Wikisource:WikiProject 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica

This project relates to the adding of the 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica to Wikisource. This edition is considered one of the best reference works of all time, and was the biggest edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica with:

• 29 volumes
• 44 million words
• 40,000 articles written by over 1,500 authors within their various fields of expertise.

As such, it was considered to represent a summary of human knowledge in the early 20th Century.

• /faq — Frequently Asked Questions for the project; look here first for the answers to your questions.
• /Style Manual
• /Transclusion
• /Advertisement

See Wikisource:Project disclaimers/1911 Encyclopædia Britannica

This is a work in progress, feel free to add to the list of things to consider ;)

• Layout: images, navigation etc.
• Organising wikipedians for this mammoth task.
• Linking to corresponding articles on Wikipedia where appropriate
• Creating categories for content. I.E. Cities, biographies, elements, etc. Just like Wikipedia.
• Providing English translations of Latin and French passages (EB1911 doesn't do this).
• Contrasting smaller (detailed information or extended quotes) with larger fonted portions of an entry.

• The EB1911 style manual is a general style manual that should be used specifically to this project. Mainly, it is a way to standardize the look and feel of going from one article to another, suggestions on formatting, and in general some tips on what to look for when trying to improve these articles over the raw text from external sources.

Few people read a volume of a long encyclopaedia from cover to cover. It is a reference work, and the natural unit for the reader is the article. To do the two things at once (reproduce the paginated text, produce single articles) is quite possible, using the transclusion of whole or partial pages into other pages. For one fundamental aspect of the activity of the project, checking the text against the image of the original in our djvu files, this has a clear advantage: correction of an error found with the text next to the image will propagate into the free-standing article. And then anyone can go and verify a spelling or date (say), and make a change if one is needed.

The technical requirements to do the transclusion are twofold: markup in the Page: namespace, which is simple and something of which the reader will not be aware; and the transclusion syntax applied by the article creator, which lives on the article page.

The current position is that the project uses two styles of transclusion, and there are numerous pages created simply by article text plus header only. Therefore there are three types of pages that you will see if you go to the edit tab on a EB1911 article. The project does not prescribe which way is "correct". For more details see /Transclusion.

The Wikimedia Sister Project Ad is a recruiting tool that is to be edited by current participants to try and get some more help here when we are ready for them. The intention is that the contents of this page will be posted in the "Water Cooler" section of the respective Wikimedia projects to advertise this project among other Wikimedia users. As of right now this is just a draft, and add comments in the Talk page about this if you don't like the tone before it gets sent out.

The targets (for now) of participation and announcement will be on Meta, Wikipedia, and Wiktionary. Wikibooks has plenty of advertising for now, although a general announcement might be in order too, at least to formally let everybody know the project is finally over here at this Wikimedia project.

See comment on talk pageApwoolrich 14:30, 24 September 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Add your name here with ~~~~ if you wish to join the team!

• GregRobson 9 July 2005 12:46 (UTC)
• —Zhaladshar ^(Talk) 9 July 2005 15:50 (UTC) (although I can't start until the 17th of July)
• Robert Horning 9 July 2005 17:38 (UTC)
• Apwoolrich 20:23, 8 August 2005 (UTC)[reply]
• --LEMPERERUR1988 20:21, 5 September 2005 (UTC)[reply]
• — PhilHibbs | WP:talk | talk 09:16, 13 September 2005 (UTC)[reply]
• Brian0918 12:14, 24 October 2005 (UTC)[reply]
• Tim Starling 03:44, 16 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]
• J.Steinbock 02:10, 16 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]
• Danny 04:59, 3 March 2006 (UTC)[reply]
• Pmsyyz 08:28, 15 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
• Antireconciler 06:12, 17 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
• nikemoto2511 11:11, 27 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
• Jjbeard 21:58, 6 May 2006 (UTC)[reply]
• Politicaljunkie 21:43, 12 May 2006 (UTC)[reply]
• Banjee ca 03:02, 22 May 2006 (UTC)[reply]
• Badbilltucker 18:25, 21 July 2006 (UTC)[reply]
• Laverock ( Talk ) 09:06, 29 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]
• John Kenney 03:27, 12 June 2007 (UTC)[reply]
• Psychless 04:24, 26 June 2007 (UTC)[reply]
• WikiKing 17:07, 5 July 2007 (UTC)[reply]
• SQL^{Query me!} 09:55, 13 November 2007 (UTC)[reply]
• Chaucelle 07:56, 16 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]
• Toby 14:47, 21 February 2008 (UTC)[reply]
• Jeepday 19:56, 7 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]
• Anonymous101 12:51, 10 August 2008 (UTC)[reply]
• Bob Burkhardt (a.k.a. Library Guy) 21:36, 12 September 2008 (UTC)[reply]
• RDBury (talk) 20:17, 20 September 2008 (UTC)[reply]
• Dkb (talk) 03:12, 6 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]
• —Anonymous Dissident^Talk 14:59, 18 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]
• Manoel Fernández^Msg 16:24, 16 May 2009 (UTC)[reply]
• --Beachcomber (talk) 12:26, 21 May 2009 (UTC)[reply]
• Innotata (talk) 22:55, 5 December 2009 (UTC)[reply]
• --Angelprincess72 (talk) 09:43, 30 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
• Amir E. Aharoni (talk)
• musicGUYGUY 01:22, 3 June 2010 (UTC)[reply]
• --Tommy Jantarek (talk) 15:49, 19 June 2010 (UTC)[reply]
• Htonl (talk) 13:06, 21 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]
• (Iuio (talk) 09:04, 19 October 2010 (UTC))[reply]
• Snarfherder (talk) 17:52, 16 December 2010 (UTC)[reply]
• Nikolas Tales (talk) 22:46, 12 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]
• Miszatomic (talk) 22:34, 25 February 2014 (UTC)[reply]
• Legofan94 (talk) 02:22, 8 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]
• Animalparty (talk) 22:43, 9 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]
• Jklamo (talk) 17:22, 22 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]
• Kastrel (talk) 11:41, 20 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]
• FoxyGrampa75 (talk) 18:24, 26 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]
• Chuntuk (talk) 12:00, 28 January 2019 (UTC)[reply]
• DutchTreat (talk) 12:29, 21 February 2020 (UTC)[reply]

