Talk:Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition/Archive 3

message: I see the article no longer includes such an assertion, but in case anyone is tempted to put it back ... the 9th, 11th and 14th were all quite different, perhaps can be thought of on a rough continuum from scholarly to popular.  To a different user, one or the other might be best.  The 9th was perhaps the last to serve as a significant tool of scholarship; the 11th culturally significant; and the 14th easy to read and rather ubiquitous.flux.books 17:04, 24 February 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: "Best edition"

message: The article references this "article" - but it's just one person's opinion, not an authoritative source, so please treat it as that. In no sense is the author an expert; he's a bookseller.   A few problems of note:
* He discusses it as a work of reference; the current version of the WP article does a good job of making it clear that it has to be used with great care in that way.  ("Among all my reference books, there is one standout, a star")
* He's loose with the facts.  The EB was of course published after the Encyclopedie; 
* Unsupported opinions / bias: "19th century saw the descent of the form into an academic exercise in navel-gazing. New editions of the Britannica were very scholarly and learned but none were particularly readable or even useful to a general audience, as they featured tediously long and ponderously dense entries."  What a shame that those poor 19th c. people had to settle for such an EB - it could have been so much more entertaining!  I suppose serving as a major tool for the diffusion and advancement of knowledge might be some small consolation, but not much.
* It's superficial, and doesn't really get the story right.  The parts about the edge or slant of editions are, in particular, not to be relied on.
Anyway, enough on that.  If you want expertise, look elsewhere, including the authors at the bottom of encyclopedia.flux.books 16:59, 24 February 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Joslin Hall article

message: I've revised this phrase in the first paragraph.  As it stood, it was inappropriately prescriptive, and so sweeping as to be inaccurate.  Rather than try to craft a way to inject this into the brief summary paragraph, better to just mention the issue and leave it for a proper discussion in the article.  It is ultimately a discussion of something rather obvious, anyway. flux.books 12:35, 15 March 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: "should not be used as a sole primary source"

message: Some good new content has been added in the past couple months.  But the use of this phrase creates some problems: "The eleventh edition pioneered a number of conventions of the modern encyclopedia."  
"It was the first encyclopedia to be issued with a comprehensive index volume in which was added a categorical index, where like topics were listed"  Not at all convinced the index of the 11th was innovative enough to be worth mentioning, that's an obtuse claim to fame.  Both those features had been seen much earlier, if indeed this was the first time they were both included, it's not that remarkable.
And this ... "It was the first to break away from the convention of long treatise-length articles" is completely unsupportable.  First for the EB, but not the first modern encyclopedia ... see the Encyclopedia Americana and any of the Conversations Lexikon versions dating back 100 years earlier.  If anything, that was a perhaps belated competitive response by EB, and a result of the attempt to popularize it as American influence increased. flux.books 12:46, 15 March 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: "pioneer" of modern encyclopedias!?- index, article length 

message: One positive and one negative quote is sufficient and balanced. It is POV to keep piling on quotes and bad form to have an article with so many quotes one right after the next, it reads like a war of the quotes, like editors trying to outdo each other with quotes.  -- Stbalbach 01:41, 31 March 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Well, that's a step in the right direction.  But it's not POV if it's true, no need to toss out that epithet.  "one positive and one negative" is not a good approach when there is no real debate; for example, there is no one who seriously thinks the 14th is an exceptional or unique encyclopedia in a broad view.  A plausible contrary view might be more in favor of the ninth edition, or the third, but not the 14th.  flux.books 16:09, 1 April 2006 (UTC)

text: By the way, Clark is hardly an authority on the subject, the quote is there for other reasons.  flux.books 16:14, 1 April 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Too many quotes 

message: The racist quote I added is outrageous enough that I imagine some people will think it's a hoax. It's not; it's on page 344 of Volume 19. —Chowbok 04:17, 4 April 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: That edited quote did indeed come from page 344 of Volume 19, but the article is on "Negritos", not "Negros". Wizened 22:34, 12 May 2006 (UTC)
replies: text:  Hmm, I don't think so... the scan of the page is here, and the quoted text appears to be in the Negro article.  (The article does, to be fair, go on to attribute much of the claimed racial differences to environment, rather than only race; but so far as it goes, the quote seems accurate.) TSP 23:15, 12 May 2006 (UTC)

