Minor updates to the Wikipedia OED page

In the course of preparing a draft model citation for the OED on Wikipedia I have, of course, run into a few minor edits that could be attended to while I worked on the task at hand.

The first thing that caught my eye was an unlinked name in the sentence,

That turned out not to be so, Philip Gell of the OUP forced the promotion of Murray's assistant Henry Bradley (hired by Murray in 1884), who worked independently in the British Museum in London beginning in 1888.

A quick search revealed a Wiki page for Philip Lyttelton Gell, so I added a Wikilink to that sentence as follows,

turned out not to be so, and [[Philip Lyttelton Gell|Philip Gell]] of the OUP forced

The edit shows some more of the Wiki mark-up language, double square brackets ([[…]]) denoting a Wikilink and the use of a piped link ([[wiki page title|text displayed]]) to display the link with a different text to the title of the linked page.

In the same sentence, I noted that the abbreviation OUP had not been defined earlier in the text. In common usage abbreviations are defined after the first full text instance so 'Oxford University Press' becomes 'Oxford University Press (OUP)' and, so defined, the abbreviation 'OUP' can be used in place of the full name at later points in the text. While I was at it I also expunged a couple of unnecessary repetitions of the definition of the abbreviation OED.

The final edit came from noticing that the 1933 issue of the first edition of the dictionary had been reprinted in 1961 and 1970. Reprint information is not easily obtainable for any particular book and is scattered across the internet (goodreads.com is a good source). For a work of this significance I think a sentence adding the reprint information is worthwhile. Others may disagree.

Comments

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