Category talk:Wikipedia articles incorporating text from the 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica

Does this category not appear to "set in stone" these articles? Surely the aim should be so to develop these that their origins become irrelevant? Is it envisaged that they will then be uncategorised from here? Djnjwd 23:21, 16 Aug 2004 (UTC)


 * I use it to help know which articles have had input from 1911. I own the hard copy and it's helpful to know which have allready had input. Rarely if ever are the articles from 1911 a one to one copy, in fact they mostly need lots of help with grammer and new information. Edit away as needed I dont think there is anything on Wikipedia that is set in stone much less some old EB articles. Stbalbach

See also: Template talk:1911 -- User:Docu

How come I can only see the As?--The_stuart 23:21, 17 Feb 2005 (UTC)

Caithness
What content in Caithness is from 1911 Britannica? Laurel Bush 10:56, 16 Mar 2005 (UTC).

Removing tag
Should we start removing the 1911 tag where nothing remains of the original BE article? In many cases I feel this give the article a more "dated" look than it really is. Fornadan 12:20, 18 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Problems with the 1911 articles
I've just been looking at the Porism article, and it contained a bit of gobbledygook. Fortunately I've got a copy of the 1929 edition, in which a number of articles are more or less unchanged from 1911, and was able to verify that it was Greek which the OCR process had made unintelligible. I corrected this, and also some mathematical expressions that had got screwed up. Should there be an ongoing project to look out for this sort of thing and correct it? rossb 22:53, 17 May 2005 (UTC)

Up-dating
Yes, for the sake of reference, and some introductory contents, Encyclopedia Britannica 1911 is, no doubt, a fine source. But, I found a number pages based on the same contain information which are “stale” and without any context to changes which may have happened during the last 100 years. Such a page serves very little purpose, and is perhaps a question mark on our credibility to present up-dated information. I think that all pages which are based on Encyclopedia Britannica 1911 require massive up-dates, and may require sustained efforts by scores of volunteers. --Bhadani 09:52, 7 January 2006 (UTC)


 * Couldn't agree more. Crossposting a recent comment of mine on Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Missing encyclopedic articles: I sometimes come along 1911-derived stubs in the field of African ethnography. More often than not, they contain glaring errors or just plain outdated statements. So much has changed since then in ethnography/anthropology, ethnolinguistics, and history, that the 1911 content of this area has become virtually useless. People should be warned against that. For an example, take the article Barabra before I cleaned it up. Stubs like that do more harm than good, especially because this area hasn't that many editors who can separate chaff from wheat. &mdash; mark &#9998; 15:00, 10 February 2006 (UTC)

section header == ==

why is this a category? The right place to mention that an article uses text from the 1911 EB is at references, but may be I miss someting. Andries 19:49, 13 September 2006 (UTC)

Merge w/ Category:Wikipedia articles incorporating text from the 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica?
I don't know if this is something we should consider or how we would go about doing it, but does this category and the category Category:Wikipedia articles incorporating text from the 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica (I don't know how to create a link to this without turnng adding it as an actual categoty) smack of redundency? Valley2city 17:08, 16 October 2006 (UTC)


 * I assume you mean Category:1911 Britannica? The articles in that category don't have 1911 applied correctly (either substituted or added manually to that category) and need to be retagged. —Ruud 17:33, 16 October 2006 (UTC)

Greek Scanning Problems: Alert Me and I Will Fix Them
The 1911 articles quote a lot of ancient Greek, given how thoroughly they tried to cover classical subjects. These invariably become gibberish when scanned. I have a copy of the 1911 EB in my office and will happily fix any of these that are brought to my attention on my talk page, as I have done for Themistius (diff). Wareh 21:32, 2 November 2006 (UTC)

Count
Does anyone know how many articles are in this category? I'd go through and count, but there must be a short cut.Ritarius 07:09, 19 February 2007 (UTC)

Referencing protocols and citing the Encyclopaedia Britannica
An observation for any interested editors, on the citing of Encyclopaedia Britannica, and a suggestion to resolve a burgeoning issue.

From my experiences of Wikipedia to date, I note that a number of articles have Encyclopaedia Britannica as their basis. For some articles this comprises the bulk of the text or even the entire article. For such articles, I typically see the following statment:

Which arises from the following template: The statement alone is fine enough when the entire content of the article comes from the Encyclopaedia Britannica, for clearly, 100% is attributable. But it is a statement of attribution, and once the article becomes less than 100% attributable to the EB, it is not a citation in any useful sense. At that point it starts to become a vague attribution, and moreso the more the article is developed away from the EB. Some - perhaps many - of you will already see where I'm going with this.

As we all know, the Encyclopaedia Britannica is often an excellent basis, especially for the static, historical component of articles, some of which is in need not of supplanting, but merely updating and supplementing, if that. However, as we also all know, with the exception of information for which we can do no better (especially, as far as I can tell, of historical nature for which facts haven't changed much if at all), it is not generally desirable to leave the article at that. Rather, especially for dynamic phenomena, meaning things which inevitably change in some fashion (even if it's primarily the understanding of underlying principles), or historical phenomena for which we have the benefit of new information, or better access to old information (or both), it is considered desirable to update the articles which were based originally on the Encyclopaedia Britannica. Hence the following type of templates found in some articles:

However, at this point, the problem of citation, or more accurately, lack of citation, arises. For as soon as we insert new text, and otherwise break up the text that originally came from the Encyclopaedia Britannica, we should commence using inline citations for the text that was from the EB. The reasons should be obvious, because they are the same as the need for any citation, from any source. So I'll not labour the point, other than to note that if we do not start using inline citations, we end up with articles containing orphaned sentences and paragraphs, for which the original source is not known. So we end up with a common-or-garden citation problem.

This is a potentially massive task, but I see that as no excuse for not chipping away at the problem. As far as I can tell, the easiest way to deal with this in the first instance is to create a reference to the volume from which the article, or the bulk of the article, came. The Balneotherapy article does this. It contains a link to an editable version of the EB, and I have added a link to a non-editable version, from the table helpfully placed in the EB article. The reason for that should be self-evident of course: a reader, or editor, should be able to check a version that is unambiguously the original.

Ideally, there should be a link to the exact page dealing with the topic of the article. I have been able to do this in the Hydrotherapy article, using the Internet Archive listings. But I find those listings currently difficult and time-consuming to search for the exact volume of a multi-volume work such as EB, so this is probably not going to be practical on a large scale in the short term. This brings us back to the task of simply citing the volume from which the text of a given article came.

This is a simple enough task, but tedious if left to one or two dedicated editors. But if each editor who cares something about these things makes a point of adding a citation to a mere few articles, the task should get done. So that is my suggestion, for what it's worth.Wotnow (talk) 07:02, 6 December 2009 (UTC)Wotnow