Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Missing encyclopedic articles/Archive 7

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This is the third archive of the discussion at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Missing encyclopedic articles.

useful tool

Perhaps you don't know this tool: http://tools.wikimedia.de/~joanjoc/sugart.php?uselang=ca. You can put the code of any wiki and see which articles are missing in english version but present in many other languagues (so relevant) --62.175.77.111 (talk) 11:16, 5 January 2008 (UTC)

Dictionary Def?

I'm working on the Art and Architecture list...there are some titles there that don't need anything more than a wiktionary entry...is that ok?

Yup. You might want to create a wikipedia article, and use {{Template:Wi}} to point to the wiktionary entry. --Tagishsimon (talk) 02:42, 7 January 2008 (UTC)

I've been going through and putting notes on the titles partly to ask for help and partly to keep track of where I am...help? —Preceding unsigned comment added by Legotech (talk • contribs) 02:37, 7 January 2008 (UTC)

Help may be a long time in coming. But annotating the list items is generally a good thing. --Tagishsimon (talk) 02:42, 7 January 2008 (UTC)

Help again...I did the wiktionary template thing and someone marked it for speedy delete...what did I do wrong? Addorsed —Preceding unsigned comment added by Legotech (talk • contribs) 09:30, 7 January 2008 (UTC)

Probably nothing wrong. Perhaps some users do not support the idea of a page with that template on it. I'd be inclined to contest the speedy, and write a note on the talk page asking potential deleters to explain their deletion w.r.t. policy. --Tagishsimon (talk) 15:00, 9 January 2008 (UTC)

Missing topics list

Hello,

I recently created a missing topics list for use by this project via WP:AFC. However, as I'm informed this is for the creation of mainspace artices only, it seems it will most likely be rejected. Would it be possible that a member of this project could look at the list to see it if might be appropriate for this or a similar project such as Wikipedia:WikiProject Biography ? Thank you. 72.74.195.146 (talk) 08:22, 16 March 2008 (UTC)

I think this list of names was added here: Wikipedia:WikiProject Criminal Biography/Wanted Articles, I will add it to the "other list" section. Cheers!Calaka (talk) 06:26, 18 April 2009 (UTC)

Template?

Is there a template we could be including on the talk page of articles we generate as part of this project? I.e. to advertise the project and request further expansion of the article.—RJH (talk) 21:50, 24 March 2008 (UTC)

I don't think we'd want to disfigure our articles with adverts for WikiProject Missing encyclopedic articles. You might want to include a link to the project from the subject line or a new article. --Tagishsimon (talk) 17:07, 25 March 2008 (UTC)

By extension then, we should remove WikiProject templates from all article talk pages since they essentially serve a similar purpose. I don't think that would be acceptible. —RJH (talk) 19:59, 22 April 2008 (UTC)

The original proposal was for a TALK PAGE template. This does not "disfigure the article", since it is on the talk page, not the article page. This plea for help is a lot less intrusive than other talk page templates, and it gives us a good way to track the page status. In this sense it's a lot like other project templates on talk pages. This is an ideal way to alert the "missing page" community of the status of the article relative to alternative sources, without modifying the mainpage article. Within this template, we could asses the article with respect to many alternatives: e.g., complete with respect to 1911, but not with respect to DNB or Britannica 2007.-Arch dude (talk) 02:50, 25 May 2008 (UTC)

{{Template:Inferior article}}

How about an inferior article stub? The stub would need to have a way to tell what source contains the superior article for effectiveness. Samples of the text entered might look like these:

{{inferior-article-stub|[[Encyclopedia of Life]]}}

{{inferior-article-stub|[[Encyclopedia Brittanica]]}}

{{inferior-article-stub|[[Microsoft Encarta 1994]]}}

It might look something like this:

This title has a more superior article in Encyclopedia of Life, yet only has a stub in Wikipedia. Please help expand it!

The category for the stub would be something like "Articles Inferior to Other Encyclopedias"

Thanks, Bob the Wikipedian, the Tree of Life WikiDragon (talk) 06:32, 13 April 2008 (UTC)

If left blank, the superior reference name would be something like "an alternate source" Bob the Wikipedian, the Tree of Life WikiDragon (talk) 06:35, 13 April 2008 (UTC)

Stubs are sorted by topic, and this would cut right across that. You can use {{MEA-expand}} for this purpose. Note that said template was created as "mea-stub", but renamed for exactly the above reason. Alai (talk) 12:18, 13 April 2008 (UTC)

I think this would work better as a talk page boiler plate message. Stubs are good for navigating your way around a topic. A talk page message for this would furnish editors of the article to find more sources. Severo^TC 13:09, 13 April 2008 (UTC)

