Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Missing encyclopedic articles/Hot/1

message: Is there a reciprocal list of topics that Wikipedia has (substantial) articles on that are not found in the Encyclopedia Britannica? Courtland 02:56, 2005 Feb 28 (UTC)
:It would be at least 400,000 articles in length for English WP (480,000 vs 80,000), and not of much use for helping fill in WP gaps, so no. Stan 05:08, 28 Feb 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: If you delete the entries that are done, the count will go down and you can see your progress, can be a useful motivator ("just five more before bed, to get below 800!"). Dash was needed as a separator before Danny numbered the entries, now they're just detritus. One could add annotations I suppose, although IMHO if you know enough to add a note, you know enough to create a worthwhile stub. Another suggestion is to edit the lists to lower-case terms that are not proper names - no one is ever ever going to make a link to "Poultry Processing" instead of "poultry processing", so those redirs will always be pointless. Changing those links will show that we have a lot more of these articles than is apparent now. Stan 00:02, 9 Mar 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Well, looking at a random sample (page 1) it seems that Danny set the convention by using the "delete when it turns blue" rule, while some other links are turning blue and being left there. For example Abram Stevens Hewitt was created just a few days ago (I don't know if it was in response to this list or coincidence), while I have just created a couple of redirects for items 1 and 3. Having the page gradually going blue is almost as good a motivator as having it shrink, and saves waiting for the database to update :-) But I'll delete if that's the best idea; should it be listed as a convention on this project page, or even on the :Category:Wikipedia missing topics page? David Brooks 01:12, 9 Mar 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: If the page never shrinks, then the numbers are kind of pointless... Lots of articles do show up due to other activity. I find it most efficient to do the prune once in a while. Wouldn't hurt to mention somewhere. Stan 13:32, 9 Mar 2005 (UTC)

text: I take a moment to think - what are the chances that someone will ever create a link using that phrase as the title? The chances are nonzero, because you're looking at one :-), but there are other circumstances. For instance, last name only, without accents, umlauts, etc is what a US reader will likely type into the search box. If the odd title seems more like an artifact of the software's crunching of titles ("Abo" instead of "ABO" for instance), I'm less inclined for the redir. If "ABO Blood Group System" is an official name, then the redir is good, because people do Google official names of things. Stan 13:32, 9 Mar 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: OK, got it; will delete the few I know about on page 1. It might help, though, if someone could run another bot trying a case-insensitive match of the titles. It would catch a fair number and would be useful to verify deletions. David Brooks 16:49, 9 Mar 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Reciprocal list of topics 

message: We have Wikipedia:2004 Encyclopedia topics, Wikipedia:1911 Encyclopedia topics and Wikipedia:List of encyclopedia topics (generated from various sources). Beyond a mere "tiding up" exercise I can see several advantages to merging the lists. Does anyone object if I do that? Pcb21| Pete 17:55, 28 Mar 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: I'd rather keep them separate - for the 1911 topics it's always possible to tell what is meant by looking at the online copies, while for 2004 you have to have access to a modern EB. The big list, it's not always possible to tell what the intended subject is supposed to be. This is not as arcane an issue as one might think; two examples that I bump into a lot are German names of now-Polish towns, and last names that could mean both a modern person and an older one. If the lists are mixed up, it's going to take more time to study multiple sources (almost by definition, the missing topics are all pretty obscure to begin with). It's also easier to keep score when you can compare EB topic lists without having a lot of other stuff interpolated. Stan 00:46, 30 Mar 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Oops sorry missed your response the other day Stan. As I said at Wikipedia_talk:List of encyclopedia topics I would retain origin information in the merged list. I set up an example of how it might work at User:Pcb21/list temp. Pcb21| Pete 15:44, 1 Apr 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: Several "lists of things of things Wikipedia hasn't got"

