Wikipedia:WikiProject Missing encyclopedic articles/DNB
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This is the central page for the "missing articles" project based on importing material from the old Dictionary of National Biography (DNB), a 63-volume British biographical dictionary published 1885-1900. The aim of the project is to create new articles here, certainly, but also to use DNB material to develop stub articles and in other appropriate ways. The mechanics are set out at the lists discussion and can be debated at the talk page there.
The project needs several kinds of listings. Basic alphabetical listings, volume by volume, can be accessed from the Epitome at Wikipedia:WikiProject Missing encyclopedic articles/DNB Epitome.[1][2] Two other sorts of listings will help the project along: topical listings, e.g. a listing of theatrical people; and listings of "most desired" articles, some of which are at Wikipedia:WikiProject Missing encyclopedia articles/DNB, people prominent in ODNB. Input and collaboration on topical listings is now particularly needed.
The main category for the project is Category:Missing encyclopedic articles (Dictionary of National Biography), shortcut CAT:DNBPROJ. The quick way to scan for articles ready for conversion to Wikipedia is to look at s:Category:DNB No WP. To request article creation, go to s:Wikisource:WikiProject DNB/Most wanted articles.
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[edit] The Dictionary of National Biography
The 1885-1900 DNB was a UK publication providing biographies of 30,000 or so people from the UK and its colonies. The content of the 1900 works are (almost certainly) in the public domain in the US.[3] The description a monumental compilation of biographical entries for people important in the history of the British Isles[4] is a typical assessment. (See the first page of text from over 25,000.)
Articles should be checked for accuracy and currency, probably rephrased, and often trimmed. At first sight DNB material can look bad: stilted prose, too many verbatim quotes from primary sources, judgemental, sometimes scarcely verifiable ("X was probably connected with the old Staffordshire family of the same name"). An example such as s:Chillenden, Edmund (DNB00) shows how the DNB can (sometimes, possibly) fail to establish notability by WP standards (in fact there is plenty about Edmund Chillenden in current scholarly literature, so this is a caveat about needing to update as well as adapt). Generally the DNB can have an antiquarian feel, but it mainly needs good and severe copy-editing and the dust blown off. The level of detail is often stimulating for extra research and linking, even if there are also some gross errors. (Errata were published in 1904.)
See the DNB article for further information on the current, updated Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (ODNB), which is up to 56,000 articles. Obviously we just trail in the wake of what is a major scholarly effort on that (subscription) site. On the other hand WP's purposes are well served in many cases by having a respectable biography, and this project could (on a conservative estimate) add 10,000 such articles to Wikipedia, as free content that can be upgraded.
[edit] Wikisource DNB project
A small but growing number of the DNB articles are available on Wikisource at Dictionary of National Biography, 1885-1900. If you decide to create a Wikipedia article based on the DNB, please consider creating the Wikisource article first, as described at the Wikisource DNB project page.
[edit] Concise DNB and the Epitome pages
The first concise version of the DNB (the Concise Dictionary of National Biography or CDNB) forms the basis for the pages accessible from the Epitome. These Epitome listings, 63 in number, cover a volume at a time; they will be checked over further and have original page numbers added.[5]
There are a few technical issues to notice about the Epitome listings.
- There are subarticles, which will be noted as page numbers like 123sub. That means that the person named is given a section of another biography, picked out only by their name in small caps. In other words the original DNB does not have an article with their name as title.
- Another case is of articles that were in one of the Supplement volumes issued 1901 to catch up. Once page numbers are added these will show up as Supp instead of a number.
- In due course the Supplement articles will be catered for here and on Wikisource, as will the Errata, but the infrastructure is yet to be put together.
You can read the whole CDNB as PDF by downloading from archive.org - if you are for prepared a 330 megabyte download. The Epitome pages still have much corruption from the scanning and processing, which can be corrected from the PDF or the print version (three fat volumes).[6]
[edit] Scans and adaptation of the original DNB
For information on scans of the full DNB, see Wikipedia:WikiProject Missing encyclopedic articles/DNB scans. Because of the textual issues mentioned above, the "text dump" route (placing the scanned text into WP with minimal editing) is deprecated. Ideal is to create the article at Wikisource first, after which it can both be edited into good material, and used as a reference (because the DNB used many primary sources, it is a desirable reference even if its content is outdated for a topic). There are obviously intermediate routes, such as summarising the DNB article, or expanding the CDNB text into proper prose.
[edit] Notes
- ^ These pages were made from scans that can be found at User:Magnus Manske/Dictionary of National Biography. For checking and further work, there is an online PDF.
- ^ NB that the alphabetical listings currently contain also names from the 1901 supplementary volumes.
- ^ Whether any specific article is in the public domain in other jurisdictions may depend on the date of death of the article's author: either 1908 or 1938 - see Wikipedia_talk:Copyright problems#Re-examining whether EB1911 really is PD. The editors on the Wikisource DNB project are creating pages for each of the 600 or so DNB contributors, with birth and death dates: this effort tends to identify the most prolific authors first, so we have the dates for most of the DNB articles, and we have a simple way to identify authors.
- ^ http://www.lib.uwaterloo.ca/society/history/DNB.html
- ^ It is intended to move from bulleted list to table form on the Epitome pages, to provide good documentation of the effort as it proceeds (e.g. to note and check merges possible once there is a correct blue link).
- ^ A caveat on ordering issues. The modern CDNB editions have some significant changes in the order of articles compared with the Epitome (e.g. "Peter of Savoy" alphabetised as if it was PeterS) which makes its use for checking sometimes a little awkward. For obvious reasons the project needs to stick with the ordering of the original DNB as used on Wikisource.
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