Ray Saintonge wrote: Hoi, Indeed, we tried we erred. Can we move on ? NB we will not stop learning .. Thanks, GerardM

maru dubshinki wrote: Hoi, When a book is used quite often, it may mean that someone is pushing a particular point of view.. When a book is relevant you want to annotate that book. But it does not follow that it needs a Wikipedia article of it's own. Thanks, GerardM

Francis Tyers wrote: When anybody says we "have to" introduce completely new markup or we "have to" wait for Wikidata to be implemented, then I know it's just an excuse for doing nothing. Suppose you define a way to identify a pre-defined reference, e.g. the Wikipedia Standard Reference Numbering (WSRN), you could set up a server of your own where the reference database is kept and just link to that from a template. It would be no different from Egil Kvaleberg's map link server and the {{coor}} template. WSRN = 1 --> "The Wiki Way", ISBN 0-201-71499-X WSRN = 2 --> "The Hive", article in "The Atlantic Monthly", http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200609/wikipedia WSRN = 3 --> ... and a template {{wsrn|3}} to make a reference. If you implement the database and fill it with contents, I can write the template. Here are two ideas for how to populate the database: 1. Copy the entire catalog of the Library of Congress and hope they don't mind your doing so. You can use the LCCN as the key, but this won't give you any reference to The Hive article, unless the LoC starts to catalog The Atlantic Monthly on an article level. 2. Download the latest dump and extract all the <ref>...</ref> tags currently used in the English Wikipedia. Begin with the works that are most frequently referenced. -- Lars Aronsson (lars(a)aronsson.se) Aronsson Datateknik - http://aronsson.se

I agree that WikiData is a good idea, but what will it take for the developers to implement this? Are wikitech-l subscribers subscribed to wikipedia-l as well? On 9/5/06, Gerard Meijssen &lt;gerard.meijssen(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote:

Gerard Meijssen wrote: Gerard, your promotion of Wikidata is as predictable as a Swiss watch. I admire your optimism. In this case, however, I was talking about the tendency to use its name as an excuse for not doing something else. In the case of Wikicat, I don't think it's the Wikidata technology component that is lacking. -- Lars Aronsson (lars(a)aronsson.se) Aronsson Datateknik - http://aronsson.se

GerardM wrote: For WiktionaryZ you needed two things: Wikidata and some free contents to fill it, which you found in the GEMET vocabulary. For Wikicat, perhaps it could be based on Wikidata or perhaps on some other technical solution, but it also needs contents, and this contents needs to be free (as in freedom). The dump of the database must be possible to download and reuse for other purposes. My point is that we currently don't have that kind of content. What's lacking is not so much the technical platform, as the contents. The most recent proposal ([[m:Wikicat]]) by Jleybov is based on lifting catalog records from the Library of Congress and other major libraries through a Z39.50 interface. I don't see any contract with the LoC and other libraries that confirms that these data can be reused for any purpose, and I don't see any efforts being made to getting such contracts. Instead, on the m:talk:Wikicat page, I see vague ideas about using data that are available for educational non-profit purposes, and I personally think that is quite insufficient. I don't think it is impossible to solve the licensing issue, but I think it needs to be solved. Just ignoring the legal issue is not good enough. Whether Wikidata is ready for deployment or not, this is not what's stopping Wikicat at this moment. Could you talk to kb.nl and ask if their entire catalog can be released into the public domain or under a useful license? That would be a move similar to releasing the GEMET vocabulary, and could provide the starting of Wikicat. -- Lars Aronsson (lars(a)aronsson.se) Aronsson Datateknik - http://aronsson.se