message: 4.250.132.69's change said: redirects are important ESPECIALLY for "truly trivial differences such as capitalization" but no reason why. In the discussion above, Stan says: no one is ever ever going to make a link to "Poultry Processing" instead of "poultry processing", so those redirs will always be pointless.
I'd side with Stan because of the behavior of the Go button. If someone enters "Poultry Processing" in the box, the software finds "Poultry processing" for them. Proper capitalization is only important for people who try to construct a link, and how often does that cause a problem? Last night I changed "Arpad Dynasty" to "Arpad dynasty" just to make sure the link turned blue. Does anyone else have an argument here? Danny? David Brooks 16:26, 29 Mar 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: I err on the side of creating the orphan redirects because all the value they add is tiny, the downside is even smaller (0) Pcb21| Pete 18:15, 29 Mar 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Not quite zero - if an article is moved, each redirs has to be updated separately. Stan 00:48, 30 Mar 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: I support making those redirects. People often use improper capitalization in articles (see the bird articles, for instance, or any other animal articles), and the links may appear empty, causing someone to create a duplicate article with slightly different capitalization. It doesn't really hurt to have them, and at worst, it causes pipes, which are easily fixed when found. BTW, some hints for places to look for what the articles are. I use http://www.britannica.com and http://www.probert-encyclopaedia.co.uk. Both have long lists that can be used to identify subjects, decide if it needs a disambiguation page or a redirect, etc. Also, the information can sometimes be used to start a stub. Danny 01:33, 30 Mar 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Thanks, Danny, makes sense. I'll fix the places where I deleted an entry on the basis of a differently capitalized article - if I can find them in the histories. David Brooks 01:52, 30 Mar 2005 (UTC)

text: Also, if you make a redir with different capitalization, let's put something in the edit summary (I've just been using "EB2004"). I read recently that some people think a redir page that differs only in caps, without explanation, is a candidate for speedy deletion. David Brooks 03:05, 30 Mar 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: What on earth was the reasoning behind that?! If only we can harness the power of these wikiaddict busybodies on emptying these lists we would be there in no time! Pcb21| Pete 07:22, 30 Mar 2005 (UTC)

text: (re-indenting for readability) - I used to believe that we could knock out a link so long as we are convinced that the same subject is covered under a slightly (or not-so-slightly) different name, but I'm persuaded by the above arguments. In addition, creating the semi-redundant links provides an element of provability and repeatability. The aim should be that, if the list is re-generated, it comes up empty, and we don't have to go back and figure out all over again that "Treaty of Erewhon" and "Erewhon Agreement" are the same thing. In addition, it would catch an accidental deletion of the wrong line. Nobody will ever look up, or link, Yehudi Menuhin as Yehudi, Lord Menuhin of Stoke D'abernon Menuhin (that, and some more contorted examples, are artefacts of processing the EB titles) but it does no harm. David Brooks 16:16, 1 Apr 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: I was wondering about where the contorted examples came from... if they arise out of some intermediate step of processing, then aren't the redirects less valuable than if they were from the actual naming convention(s) EB uses in its articles and indexes? Is it remotely feasible and valuable to repeat the generation process whilst refining the processing process? Pcb21| Pete 16:47, 1 Apr 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Some of the garbles clearly look like software bugs - "Nim, or Neem" becomes "Neem Nim" for instance. If anyone ever plans to re-generate the list, it would be better to fix those bugs than to create artificial redirects to accommodate. Personally I don't see much value in re-generation; if we actually get WP articles for all but 20-30 EB articles that slip through the cracks due to clerical error, everybody will be completely impressed. Note also that 1911EB has hundreds of dicdefs for which we don't ever want to create articles. Stan 01:01, 2 Apr 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: And, after all, finding matching articles already in Wikipedia is the easy part, and we shouldn't be fussing about it. Lots of articles remain to be written, and that's what takes the effort (I noticed Antequera in the list and spent almost a week of some very limited spare time translating of the German article). Even a decent stub can take time. David Brooks 01:09, 2 Apr 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: Redirects and capitalization

