Wikipedia:2004 Encyclopedia topics

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This is an old revision of this page, as edited by Eugene van der Pijll (talk | contribs) at 02:58, 4 May 2005. The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.

Jump to navigation Jump to search

This a list of topics from the 2004 Encyclopædia Britannica which do not have articles on Wikipedia. The list began with 28,360 articles on twenty-nine pages each with 1,000 articles, except for Page 2, which had 1,001, and Page 29, which had 359. Please fill in the missing articles or link them to existing ones. The existence of a topic title in EB is a good hint that someone will try to find the article in WP using that title.

Here's one way of going about it. Your aim is to be able to delete a red-link entry on these lists, and usually you will do that by turning it blue. First, pick an entry.

  • Find a WP article that's clearly on the same topic as the EB article.
    • Is the title the same except for truly trivial differences such as capitalization? If so, create a WP redirect and you can delete the entry from the list.
    • If the titles are significantly different (diacritics and most punctuation are significant), create a WP redirect. But first, make sure the two articles are really about the same thing. If you have any doubt, you can refer to the EB article at www.britannica.com, but remember you are reading copyrighted text.
    • Or you may need to create a disambiguation page. For example (not a real example), suppose EB has an article titled "J. Brown" that is about the WP subject John Brown, and WP also has a James Brown article. You would create a "J. Brown" disambiguation page.
    • Does the WP article contain the EB information as a subset, and is the subset obvious to the reader? If so, redirect to the WP article. For example, Blood type has a major, prominent section on the ABO system, so I created a redirect from ABO blood group system (which is an EB article) to Blood type.
    • In other "subset" cases, you may want to write a short article, using the EB title, and link directly to a subsection of the larger WP article. It’s not a stub because you aren't looking for it to be expanded; it is more like a disambig with only one target. Remember, you can't use a redirect to link to a subsection.
    • For biographies, there are lots of ways to write someone's name, and you may not know what form of the name WP is using. One useful trick is look at birth/death categories, such as Category:1816 births. Look around the category for possible alternate spellings. In practice, death years are more reliable than birth years, particularly before 1800, but both tend to be unreliable before 1500.
  • If there isn't an appropriate WP article, now's a good time to create one.
    • Remember the WP copyright rules. You may have just read the EB article as part of your search for the matching WP article; don't let that dictate what you write.
    • Use the WP naming conventions, not the EB conventions. They are different in capitalization and in many cases of personal names.
    • If you have chosen a title different from EB's title, create a redirect or disambiguation page.
    • You may be able to use material from the 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica directly. Be aware that the world has changed a lot in a century, and 1911EB is not so useful for science or geography; but comparison of 1911 and 2004 entries for, say, 18th-century French dramatists shows that the 1911 versions are often more informative than the 2004 versions. Also, the online versions of the 1911 Britannica are uncorrected optical scans of the printed books, and the scanning process is particularly bad at picking up diacritics, so do check spellings of non-English words against other sources.
  • Remove the article from these lists. Batch them if you are working on several at a time. You will sometimes see that some other links have turned blue thanks to work by other Wikipedians (send them silent thanks). Be careful and double-check your editing; it is too easy to delete the wrong line, and it is unlikely that anyone will check your work.
  • Finally, if you have done a significant number of deletions, return to this page and edit the "% done" comment.

Table

(Some %done figures are too conservative)

Conservative estimate of red links removed: 19.8%

See also:

Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:2004_Encyclopedia_topics&oldid=13214938"