Saturday, April 30, 2011

Helping a friend with a #Wikipedia article

Jan Velterop  is a friend. He wanted to write an article in Wikipedia and got stumped with all the technical hurdles. The article was about a person that is relevant; a person that has already articles in the Italian and German Wikipedias. His concept was filled with hyperlinks to Wikipedia articles and there were sources as well.

The article was written in MS-Word and all I had to do was copy and paste the text, make wikilinks out of hyperlinks add some sections and there was a great start.  I am not strong on the citation stuff so I left them in as I found them.

The article is about Alice Ricciardi-von Platen, Mrs Ricciardi was famous for writing about the murder on mentally ill people in Nazi Germany.. She was an observer at the Nuremberg Doktors' trial. The observers wrote two books about this "Wissenschaft ohne Menschlichkeit" and "Das Diktat der Menschenverachtung". Both books were printed in a large volume but not distributed nowadays less then 20 copies exist in libraries.

If any books deserve to be digitised and become widely available it is these books as the prevailing feeling was/is that it was not the doctors who were to blame. Mrs Ricciardi's book "Die Tötung Geisteskranker in Deutschland" was largely ignored for the same reason.

Maybe Mr Velterop can help to make Mrs Ricciardi's book available under a free license otherwise we will have to wait for a very long time before the copyright expires. Having information available about this is what helps make a world conscience.
Thanks,
       GerardM

4 comments:

Mike Peel said...

Next step, start the Dutch Wikipedia article on her? ;-)

GerardM said...

The next step would not be writing the Dutch article but to see if it possible to get a freely licensed version of her book.
Thanks,
GerardM

Peter Weis said...

i've found all three books at the library of the hamburg university.

Wissenschaft ohne Menschlichkeit
https://kataloge.uni-hamburg.de/DB=1/PPNSET?PPN=307285456

Das Diktat der Menschenverachtung
https://kataloge.uni-hamburg.de/DB=1/PPNSET?PPN=021390436

Die Tötung Geisteskranker in Deutschland
https://kataloge.uni-hamburg.de/DB=1/PPNSET?PPN=178356921

Dami said...

It is interesting to note that both MS Word and OpenOffice have extensions or built-in functionality which allow it to save into MediaWiki format (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:WordToWiki).
It is not perfect, as last time I tried it lacked some of the internal logics of Wikipedia (e.g. that a link to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foo should be treated as an internal link and not an external one), but it might come in handy (especially with some development or extra settings options to simulate the Wikimedia environments) and the end results are already usable.