message: ===Page 26===
Hi. I want to nominate page 26 as the focus of this week. Let's see how much of this page we can get done by Tuesday. Danny 12:46, 31 Mar 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: We treat diacritics like capitals, I guess. Suppose both EB and WP have Flügel (I made that up), but because of the processing, it shows up as Flugel on this list. Well, we already met the real goal, but it does no harm to add a redirect from Flugel, especially as English readers are likely to drop the accent when looking it up. (Wicked thought: should we also make a Fluegel redirect for the special case of German?) David Brooks 17:09, 5 Apr 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Yes, because spellings like "Fluegel" are often seen as attempts to represent "Flügel" in ASCII, for instance in mid-20th-century conference papers produced on typewriters. Stan 19:45, 5 Apr 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Actually it's more official than that; the e is still a valid but less preferable alternative in Germany for umlaut (as is ss for ß). And the French have, I believe, banished the œ, which is why it's not in Latin-1. But I don't think there are any other examples of valid re-spellings: for example, neither Malmo nor Malmoe is correct Swedish. David Brooks 20:01, 5 Apr 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: Pages of the Week

message: Hi. I want to nominate page 26 as the focus of this week. Let's see how much of this page we can get done by Tuesday. Danny 12:46, 31 Mar 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: [[Wikipedia:2004 Encyclopedia topics/26|Page 26]]

message: Well, it's Tuesday, and we got over 40% done. Great job, everyone! For this week, I want to nominate Page 14. This should actually be very easy, since a lot of the redirects will simply depend on diacritics and hyphens. Good luck, everyone! Danny 11:21, 5 Apr 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: We treat diacritics like capitals, I guess. Suppose both EB and WP have Flügel (I made that up), but because of the processing, it shows up as Flugel on this list. Well, we already met the real goal, but it does no harm to add a redirect from Flugel, especially as English readers are likely to drop the accent when looking it up. (Wicked thought: should we also make a Fluegel redirect for the special case of German?) David Brooks 17:09, 5 Apr 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Yes, because spellings like "Fluegel" are often seen as attempts to represent "Flügel" in ASCII, for instance in mid-20th-century conference papers produced on typewriters. Stan 19:45, 5 Apr 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Actually it's more official than that; the e is still a valid but less preferable alternative in Germany for umlaut (as is ss for ß). And the French have, I believe, banished the œ, which is why it's not in Latin-1. But I don't think there are any other examples of valid re-spellings: for example, neither Malmo nor Malmoe is correct Swedish. David Brooks 20:01, 5 Apr 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: [[Wikipedia:2004 Encyclopedia topics/14|Page 14]]

message: 90% of this list can either be redirect to an already existing article or be left untouched - but what about real coverage holes that are found?  I've only seen one (Affair of the Poisons)  Can we all agree to put a "(look)" mark next to the term? Lotsofissues 07:15, 9 Apr 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: I think only 10% missing coverage is very wishful thinking. What sort of thing do you think can "be left untouched"? Pcb21| Pete 09:27, 9 Apr 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: I'm not clear what a "real coverage hole" is. Are you distinguishing major topic areas from insignificant topics, or just saying that the topic is already handled somehow? So far I have written, from scratch, 13 articles that were more than just "see xxx#yyy for more details", and some of them were significant figures in their fields. All you have to do is work down the list; there are plenty of them. David Brooks 18:05, 9 Apr 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: Highlighting real holes

message: Tuesday again, and time to select a new page. For this week, I nominate Page 8. Danny 10:16, 12 Apr 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: [[Wikipedia:2004 Encyclopedia topics/8|Page 8]]

message: Tuesday again, and time to select a new page. For this week, I nominate Page 21. This time, however, it is a little more difficult, since it is 0% done. Danny 10:30, 19 Apr 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: [[Wikipedia:2004 Encyclopedia topics/21|Page 21]]

message: This week's page is 17. The goal is at least 30%. Danny 11:00, 26 Apr 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: I think we hit the goal already. 723 in the list and 39 of them are blue. David Brooks 19:35, 28 Apr 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: [[Wikipedia:2004 Encyclopedia topics/17|Page 17]]

