Meta:Historical/Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia

This page is kept for historical interest. Any policies mentioned may be obsolete. If you want to revive the topic, you can use the talk page or start a discussion on the community forum.

This page is obsolete; see Britannica Public Domain/Status

These articles are from the first volume of a very old public domain encyclopedia. Most of them will need some rewriting and updating.

This page is an excellent idea...

I've been adding articles from the PGE but I didn't know this page was here. I'm working on some scripts to automate adding more articles from the PGE, so hopefully there will be quite a lot more articles brought over. Ideally, the articles will get updated and revised, but I would think we want that regardless of source. Is it really useful to update this page? It seems like one more maintenance nightmare to me. I'd rather see people monitor the Recent Changes page.

I used a couple of throwaway scripts to make a similar page for tracking the status of the CIA World Factbook porting effort. CIA World Factbook/Status

Turns out the port was further along than I though, at the time, but the page still highlighted some areas that had been missed or needed further attention. If one could go through and pull out, semiautomagically, all the article titles from the "Gutanicca" source and put it into a page as free links, those that already had pages versus those that had question marks next to them would make it obvious to people what most needed the work. Monitoring Recent Changes is good, but extracting the "what needs to be ported yet from Britannica" signal from the rest of the churn there isn't necessarily straightforward.

See Britannica Public Domain/Status

I would have put it here, but afaik, usemod only allows one level of subpages. If not, maybe it could be moved here?

I've done some of the porting as well, some time back, and we do not want all of the articles ported over. Honestly. Many of them, yes, perhaps more than half; but even some of the country articles are so terribly dated that it can take hours and hours of research to update and verify even one sentence, and in each case where I had to do that, there were still bits which could not be verified because of changing boundaries and names. Expect similar problems in other articles. I'm not trying to dampen your enthusiasm; just to encourage you to pick subjects which are unlikely to have changed much at all unless you are willing to spend quite a lot of time researching and updating as well. For instance, the last two I added, which required the least amount of change, were Ale and Almond. You can see I have a weakness for material which can simply be cut and pasted as is or very nearly so; perhaps you aren't leery of dedicating more time per article than I; and if that's the case then by all means disregard this message. :-) --KQ

See also : Wikipedia Projects