text: My source was the 1911 online enclyclopedia britannica (which is referenced in this article). The link is []. If you then go to the index and look up the article on Negros, you will find that the quote is not repeated there. Wizened 00:35, 13 May 2006 (UTC)
replies: text:  Indeed - that version seems to have some text transferred from the Negro article into the Negrito article.  If you look at the second paragraph of its Negrito article, you'll see the Negrito article end with its list of references; then some material from the Negro article starts in the middle of a sentence.  The Love To Know] version has the text in its correct order, though numerous scanning errors make it hard to read.  Because of the low quality of all the completed text versions, it's generally best to check stuff against the [en.wikisource.org/wiki/User:Tim_Starling scans]. TSP 12:52, 13 May 2006 (UTC)

text: I stand corrected. I tracked down someone who owns a copy of the original 1911 set and he verified that the OCR version which I referenced has mixed the two articles -- as you suggested. Your quote is correctly attributed. Wizened 19:43, 16 May 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  "Negro" quote 

message: It seems to me that this article is trying to do two things - firstly, to be an encyclopedia article on the 11th edition of Britannica; and secondly, to be a guide to how to use Britannica in writing wikipedia articles.  It seems to me that it might be useful to split it in two, with a normal encyclopedia article here, and a discussion of its use in wikipedia at Wikipedia:Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition to deal with the other stuff.  Is there any other article on a reference work from a century ago that talks about how its articles on science are out of date?  It is unfair to the 1911 Britannica for half of its article to be a guide to how to use the 1911 britannica on wikipedia. john k 01:18, 28 July 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I disagree this article is a guide on how to write Wikipedia articles. There is already a Wikipedia guide on using EB1911 (see links top of this page). -- Stbalbach 01:43, 28 July 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: In that case, I'm going to suggest that there's no need for most of the "1911 Britannica in the 21st Century" section.  Most of this is OR, as far as I can tell, and not based on what reliable secondary sources say about the 11th edition.  And there is certainly no need for the discussions of copyright status of the different online versions, which is not of any interest to anyone besides wikipedia editors. john k 17:18, 28 July 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I disagree. This information is relevant and accurate. -- Stbalbach 17:24, 28 July 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I agree with both (and thanks, Stbalbach, for waiting for a consensus). MO: Describing the online sources, and the different ways in which they may differ from the ur-version, are relevant and encyclopediac in the electronic age. Agreed that some of the text near the end, including what I added, was written from the POV of someone using it as a free source for WP (would not belong). However, you can argue (I'll let others judge) that it successfully acts as a guide on whether you can use the online versions as a free source for any purpose (would belong). To the extent it is WP-specific, I would move that somewhere else. The problem is where? We have about two too many project and talk pages on how to use the EB text as a WP source, as the 1911 subproject of Wikipedia:WikiProject Missing encyclopedic articles has gone through several stages. David Brooks 17:40, 28 July 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: If there's going to be a discussion of the online versions, it should not be written in the way that it is, and it should be in a section of the article, not the external links section (as we already do for the Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia).  In terms of the "the encyclopedia in the 21st century" section, I think that Stbalbach ought to provide some citations for any of the bulleted points.  Until that is done, it is OR and should be removed.  I'll give him a couple of days to provide references.  BTW, David Brooks, you're not that David Brooks, are you? john k 18:06, 28 July 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: No, and I'm not User:DavidWBrooks either, despite my middle initial being W :-). Back to topic - I see your point about OR (although the sections are a plain recitation of fact) but I would still urge that we keep the simple list of links with the important warning "Versions of this public domain work claiming copyright". Then we should move the warning about the IP taint somewhere it will be seen by any Wikipedians who might want to import from those sites. I just did that to Wikipedia:WikiProject Missing encyclopedic articles. There aren't many of us left, anyway. When I want to add 1911 factoids, I retype from the TIFF scans. David Brooks 19:48, 28 July 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Well, I think there needs to be some kind of change in the links.  Whatever you think is best would be okay with me.  And I don't think that bulleted list is a plain recitation of fact, if that's what you mean to say.  Much of it is vague and unsourced, like the part about "hagiographies" of "nobility". john k 20:54, 28 July 2006 (UTC)

