Wikipedia talk:Nuttall Encyclopedia topics

Personally, I prefer the old lists. I think that they are more managable because they are smaller, and there is a greater sense of achievement working on them. User:Danny)

thats fine, but it is surely not worth pruning them as well though? it is of course your choice. thanks Bluemoose 21:46, 25 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Sexism

Most of the older encyclopedias have cultural biases (and heaven knows, Wikipedia does). I think Nuttall will show to be pretty sexist in his coverage. The Alexander Gilchrist entry contains a brief grudging mention of Anne Gilchrist, but as you can see from her potted biography (I could have gone on much more) she is much the more interesting person. I claimed a moral victory by giving her her own entry, and I'll look out for more opportunities. David Brooks 1 July 2005 15:11 (UTC)

Carlyle

Many Nuttall entries are just notions from Carlyle's works. I would propose to not include them, since IMHO this would be to much and not in today's encyclopedic interests.--J heisenberg 15:41, 8 August 2005 (UTC)

And characters from Sheridan plays. The plays themselves are in WP of course. While WP is already full of minor rubbish (for example, every minor character from every video game ever written, it appears), I see no reason to compound that. I'm for exclusion, so long as this Talk page lists (a) an objective criterion for exclusion (b) the exclusions. And we err on the side of inclusion. David Brooks 17:15, 8 August 2005 (UTC)

I should have added: I'm only for this if the "notion" in question is mentioned in the Thomas Carlyle article (or the article about the particular Sheridan play). David Brooks 23:18, 9 August 2005 (UTC)

I've not seem many of these but when I did it seemed clear that the "redirect and mention in supra-topic" was the obvious way to go. Is that what you are proposing? Pcb21| Pete 07:22, 10 August 2005 (UTC)

Nuttall as a Primary Source

I'm getting mixed messages about creating articles using Nuttall as a primary source. The front page proclaims "You can create articles very easily from the Gutenberg version of the encyclopedia" (and gives some helpful guidelines), but Pcb21 just added a bold warning "Please do not just copy directly from Nuttall. The world has changed a lot since 1907!". I guess I'm a little confused -- if Wikipedia doesn't have an article on a topic, is a wikified/stub'd Nuttall article good enough for a first draft? How many sources should these articles have before we consider them 'done'? Should we add something to the guidelines?

I agree that Nuttall might be a bit out of date -- the world has seen large changes over the past 100 years -- but to be fair, many of the people mentioned in Nuttall haven't changed that much: they are as dead today as they were then... ;-)
Womble 22:51, 15 August 2005 (UTC)

thats exactly right, but a lot of the ones left are the ugly ducklings (e.g. towns/villages/regions) that have changed an awful lot. Martin - The non-blue non-moose 23:17, 15 August 2005 (UTC)

In practice, 1907s description of someone who died in 1800 are turning out to be woefully inadequate. Maybe the guideline could be tweaked to "please make sure you know you are doing when you copy material!". Pcb21| Pete 07:10, 16 August 2005 (UTC)

There are other reasons to modify old Nuttall listings, if you want to bring a touch of quality. The most important is that there are way too many flat-out errors of fact or spelling, even in the article titles, and a little bit of creative looking-up will find the correct or, sometimes, modern spellings and sometimes even the gift of an existing article (in cases like that, I usually don't believe in creating a redirect despite the project's preference for them: be bold and delete the link, and explain in the edit summary). Other cases where I'd plead for a little extra quality: some of the references assume the readers are well-educated Edwardians (e.g. Louis Philippe II called just Egalité in one example I looked at) and I really think you owe it to your modern audience to explain. Some of the bio subjects weren't dead at the time but I imagine all are now.

And because we're good encyclopedists, add category listings (birth, death, and occupation) to the bios. The occupation categorization can draw a subject-area specialist to spot the entry and work on it.

Add category tags to the non-bios too, for the same reason! David Brooks 18:32, 16 August 2005 (UTC)

Another problem with "good enough for the first draft" is that these entries are almost by definition obscure and may not be edited for a long time once they turn blue. David Brooks 23:53, 15 August 2005 (UTC)

Hmmm. A lot of good comments, but I'm still not sure how much work one should put into each article. I'll try to add category listings, stubs, and wikify any content I get from Nuttall or from other sources. And any terms (like Egalite, etc...) I'll try to direct to relevant Wikipedia pages or replace with modern terms. If someone could give an example or two of a nicely-formatted page created from the original Nuttall source (with maybe a couple of references), that would be very helpful. Womble 01:22, 20 August 2005 (UTC)

2 lists?