message: My feeling is that there aren't many of us working on this project... (though it is difficult to tell for sure as the red links tend to turn blue "by magic")
On the other hand however, we have made good progress - nearly 6,000 red links have been turned blue. My guess is therefore that these have generally been the "low-hanging fruit", such as redirects to pre-existing articles. As time goes on, it looks like we can do 40% of the links this way. How do we do the remaining 60% ? Is the current team big enough? Should we be shouting about this project from the rooftops to get more input? Surely the "manpower" is out there (much as so many of us like arguing about policy etc, there must surely be plenty of appetite to create content on unimpeachibly encyclopedic topics!) but they just haven't found out about the project yet? On the other hand, do we really care about finishing this project in any particular length of time? Wouldn't we prefer to just carry on chipping away amongst ourselves, having fun finding out about all sorts of oddball things, and generally getting a real feeling of contributing useful content? Pcb21| Pete 14:11, 26 Apr 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: While there mightn't be that many people actively working on this project, I think it does provide a good motivator for some of those (like me) who don't really have much time to write articles to chip in and help sometimes. I've done one of these already, and I'm sure I'll try to do more in the future. That said, I agree - shouting from the rooftops would be useful, yet at the same time, chipping away also works well. :) Ambi 14:21, 26 Apr 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: It is daunting though. I have created 16 original articles under this project, and most of the bios are more than stubs but less than complete. Although the process is straightforward, research and wikifying takes serious time, and I don't have a lot of wiki-time (on the upside, I now know all I care to know about Belgian literary history!). There's a long way to go with such an apparently small team. David Brooks 17:46, 26 Apr 2005 (UTC)

text: Re the page in your user area: It is interesting that three of the 204 articles are still red. Could be a mistake in your list, but more likely a mistake by people working the list. I think that rate of error is acceptable because we can always start over :). Pcb21| Pete 07:43, 27 Apr 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: The red links are because some links are corrected before an article is created. For example: the original link Emanuele D' Astorga (capital D, space before A) was first changed to Emanuele d'Astorga, and then an article was written (in this case, copied from EB1911). This happens because some of the links are clearly wrong; not because EB has them wrong, but because of the program that created the list. Most clearly: EB "Aldrin, Jr., Edwin Eugene" was converted to Edwin Eugene, Jr. Aldrin. The correct redirect is at Edwin Eugene Aldrin, Jr.. Eugene van der Pijll 22:03, 27 Apr 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Thanks for the info... my personal policy is to personally create as many redirects as I can think of.... including redirects from the faintly nonsensical names created from the filtering algorithm. Redirecting from nonsense does not harm and in the long-term probably does a little bit of good. Pcb21| Pete 00:33, 28 Apr 2005 (UTC)

text: It would be nice to think so, but I don't think that is the case for bios. My own meager efforts (those 16 original articles) have included 4 or 5 20th century bios, a couple of them significant in their fields. The other problem I sometimes run into is that a EB topic is dealt with in a few sentences in the bowels of a WP topic; that needs to be addressed case-by-case (new article with some duplication? Stub-sized article with a "q.v."? Redirect and let the reader figure it out?) David Brooks 00:17, 27 Apr 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Interesting - well, I guess that's why we're working with these lists! Stan 13:01, 27 Apr 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: Low hanging fruit?