text: So how about this: keep the introductory warning line in place, and reduce the lists to the external link and the sentence that duplicates their copyright notices. But first give Stbalbach and/or me time to (a) put some stronger warnings into any project pages that might be seen by users of 1911 text (b) move the bulk of those two current paragraphs into this talk page. David Brooks 22:50, 28 July 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  This article's a bit schizophrenic 

message: If you want to add cite tags that's fine, but you don't delete things unless you think they are wrong, and can provide some rationale or reason on why they are wrong. If you think something is wrong, then delete it, and defend your position on the talk page. If you think it's OR, then add a cite tag.  You did delete it, but you didn't defend your position on why it's factually wrong, just some wishy washy argument about schizophrenia that doesn't address why the section is factually incorrect. --Stbalbach 01:43, 29 July 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: The material is pretty blatantly OR.  Are you saying it's not?  Also, some of the points are incredibly dubious - the one about "hagiographies" of "nobility" for instance. john k 10:53, 29 July 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Now I'm confused, because I don't know what you are pointing to as OR. This discussion started with the descriptions of the external links but that's not where the hagiography stuff is. Can you provide a list? David Brooks 20:17, 29 July 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: The discussion started with two points, actually - I removed the descriptions of the external links, and also greatly changed and shortened the "The 11th edition in the 21st century" section.  I think this section consists very largely of OR (in that there is no evidence that anyone besides the writer of that section in this wikipedia article has actually made the claims being propounded there), and several of the points are not only OR, but inherently questionable (the claim that articles on nobility are hagiography, for instance, which, at best, is using a number of the wrong words and isn't saying what it intends to.) john k 20:40, 29 July 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I agree the three cited cases were OR - I had not written them originally and assumed they were accurate, but when I went to verify (I own a hard copy set), there are no entries for those three in the encyclopedia at all (perhaps under different names but I didn't pursue it). But the rest of it is objective and verifiable by looking at the EB1911. If you need more direct quoting let me know. -- Stbalbach 00:50, 30 July 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Stbalbach, I'm happy to accept, in my capacity as an educated person, that you are correct in your characterization of the 11th Edition of Britannica.  But looking through your copy of the 11th edition and finding examples of various problems that you identify is pretty clearly original research.  What you need to find are reliable secondary sources which identify these problems with the 11th Edition.  For some of the points, I'm sure this could be found - for instance, the introduction to the 14th edition of Britannica probably discusses the reasons that an update was felt to be necessary, and gives some of them.  But as it stands it's OR. john k 00:59, 31 July 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: John, your missing the point of OR. OR was not written to keep out obvious facts. The source in this case is the EB1911, it speaks for its self - it is self-evident - it is not "research" to say the President of the United States made an error in his speech - you don't need to find a third party who said "the President made an error", you just say "The President made an error, here is the source/quote ..". Stating the obvious is not OR. We have tons of articles on WP that state plain facts. I mean, saying EB1911 has lots of errors  because of its age and is therefore problematic for researching is mainstream, common knowledge. As for a EB14th intro I doubt it, they are usually not critical of their own products, and many of these problems would not become problems until much later so you would need a recent critical review of the EB1911 which probably does not exist (I sure can't find one). John, people normally cite OR when they disagree with something - you seem to agree that the section is correct - why are you making an issue over it? -- Stbalbach 01:47, 31 July 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: It's more or less correct, but I think it's undue weight to have a long discussion of entirely predictable flaws of a hundred year old encyclopedia.  Of course they have outdated racial ideas, and of course a lot of the science is wrong, and of course information about geographical locations is out of date.  Why is this interesting?  Is this providing any information beyond what the mere fact that it was written in 1911 gives us?  Beyond that, it is pretty clearly original research.  I think it's fine to say the EB1911 has a lot of errors because of its age, but getting into specific examples is original research, in that you are looking at the encyclopedia yourself, analyzing it, and putting your analysis into the article. john k 16:54, 31 July 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Actually, it may be obvious to you, but it is not to a lot of people. The EB1911 is being copied, quoted and reproduced probably more than any other reference work on the Internet. It specifically mentions that. As for OR, I really think your taking the rule to an extreme - you already agree that information is correct, your being technical about the rule for other reasons - your using it in a way it was not intended to be used. I could point to countless examples of similar situations on Wikipedia where we don't flag things as OR because there is a common understanding they are factually correct. Also it's hardly "research" or "original" to open the EB1911 and point out errors in it which are on every page, it's not like you have to hunt them out. The EB1911 is the source and the errors speak for themselves, you don't need a third party source to repeat what is self-evident. If the President of the United States says after 9/11 that we are going on a "Crusade", we quote the President directly and point out his "mistake", we don't need a third party source, it is self-evident, the Presidents quote is the source. -- Stbalbach 12:25, 1 August 2006 (UTC)