Origionally i made the new set of lists because we needed the quick links for making redirects easily, a couple of thousand redirects later that need has passed, and having 2 sets of lists is maybe a bit of a burden, as notes on one will be missed on the other, and it is more blues that need clearing as well. Does anyone agree we would be better off getting rid of one of them? Martin - The non-blue non-moose 22:19, 21 August 2005 (UTC)

YES! (can I shout louder?) I prefer to keep the fine-grained. David Brooks 00:48, 22 August 2005 (UTC)

Aside: Sure you can shout louder. The scale goes YES!, YES!, YES!, YES!. (Please no followups about using <big> :) ).

As for original comment... any objections to removing the big lists? Pcb21| Pete 07:34, 22 August 2005 (UTC)

Keep the fine-grained lists, I never use the other lists. — Wackymacs 07:59, 22 August 2005 (UTC)

OK removed for now, if there are no complaints, which i doubt there will be, then they can be deleted. List A List B List C List D. Martin - The non-blue non-moose 08:20, 22 August 2005 (UTC)

Original Number of Entries?

I'm trying to calculate the new percentage done, but I don't know how many entries we started with from Nuttall. Considering the page on Nuttall Encyclopedia says over 16,000, I'll just use 16,000 until I hear a more precise figure... Womble 05:47, 26 August 2005 (UTC)

Encarta lists deleted

If you haven't heard yet, Jimbo pulled the Encarta lists due to possible copyright violations. EB2004 was apparently pulled, but has now been restored (for the time being).

It looks like the Encarta page might come back, but only after a merge with lists from other encyclopedias. If you'd like a plain copy of the lists for Nuttall, Hutchinson, EB1911, EB2004, etc..., I'd suggest that you download a copy now. You might not get a chance later. Womble 09:41, 29 August 2005 (UTC)

Dicdefs

Some of the entries we have created are being marked as dicdefs, usually a valid judgement. I think we should regard a Nuttall entry as "done" if it has a matching entry in either WP or Wiktionary, so long as the entry has at least as much material as Nuttall (not hard!). If it's in Wiktionary, please notate that fact in the list itself or in the comments entry as an audit trail. Deal? David Brooks 05:23, 30 August 2005 (UTC)

Is there some _easy_ way to search both the Wikipedia and Wiktionary namespace? Because until the two work together more smoothly it would be nice if stuff that should go in Wiktionary had a redirect from Wikipedia to the dictionary def. Womble 22:07, 30 August 2005 (UTC)

One way, easy or not is to create another search of the English Wikitionary. This of course would add to load time, but for the small pages on Nutall I don't think it would be a problem. I prefer using google site searches because they will not be "down for performance reasons". Reflex Reaction 16:47, 31 August 2005 (UTC)

No, not that -- sorry, I wasn't clear. What I meant was that if a user is coming to Wikipedia to look up things, they probably don't want to have to think "Is this going to be in the encyclopedia or the dictionary?" -- What would be nice is a way to search through multiple namespaces at the same time and then get results from each of them... then they can choose if they want the Wikipedia article on Depression, or the Wiktionary article on Depression (just to pick a word ;-). Something like the interface at Answers.com where you get a blurb from each article would work well... Womble 19:30, 7 September 2005 (UTC)

Under 1000 to go!

Nicely done, everyone. Womble 18:54, 7 September 2005 (UTC)

Do not edit article names in place

Please do not edit article names to include accents without making the plain-text version a redirect. Wikipedia's search engine will not find Foobaré if you search for Foobare. If you think the plain-text version is an archaic spelling or might be an error in Nuttall, just add a note to the commit message. Something like "Nuttall redirect; archaic spelling of name" or "Nuttall redirect (Nuttall spelled name incorrectly)". Womble 19:23, 7 September 2005 (UTC)

Generally, diacritics don't fit under the 'common names' policy for article titles

I strongly disagree with "In these lists, accents have been removed and umlauts have been converted into e's (for example: the Nuttall entry "HACKLÄNDER" is called "Hacklaender"). Create the article at the proper name, including accents and umlauts; and create a redirect at the accent-less location. This is important."

