Wikipedia:WikiProject Library of Congress Country Studies

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Country studies

Some Wikipedians have formed a project to better and systematically use information in articles related from the public domain Library of Congress Country Studies.

This project is designed to take text and information from the 101 Library of Congress Country Studies and the associated 48 country profiles (some of which are pending). The text from these documents is in the public domain and may be incorporated into Wikipedia. Many Wikipedia articles already contain text from the LOCCS, but this project will attempt to ensure that the texts are used systematically. The LOCCS specializes in often overlooked countries. Including information about them will fight systemic bias in Wikipedia.

Parentage

This project drew inspiration from:

Participants

To join add your name to the list below:

♦Blofeld of SPECTRE♦ ^$1,000,000? 16:43, 11 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Calliopejen1 (talk) 16:50, 11 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]
I'm an Editor of the wiki^{[citation needed]} 19:26, 11 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Goals

/Reference fixing
/Articles with broken URLs
Fill in the gaps. Find areas covered in the LOCCS but not on Wikipedia.
- Fully utilize the Profiles on all countries that have them. The profiles offer recent information.
- Go through Country Studies and find whats useful.
Check to see that all LOCCS information is fully utilized, even on subjects already covered on Wikipedia.

Tasks

Set up the country subpages at /By country, finding which of these resources have information about each country
- Library of Congress Country Studies and profiles
- Background notes - as of 2002
- World Factbook as of 2000
- International religious freedom reports - also contain info on religion generally.
- International human rights reports
- Congressional research service reports
- Mineral industry descriptions by country
- Energy industry descriptions by country
- Economic policy and trade practices by country
- Foreign agricultural service attache reports
- Forestry by country
- Child labor and education
- travel.state.gov - info on transport and crime
- ~~Criminal justice by country~~ Heard back from their general counsel, this is not PD.
Countries that this is done for are marked with
Begin incorporating country information
- Some information may be redundant with what's already in Wikipedia, but these documents have information that can be used to create articles that often do not yet exist on Wikipedia for a many countries such as Economic history of Foo, Media of Foo, Human rights in Foo, Education in Foo, and Environmental issues in Foo.
- As participants incorporate sections they should strike out what they have used with the html command <s>...</s>. Also link to the article the text has gone to. Also strike outdated and unusable text. Once no useful information is left, the country will be considered completed.
- The Country Studies are old, but some information may have a place. For instance, old economic information from the CS on Spain was used to make the Economic history of Spain.
- Suggested edit summary: Adding [[public domain]] text - [[WP:LOCPROJ|You can help!]]

References

Wikimedia Commons

Public domain images from the Country Studies have been uploaded to Wikimedia Commons and tagged with this category.