message: I really should have brought this up before, but... the lists here have lost diacritics, although they are present in EB. For example, Louis-Honore Frechette is on page 17, but it wouldn't be there if it hadn't dropped the accents; the EB and WP articles on Louis-Honoré Fréchette are spelled the same way. My feeling is that this may have been unintended (Danny?) but it's a good mistake because English-speakers are quite likely to try a lookup without striving to type those odd characters. So, a redirect it is. David Brooks 00:29, 27 Apr 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: I found this list in an index file (in binary format -- I had to make a program to extract it) on the Britannica CD and they were without diacriticals (I assume this list was used only for search and not for display). bogdan ʤjuʃkə | Talk 12:07, 27 Apr 2005 (UTC)

text: Yep, I'd say as a general principle that every title with diacritics should have a redir from the same title without. Stan 12:58, 27 Apr 2005 (UTC)

text: Yeah, that's happened to me a number of times. The birth/death categories are useful this way ... assuming that the birth or death years are known accurately, not always the case. Stan 21:20, 27 Apr 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Missing diacritics 

message: I really like Danny's idea of concentrating on a particular page for a week as it creates a real sense of progress. However it occurs to me that as a side-effect we may be duplicating each others work. E.g. we each look down the list looking at potential redirect candidates - doing searchs etc. Would it be useful to mark areas we have scoured with, say, "CFR" to mean "I looked at numbers X through Yand Couldn't Find Redirect"? Pcb21| Pete 10:34, 30 Apr 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Do you mean to tag each line (preferably in batches)? One problem is that I might not be able to find a RD, but you could be better at it :-). Another suggestion: "1911" meaning I found a 1911 entry, but don't have the time right now to copyedit and wikify it. David Brooks 18:33, 30 Apr 2005 (UTC)
replies: text:  I like the 1911 idea. You've hit the nail on the head when trying to figure out the best way to implement this. Tagging each line is laborious, whereas tagging in groups is more prone to error - i.e. redirects are easy to miss. The current practice of writing a few words next to a red name is also a good one if the writer doesn't feel the energy to write the stub. Pcb21| Pete 21:57, 30 Apr 2005 (UTC)
replies: text:  I wasn't even contemplating errors. We've had the experience of one of us failing to find the existing article, and then another finding it with a more inspired search. Still, I think the advantage of avoiding duplicate effort is worth the possible missed one. David Brooks 04:55, 1 May 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Are we duplicating effort? 

message: Great job on page 17! 40 percent done. Our next goal is Page 9. Let's see how far we can take this one. Can we match 40 percent? Danny 11:24, 3 May 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Yes we can. Eugene van der Pijll 02:58, 4 May 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: It must have been a typo. He meant 50%. David Brooks 04:08, 4 May 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Seems feasible, there are still a good number of easy red topics on 9. Pcb21| Pete 07:07, 4 May 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: [[Wikipedia:2004 Encyclopedia topics/9|Page 9]]

message: This week we really came close to 50 percent. In fact, page 9 is now the page that is furthest along. Today, I am nominating Page 2. Let's try and match our record! Oh, and as an extra challenge, see what you can knock out on this Page 2 as well. Danny 10:14, 10 May 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: [[Wikipedia:2004 Encyclopedia topics/2|Page 2]]

message: After another great week, the new list for this week will be Page 12. This time, we are striving to break 50 percent. Danny 10:55, 17 May 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: [[Wikipedia:2004 Encyclopedia topics/12|Page 12]]

message: We are getting good at this! For this week, let's collaborate on Page 19. We still have to break fifty percent on at least one page. Danny 10:05, 24 May 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: As Hercules, aka Eugene, points out actually /26 has just passed that landmark. Great work guys! Pcb21| Pete 10:09, 24 May 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: [[Wikipedia:2004 Encyclopedia topics/19|Page 19]]

message: National Women's History Week Project - a recently founded org with only 4,600 due payers?
The eighth and current president of Duke?
A notability criteria that can't be explained.  lots of issues  | leave me a message 01:11, 31 May 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Might be partially explained by Britannica's special "featured series" on particular subtopics - one of which is women in history. Seems like some of the specialist material there has been fed back into the main encyclopedia. Pcb21| Pete 09:12, 31 May 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  EB's selection criteria is sometimes bizarre 

message: Since I won't be around tomorrow morning, I am switching collaborations early. Ths was another outstanding week. In the new week, let's collaborate on Page 24. Danny 01:46, 31 May 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: [[Wikipedia:2004 Encyclopedia topics/24|Page 24]]

