Wikipedia:WikiProject Dictionary of National Biography/Topical lists

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The DNB is a big reference work, lacking a serious index. Judging by other such projects, the DNB effort should produce lists of biographies sorted by topic (e.g. artists) and use these to motivate and track part of its work of adaptation.

A good topical breakdown of the DNB is an interesting end in itself. There are various approaches that might be considered. Some of these look to start at Wikisource:

  • Categorise created DNB articles on Wikisource;
  • Use the author listings on Wikisource to identify articles in specialist areas, possible since many authors concentrate on a limited number of topics (e.g. s:Author:Lionel Henry Cust and artists);
  • Use search on keywords on the articles at Wikisource;
  • The main volume listings here are from the 1904 Index and Epitome of the DNB, but contain scanning errors reducing the effectiveness of search. Proofreading of the Index and Epitome is a natural task for Wikisource.

Another way, for those with access to it, is to use the ODNB subscription website. This offers:

  • full text search of the new ODNB articles (less than 50% of these correspond to DNB articles, but the proportion is higher for older subjects);
  • the text of the old DNB, in various revisions (not guaranteed to be the first edition version as found on Wikisource, usually the 1912 update) - but this is not searchable;
  • short summaries of the old DNB articles, in the style "Abbadie, Jacques (or JAMES), D.D. (1654?–1727), dean of Killaloe, preacher, and christian apologist" (compares with just "dean of Killaloe" as first clause of the Index and Epitome summary).

Doing a full text search, or otherwise using the ODNB tools, is certainly a good if laborious approach to compiling topical lists. The short summaries aren't obviously in the public domain (so should not be posted to Wikipedia without discussion), and the ODNB's topical lists should not be copied here.

There is also a lot of sense in starting from Wikipedia. There will be many Wikipedia lists where redlinks could be filled in by using DNB articles. Some of the more interesting topical lists would be those with the particular target of improving the coverage of lists of office-holders, members of the Royal Society, lecturers and so on.

By analogy with the Catholic Encyclopedia project, we would concentrate on working from the "short summaries" to sort the biographies in a preliminary way. There do, however, seem to be different and overlapping methods that could be applied.

We seem to need:

  • Some idea of format of topical listings;
  • A structure for integrating topical listings to give an overview of the DNB and the work to be done on it.

See for example Wikipedia:Catholic Encyclopedia topics; but if we want to end up with a collection of listings serving as a reader's guide, we'd list both redlinks and bluelinks initially, and annotate rather than remove biographies.

Experimentation with a prototype welcome

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