Wikipedia:1911 Encyclopaedia Britannica

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The 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica is out of copyright and can in some cases be used as a source of material for the English Wikipedia. However, it is now quite old, and there are many problems with this material in a modern encyclopedia. Even in 1917 it was seen as an unreliable source when Willard Huntington Wright published his scathing Misinforming a Nation, a 200+ page critical examination of the problems with the encyclopedia. The "myth" of the EB1911 being the best and greatest Encyclopedia is a testament to a successful marketing campaign which usually doesn't hold up under critical examination.

The {{1911}} template should always be used whenever significant amounts of imported text appear in an article; in addition, you should consider use of one of the expanded templates to warn readers and guide other editors. Before using one of the online versions as a source, read the appropriate section below.

The following is a checklist of things to do to make this material most useful for Wikipedia.

  1. Use for information only: Strongly consider using the article for information only. That is, restructure and rewrite the whole article, supplementing the encyclopedia information with other sources. That isn't always worth the effort, so the following are some points to keep in mind when using encyclopedia material.
  2. Unreliable scanned source: Since some online versions are scanned using OCR software, there are often typographical errors or gaps in the text, especially where there are diacritical marks or Greek text, and also particularly at the end, where some material may be at the top of the succeeding article. You must copy-edit material carefully for gross errors, give it Wikipedia markup, and, as always, check the Wikipedia index for associated material and link as needed.
  3. Unreliable old information: Many facts given have been supplanted, diseases overcome, kings overthrown, empires dissolved, new materials and new uses for old materials discovered, and so forth. You should run a Google search or check some other reference sources and not rely entirely on the Encyclopædia material.
  4. Obsolete formatting and wordiness: The articles are very complete and the paragraphs are very long. Almost all articles can benefit from being broken up into shorter paragraphs for online reading and most articles can be shortened without loss for modern readers. You may also want to insert crossheads every time the subject changes. Dates should be converted from forms like 17th of June 1844 to June 17, 1844. The bibliographical notes are particularly cluttered and should be pared down to title, author, and date.
  5. Old fashioned attitudes: Many attitudes expressed are outdated, particularly with regard to race. Phrases like "the first white man" can be replaced by "the first European". Other attitudes may be prudish or too much in line with the interests of Victorian England. Many articles show academic biases (especially of historiography) that can be hard to eradicate; the material that has been modernized still often reflects the underlying methods and approaches of the original article.
  6. Names have changed: Many names have been changed as colonialism has been replaced by nationalism. Fernando Po is now Bioko. "Somali country" is now Somalia (and part of Yemen), and so forth. Many people familiar to the 1911 reader have slipped into obscurity. It is no longer sufficient to say "Lord Derby said"; he has to be identified more.
  7. British spelling: The presentation is British, and also designed for compactness. In accordance with Wikipedia policy, if the topic is American it may be best to change spellings like "labour" to "labor"; if a British subject, the British English spelling is preferable. You may also want to add periods after "Mrs" and the like. Both British and American spelling styles per se are perfectly acceptable in the Wikipedia, so this is up to your own tastes.
  8. British biases: Articles about British subjects will exaggerate accomplishments and underplay or even ignore things that might tarnish a persons reputation.
  9. References are old: Many articles end with a string of references. Although these can be maintained, in list form, be aware that the intervening century may have produced more recent scholarship that should be given at least equal billing.
  10. Victorian prose should be checked but can be quoted: The prose style is Victorian and sometimes may seem somewhat stuffy to modern eyes. On the other hand, it has a much stronger point of view than the usual modern encyclopedia. You may want to change wording here and there. If the Encyclopædia makes a particularly striking judgement, rather than paraphrasing, you may simply want to quote it directly:
    The 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica puts it, "Burton had not the charm of style or imagination which gives immortality to a book of travel."

There is some beautifully written material in the Encyclopædia that has not been outmoded and still can serve modern readers. You should feel free to quote sections using the {{quote}} template, as long as you do so from an original, textually reliable source, giving proper credit and including a link to 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica.

Although the Encyclopædia is not copyrighted and you can copy its phrasing directly, Wikipedia cannot advertise the presence of this material using the word "Britannica", which is a trademark of Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. Of course, we can still use that phrase within our pages to give proper credit. Indeed, you should always cite your sources in a References section on the same page.

The 1911 Encyclopædia can continue to be a resource for readers well into the 21st century with some care and discretion in using it.

Contents

[edit] Recommended reference style

==References== 

*{{1911}}

Which appears as:

References

The template also has variables, so:

{{1911|article=Anarchism|author=[[Peter Kropotkin]]|url=http://62.1911encyclopedia.org/A/AN/ANARCHISM.htm}}

appears as:

This article incorporates text from the Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition article "Anarchism" by Peter Kropotkin, a publication now in the public domain.

