Wikisource:WikiProject 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica

This project relates to the adding of the 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica to Wikisource. This edition is considered one of the best reference works of all time, and was the biggest edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica with:


 * 29 volumes
 * 44 million words
 * 40,000 articles written by over 1,500 authors within their various fields of expertise.

As such, it was considered to represent a summary of human knowledge in the early 20th Century.

Sub-pages

 * /faq — Frequently Asked Questions for the project; look here first for the answers to your questions.
 * /Style Manual
 * /Transclusion
 * /Advertisement

Disclaimer

 * See Project disclaimers/1911 Encyclopædia Britannica

Structure and points of discussion
This is a work in progress, feel free to add to the list of things to consider ;)
 * Layout: images, navigation etc.
 * Organising wikipedians for this mammoth task.
 * Linking to corresponding articles on Wikipedia where appropriate
 * Creating categories for content. I.E. Cities, biographies, elements, etc.  Just like Wikipedia.
 * Providing English translations of Latin and French passages (EB1911 doesn't do this).
 * Contrasting smaller (detailed information or extended quotes) with larger fonted portions of an entry.

Style Manual

 * The EB1911 style manual is a general style manual that should be used specifically to this project. Mainly, it is a way to standardize the look and feel of going from one article to another, suggestions on formatting, and in general some tips on what to look for when trying to improve these articles over the raw text from external sources.

Using transclusion
Few people read a volume of a long encyclopaedia from cover to cover. It is a reference work, and the natural unit for the reader is the article. To do the two things at once (reproduce the paginated text, produce single articles) is quite possible, using the transclusion of whole or partial pages into other pages. For one fundamental aspect of the activity of the project, checking the text against the image of the original in our djvu files, this has a clear advantage: correction of an error found with the text next to the image will propagate into the free-standing article. And then anyone can go and verify a spelling or date (say), and make a change if one is needed.

The technical requirements to do the transclusion are twofold: markup in the Page: namespace, which is simple and something of which the reader will not be aware; and the transclusion syntax applied by the article creator, which lives on the article page.

The current position is that the project uses two styles of transclusion, and there are numerous pages created simply by article text plus header only. Therefore there are three types of pages that you will see if you go to the edit tab on a EB1911 article. The project does not prescribe which way is "correct". For more details see /Transclusion.

Using Gutenberg text to aid proofing
For most articles from "A" up to "Mecklenberg" you can use already-proofed text from Gutenberg. Converted to Wiki-format text from there is available from Dropbox along with the script used to do the conversion. Further details are available at WT:EB1911.

Wikimedia Sister Project Advertisement
The Wikimedia Sister Project Ad is a recruiting tool that is to be edited by current participants to try and get some more help here when we are ready for them. The intention is that the contents of this page will be posted in the "Water Cooler" section of the respective Wikimedia projects to advertise this project among other Wikimedia users. As of right now this is just a draft, and add comments in the Talk page about this if you don't like the tone before it gets sent out.

The targets (for now) of participation and announcement will be on Meta, Wikipedia, and Wiktionary. Wikibooks has plenty of advertising for now, although a general announcement might be in order too, at least to formally let everybody know the project is finally over here at this Wikimedia project.


 * See comment on talk pageApwoolrich 14:30, 24 September 2005 (UTC)