• 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica
• Scanned pages at User:Tim Starling/ScanSet PNG demo — Tim has written a MediaWiki extension to view scanned page images from Andreas Grosz's CD/DVD sets. Brian0918 obtained a DVD and uploaded the images.
• Encyclopædia Britannica
• Category:1911 Encyclopædia Britannica

Commons sources (a full set of DJVU files, by volume) These are large (around 85 MB) and may not load in all browsers.

The 29 volumes are named:

[[:File:EB1911 - Volume 01.djvu]]

[[:File:EB1911 - Volume 02.djvu]]

[[:File:EB1911 - Volume 03.djvu]]

[[:File:EB1911 - Volume 04.djvu]]

[[:File:EB1911 - Volume 05.djvu]]

[[:File:EB1911 - Volume 06.djvu]]

[[:File:EB1911 - Volume 07.djvu]]

[[:File:EB1911 - Volume 08.djvu]]

[[:File:EB1911 - Volume 09.djvu]]

[[:File:EB1911 - Volume 10.djvu]]

[[:File:EB1911 - Volume 11.djvu]]

[[:File:EB1911 - Volume 12.djvu]]

[[:File:EB1911 - Volume 13.djvu]]

[[:File:EB1911 - Volume 14.djvu]]

[[:File:EB1911 - Volume 15.djvu]]

[[:File:EB1911 - Volume 16.djvu]]

[[:File:EB1911 - Volume 17.djvu]]

[[:File:EB1911 - Volume 18.djvu]]

[[:File:EB1911 - Volume 19.djvu]]

[[:File:EB1911 - Volume 20.djvu]]

[[:File:EB1911 - Volume 21.djvu]]

[[:File:EB1911 - Volume 22.djvu]]

[[:File:EB1911 - Volume 23.djvu]]

[[:File:EB1911 - Volume 24.djvu]]

[[:File:EB1911 - Volume 25.djvu]]

[[:File:EB1911 - Volume 26.djvu]]

[[:File:EB1911 - Volume 27.djvu]]

[[:File:EB1911 - Volume 28.djvu]]

[[:File:EB1911 - Volume 29.djvu]]

Additional sources that can be used to help in compiling the text of EB:

Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia:

• Project Gutenberg's Distributed Proofreaders
  • A place to help out if you want to get more EB texts available and proofread: List of Distributed Proofreaders "Britannica" projects

Encyclopaedia Britannica 11th ed. 1911, separate volumes in several formats, on the Internet Archive:

• archive.org: ninth edition, 1878
• archive.org: a little of the fourteenth edition, 1929

Google Book Search:

• Format: all have machine-readable plain text, with many typos
• Completeness: complete
• The text is not accessible to many IP addresses outside the USA however the same sources are available at the Internet Archive (See above)

• The "LoveToKnow Classic Encyclopedia" was a wiki that was "based" on the original encyclopædia text, and claimed copyright on the modified text.
  • It later displayed the notice "Thank you for visiting the 1911 encyclopedia. This site is no longer available." From 2018 it displays "404 - File or directory not found."

• The JRank "Online Encyclopedia" includes original and contributed articles; the originals may have been edited and the collection is subject to a claimed copyright.
  • Format: mediawiki wiki text
  • Completeness: incomplete?; almost complete?
  • Quality: needs formatting and proofreading
  • includes a lot of hidden text, making copy and paste very difficult. Firefox extension CleanHide removes the hidden text to make copy and paste simple.
• Encyclopædia Britannica 1911, www.theodora.com, <http://www.theodora.com/encyclopedia/>. 
  • unedited, html version, from scan/ocr of the original text, with interactive alphabetical index, and Google translation into Spanish, Chinese, French, German, Russian, Hindi, Arabic and Portuguese.
  • Use Earwig's Copyvio to help proof page text using the Theodora version as a source e.g. https://copyvios.toolforge.org/?lang=en&project=wikisource&title=Page%3AEB1911+-+Volume+28.djvu%2F565&oldid=&use_engine=0&use_links=0&turnitin=0&action=compare&url=https%3A%2F%2Ftheodora.com%2Fencyclopedia%2Fw%2Fthe_west_indies.html
• 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica, StudyLight.org, <http://www.studylight.org/enc/bri/>. 
  • "Containing 35,820 entries cross-referenced and cross-linked to other resources on StudyLight.org". "Copyright Statement[:] these [EB 1911] files are public domain".
• Classic EB is an aggregation of Project Gutenberg projects in Wordpress format, one post per article. As of September 14 2015, the domain seems to have reverted to its hosting site. When it was live, it had:
  • Completeness: lags PG releases.
  • Quality: Thoroughly proofed and HTML formatted.
  • Article identification: Site search; article urls have the format eb.tbicl.org/article-name (approximately).