AFAIK, most native English speakers don't use/know words by their diacritic versions, so "Hacklaender" is probably a more common name than "HACKLÄNDER". Waterguy 19:28, 7 September 2005 (UTC)

Well that would be against wikipedia common practice/policy. Martin - The non-blue non-moose 19:34, 7 September 2005 (UTC)

As long as there are non-accented redirects put in, such as Bozo and Boezo for Bözo, does that solve the problem? Womble 23:27, 7 September 2005 (UTC)

Sayings & Expressions

There are a lot of (mostly historic) expressions, like Cousin Michael. Should we make a "list of historical expressions" or everyone have an own page?--J heisenberg 16:06, 19 September 2005 (UTC)

I definately don't think they need an article each, a "list of historical expressions" sounds like a good idea, although I would suspect we have something similar already, if not then one could be created. Martin 16:32, 19 September 2005 (UTC)

Found the List of idioms in the English language. I'll add them there.--J heisenberg 18:06, 19 September 2005 (UTC)

The merge

Hey, Magnus, did I miss a discussion of this merge? A little while back we voted for small lists over the four large lists. I admit it's more manageable now that we are under 1000 articles, but I was looking looking forward to that sense of accomplishment Danny was talking about, as I worked slowly through the D's. David Brooks 17:02, 19 September 2005 (UTC)

You could re-section them alphebetically. Martin 17:14, 19 September 2005 (UTC)

Under 500

Nice work, folks. What's our goal by Halloween? Under 100, perhaps...?  ;-) Womble 15:13, 20 September 2005 (UTC)

120 right now, we almost made it. -- Kjkolb 04:23, 31 October 2005 (UTC)

Expand?

I see a lot of "Expand" notes on the list next to blue links. Is this really our focus? As far as I understand it, we want "to ensure that Wikipedia has a corresponding article for every article in every other encyclopedia" (project mission statement). For this list, I read this as creating contents as "Nuttall + X", a good stub at least, a real article at best, but usually something in between. For expanding articles, there's {{stub}}. While we should aim at writing good articles, IMHO we should remove existing articles from the list, as long as they at least contain the information from Nuttall. --Magnus Manske 13:06, 25 September 2005 (UTC)

Concur. Pcb21| Pete 13:18, 25 September 2005 (UTC)

It's unanimous. David Brooks 19:35, 25 September 2005 (UTC)

Gather up all the expressions

There's a hard core of problematic articles emerging. You know the ones I mean. Perhaps we need an article "List of mostly archaic expressions used in England in the early years of the 20th century". The title could probably be snappier, but you get the idea. Perhaps it already exists. Then we could just tip into it a lot of one-liners like:

* Blue-gown: in [[Scotland]] a [[begging|beggar]], a bedesman of the king, who wore a blue gown, the gift of the king, and had his license to beg.

and clear a lot of these in one swell foop. Anyone want to be bold, come up with a convincing title, and do this?

BTW what's the difference between a blue-gown and a gaberlunzie? David Brooks 22:52, 28 September 2005 (UTC)

makes sense to me. Archaic 19th century english expressions Rick Boatright 02:29, 29 September 2005 (UTC)

Standardization suggests List of archaic English expressions? I bet that article would turn into an interesting piece actually - certainly better than the sum of its parts? Pcb21| Pete 12:08, 29 September 2005 (UTC)

To make it even more interesting, search through the archives for other expressions that have already been given a (dubious) redirect to another article on the same concept, or created as a pseudo-dicdef. But that takes organization, or a dedicated volunteer! David Brooks 15:59, 29 September 2005 (UTC)

There is the List of (non-archaic) idioms in the English language--J heisenberg 17:34, 29 September 2005 (UTC)

The term Archaic would include expressions back to, oh, Chaucer, which is a much more interesting but huge list. I was thinking of just a list of end-19th-century expressions, unless someone wants to kick off the huge list instead. David Brooks 19:23, 29 September 2005 (UTC)

OK - this weekend I'll create either List of 19th century English expressions or List of archaic English expressions with a at least one, 19th century subhead. I prefer the first; I guess Pete prefers the second. Any other votes? My feeling is Pete's list is a wonderful challenge but calls out for at least three dimensions of organization: period of currency, degree of formality (literary versus colloquial), part of speech (noun, verb, adjective, expletive - oh those Shakespearian expletives!). My suggestion at least reduces that to part of speech and formality. David Brooks 04:16, 1 October 2005 (UTC)