text: Of course it is OR to open up a book and point out errors that nobody else has noticed before.  That's the definition of OR - you're doing your own research and including it on wikipedia.  And we can't call the president hypothetically calling a war a "Crusade" a "mistake."  That would not only be OR, it would be POV,  because "crusade" is a word which has a  meaning in the English language beyond the strict sense.  But even for basic factual errors, I don't think we're supposed to discuss them unless somebody else has (which usually they have).  For instance, we can talk about Keats' mistake of "Cortez" for "Balboa" in "On First Looking into Chapman's Homer" because this is a famous mistake that has been noted many times.  But do you really think that it would be perfectly appropriate for me to mention that the 11th edition of Britannica contains the inaccurate claim in its article on Anjou that Charles I of Sicily was the son, rather than the brother, of Louis IX of France?  That's a completely true statement, but it's OR to point it out, and it doesn't belong in wikipedia.  Clearly you have an agenda here, which is that you are irritated that stupid people use the 1911 Britannica in an uncritical way.  And of course it is unfortunate that stupid people use the 1911 Britannica in an uncritical way.  But that doesn't give you the right to engage in OR to "prove" that the thing is unreliable, which is, at any rate, obvious to anyone with a brain. john k 15:51, 1 August 2006 (UTC)

text: (OK, so I lost count of the colons) But people ("stupid" is POV) using 1911 in an uncritical way has damaged Wikipedia. As I labor in the verification vineyard I find verbatim imports that aren't even tagged as 1911 material, let alone rewritten. Now, the damage may already be done and unlikely to be extended, bit I'd still like to ask - how would you (John) prevent people from damaging WP by using 1911 uncritically? I've made a suggestion (place a warning on the likely entrypoints for people using 1911 material, such as project pages and talk pages including this one) and started to implement it; is that enough? And I assume we agree that it's not our business to prevent people from abusing 1911 in any other part of their lives. David Brooks 16:46, 1 August 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Any problem inspired by concern with editing problems should be dealt with in the Wikipedia namespace, not in the main namespace. Your suggestion sounds fine to me. It might be a good idea to create a page specifically about use of 1911 in wikipedia, and cautioning against misuse, and suchlike.  Although, I fear, the damage has already been done.  (For a fun example, see Annam (French colony), which includes the verbatim text of the history section of 1911, combined with a recommendation to ignore that section because it's inaccurate, and go to History of Vietnam instead.) john k 17:53, 1 August 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: We already have a page Wikipedia:1911 Encyclopaedia Britannica. But Wikipedia is not written for Wikipedia editors, it is written for the general public, including kids in Africa and middle school students etc.. and EB1911 is notable as a resource for a number reasons: it was once marketed as "the sum of all knowledge" and this "myth" is still alive and active, it is out of copyright and is probably the number one most widely copied and distributed work of its type on the internet, CD-Roms, Project Gutenberg, etc.. thus discussing it in a critical manner is not only appropriate, but needed - not for Wikipedia editors (we already have a page for that), but for anyone who is reading the article. The problem is there are no recent modern critical reviews of EB1911 to satisfy the technical requirement of OR, but it is a common mainstream and widely accepted view and should not be excluded from Wikipedia on OR grounds.  -- Stbalbach 18:32, 1 August 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: The job of wikipedia is not didactic moralizing.  That much of it is out of date is obviously true, but I don't see any particular need to go into detail, because the ways it is out of date are completely predictable, and can be deduced by anyone based on the fact that it was put out in 1911.  And if your criticisms are a commonly held view, it should not be difficult to find citations.  If there are no citations, then it is original research, and shouldn't be here.  