Is there a boilerplate creation standard? Such as getting them approved prior to creation? Bob the Wikipedian, the Tree of Life WikiDragon (talk) 14:29, 13 April 2008 (UTC)

Please note that the stub has been created, not by myself, but by a vandal. The stub's only contents are the name of the person who created it, and it has no other revisions to which I can revert it. Can someone please delete it? Thanks, Bob the Wikipedian, the Tree of Life WikiDragon (talk) 14:32, 13 April 2008 (UTC)

Done. AFAIK there's no such proposal process, but very often they're associated with a Wikiproject. In this case, coordinating with the MEA people would seem appropriate. Alai (talk) 14:53, 13 April 2008 (UTC)

Please note that the above 7 posts of this conversation have been copied from Wikipedia:WikiProject_Stub_Sorting Bob the Wikipedian, the Tree of Life WikiDragon (talk) 16:53, 13 April 2008 (UTC)

I have reposted this conversation here. I am no longer looking to create a stub, but a template now, hence the renaming of the topic. Please read above to get a general idea. Because I designed it in stub format, it needs to be boilerplate-ified before it can be made...does anyone know how to do this? Bob the Wikipedian, the Tree of Life WikiDragon (talk) 16:56, 13 April 2008 (UTC)

At the risk of repeating myself: I'm not recommending that you assist in the creation of the above, but that Bob use the existing template, instead. Having two resources to do essentially the same thing seems to me to a fundamentally poor idea. Alai (talk) 18:26, 13 April 2008 (UTC)

"more superior"??? Come on guys! Kaldari (talk) 20:28, 22 April 2008 (UTC)

Agree that this would work better as a Talk Page notice. Kaldari (talk) 20:30, 22 April 2008 (UTC)

Monthly focus: hotlist letter S

I think this focus has stayed on long enough (4 months?) and should be changed to a new focus. May I suggest someone that has looked at the hotlist letter S page (and has done a few of those articles perhaps) to remove all the blue links that are the correct article and then we can talk about adding something else as a monthly focus. If anyone happens to have some general knowledge and knows the accuracy of those articles are fine, then they can remove the blue links as well.

Any thoughts of a new focus? Another letter perhaps? Any projects near completion? Oh and by the way, I would have pruned the page myself, but I am unable to determine if the articles are indeed created for that page and not for something else (or it's redirecting to somewhere else for example) Calaka (talk) 04:29, 1 May 2008 (UTC)

I have decided to place OBI Biographies as the monthly focus. My reasoning is that at 98.1% the project is almost complete and in about 1 month (maybe 3 haha) it will be complete! Any thoughts? Cheers!

Oh and PS. Great job on removing all the blue links in the previous monthly focus. Keep up the great work! Calaka (talk) 08:50, 26 May 2008 (UTC)

Bot?

I don't know if this is already happening, or has been suggested before and there are good reasons not to do this, but I thought I'd put the idea out there. What if there were a bot to fill the Wikipedia redlinks from the public domain encyclopedias?--Aervanath lives in the Orphanage 18:42, 10 June 2008 (UTC)

FritzpollBot

Per the discussion at WP:GEOBOT, we need a place to centralise discussion - although we're currently using a subpage here, can we have permission to set up an official task force within this WikiProject - something like Wikipedia:WikiProject Missing encyclopedic articles/GeoBot ? Fritzpoll (talk) 11:22, 12 June 2008 (UTC)

The Places subpage could be turned into something like the Wikipedia:WikiProject Missing encyclopedic articles/Geography task force, I assume. I'm a member of the project, and I don't have any objections, anyway. John Carter (talk) 14:13, 12 June 2008 (UTC)

Let me know when the project gets going, WP:DO will be willing to do our bit on this project.--Aervanath lives in the Orphanage 18:56, 13 June 2008 (UTC)

I would like to encourage everyone to take this project very slowly. As far as bot editing goes, once articles are created and set out into the wild of Wikipedia, it takes a lot more effort to fix or add information to such articles, than if it's done well in the initial creation. If Polbot had waited a year before creating all the animal taxonomy articles, for example, it could have incorporated the MSW3 data (among others), and we wouldn't have the impossible clean-up task that we were left with. Even 10 years from now, I think we'll still be cleaning up what Polbot created prematurely. Let's not make the same mistake with FritzpollBot. Let's take our time and do it correctly from the beginning, rather than rushing to create articles with the mindset that we can fix them later. There is no pressing need for these articles, so the slower the better, IMO. Kaldari (talk) 20:11, 13 June 2008 (UTC)

Comments about MISSING on Talk:Plagiarism

Heads-up that there is a discussion on Wikipedia talk:Plagiarism, which I noticed after an entry in the 1911 verification talk page. Start at this section, then "More EB 1911 stuff" et seq. Users including DGG, Carcharoth, and John Vandenberg seem to have discovered the wp:missing and 1911 verification projects, and discussed what's wrong with it. There seem to be two issues:

• The 1911 material, and by extension other sources, has been plagiarised, which while not an IP violation is a violation of the authors' "moral rights" (recognized in the Berne convention). Worse, the text has been subsumed into WP articles without clear markup of the citation, so there is no way of distinguising the old text from incremental additions.
• The results aren't very good, especially in geographical articles. We knew that.