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Any interest in me polishing this up into a usable-on-proper-page state? Pcb21| Pete 18:16, 2 Jun 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: Mucking around with timelines

message: We are really moving ahead with this. This page should be easy. The challenge is to bring it up to 50%. We have a week. Let's see how far we can get on Page 6. One helpful hint to get the Chinese names is to check the pinyin spellings that are given in EB. Danny 01:30, 7 Jun 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Also, I believe EB standard is the Wade-Giles romanization, while WP prefers pinyin. New articles should probably have their main page in pinyin with a redirect from the EB version. David Brooks 20:45, 7 Jun 2005 (UTC)

text: Low-hanging fruit list uploaded. There are very few hits. David Brooks 20:45, 7 Jun 2005 (UTC)

text: And - one more time - unless it's blindingly obvious, check the EB entry before making a redirect, to make sure it is the same topic! David Brooks 23:37, 7 Jun 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: [[Wikipedia:2004 Encyclopedia topics/6|Page 6]]

message: I think most people would argue that an entry for "University extension", modelled after the EB "University Extension", would be a dic def, and not appropriate for WP. Niteowlneils 21:09, 10 Jun 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: The article names don't have to be 1-to-1 if you think a topic is too small for a WP topic (I often find this to be the case too). You can redirect to a suitable supra-topic and edit that topic to make explicit the sub-things that redirect there. Pcb21| Pete 07:28, 11 Jun 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: What about dic defs?

message: One strategy I've found useful is clicking through to the EB article, which often displays alternate spellings of names and places, especially those transliterated from languages using other alphabets.  I've had the most success with Arabic, for which EB seems to list three, four, or even five alternate spellings, one of which often has a WP article already there.  In those cases I try to create redirects from all of EB's alternate spellings.
Also useful for biology articles is searching by scientific name -- WP seems to mix and match; some articles use common name while others use genus or species names.  Searching by those can help locate existing articles -- this is especially true for groups of animals where the EB article says something like "Shoofly refers to any member of the family shooflyus". - Bryan is Bantman 18:58, Jun 16, 2005 (UTC)
* You've hit one of my pet peeves (pun intended :) on the scientific names issue.  I just posted to Talk:Insect to see if there is going to be a consensus to get rid of that.  My preference is to have the scientific names built out, and make the common names redirects.  Wikibofh 20:31, 21 Jun 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: True, but for full credit check whether one encyclopedia article is about a genus while the other is about one of its species. Sometimes the "genus" article focuses almost exclusively on one species; then it's a judgement call. David Brooks 20:50, 16 Jun 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Tips 

message: I apologize for the removal of Narodnost from the listing. I was mistaken about the purpose of this page. - Mike Rosoft 18:03, 21 Jun 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: [[Narodnost]]

message: I have some problems with "every article in EB should have at least a redirect". Consider Severocesky, Zapadocesky (and other instances) - these are adjectives of former Czech region names (no longer in official use) transliterated from Czech. The most relevant redirect (I made them) would be to Czechoslovakia#Administrative_divisions (where I added these former names), however, this doesn't show up properly, so it isn't very helpful. Zapadocesky article is completely wrong, btw. Anyway, one could live with that. But Stredni Slovensko and Vychodni Slovensko? These are informal names of regions (even transliterated from Czech, not Slovak, I think), in English 'Central Slovakia' and 'East Slovakia' (however, they correspond to former regions in Czechoslovakia, as above). I wouldn't mind having an article on these, which would list current regions there, but for instance, there is no such thing as North Germany (actually is, but not quite what would you expect). How the redirects should be in this case? In these particular cases, EB is wrong (trust me, I am Czech); should we make WP also wrong in order to be compliant? Samohyl Jan 11:05, 14 July 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Why do you say ""every article in EB should have at least a redirect"", I dont think that is any kind of project policy as far as i am aware. Also, why shouldn't Severocesky (original name acording to Czechoslovakia) link to Ústí nad Labem Region (currrent name acording to Czechoslovakia)? You'll have to forgive my ignorance of Czech geography! Bluemoose 11:16, 14 July 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Well, I thought this was a policy to prevent misunderstanding in the future (and it is a good thing to prevent it, imho). It could, but "Severočeský kraj" was split and only part (about 3/4) of it is now Ústí nad Labem Region. The case of Zapadocesky is the same, and Vychodocesky is even bigger problem, because it was mostly split in half. Samohyl Jan 11:32, 14 July 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Why not write an article on the old regions as well, if they're changed from the new ones? That'd be quite helpful and quite interesting to read, too. Ambi 12:06, 14 July 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: I put them all into one article, since it would be too much clutter. But there  is still problem with the Slovak region names. Samohyl Jan 04:24, 15 July 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  really awful EB names 

