to choose to write the value assigned to |wstitle= with either a hyphen or an ndash in the birth/death date disambiguator but always set the interwikilink separator to a hyphen so that that link was never broken.

I guess I don't understand why you think that this venue is a better place to discuss a topic primarily concerned with how en.wiki displays wikisource titles at en.wiki. If this conversation is to continue here, and at the moment, I don't see why it should, a courtesy link from the en.wiki conversation is appropriate.

—Trappist the monk (talk) 10:45, 23 October 2017 (UTC)

@User:Trappist the monk My appoligies for getting the details wrong. This section it is to investigate the view of people to contribute to Wikisource, because if redirects are acceptable on Wikisource then there is no need for any sort of solution on Wikipedia. If they are not, then we can see what if anything is an acceptable solution on Wikipedia. Once the options here have been discussed and a consensus reach we can have a more informed discussion on Wikipedia-- PBS (talk) 13:41, 23 October 2017 (UTC)

@PBS: Why would we want to create 1000s to 10s of thousands of redirects? What is the benefit? Redirects have been created when needed and I think that you would find many be me, and even then I faced criticism for it with it being suggested to me that I should fix the underlying links, not create redirects.

The existing (hyphened) pages are linked from Wikidata, and English Wikipedia. They are only changed at enWP when someone incorrectly changes the hyphen to an en dash. I would agree with Ttm that the discussion about the template belongs at enWP, and I previously took my opportunity to comment there. — billinghurst sDrewth 11:24, 23 October 2017 (UTC)

It is more than 1,000, but I don't think it is that many as 10,000. Taking the first volume as an example there are just under 100 articles that use a daterange disambiguation extension and just over 90 in the second (call it 95 a volume) that means 95*63 ~ 6,000 in total. -- PBS (talk) 13:41, 23 October 2017 (UTC)

I will be very surprised if WikiSource editors think it better to make ~6000 fixes here so that one template fix is not needed at en.wiki.

—Trappist the monk (talk) 15:06, 23 October 2017 (UTC)

As long as the result is that we get en dashes in date ranges, I don't care how it's done or where. SMcCandlish (talk) 11:49, 23 October 2017 (UTC)

Here they are labels/page names, they are not date ranges. enWP's MoS indicates that these should not be obfuscated, so I do not understand your position they do not fall under your date range provisions. — billinghurst sDrewth 13:05, 23 October 2017 (UTC)

I have no vested interest in the DNB project (besides mild annoyance that the titles aren't formatted as Dictionary of National Biography, 1885-1900/Article name), but my take on the subject is as follows:

• There is a similar phenomenon in Author pages, such as Author:William Roberts (1862-1940). In Author pages, hyphens are always used in the page name.
• In DNB, ndashes could be used instead of hyphens provided the usage is consistent with the source text iteslf and also consistent with other page names throughout the DNB.
• Regardless of the decision, redirects should not be created. Such redirects when created in the past on other works have been found to be candidates for speedy deletion as "unneeded redirects" (M2). This is a general principle for encyclopedia article pages or any other type of work subpage.

—Beleg Tâl (talk) 12:18, 23 October 2017 (UTC)

 Comment @Beleg Tâl: within DNB we as always transcribe what is there, and most of the dates in the works are en dashes. Hyphens is the nomenclature for the titles used. Re moving the articles to subpages of the work, that discussion is around, and it is still my wish, though CM makes good argument that there needs to be resolution to find these works first in the lookahead search function, and the long names of the work are somewhat obscuring, though steps have been made to resolve this. — billinghurst sDrewth 13:02, 23 October 2017 (UTC)

@Billinghurst: Yes, I was referring specifically to hyphens in the page name/title, not to any page content or the page header or any other place. In other places I would suggest that ndash is always more appropriate. Also: I am glad to hear that there is discussion and interest to potentially move articles to subpages :) —Beleg Tâl (talk) 13:07, 23 October 2017 (UTC)

•  Comment No clear statement of the purpose or goal of this thread has been made. I personally have some idea of what it is about, because I have been around for awhile and worked on both projects. But for most people here, this thread will be esoteric, abstract, and meaningless. If you want a community to comment, please tell them clearly what it is you would like them to comment about. --EncycloPetey (talk) 16:58, 23 October 2017 (UTC)
•  Comment i think it is great we can live vicariously, with the broken inter-wiki links, template work arounds, and policy by edit warring. no action required here, they have it in hand over there. it is an instructive lesson in failure to collaborate. Slowking4 ‽ SvG's revenge 19:14, 24 October 2017 (UTC)
•  Comment So, if I understand this long-standing issue. Certain English Wikipedia templates display currently a hyphen, where the Manual of Style prescribes under its dates section an endash. A solution can lie in replacement text for the link to Wikisource, i.e. link remains with hyphen, endash is shown.