There are all kinds of positives that one could note about the 11th edition of Britannica, ways in which it has information that later versions do not (more detailed geography, for instance, and more detail on political events in medieval and early modern European history), but mentioning those would also be original research, because we don't have a source talking about them. john k 19:21, 1 August 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: It has nothing to do with morality, it is called "criticism", Wikipedia contains criticisms of works. 'it should not be difficult to find citations - than please find one. It is difficult no one has published a recent critical review of EB1911, that I can find. And they are not just my criticisms, they are yours, and just about everyones "who has a brain", as you put it. The real problem here is the OR rule has no qualifier or rule for "common knowledge with no source available". This is a known and recognized weakness in the OR rule and people are looking at it as we speak, this is not the first time the problem has come up. -- Stbalbach 21:19, 1 August 2006 (UTC)

text: Ok, can you post here "a brief general discussion of the main points of the section" as you envision it? In the meantime I'm still working on finding sources, and discussing OR and common knowledge. -- Stbalbach 04:26, 2 August 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Original research

message: Few days ago I 've seen somewhere a .tar of the eb1911 but I cant find it today. Any ideas? —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 62.1.143.209 (talk) 07:36, 18 December 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Is a tarball one of the Project Gutenberg formats?  But I think those only cover the first few letters of the alphabet.  (SEWilco 20:30, 24 December 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: A "tarball" (see tar (file format)) of the entire EB1911 would most likely be a pirate copy as I am not aware of any full digital version in the public domain, scanned or otherwise. PG is working on creating one, but only part way through. -- Stbalbach 00:13, 26 December 2006 (UTC)

text: Interesting, thanks. -- Stbalbach 05:14, 29 December 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  1911 tarball 

message: I'm not persuaded this is true.  I notice there's a cite (to a non-internet source, so I can't verify its specifics) on this sentence; perhaps it should read, "So and so wrote, 'This uses a lot of dated...'"  As I said, I find it a questionable claim anyway.  It's a different style of writing, but saying it "confounds" people is a bit excessive.  Unless someone can point to a passage that's truly so "alien" to modern sensibilities that an intelligent person can't figure it out.  --GenkiNeko 19:18, 25 January 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  "dated literary devices which often confound a modern reader" 

message: I have added law to the list "science, technology, and medicine, " in the section 1911 Britannica in the 21st century because it cropped up in the Wikipedia article Annexation. The original article was added to massively when text from EB1911 was dumped into it Revision as of 10:37, 3 September 2005. The trouble is that such text can not possibly cover the very lage changes that have taken place in international law over the last 95 years (UN charter just for one). So for many legal issues EB1911 is not a reliable source. --Philip Baird Shearer 10:32, 24 May 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: Law

message: the internal link to Charles Simmons within wikipedia itself is wrong. The Charles Simmons who put together with someone else
an anthology of readings from the Britannica Eleventh Edition is NOT the lniked-to Charles Simmons....He could not have been born in the 1800s and I know he is a contemporary writer...he wrote Powdered Eggs among other novels.  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 24.0.158.66 (talk) 01:04, 17 September 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: (The above comment moved from an inappropriate location) Please feel free to make those changes. Wikipedia is a wiki. David Brooks 03:20, 17 September 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: I've created a disambiguation page to fix the obvious error but knowing nothing of the author I'll leave to others the writing.--Doug.(talk • contribs) 02:16, 7 October 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Charles Simmons 