message: Lovetoknow appears to have a public domain plant scanned encyclopedia at http://www.lovetoknow.com/Flowers/flowers.htm but it does not say the name/year. Does anybody knows which one it is ? bogdan ʤjuʃkə | Talk 19:03, 21 July 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: That would be great. We do not have lots of articles about flowers. Danny 01:30, 29 July 2005 (UTC)

text: I can't find where they've ripped there text from. But there is this book in Project Gutenberg Gardening for the Million by Alfred Pink which has a smiliar standard of content. Be careful with the taxonomy though since names have probably changed in alot of cases.--nixie 01:48, 29 July 2005 (UTC)
replies: text:  Yes, I know. But the descriptions of plants have not changed. For the taxonomy, a good resource is Flora Europea. bogdan | Talk 08:30, 29 July 2005 (UTC)

text: I can't find where its from either - they seem to have OCRed a book that nobody else has, and didn't care to leave any mention of where it came from. Ambi 02:36, 29 July 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: They probably would tell you if you asked via email, it is (I believe) in the public domain anyway. Bluemoose 08:07, 29 July 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Would they? Their notice about how they have the copyright on stuff presented at 1911encyclopedia.org? They don't seem to play that nice. Pcb21| Pete 13:41, 7 August 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Couldn't someone just make a list of the articles here? Ambi 04:41, 27 August 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Lovetoknow Flowers 

message: I've now twice removed a see also link to a page about where Wikipedia is more comprehensive than Britannica so feel duty bound to explain myself a bit here. Admittedly I don't hold out much hope for that page - there are literally thousands of topics where Wikipedia beats Britannica - how do you pick? 
But more imporantly I don't see how that page is important to the missing topics project. It doesn't help us get the topics filled in - the reason why this project has got over 12,000 links filled in is because we have a good, tight, focused project, unfettered by all of Wikipedia's usual problems and chock-full of excellent editors. I am ultra-sensitive to any changes that might weaken that excellent focus and have it become a regular moribund wikipedia: namespace page. Yes I'm probably over-reacting about just one link, but experience shows that time and time again the slippery slope argument is valid on Wikipedia. :/ Pcb21| Pete 23:23, 29 July 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Ok. You care about the link more than I do, so I bow to your concern.  Now let's go write some more stubs! :-) JesseW 23:29, 29 July 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: Relevancy of see also links

message: Jimbo suddenly asked for the Encarta page to be deleted. This page has been deleted too. See the thread beginning at http://mail.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikien-l/2005-August/027848.html. Pcb21| Pete 15:39, 28 August 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: And I was the one who deleted the pages in question. Since Jimbo wanted the Encarta one gone for legal reasons, I did not want to take any chances with this list being active (especially due to the above chatter). Zscout370 (Sound Off) 15:55, 28 August 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: With the page active for six months, I feel that action was perhaps a bit trigger-happy. I hope Jimbo will be able to publish whatever caused him to make the Encarta announcement. Pcb21| Pete 16:12, 28 August 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: While I do not know that he can, I am restoring the project page and the A-Z index so this "merging" can take place. Zscout370 (Sound Off) 16:34, 28 August 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: Page deleted