BritannicaPublicDomain
As I understand it, ProjectGutenberg has published what they call the "Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia". What this actually is, is the classic 11th edition of the EncyclopediaBritannica. However, because 'Britannica' is a trademark, even though the text is now public domain (because it is so old), they were unable to call it EncyclopediaBritannica.
Call it what you will, it is available, and we should consider putting the entire text here, in the Wikipedia. This may be a lot of work (like my own pet project, which is cutting and pasting all of the public domain CIAWorldFactbook over in CountriesOfTheWorld -- please help me!), but it sure would be a fun thing to have in here. People could start updating/replacing the articles with ProjectGutenbergEncyclopedia as the foundation.
Also, I bet there are a lot of instances where the text of the article could be wikified by cramming words together.
-- JimboWales
Whoa, WhatACoincidence. I just now was downloading vol#1 from it and seeing what it'd take to put it in. :-)
The license says it's in the public domain and we can do whatever we please with it...
I will volunteer to work on chopping out all of the articles from volume 1 and posting them in the appropriate
places. Other than really basic stuff, I'm not going to fiddle with the formatting nor update any inaccuracies
contained in them, so anyone seeing things to change, correct, or update should lay into it.
The two MAJOR concerns I have in doing this is a) the information may be WAY out of date in some cases, maybe even
to the point of uselessness, and b) the articles may be too long for the average wikitizen to get into - they may
feel too intimidated by the length and tone of the article to add or correct as we'll need.
But, I guess we'll never know unless we try, so here goes... ;-)