message: The topic of short articles often comes up on Wikipedia, so I think it would be good to explore that a little.  The smallest article I have seen in EB1911 is Accius/s:1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Accius. John Vandenberg 03:05, 22 October 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  article length 

message: (Excuse the lack of tagging/markup)
"It also allows the original Encyclopedia Britannica text to be corrupted by contributors; for example, as of September 14, 2007, the article Mormons contains unreverted substantive changes to the main text that had been in place for five months."
Corrupted? Sounds a bit like an opinion to me 71.167.31.98 (talk) 04:51, 20 December 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: I was using the term in a technical sense to indicate that the website's text could be intentionally changed from the ur-text. I think that's what you would call it if an old, established text is modified by intervening scribes and presented back to the reader. It wasn't intended pejoratively, as you seem to suggest. David Brooks (talk) 05:15, 20 December 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  POV 

message: Just to say you can download the entire collection through BitTorrent at the Pirate Bay. I assume that because the original was gotten from Wikisource, in individual page tiff files, the torrent and data hosted at piratebay are legitimate. Yes, the material is under GNU FDLThis should be worth mentioning on the main page for those who may want to download chunks or the whole encyclopedia. Britannica collection, djvu
--Randomuser756756 (talk) 06:45, 21 March 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  Download entire collection in djvu 

message: What makes the 1911 edition public domain? Is it simply that 70 years have passed, or some other simple factor of age? If so, why is not a later edition from pre-1939, such as the 12th or 13th editions, or whatever was put out after 1911 but before 70 years ago, the more commonly used, cited, as a public domain source?
Why did the Gutenberg Project choose the 1911 Edition, and not the 1912 or 1920 or 1925 or 1933 edition to publish online as a free document? LordAmeth (talk) 19:52, 6 January 2009 (UTC)
replies: text: I can't speak for Gutenberg's decision. The 12th edition is in the public domain on the same basis as the 11th: it was published before 1923.  It's rarely mentioned because all it did is add three supplementary volumes to the 11th.  The 13th only replaced those three volumes; the copyright was never renewed.  The copyrights on the early 14th were not renewed for anything published before 1946.  This may have been the result of a change of ownership; the new owners may not have had the right to make such renewals. Eclecticology (talk) 20:39, 1 February 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  Why 1911? 

message: The statement that "Contemporaneous belief ... often prevailed in the Encyclopedia's articles" is a truism.  Any reputable encyclopedia exists to inform by stating contemporaneous (surely contemporary?) knowledge and belief.  It it obvious that, as human knowledge expands and beliefs change, a large proportion of the articles will at a later time be found to be out-of-date in statements of knowledge or unfashionable in their statements of belief.  The first example selected as noteworthy must have at the time have been a seriously considered statement, though unfashionable now, and that premise like anything that can be measured can be a subject of research, unless we live in a totalitarian state and afraid of discovery and approaching truths.  If we consider "belief" being synonymous with "convenient opinion without tested foundation masquerading as knowledge" (this is my own definition), then at the time that was a belief.  Now there are better methods of research, whether or not that belief was justified may now actually be quantifed.  It does not seem unreasonable to suppose that over a long period of time (we are talking about thousands of years and hundreds of generations) living beings would have different attributes attributable to the environment.
I would suggest that the first example may not as worthy of our scorn as it's inclusion intends it to be, and the second example was probable a quotation from a remark made in jest.  My conclusion is that neither are very good examples.
There are examples of "strange" beliefs to be found in many articles in the 1911 encyclopedia.  We take it for granted that knowledge moves forward (while beliefs wobble) because it was published in 1911 and it's now 2009.  Don't pick on beliefs as examples, they may be there yesterday, gone today, and back tomorrow!
P0mbal (talk) 22:08, 30 October 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  1911 Britannica in the 21st Century