[edit] Other templates

See also Category:1911 Britannica templates
  • Template:1911POV – should be in the main body of 1911-based articles that probably have POV problems; in addition, the problem should be explained in the talk page
  • Template:Update-eb – should be in the main body of 1911-based articles that contain known or suspected out of date material and should be verified
  • Template:Ni-eb – in the main body or talk page of substandard articles that could be improved by including 1911 material
  • Template:Include-eb – preferably in the talk page of articles that are acceptable, but could be expanded by reference to additional material in 1911

[edit] Legal notes

Sometimes versions of the 1911 EB may claim a new copyright. The following may clarify the merits or otherwise of such a claim.

In US law, typographical corrections are not sufficient to create a new copyright. Sites which rely on that and/or correction of scanning don't actually have a valid copyright claim unless they add some new creative content. See the West Publishing decisions described at Feist v. Rural and this quote from Matthew Bender v. West Publishing Co., which is itself taken from Grove Press, Inc. v. Collectors Publication, Inc., 264 F. Supp. 603, 605 (C.D. Cal. 1967):

"Plaintiff made approximately forty thousand changes from the Verlag copy in producing its edition. These changes consisted almost entirely of elimination and addition of punctuation, changes of spelling of certain words, elimination and addition of quotation marks, and correction of typographical errors. These changes required no skill beyond that of a [1967] high school English student and displayed no originality. These changes are found to be trivial." [1]

In addition, correcting a scan to restore it to the original text is not creative, since it's simply restoring the work to its original public domain form.

Care is needed to distinguish between such "trivial" changes which don't create a copyright and the possibility that there's a new article or additional material of some sort involved, for any new material could be copyrighted. This appears to be a problem with at least two online versions (see below).

Trademark law doesn't provide ongoing protection beyond the expiration of copyright. See Dastar Corp. v. Twentieth Century Fox Film Corp. (2003),

[edit] Online versions of the encyclopaedia

Several online sources are available for consultation by editors. In addition, CD-Roms can be purchased at classiceb.com (which is not the publisher of the modern Encyclopædia Britannica).

[edit] Free, public-domain resources

[edit] Versions of this public domain work claiming copyright

As described below, these versions not only have scanning errors, but are potentially tainted by additional, copyrighted material and cannot be trusted to contain the pure out-of-copyright text. Their content should be crosschecked with a scanned version or the Gutenberg version.

  • LoveToKnow Classic Encyclopedia World Wide Web edition, "based on" the 1911 encyclopædia. It is sourced from a raw, unproofread OCR-scanned version, without the illustrations: it contains a number of errors, many of them quite serious, as for example when the beginning of one article is spliced to the end of another with the intervening material missing, or tabular material is garbled across the columns, or again anything in a non-Latin script. Around July 10, 2006, the site was relaunched as a wiki using MediaWiki software. Wikilinks have been inserted, apparently automatically, and often with odd results. The wiki allows contributors to correct transcription and linking errors, and to add (in "what's new" pages) new information. An introductory page reads, in part: To the extent permitted by applicable law, all content, including but not limited to edits, changes and additions are © 2002 - 2006 by LoveToKnow Corp.
  • Online 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica. World Wide Web, OCR-scanned version of the encyclopædia, that has scanning errors. This source is unreliable; for example, long articles may contain only the first part of the original information. Links have been inserted, apparently automatically and frequently leading in irrelevant directions. There are also French and German translations, of unknown origin. Readers are invited to submit corrections and additions using a web form, and the content cannot be assumed to be original 1911 material. At the bottom of a page the following footnote can be seen: Site © 2006 - Net Industries.

[edit] Possible notes from the operator of 1911encyclopedia.org

Several anonymous edits may or may not be from the LoveToKnow Classic Encyclopedia's site operator and have been moved to this section in italics. If you are the operator of the site or producer of the CD-ROM, please use this area for your comments, to keep them distinct from the edits made by Wikipedia contributors and the view of the Wikipedia project contributors about what your legal rights are.

LoveToKnow is also in the process of updating entries and adding new articles, which are obviously also under copyright. This on line version cannot be used, except as any other copywritten [sic] work. Also note the License and Terms of Use agreement for the LoveToKnow site, specifically section 5: "5. Use on Other Web Sites. The Contents are licensed only for the personal, household, educational use by a single individual. Reproducing Content on another site or redistributing Content is forbidden. Taking Content from this site and editing it and posting it on another site is also forbidden. Framing of this site is forbidden."

The section about scanning reliability was removed and has been restored.

The Encyclopædia is not copyrighted and you can copy its phrasing directly as long as you have an original hardcopy source and do the transcribing yourself.

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