I have pointed out that we've been at this for over 4 years, we're aware of the shortcomings, any attempt to resurrect the ur-text would be a huge undertaking and unlikely to attract volunteers, and we had already discussed issues like this back in the mists of time (Franamax pointed out that attitudes were different then). Admittedly, I doubt there have been many subsequent editors coming across the obsolete geography articles and "evolving" them as we had hoped.

Best I can suggest is that where possible we add links to Wikisource using {{Wikisource1911Enc}}. I've added a suggestion to the (essentially moribund) 1911 verification project page. I don't know if that can or should be automated; in any case, the Wikisource EB1911 is mostly empty right now. Perhaps it should be the responsibility of Wikisource builders to drop the links into WP? David Brooks (talk) 17:36, 25 June 2008 (UTC)

The backstory appears to be a determination, started by User:Durova, as far as I can see, to expand on the existing plagiarism coverage at Wikipedia:Copyright problems#Plagiarism that does not infringe copyright and to give plagiarism its own policy page at Wikipedia:Plagiarism. The talk page is, thus, rehearsing the sorts of discussions one would anticipate during the formation of policy. Long discussion, sensible points made, prevailing advice appears unchanged: attribute text taken from PD sources to the source. --Tagishsimon (talk) 21:32, 25 June 2008 (UTC)

Thanks; you have looked at this from a higher altitude than I did. There is still a specific problem, identified in passing in those discussions: "attribute text taken from PD sources to the source" runs aground as soon as the article is extended, modernized, or even corrected. Then there is no way for the reader to know which words fall under the attribution. We do our best with the {{1911}} and {{1911 talk}} templates, given their deliberate imprecision, but that doesn't keep with the spirit of the policy. I really wouldn't want to make a visible demarcation in the article though. Using {{Wikisource1911Enc}} would be a decent compromise except that the 1911 WS project has very little completed content. David Brooks (talk) 23:50, 25 June 2008 (UTC)

For my money, the fuzzy attribution in the 1911 template, and others of its ilk, survives and continues to function as the article diverges from its source. The ideal, for me, is a combination of an attribution notice at the foot of the article, and inline citations demarcating boundaries between content from source A & B & C, such as in a recent example of imported PD text, Salathiel Lovell. I appreciate others may not be as content with this as I; but I don;t see a problem w.r.t. policy, as it's currently stated on the proposed policy page. Put another way, I think we could worry too much about the attribution issue once the source is diluted. I don't think a pointer to wikisource is of much help; it does not deal with the issue at hand, which is how to deal with PD text inserted into wikipedia. --Tagishsimon (talk) 23:57, 25 June 2008 (UTC)

Encyclopedia of Islam

I think it'd be a worthy goal to add encyclopedia of Islam to this since it is one of the most important sources for knowledge about Islam and Islam related materials. gren グレン 15:46, 6 July 2008 (UTC)

Wikipedia:WikiProject Missing encyclopedic articles/1919 Bartlett's Quotations

Only 44 names left in this one, if anyone's interested in lasering in on it. bd2412 T 09:22, 8 July 2008 (UTC)

I knocked out William Ross Wallace, so make it 43 :) Kaldari (talk) 20:11, 8 July 2008 (UTC)

and then there were 40 :) Dsp13 (talk) 02:24, 9 July 2008 (UTC)

Now it's down to 36. bd2412 T 01:19, 10 July 2008 (UTC)

35, although I'd like to mildly curse BD2412's initiative for the time I've spent on McDonald Clarke (although it was nice to meet him & I trust we'll be seeing him on DYK shortly). --Tagishsimon (talk) 02:53, 10 July 2008 (UTC)

:-) bd2412 T 04:15, 10 July 2008 (UTC)

Only 3 major cities left in the world without Wikipedia articles

From an original list of about 400, Wikipedia:Missing articles for towns and cities with 100,000 or more inhabitants has been whittled down to 3. Help Wikipedia complete this important milestone. Kaldari (talk) 21:35, 15 July 2008 (UTC)

I even did all the hard work for you :) Kaldari (talk) 22:32, 15 July 2008 (UTC)