Participants
Add your name here with ~ if you wish to join the team!
 * GregRobson 9 July 2005 12:46 (UTC)
 * 9 July 2005 15:50 (UTC) (although I can't start until the 17th of July)
 * Robert Horning 9 July 2005 17:38 (UTC)
 * Apwoolrich 20:23, 8 August 2005 (UTC)
 * --LEMPERERUR1988 20:21, 5 September 2005 (UTC)
 * &mdash; PhilHibbs | WP:talk | talk 09:16, 13 September 2005 (UTC)
 * Brian0918 12:14, 24 October 2005 (UTC)
 * Tim Starling 03:44, 16 November 2005 (UTC)
 * J.Steinbock 02:10, 16 December 2005 (UTC)
 * Danny 04:59, 3 March 2006 (UTC)
 * Pmsyyz 08:28, 15 April 2006 (UTC)
 * Antireconciler 06:12, 17 April 2006 (UTC)
 * nikemoto2511 11:11, 27 April 2006 (UTC)
 * Jjbeard 21:58, 6 May 2006 (UTC)
 * Politicaljunkie 21:43, 12 May 2006 (UTC)
 * Banjee ca 03:02, 22 May 2006 (UTC)
 * Badbilltucker 18:25, 21 July 2006 (UTC)
 * Laverock ( Talk ) 09:06, 29 October 2006 (UTC)
 * John Kenney 03:27, 12 June 2007 (UTC)
 * Psych less  04:24, 26 June 2007 (UTC)
 * WikiKing 17:07, 5 July 2007 (UTC)
 * SQL Query me! 09:55, 13 November 2007 (UTC)
 * Chaucelle 07:56, 16 December 2007 (UTC)
 * Toby 14:47, 21 February 2008 (UTC)
 * Jeepday 19:56, 7 June 2008 (UTC)
 * Anonymous101 12:51, 10 August 2008 (UTC)
 * Bob Burkhardt (a.k.a. Library Guy) 21:36, 12 September 2008 (UTC)
 * RDBury (talk) 20:17, 20 September 2008 (UTC)
 * Dkb (talk) 03:12, 6 October 2008 (UTC)
 * &mdash; Anonymous Dissident  Talk 14:59, 18 December 2008 (UTC)
 * Manoel Fernández Msg 16:24, 16 May 2009 (UTC)
 * --Beachcomber (talk) 12:26, 21 May 2009 (UTC)
 * Innotata (talk) 22:55, 5 December 2009 (UTC)
 * --Angelprincess72 (talk) 09:43, 30 March 2010 (UTC)
 * Amir E. Aharoni (talk)
 * musicGUYGUY 01:22, 3 June 2010 (UTC)
 * --Tommy Jantarek (talk) 15:49, 19 June 2010 (UTC)
 * Htonl (talk) 13:06, 21 September 2010 (UTC)
 * (Iuio (talk) 09:04, 19 October 2010 (UTC))
 * Snarfherder (talk) 17:52, 16 December 2010 (UTC)
 * Nikolas Tales (talk) 22:46, 12 October 2012 (UTC)
 * Miszatomic (talk) 22:34, 25 February 2014 (UTC)
 * Legofan94 (talk) 02:22, 8 March 2015 (UTC)
 * Animalparty (talk) 22:43, 9 March 2015 (UTC)
 * Jklamo (talk) 17:22, 22 March 2015 (UTC)
 * Kastrel (talk) 11:41, 20 April 2016 (UTC)
 * FoxyGrampa75 (talk) 18:24, 26 August 2018 (UTC)
 * Chuntuk (talk) 12:00, 28 January 2019 (UTC)
 * DutchTreat (talk) 12:29, 21 February 2020 (UTC)

Free, public-domain sources for 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica text
Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia:
 * Project Gutenberg's Distributed Proofreaders
 * A place to help out if you want to get more EB texts available and proofread: List of Distributed Proofreaders "Britannica" projects

[http://www.archive.org/details/EncyclopaediaBritannica1911HQDJVU Encyclopaedia Britannica 11th ed. 1911], separate volumes in several formats, on the Internet Archive:


 * archive.org: ninth edition, 1878
 * archive.org: a little of the fourteenth edition, 1929

Google Book Search:
 * Format: all have machine-readable plain text, with many typos
 * Completeness: complete
 * The text is not accessible to many IP addresses outside the USA however the same sources are available at the Internet Archive (See above)

Other sources for 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica text

 * The "LoveToKnow Classic Encyclopedia" was a wiki that was "based" on the original encyclopædia text, and claimed copyright on the modified text.
 * It later displayed the notice "Thank you for visiting the 1911 encyclopedia. This site is no longer available." From 2018 it displays "404 - File or directory not found."


 * The JRank "Online Encyclopedia" includes original and contributed articles; the originals may have been edited and the collection is subject to a claimed copyright.
 * Format: mediawiki wiki text
 * Completeness: incomplete?; almost complete?
 * Quality: needs formatting and proofreading
 * includes a lot of hidden text, making copy and paste very difficult. Firefox extension CleanHide removes the hidden text to make copy and paste simple.
 * unedited, html version, from scan/ocr of the original text, with interactive alphabetical index, and Google translation into Spanish, Chinese, French, German, Russian, Hindi, Arabic and Portuguese.
 * Use Earwig's Copyvio to help proof page text using the Theodora version as a source e.g. https://copyvios.toolforge.org/?lang=en&project=wikisource&title=Page%3AEB1911+-+Volume+28.djvu%2F565&oldid=&use_engine=0&use_links=0&turnitin=0&action=compare&url=https%3A%2F%2Ftheodora.com%2Fencyclopedia%2Fw%2Fthe_west_indies.html
 * "Containing 35,820 entries cross-referenced and cross-linked to other resources on StudyLight.org". "Copyright Statement[:] these [EB 1911] files are public domain".
 * Classic EB is an aggregation of Project Gutenberg projects in Wordpress format, one post per article. As of September 14 2015, the domain seems to have reverted to its hosting site. When it was live, it had:
 * Completeness: lags PG releases.
 * Quality: Thoroughly proofed and HTML formatted.
 * Article identification: Site search; article urls have the format eb.tbicl.org/article-name (approximately).
 * Quality: Thoroughly proofed and HTML formatted.
 * Article identification: Site search; article urls have the format eb.tbicl.org/article-name (approximately).