That's a good point. I am happy to start with 19th century and then maybe get more aggressive in scope later on. I've mostly been doing hotlist stuff recently so am not so up to speed on which Nuttall entries this is going to apply to anyway... Pcb21| Pete 11:14, 1 October 2005 (UTC)

Well, I went with List of 19th century English language idioms and working on it now. David Brooks 22:51, 2 October 2005 (UTC) -- done. The results are a little forced in places, and I've only just started on the archives, but I'm sure it can only improve. Someone want to start adding their favorite archaic Dickens idioms? David Brooks 02:00, 3 October 2005 (UTC)

Striking

A lot of entries seem to have stricken entries and then a diacritically correct version next to the struck version. The notes page correctly states that we should create redirects in this case. Are the strike-outs there as a relic of when we didn't have this guideline? Pcb21| Pete 14:21, 1 October 2005 (UTC)

I started striking out ones that didn't have correct diacritics, etc... and putting the correct link to the right. Some people had been editing the links in place, and I was trying to keep both accented and non-accented versions, while indicating that the primary article should have the accented name... but you're right -- there's probably a better way to mark those up. Suggestions? Womble 18:50, 6 October 2005 (UTC)

Proposed deletion of Nuttall category

Please go here and say why deleting the Nuttall category is insane. thanks Martin 12:00, 30 October 2005 (UTC)

I'd like to defend it, but I'm not sure I can. If you think the article maintains an obsolete POV, you can (and should!) use {{update}}. I think we can keep {{Nuttall}}, but just expand it to an italicized blurb. On the other hand (there is one, of course), why isn't the 1911 Britannica category also listed for demolition? And I suppose the 488-entry Nuttall category does give us some bragging rights... David Brooks 21:25, 30 October 2005 (UTC)

Under 100

Looks like Womble's prediction for Halloween was just off. Thanks to everyone who has worked on this project you have been doing a great job. Even I'm getting into creating articles and pruning! Let's make this a completed project. --Reflex Reaction (talk)• 01:40, 4 November 2005 (UTC)

Cimber

I'm having trouble understanding the conversation under the Cimber entry. Why can't Cimber be Lucius Tillius Cimber? The cognomen can be used as shorthand if the nomen gentile is too common to be useful (cf. Cicero). L. Tillius Cimber is mentioned as one of the assasins of Caesar by Harry Thurston Peck. I don't know if there's enough information to write an article about the guy, but I believe the information on the Cimber disambig page is correct or close enough. Please correct me if there are other reasons to think I'm wrong. Chick Bowen 14:38, 4 November 2005 (UTC)

What next?

Ach... down to 47 now, with a bunch of blue links yet to verify. Once it's done, what are people going to do after Nuttall is done? I've got my eye on the ~2000 ~1500 articles left for 1911 :-). Womble 06:02, 9 November 2005 (UTC)

French and Music for me. But first maybe I'll take a break from researching the dusty corners of the Edwardian gentleman's mind and write a few original articles myself! David Brooks 07:29, 9 November 2005 (UTC)

I'm currently compiling what will probably be called Hotlist 2. I have no idea how big it will be, but it will definitely take up a large chunk of my time. — BRIAN0918 • 2005-11-9 07:56

I could generate some more crossover lists; if you'd like a combination of two/tree/... lists, leave a note on my talk page. --Magnus Manske 16:08, 9 November 2005 (UTC)

We did it! Crack open a bottle of 1907 brandy! David Brooks 22:43, 10 November 2005 (UTC)

I wonder what the good rev. James Wood (encyclopedist) would have to say.....hold on, we're not finished yet, we don't have an article on him! (just a disambig page) Martin 22:54, 10 November 2005 (UTC)

You know what I'd like explained? Who was Nuttall? Wood compiled the Nuttall Dictionary before the Encyclopaedia, but that doesn't help answer the question. David Brooks 23:49, 10 November 2005 (UTC)

I couldn't find anything about him online, this internet is crap! Having studied so much of his work by now, I am genuinely intrigued as to some more details on him. Martin 00:00, 11 November 2005 (UTC)

I agree... ;-) Womble 05:19, 11 November 2005 (UTC)

I found some interesting information. It was named for Peter Austin Nuttall. It appears that the publisher (Frederick Warne) acquired these old books that Nuttall published back in the 1860s, and hired people like James Wood to bring them up to date. See details and external link at The Nuttall Encyclopaedia. — BRIAN0918 • 2005-11-11 06:28