This appears to be an exercise in Lua programming. In other words finding and parsing instances like "1666-1715" and replacing them with "1666–1715", setting up a piped interwiki link.

Not rocket science, I think. Also, as has been pointed out, an enWP problem rather than ours. In a problem-solving tone, I'd like to suggest that someone who cares about this issue find a competent Lua hacker to look at it.

That is apparently what has been done? In which case I would suggest that "defending" the convention here against the convention there is not required. There is no fantastically good reason to impose the MoS convention for text mentions of dates on enWP templates, as far as I can see; but neither is there a fantastically good reason to defend the hyphens, downstream. Charles Matthews (talk) 12:05, 30 October 2017 (UTC)

•  Comment I agree with Charles. Basically, we arbitrarily established an article naming convention here at Wikisource for this project: we use the hyphen. If WP want to link to our articles, they must use the hyphen in the link. If they wish to display an en-dash, then they are free to do so, and in fact they have already solved the problem by adding code to their template. That code displays an en-dash but links using a hyphen. This change should be re-instated there, and any discussion should occur there. We should remove all of our redirects here, as they may cause problems with Wikidata. -Arch dude (talk) 03:51, 13 December 2017 (UTC)
•  Comment Incidentally, I made the decision to use hyphens in 2008, because the article title becomes part of a URL, and URLs are simpler when they use plain old ASCII characters. -Arch dude (talk) 03:57, 13 December 2017 (UTC)
• We should use en dashes where it's appropriate to use them, e.g. in date ranges – and not just according to w:en:Wikipedia:Manual of Style, but The Chicago Manual of Style, New Hart's Rules a.k.a. Oxford Style Manual, Garner's Modern English, Fowler's Dictionary of Modern English, and most other English-language style guides that are not specifically for news journalism.
  [News writing is its own weird animal, aimed at compression and expediency; in most cases, news style guides do not even recognize the existence of multiple dash characters, and call for unspaced em dashes to be used for all the clause-level purposes of dashes, but for the hyphen (in Unicode terms, the hyphen-minus, the - found upper-right on most keyboards) to be used for all conjoining instances of dashes, as in Mexican-American War and 1998-2002). News-style guides don't tell us anything about how to write a reference work like an encyclopedia, dictionary, database of non-copyrighted source material, etc. Maybe news-style guides are relevant at WikiNews, but I can't think of any other WMF project that should pay any attention to them, and even WikiNews probably should not, since not of the compression and expedience concerns apply to it – it doesn't need to save paper and column width, and there is no pressure to meet a 4 PM deadline for printing an evening edition.]
  Anyway, yes, it will result in redirects, and that is perfectly fine. That's what redirects are for - getting people (and software agents) to the actual location of the sought material despite minor orthographic variances (or bigger differences like alternative names for things). Redirects are cheap, especially when scripts can auto-create them. PS: I decline to use the silly {{comment}} tag that seems popular on this site (for no explicable reason); the fact that I'm commenting on a talk page already indicates that I'm leaving a comment, by definition. SMcCandlish (talk) 03:46, 3 February 2020 (UTC)

In the body of works we replicate what is typed. In page titles, they are labels, and we use the house style, and that is hyphen/dash. So can we please stop this continuing commentary. How irritating is it that enWPers come and complain that we should do what they have when it isn't pertinent. — billinghurst sDrewth 12:27, 3 February 2020 (UTC)

Mason, Charles

The second "Mason, Charles" is missing. This might not be the place to put this info, but I can't find anywhere more appropriate.

Thanks, done: Mason, Charles (1730-1787) (DNB00) now exists. Charles Matthews (talk) 16:50, 3 February 2020 (UTC)

OpenLibrary

I have substantially cleaned up the DNB entry at OpenLibrary. It is now an easier way to locate clean scans on archive.org in order to address problem page scans. Go to it, folks! LeadSongDog (talk) 14:08, 3 November 2018 (UTC)

Time to move works to be subpages of works

@Charles Matthews, @Mpaa, @Slowking4: +++ now that all these works are transcluded do you see any reason why we should not be moving all the biographies to be subpages of their respective parents => Dictionary of National Biography, 1885-1900 / Dictionary of National Biography, 1901 supplement / Dictionary of National Biography, 1912 supplement ? We can put in redirects and look at those again sometime into the future. We can do all the fixes to templates, etc. once the pages are moved. — billinghurst sDrewth 11:23, 13 October 2020 (UTC)

Certainly redirects: there are templates that use the current titles, for example. Certainly start small, with one of the supplements (at most). Charles Matthews (talk) 11:38, 13 October 2020 (UTC)

I think it is OK to move. It will be a lot of work but redirects will keep things in shape. We will probably have to write dedicated queries/scripts to cover all the different areas (links to author pages, "works about", cross links, links to other Main ns. etc).Mpaa (talk) 17:06, 13 October 2020 (UTC)

