Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Missing encyclopedic articles/NZ/Dictionary of New Zealand Biography

List maintenance

What is the intention of this list? The name ("missing encyclopedic articles") would imply that it is a list of those articles that are missing. It would appear, however, to be a list of names contained in the DNZB, with the missing ones as redlinks, and the existing articles as blue links. Or are existing articles to be removed from the list once they have been created? Schwede66 19:33, 4 December 2010 (UTC)

Hey Schwede66, the objective of this list is to see which individuals from the DNZB are missing on Wikipedia. Once an article of the individual is created, it is meant to be removed from this list. Those would be the blue links, but the blue links on this list should be double checked before they are removed in case they are for a different person (which as I found out a while ago happens quite often!). At the moment, it has not been propelley pruned in a while (i.e. remove all the blue links that are already created --> if the blue link is not the DNZB individual then the name gets modified (e.g. Harry Johnson (architect)) or something or rather to that effect. Hope this helps.Calaka (talk) 04:16, 5 December 2010 (UTC)

Cool. I've clarified this on the project page itself, so that everybody understands this point. Schwede66 04:23, 5 December 2010 (UTC)

1940 edition

The DNZB has its origins in the work undertaken by Guy Scholefield, who finished the first edition of the Dictionary of New Zealand Biography in two volumes in 1940. The WP article doesn't even mention this, but never mind. Those two volumes have recently been digitised and put online:

• volume 1
• volume 2

Interestingly, many people listed in the 1940 work are not included in the current DNZB. I would argue that if Scholefield included them in the 1940 edition, they must be notable. I thus propose that we start a new list on the project page with all those people who were included, but don't have a WP entry yet. Thoughts? Schwede66 05:01, 23 January 2014 (UTC)

Great idea. I completely agree. Those biographies will definitely be notable. -- Shudde ^talk 08:46, 23 January 2014 (UTC)

Could you give us an example of someone in the 1940 work who is not in the current DNZB? A few of the entries in the current work are of marginal notability and articles based on them were criticised at AfD. If the current editors of DNZB decided to remove some entries, those may be less notable than the ones kept by them and are more likely to fall short of our criteria.-gadfium 22:38, 23 January 2014 (UTC)

I think that notability will be less of an issue. This arose because the current objective is to include some people in the DNZB as being representative of a group of people, and where workers, struggling widows, prostitutes, or criminals were included, it caused AfD issues. Back then, there certainly wasn't a desire to include anybody just because they were representative; they were all well known at the time. As for examples, I'm currently working on Joseph Colborne-Veel, and have just finished with Charles Purnell. I've previously worked on bios before the 1940 DNZB got digitised (and I had never got those books out of the library), and this includes Joseph Brittan, Guise Brittan, and John Evans Brown. Looking further through B, I see Charles Brown, Charles Hunter Brown; loads of notable people! Schwede66 23:26, 23 January 2014 (UTC)

Ok, thanks. I hadn't realised about the current DNZB including representative entries.-gadfium 02:56, 24 January 2014 (UTC)

I've amended the Dictionary of New Zealand Biography article to something more useful that explains what's been going on. There was a bit of background reading necessary. Schwede66 20:44, 24 January 2014 (UTC)

Some of the people in the earlier version are in my opinion not notable. Some of the people in the latest edition were also skipped as not notable enough in my batch creation of a while ago. The person that springs to mind was someone who was given a knighthood and sent to be a bank representative in London; there was no record or mention of what the knighthood was for, except maybe to open doors in London. Stuartyeates (talk) 09:40, 5 February 2014 (UTC)

Can you please give examples of non-notability in the earlier version? Schwede66 17:36, 5 February 2014 (UTC)

If he had a knighthood then he undoubtedly meets criterion #1 of WP:ANYBIO! The London Gazette should record why he was actually knighted. -- Necrothesp (talk) 19:33, 6 February 2014 (UTC)

Examples

When I did the batch-creates, I went through the two lists and created articles for everyone I believed to be notable, based on their linked DNZB article. I deliberately had quite a high bar for "believed to be notable" because I was running in an essentially automated fashion (I got blocked by google twice for being a bot). That means that all of the red links on those versions of the lists that aren't mangled unicode characters and don't have a deletion in their logs I passed over as not clearly notable. I've been unable to find the person in the knight example above from the earlier encyclopedia Stuartyeates (talk) 02:06, 7 February 2014 (UTC)

Thanks. My question was about examples from the 1940 version of the DNZB, though. Schwede66 02:38, 7 February 2014 (UTC)

Hey Schwede, Shudde and anyone else, I made a bot list of the 1940s list (basically I copy pasted the index list found on volume 2 on Word, swapped the names, removed the numbers, commas, and full stops, removed a few other bits and pieces, and added the wiki link and hashtag in front of their name and placed them all here: Bot list. I did so that it would be perhaps easier to figure out whether we have the articles or not, and move them to the appropriate section (in the red link section if no article here: Red links and if blue in the blue link section here: Blue links. If you guys can help fix up the page (by adding the full names/and or placing them appropriately to the manually created pages, that would be great)! Calaka (talk) 03:31, 18 June 2016 (UTC)

Very good initiative indeed! Reconciling this with where I had got up to, I see that Arthur James Barth was my last entry. So I shall delete the bot list up to him. But alas, Barth is missing from Scholefield's index for some reason, so the bot list won't be complete. Anyway, it's a good help to have that list. Schwede66 22:28, 18 June 2016 (UTC)

Having now done 46 of them, Scholefield's index has very little to do with the individuals listed in the books. :( Schwede66 02:36, 19 June 2016 (UTC)

Ah that is very odd, I wonder why some entries are missing in the index as you noted with Barth and then why some of the names on the index are not actually in the book (or to be more precise, they are in the book but don't have their own biographical entry?)... Not sure what to make of that. I guess having this index is useful in itself as there might be additional NZ bios that can be created - except their notability might not be guaranteed and additional sources might need to be looked at to verify. But perhaps it would be a good start!Calaka (talk) 06:15, 19 June 2016 (UTC)

Josephine and Sybil Mulvany

MurielMary, I'm not so sure about this edit. Are Josephine and Sybil Mulvany not individually notable? If they are (and I suspect so), then I'd say it's not done (yet) and the article should be split so that we have two proper bios in line with the Manual of Style. What do you think? Schwede66 20:00, 30 April 2018 (UTC)

Good point. When I read the WP article it seemed that there wasn't much information specific to each person, however now I've read some more background material it does look like there is enough to differentiate them. I'll reinstate them to the task list. MurielMary (talk) 07:33, 1 May 2018 (UTC)