Template:DNB listing

This listing page belongs to WikiProject Dictionary of National Biography, spun out of the “missing article” project, and is concerned with checking whether Wikipedia has articles for all those listed in the Dictionary of National Biography (DNB), a 63-volume British biographical dictionary published 1885-1900 and now in the public domain. This page relates to volume running from name  to name.

Scope of the subproject:

It is envisaged that the following work will be done:
 * Checks made that links on this page point to a wikipedia article about the same person;
 * Addition of new articles for all red-links based on DNB text;
 * Checking whether blue-linked articles would benefit from additional text from DNB.

Listings are posted as bulleted lists, with footnotes taken from the DNB summaries published in 1904. The listings and notes are taken from scanned text that is often corrupt and in need of correction. Not all the entries on the list correspond to actual DNB articles; some are “redirects” and there are a few articles devoted to families rather than individuals.

If you are engaged in this work you will probably find quite a number of unreferenced articles among the blue links. You are also encouraged to mention the DNB as a reference on such articles whenever they correspond to the summary, as part of the broader campaign for good sourcing. A suggested template is DNB.

Locating the full text:

DNB text is now available on Wikisource for all first edition articles, on the page s:Dictionary of National Biography, 1885-1900/Vol  -. Names here are not inverted, as they are in the original: Joe Bloggs would be found at Wikisource s:Bloggs, Joe (DNB00). The text for the first supplement is available too: NB that this Epitome listing includes those supplement articles also.

List maintenance and protocols:

List maintenance tasks are to check and manipulate links in the list with piping or descriptive parenthetical disambiguators, and to mark list entries with templates to denote their status; whilst as far as possible retaining the original DNB names:


 * piping: Charles Abbot -> Charles Abbot
 * descriptive parenthetical disambiguators Charles Abbot -> Charles Abbot (botanist)
 * both combined Charles Abbot -> Charles Abbot

The work involves:
 * Checking that bluelinks link to the correct person; if so, tick them. If not, try to find the correct article and pipe or disambiguate the link.
 * Check whether redlinks can be linked to an article by piping or disambiguation.
 * Create articles based on the DNB text for redlinks for which no wikipedia article can be found
 * Check whether existing blue-linked articles could benefit from an input of DNB text (e.g. the article is a stub), and if so, update the article from DNB

A number of templates are provided to mark-up entries:


 * mnl the link runs to a wrong person; - produces the text: . It is preferable to amend the link by adding a disambiguator to make it red, if an article for the correct person cannot be found
 * dn the link runs to a dab page - produces the text . It is preferable to amend the link by adding a disambiguator to make it red, if an article for the correct person cannot be found
 * tick the link has been checked and runs to the correct person - ✅
 * tick tick the text of the linked article has been checked against DNB text and would not benefit from additional DNB text - ✅ ✅
 * tick cross the text of the linked article looks short enough to suggest it would benefit from additional DNB text - ✅

Note that before creating new articles based on DNB text you should undertake searches to check that the article's subject does not already have an article. It is easily possible that the disambiguation used in this page is not the disambiguation used in an existing wikipedia article. Equally, feel free to improve upon the disambiguation used in redlinks on this page by amending them.

Supplement articles:

Because of the provenance of the listing, a number of the original articles will not in fact be in the announced volume, but in one of the three supplement volumes published in 1901. Since the DNB did not include articles about living people, this will be the case whenever the date of death is after the publication date of the attributed volume. In due course there will be a separate listing.

General thoughts:

This project is intended as a new generation in “merging encyclopedias”, as well as being one of the most ambitious attempted. For general ideas of where we are, and some justification of the approach being taken, see the essay Merging encyclopedias.

Helpful access templates:

There are two templates to help link to the correct page: and. The page number automatically link to the correct url for the page at the Internet Archive site.

and

if a  parameter is used in place of   then the templates also link the DNB article on Wikisource: