Wikipedia:WikiProject Missing encyclopedic articles/1911 verification

This project’s sub-pages have lists of Wikipedia articles that were included in the original listing of article topics, and may have inadequate or outdated information. They seemed to correspond with entries in the 1911 Encyclopaedia Britannica Eleventh Edition, or once had a or  reference template added. Many of these Wikipedia articles contain largely identical copies of the century-old text, which brings with it two significant problems:
 * 1) In many cases, the single general reference template, usually in the footer material, is still all that we have. Current citation practice requires that at least each paragraph of the article have an acknowledgement of its source, especially when the text is still a significant copy. Worse, there may be other material (sourced or not) interpolated or added to the original material
 * 2) While the 1911 Encyclopaedia was one of the most complete encyclopedias of its era, it has become dated as territories have changed, technology improved and prevailing social attitudes have changed. In addition, some of the Encyclopaedia Britannica Eleventh Edition entries may have been loaded into Wikipedia based on uncritical use of available online copies, which may themselves have suffered from scanning errors, the insertion of inauthentic text, or wholesale deletions. In the intervening years many of these problems have been cleaned up; many remain.

Editors can help on three fronts: detailed attributions, verification, and general reference notation.

Attributions
If the article contains verbatim text from the Encyclopaedia, it's important to acknowledge the source explicitly to avoid plagiarism charges. The choice of method may take note of the article's current citation style (mostly inline or mostly harvard-style). If the source article is longer than a page, it is advisable to use the first method with a p parameter to help a reviewer locate the original text.
 * If the article is, in large part, substantially a copy of the original, include a standalone notation in the at the bottom of the References section. If there is more than one entry in the References section you should add a heading of the form, and then use the  template with parameters (see below). In addition, mark each paragraph (or sentence if appropriate) using the {{{tl|sfn}} template or equivalent.
 * If it has multiple sources but contains isolated sentences substantially copied from the Encyclopaedia, mark them with a &lt;ref&gt; tag containing the template with an inline=1 parameter. This will make the footnote text explain that it’s a copy.

Verification
Since the main project's activity in 2006, incremental changes by Wikipedia editors have fixed many of the issues outlined in this section. You will occasionally find an error to be fixed, but they are now much less common than they were. Ideally, though, these steps should still be taken because a small number of errors can still be found.

If the article contains verbatim text from the Encyclopaedia, it may need some basic copy-editing. Try to use an authentic copy, such as that at archive.org, for reference.

First, check for scanning errors. The original scans were of good quality, but there are occasional mistakes and garbled text, and often missing diacritics. Sometimes, a footnote in the original book was included as part of the article that happened to be at the bottom of the page. Compare with a good-quality scan to be sure.

Next, be alert for outdated information, or inappropriate point of view, and edit boldly. If you feel that the article is still in serious need of updating, include the template in the main page or talk page.

"Further reading" or "External links" sections
If the Wikipedia article needs neither attribution nor citation, but you think the Encyclopaedia article is interesting for additional (particularly historical) insight, then add an entry to Further Reading or External Links:
 * If the Encyclopaedia article exists in the Wikisource copy, then use:
 * template — with the Wikisource article name as the only parameter.
 * template — with at least ArticleName and x.

Template parameters
Both the and  templates should be used with the appropriate parameters:
 * wstitle= if the Encyclopaedia article is in Wikisource, else title=. For the importance of adding at least a title/wstitle parameter, see this category page.
 * display= if the Wikisource title is not the same as the title in the printed Encyclopaedia (for example, if Wikisource includes a disambiguation tag)
 * inline=1 if necessary (see Attributions above)
 * volume=, which you can get from the Wikisource index
 * page= or pages=, which is often found to the left of the Wikisource article, but in some cases you can only get from a scan of the printed book which can be found at s:Index:EB1911 - Volume 01.djvu (replace 01 with the appropriate volume number), or from other archives (see Free, public-domain sources for 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica text).

Using EB1911 as a supplementary source
There are some rare cases where you can add EB1911 text to an existing article. If you don't want to do so immediately, you can use the template to indicate to another editor that the article could usefully have 1911 text added to it. Eventually, tagged articles should be fixed. They can be found in Category:1911 Britannica articles needing updates or Category:Articles needing improvement from EB1911. When the article has been fixed, the template can be removed. It would be polite to leave a note on the talk page.

Update the lists
Finally, when an article has been checked, edit the appropriate subpage: remove the template and add a note after the trailing hyphen. This will help with automatic calculation of the statistics. It's possible we will want to do another review pass, so lines should not be deleted, but articles can be considered done when they have been basically checked for accuracy and appropriateness, and have at least one of the 1911 templates.

See the guidelines at the project page for detailed instructions on creating new articles.