":I'm sure that's an honest opinion. It is not, however, one I agree with. It for example assumes something like that the initial content of the article is what we are stuck with. Well, not on a wiki. What I said about ""the perfect being the enemy of the good"" applies. In a practical sense, factchecking the DNB article on someone gets you further and faster than starting from scratch.  

 :In a project like List of dissenting academies (1660–1800), which explores to a reasonable extent a whole sector of English and Welsh education, the DNB and ODNB function as the first instance as conventional references. For the types of persons mentioned, the DNB articles by (for example) Alexander Gordon are quite respectable, if you take out his intrinsic bias towards the nonconformist point of view. That would not be true for those by, say, Alexander Balloch Grosart who, as far as I know, was thrown off the DNB project by Leslie Stephen. This is an area where ""modern sources"" are not exactly prolific. In fact I know from experience that academics themselves used to copy the old DNB shamelessly, up to about 1980 anyway. (You are wrong, in my view, to see the DNB and EB1911 as the same sort of text: the Britannica version of a biography is often a popularised and less scholarly take on the DNB content.) 

 :I have been here long enough (11 years) to know the bottom line on how we self-assign our tasks. I get job satisfaction from DNB work because taking it all together, I can improve the encyclopedia in ways that seem to me significant. (I could go on all night ...could just mention that I only encountered you because I was following up on a DNB direction, and I'm not sorry to have.)    

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