Talk:NEH Advancing Knowledge grant

Finding aids

Suggestion: Try to get one or more manuscripts collections/archives to release their finding aids as GFDL, and/or find ways to better integrate or highlight links from biographical articles to digitized finding aids. Many libraries are currently working on digitizing and making available online the finding aids for their manuscripts (for example, I worked with the ongoing project at Yale in Summer 2006). These finding aids are very rich sources of information, and in most cases are the single most relevant external link in a biographical article, yet many or most biographies do not have links to finding aids, even when they are available. Plus, the finding aids are extremely valuable as reliable sources (and most are written from a perspective much closer to NPOV than the typical scholarly biography. It should make sense for them as well, because, like Wikipedia, the purpose of finding aids is to serve as a starting point for further research rather than give a final answer. Getting a library to sign on is probably a long shot, but it may be worth a try if we had a form letter to send out to many at once.--Ragesoss 15:23, 12 January 2007 (UTC)

I am not hugely familiar with what a finding aid is or how it is used. Can you explain a bit more? Would links to finding aids really be that useful for the average Wikipedia reader? (which I presume is what you mean, links from Wikipedia biographical articles) --pfctdayelise 07:05, 13 January 2007 (UTC)

A finding aid is basically a guide to a manuscripts collection. For example, if the papers of John Doe are in the archives of the State University Library, then the archivists have probably created a finding aid for the John Doe Papers. Generally, this would consist of a short biography John Doe, followed by a prose description of what material is in the John Doe papers, followed by a box-by-box or folder-by-folder inventory of the collection and maybe an index of all of John Doe's correspondents represented in the collection. For historical figures who are notable enough to be in Wikipedia and have their papers saved and organized by a university, but not notable enough to have a biography written about them, a finding aid biography is probably the best source available. Because finding aids are just now being digitized by (some of the) libraries (who can afford to do it), it is only now that such sources are becoming available to people who don't actually physically go to the library and get the paper copy. Here is a typical finding aid:

http://mssa.library.yale.edu/findaids/stream.php?xmlfile=mssa.ms.0055.xml

This random one doesn't have much in the way of biography, but it has more than you are likely to find anywhere else on these people.--Ragesoss 17:50, 13 January 2007 (UTC)

Go really broad

Another suggestion: Go the postmodern route and propose a project about getting humanities scholars to contribute to Wikimedia projects. Broadly speaking, Wikimedia as a whole is very much in line with the purpose of this grant program; for all we know, NEH got the idea for this program from Wikipedia. If we could find a university or other eligible partner that is already committed to free/open source content (e.g., the institutional home of an open journal), we could work with them toward convincing more humanist scholars to contribute and provide a venue for them to do so. The project could be a sort of joint publicity campaign aimed at professors and students in the humanities.--Ragesoss 15:41, 12 January 2007 (UTC)

Hm... but Wikipedia and many of the projects don't allow original research. Pay scholars to edit Wikipedia articles in their field? I am not sure what the attitude of scholars (one type of "expert") to Wikipedia generally is, but I don't know how many would be willing to get into the edit wars. :) --pfctdayelise 07:09, 13 January 2007 (UTC)

There is a lot that scholars who have a handle on the literature in their area can do without crossing over into original research. It is, for example, very hard to write well-balanced articles on broad topics ("History of the United States" or "Scientific revolution", for example), without being a scholar in that field, simply because the amount of published material is so large. But in any case, I don't suggest paying scholars to write. I suggest a publicity campaign aimed at convincing them to edit voluntarily. Of course, most won't be willing to. But we already know from experience that some will; we just want more. If entreaties to edit Wikipedia are coming from scholarly institutions, scholars might be more likely to sign on.--Ragesoss 17:31, 13 January 2007 (UTC)

It might be worthwhile to pay (or otherwise encourage) scholars to review Wikipedia articles (or perhaps Wiktionary entry sets, Commons diagrams, etc.) for accuracy and comprehensiveness. Internal peer review only goes so far. This would be of particular value for the ongoing work on production versions. -- Visviva 03:51, 17 January 2007 (UTC)

New Sister Project: Genealogy

There are a lot of historical records on people which are researched mostly individually to reconstruct family trees. However that has the potential to be amalgomated into one giant tree, which is what some milk-your-money sites like ancestry.com try to do quite pitifully and which a wiki could accomplish spectacularly. "New ways to share, examine, and interpret humanities collections in a digital environment"? Absolutely! "Develop new...audiences for existing digital resources"? Absolutely! "Benefit of the American public" is a result of using (starting with) US resources. Heritage, it looks like a winner! Davilla 17:11, 14 January 2007 (UTC)

"See wikitree for how not to design a wiki genealogy site - you cannot have two people with the same name - tough if your father and grandfather were both named John Smith, it's already taken). SemperBlotto 18:00, 14 January 2007 (UTC)" Copied from Wiktionary Beer parlour. Davilla

This has been suggested several times - see Wikigree, Wikimorial (for the dead), Wikipeople, GlobalFamilyTree, Lookup directory wiki. That doesn't mean it couldn't happen, but starting a new project needs a strong effort to gather people interested in starting it up. My personal opinion is that is not really within the scope of the WMF's vision, which I think should be explicitly educational, but evidently others disagree with me on this point. --pfctdayelise 01:26, 16 January 2007 (UTC)

Wonderful! The groundwork is already laid. In fact the initiators of existing attempts seem to be open to the idea of working with the WM Foundation. Tell me that public records aren't needed for this kind research. Davilla 20:06, 16 January 2007 (UTC)

Well... if you feel like pursuing this, you are welcome to :), but it's not something I personally will put a lot of effort towards. pfctdayelise 11:36, 17 January 2007 (UTC)