@Mpaa: {{DNB link}} and {{DNB lkpl}} should be relatively easy as I will be converting them to utilise {{authority/link}} and {{authority/lkpl}}. In fact we get more flexibility then as those templates were designed for purpose. We will have some double redirects for ndash names, but at least they are reported and easily findable. Redirects will give us time to manage, and I think that the bigger issues will be offsite links which may mean they become a permanent fixture. <shrug> — billinghurst sDrewth 05:02, 14 October 2020 (UTC)

 Comment @Charles Matthews, @Mpaa, @Slowking4: A... DNB00/01/12 have been moved, and I will next get the sandbox templates and testcases up and running, and see what maintenance turns up that is a priority to fix prior to continuing. Please report any issues that you see.

• special:prefixindex/Dictionary of National Biography, 1885-1900/
• special:prefixindex/Dictionary of National Biography, 1901 supplement/
• special:prefixindex/Dictionary of National Biography, 1912 supplement/

— billinghurst sDrewth 13:42, 17 October 2020 (UTC)

The header Template:DNB00 needs an update and a tidy, (presumably DNB01 and DNB12 are needing the same) and I will need to look to add a DEFAULTSORT. — billinghurst sDrewth 14:11, 17 October 2020 (UTC)

This is not moved À Beckett, Arthur William (DNB12). Mpaa (talk) 14:15, 17 October 2020 (UTC)

Yes, it starts with À not A. I was grabbing them from category:DNB biographies. I will come across it in the days ahead. I was thinking that my check from completeness to identify something that doesn't use one of the DNBxx templates, has (DNB in a title and is not a redirect; not that I am expecting anything to not use one of the templates from the DNB series. — billinghurst sDrewth 05:58, 18 October 2020 (UTC)

 Comment squared @Charles Matthews, @Mpaa, @Slowking4: all DNB00, DNB01, DNB12 articles moved, 3x header templates and link/lkpl templates updated — billinghurst sDrewth 23:10, 23 October 2020 (UTC)

testcases

• Template:DNB lkpl/testcases Y
• Template:DNB link/testcases Y

Sandboxed and testcases, seem to be working. Any further customisation of title display may need updated to base script. — billinghurst sDrewth 11:31, 19 October 2020 (UTC)

• implemented from sandbox to active templates. — billinghurst sDrewth 23:07, 23 October 2020 (UTC)

 Comment TO DO, to {{DNB00}}, {{DNB01}} and {{DNB12}}

• put in DEFAULTSORT, though will only do once all moved Y

I had thought about removing Category:DNB biographies from the templates as that is not typical for subpages of Encs/Dict, especially with special:Prefixindex functionality. However as we have multiple editions, and volumes, there is value in a collective category. — billinghurst sDrewth 21:42, 22 October 2020 (UTC)

@Billinghurst: I'm now getting anomalous results from the DNB Petscan queries on w:User:Charles Matthews/Petscan. I'm hoping these are transient, to do with dumps used by Petscan. Charles Matthews (talk) 07:27, 26 October 2020 (UTC)

@Charles Matthews: that link is busted so I am not certain that I can comment. I could envisage that things may take time to autocorrect. Do note that you can grab DNB pages by the subpages component now. — billinghurst sDrewth 09:11, 26 October 2020 (UTC)

I meant d:User:Charles Matthews/Petscan. I'll check again. Charles Matthews (talk) 09:25, 26 October 2020 (UTC)

@Charles Matthews: Ah, I know for one query "no WP" will need updating as when I was adding missing volume numbers and I did remove overt wikipedia links from these articles as they are now all imported through the amended header (they use {{import enwiki}}), you should be able to re-write your query looking whether the biographies have statement P921 present or not. Category:DNB No WP will no longer be accurate, and I hadn't removed it at this point, and once the query is rewritten that should be a lot more reliable and automated check anyway. — billinghurst sDrewth 14:34, 27 October 2020 (UTC)

I have been looking through articles that have been amended and I feel comfortable that things are working fine with the enWP linking modification to underlying template, so will start removing the explicit wikipedia = lines. With that occurring I will then look to amend the logic for our biographical articles that don't link are categorised. — billinghurst sDrewth 12:31, 26 December 2020 (UTC)

All "wikipedia =" links have been removed (DNB00/DNB01/DNB12 articles), and the logic updated to categorise "no WP" based on Wikidata. Should get around the issues raised on the template talk page of our articles pointing to the wrong place. I have no further action planned, though I notice that we do have "DNB See" articles categorising there, so that is some thinking for another day. — billinghurst sDrewth 14:17, 1 January 2021 (UTC)

• category:DNB No WP (4033) < 20210101 (5,376)