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Welcome to the Domesday Book WikiProject! This project aims to add newly available images and data from Domesday Book to Wikipedia and Wikisource, in order to enhance the historical background on many English place-entries.

Project

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Background

Domesday Book is a unique historical dataset. We are lucky that in recent years some new resources relating to Domesday have been made available:

  1. Domesday has been converted to modern, structured data. The "Hull" Domesday dataset was created by Professor John Palmer and a team at the University of Hull - it contains geocoded database entries for around 13,000 places mentioned in Domesday Book, with population and other statistics. I have put the dataset online at my Open Domesday site.
  2. Recently Professor Palmer has kindly also made images of the Domesday folios available under CC-BY-SA (see my blog post).

Both of these could be valuable resources for Wikipedia English place-entries, and beyond.

Goals
  • Add details of Domesday Book entries to English/Welsh places mentioned in Domesday, thus improving the historic information available for around 18,000 English places. See Weston-on-Trent#History for an example of how this might look, in a nice infobox.
  • Add the folios of Domesday Book to Wikisource (currently on the Internet Archive).
  • If possible, use Wikisource to crowdsource a freely available English translation of Domesday Book - this would be an immensely valuable resource, as there is currently no freely available translation, and entries based on statistics alone can be a little unappealing.
  • A great suggestion by Victuallers: use the Domesday statistics to autogenerate text for each place, that can then be easily translated into other languages for other Wikipedias. For example: "Weston on Trent is an English town, mentioned in Domesday Book of 1086. In Domesday Book, it is recorded as having 35 households, 1 fishery, 2 churches...". This could then be automatically translated into French, German etc., as Domesday has a limited vocabulary.

Others may have other suggestions for goals!

Scope
  • English Wikipedia entries for places that are mentioned in Domesday Book.
  • Potentially, foreign-language Wikipedias that would like autogenerated entries for English places.
  • Wikisource.

Members

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  1. AnnaPS (talk · contribs) ()
  2. Victuallers (talk) 18:24, 2 February 2012 (UTC)[reply]
  3. Andrew Dalby 14:15, 29 March 2012 (UTC) I most often work on Vicipaedia. I'm interested in the idea of adding autogenerated information there, but also in contributing here[reply]
  4. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 15:26, 12 May 2012 (UTC)[reply]
  5. AdamBMorgan (talk) 20:39, 12 May 2012 (UTC). I usually work on English Wikisource but I could try Latin Vicifons (Wikisource) too.[reply]

Open tasks

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TBD depending on interest, but a good starting point would be:

  • AnnaPS: create a Google doc (or similar) with all places, associated statistics and images for each place: we can then use this to keep track of editing place-pages.
  • Match up each Domesday entry with its modern-day Wikipedia equivalent.
  • Create a standard infobox for Domesday entries, with image and (the most interesting) statistics.
  • Generate by script, or manually, an infobox for each Wikipedia page, with the Domesday statistics and image.
  • Standardised external link template Done: {{OpenDomesday}}
  • Transcribe Domesday Book scans on Latin Wikisource (e.g. la:s:Liber:Domesday Book Bedfordshire.djvu).
  • Translate Latin text into English on English Wikisource.
  • Make for use with Google Earth with photos and more where able and applicable. You have all the coordinates for near all places. For those unknown have a separate kmz file. Freedom of information (copy left, right, centre or whatever else it to make this available). I guess it could be done within a few weeks for someone who has the data such as co-ordinates and other resources. Even if when visit a location could have settings so viewer can see translated to English only or the original text and the option for both, or maybe option also for no text if that what the user prefers. This makes it easy for everyone to view and read easily however they like to or have no text. This way is archived for years can be used for learning to teaching to fascination to use by companies and businesses. I think everyone what ever the need should have such an important English history available for all for free without obligation because it is our history. Don't think that site does that because I tell you that site is to restrictive and nothing with it can be done that could be possible with large kmz files. Today PC have GB memory, fast cpu, large storage drives and the rest easily able to load huge kmz files. Better the kmz files and pictures are locally available on pc than serving them from servers. Think of photos that can be zoomed into without pixel degradation. That said shame Google yet is not come of age (moreover it is getting worse) but it is very workable for this. Please do edit the above to much I have written and maybe even some has been repeated.
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