A "master list" for the DNB is simply a list of all the biographies by title (our naming conventions), in a given edition, in the order in which they occur. We are quite far from having such a thing for DNB00 (only some approximations available right now). We are not so far from it with DNB01.
What would we do with such a master list?
- Cut it up to create volume ToCs.
- Refer to it to get "previous" and "next" articles without effort.
- Can use it to automate creation of templates.
- Can use it to check disambiguation of a name given at random.
We could even reconstruct more formally the way the DNB is ordered. Another purpose is this:
- Look over the Epitome listings used on WP for the DNB project there, and pick out the subarticles and Supplement articles there.
Getting there edit
The idea is to avoid typing that will duplicate effort.
For DNB01 there is work in progress to take the DNB01 names from author pages and sort them. This should produce a fairly good master list shortly. Points to notice:
- DNB01 has relatively little disambiguation by dates to be done.
- There are just four unsigned articles in DNB01, to add to what is on author pages.
- There will also be just a small number to recover of names on author pages that are still redlinks.
This means that sorting the DNB01 names alphabetically will produce something close to a master list. (There may be some missing names, and sorting may not give quite the right answer).
For DNB00 life is much harder. Starting with all the names on author pages, sorting will not give a great result, for several reasons:
- The order will be wrong, sometimes because the dates will not be sorted as the DNB does, sometimes because the DNB gives monarchs precedence, and for other reasons to do with the requirements of DNB order that matter more in this case.
- The names on author pages are not yet properly disambiguated, so there will be some duplicate names and other anomalies.
We can on the other hand use the "anomalies" to troubleshoot the names on author pages, thus ensuring that more of the newly-created articles will have an automatic author page link.
To sum up, we can have a master list for DNB01 quite quickly, but for the first edition it will take considerably more work, some of which needs doing anyway though. For trialling, Wikisource:WikiProject DNB/ASCII list.txt is ASCII-sorted from existing DNB00 articles. It shows anomalies such as Æ sorted to the end.