Keep going. We'll be with you in, ahem, a minute or two. More seriously, for all three could we not be content to create a stub with the sentence found in the Missing Articles page? If you can dispose of one with a redirect to a district, then disposing of the other three with a v.stubby article is no crime? --Tagishsimon (talk) 22:35, 15 July 2008 (UTC)

The one that was disposed of with a redirect to a district was a city that was actually changed into a district, i.e. the city doesn't exist anymore (as of 1994, 4 years after the list was compiled). Kaldari (talk) 22:44, 15 July 2008 (UTC)

I wouldn't mind them being stubs. If no one wants to make them more fleshed out articles, I'll eventually just dump the sentences that I have into stub articles. Kaldari (talk) 22:45, 15 July 2008 (UTC)

With no disrespect to the three cities meant, I think the single sentence we have for each will suffice for 99.99% of our readers. Meanwhile creating the article does at least allow it to be categorised and assessed by relevant projects, which as as likely to lead to destubbification. I can't see a good reason to hesitate & thus close this particular missing articles page. --Tagishsimon (talk) 22:52, 15 July 2008 (UTC)

I've been bold &c. All done now. --Tagishsimon (talk) 22:59, 15 July 2008 (UTC)

Actually, it looks like we might not quite be done yet. It looks like a certain Sneaky 013 removed a lot of cities from the list simply because they had a note next them speculating that they might refer to something else. Kaldari (talk) 00:08, 16 July 2008 (UTC)

Bad article name (planetmath)

What should be done with a redlink on the list if it's just not a good name for a wikipedia article (nor a redirect). The case I'm dealing with is in the Wikipedia:Missing_science_topics/Maths1 list. The redlink is Algebra (module) and it is the title of a planetmath.org article. An algebra (in this case) refers to the content of the article Algebra (ring theory) and happens to be a module with extra structure. Do I just remove the redlink from the list? RobHar (talk) 01:38, 26 July 2008 (UTC)

Actually module (algebra) is what is meant. It wouldn't do much harm to redirect the redlink. Charles Matthews (talk) 15:39, 26 August 2008 (UTC)

No, if you go to planetmath.org, there is an article called "Algebra (module)" ([1]) and it is about algebras over rings. RobHar (talk) 17:16, 26 August 2008 (UTC)

Essay

User:Charles Matthews/Merging encyclopedias may be of interest. I don't know where else these exact issues are addressed. Charles Matthews (talk) 12:43, 26 August 2008 (UTC)

Are you still active?

Asking because I haven't seen any activity since last August. — Sebastian 02:43, 12 December 2008 (UTC)

Yup. We putter along. --Tagishsimon (talk) 02:45, 12 December 2008 (UTC)

Wow, that was a fast reply! That's a role model: All work, no talk for four months! — Sebastian 02:48, 12 December 2008 (UTC)

Still working through the B's in the EB1911 verification. Slowly. I seem to be very alone. David Brooks (talk) 03:24, 12 December 2008 (UTC)

I'm still more or less working on the Project Gutenberg author list. I don't usually create articles, but I do try to add the Gutenberg backlink to a new article when a link turns blue. Slow and steady. I've done about 500 in two years. I've been a bit more aggresive on the DNB missing articles lately, where I have actually created a bunch. I first transcribe the source at Wikisource, and then copy it to Wikipedia and wikify it. I'm taking a break while we sort out our pagescans over at Wikisource, but I hope to resume soon. -Arch dude (talk) 23:20, 6 January 2009 (UTC)

David, you're not the only one working slowly and alone. I've been working on the Tree of Life articles without images for months now. Finished the mammals last summer, and I've been working on plants ever since. 33% through the plants list. Bob the Wikipedian ^{(talk • contribs)} 23:24, 6 January 2009 (UTC)

Luxury! First I spent 100 sleepless nights listening to every notable album without an article. When I finally got to Stand Back! Here Comes Charlie Musselwhite's Southside Band, I went into a blind rage and tore up all my notes, thus scuttling the entire project. Then I decided to redeem myself by creating articles for missing Academic journals by locking myself in the periodicals department of Harvard Medical School and reading the first 50 pages of every journal while subsisting solely on water from the bathroom sink and dried gum I found under the tables. When I finally passed out on the 20th day they took me to the hospital and told me I couldn't use Wikipedia for a month because of "mental health" issues. I know I've been gone for a while, but I'm ready to dive back in now. Anyone want to help me watch the 10,720 TV shows without articles? Kaldari (talk) 19:38, 8 January 2009 (UTC)

I hope you're not serious about the mental health issue, the hospital, and the craziness. I can perceive this project driving people to madness, though. Edit in moderation; that's the key. Bob the Wikipedian ^{(talk • contribs)} 19:45, 8 January 2009 (UTC)