Ray Saintonge wrote: Why don't I see any downloadable dump of their entire database? Providing that would be a great goal for the Wikimedia Foundation. Here we're freeing the encyclopedia, news reporting, pictures, and why not the library catalog. Just think about being able to importing it to MySQL or PostgreSQL on your own computer, and then do things like "select count(*)" to find which people translated most works from Croatian to Hungarian, and make a [[List of translators from Croatian to Hungarian]], so we can make sure we have encyclopedia articles for the 50 most active ones. Currently there is only one entry in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Hungarian_translators Today I can download the LoC catalog one MARC record at a time through a Z39.50 interface. So far, I'm not aware of anyone who copied the entire catalog this way and provided it for free download. If we had a copy, would the Wikimedia Foundation provide it for download? What does the legal councel or foundation board say? Do we need a written permission as a legal security, or can we simply trust that these U.S. government data are in the public domain? Are they in fact U.S. government data, or were they licensed from other sources, and under which terms? While the LoC catalog is huge in the number of records, and providing it for free download would be a great achievement, the assumption that it could replace every other library catalog is naive. For the example above, the LoC rarely catalogs which people translated between which languages. That information (for Croatian-Hungarian) is probably only in the catalog of Hungary's national library. For Hofstadter's famous "Gödel, Escher, Bach" LoC only finds three hits for three English editions, but none of this book's many translations to other languages. The German national bibliography shows 2 English editions, a dozen German printings, and 1 each in Dutch, Danish, and Spanish. The Dutch Royal Library lists two English and five Dutch printings, but the last one is documented as being the 9th printing, so the catalog in fact only covers half of what's been published. Many Dutch Wikipedians are likely to own copies of the other printings, and could provide the missing information if the database was Wikicat. And these are only languages that are close to English and well represented at the Library of Congress. This takes us back to explaining the basics of library & information science. We should have a mailing list specialized on Wikicat and how to free the bibliography. -- Lars Aronsson (lars(a)aronsson.se) Aronsson Datateknik - http://aronsson.se

Lars Aronsson wrote: I think that the answer may be quite innocent. Until Wikimedia came along who would have wanted the entire database? If the demand didn't exist, they would have no reason to make it available. Again before such a task was undertaken someone had to imagine that it could be done. As long as the list had to be created manually, the task was for all practical purposes impossible. There are surely many other databases that need freeing, and they could be just as free if someone else were doing the freeing. If that other databse allows you at no cost to search in such a way that you can find the information you want is it not effectively free? While it's a good thing to investigate these questions more thoroughly, it would be pointless if proposal were technically impossible. I have been looking through http://www.loc.gov/z3950/agency/ where LC is indicated as the maintenance agencey for Z39.50/ISO 23950. Nowhere have I yet found any mention of copyright for the standard on the site. This may cover the standard and formats, but what about the content of any particular entry? I would venture to say that it is not copyrightable. Copyright applies to the expression of information, and not the information itself. If the form of expression is predictable, as in conforming to a public domain standard the result would not be copyrightable. One of the greatest threats to open access is the belief that something is protected by copyright when it isn't. Any fair use claim presumes that the material used is copyright protected in the first place. If the underlying material is not protected a fair use claim is redundant. Things that I have looked at while trying to answer this http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/newsletter/03-02-06.htm#collateral http://www.loc.gov/standards/relreport.pdf http://www.dlib.org/dlib/march00/coyle/03coyle.html The Hofstadter example is a good one in that it warns us of the dangers of simplistic reduction. Many of our online colleagues seem to be motivated by some desire to make tasks easier. This is often done by ignoring embarassing complexities. Perhaps, although I'm not sure we're ready for yet another mailing list. Full scale freeing of bibliographies can easily lead us into what amounts to a Union Catalog of private holdings. Ec

Lars Aronsson schrieb: Well, so is mine (predictable) ... What about reusability of the data? Did you consider that bit? Btw. waiting for wikidata is not an excuse for not working on stuff - you can well do it structured in such a way that it is then easy to import. Salutammo, Sabine Chiacchiera con i tuoi amici in tempo reale! http://it.yahoo.com/mail_it/foot/*http://it.messenger.yahoo.com

On 03/09/06, Ray Saintonge &lt;saintonge(a)telus.net&gt; wrote: Yes. ISBNs are useful indeed, but they were created for the use of the publishing industry and are per *edition* rather than per *book*. - d.

On 03/09/06, Gerard Meijssen &lt;gerard.meijssen(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: Ah, of course, we can reduce it to a previously solved problem! - d.

On 9/3/06, Andrew Gray &lt;shimgray(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: But isn't the edition of the book crucial in a bibliographic entry? Page numbers can change between editions, not to mention actual content. -Rich -- [[W:en:User:Rholton]]