This is the crucial problem with Wikidata and books. 90% of books are easy: "work" is the same as "edition" (eg. "How to get an Headache with Wikidata", Andrea Zanni, 2015, selfpublished). So it makes sense to have just an "edition" item on WD, and have all projects link to that page. Sometimes things get more complicated: PInocchio, Hamlet, have hundreds of translations (and comics, movies, TV series, etc.) so they really need to have different items. I'm working on these things with some (good) librarians in Italy, and they get very confused too... There is no easy solution to this: we need to *choose* a protocol and stick with it. Moreover, protocol is important because wiki projects are dynamic and information comes one piece at the time: we are not just imposing a structure on existing knowledge and information, but we need to find a procedure/workflow for all the next books... So, I change opinion on this every week, this week is this way: * we must work just with "editions". Even in Wikipedia. The "work" item is an emergent property, is a librarian concept: we can create that item when it is strictly necessary (eg. Pinocchio, Alice, Hamlet). In Italian Wikisource we are creating some pages in a brand new "Work:" namespace. We create it when we have different editions. * "work" metadata, in theory, are just author and title. Not even the data (it's the "idea" of the work). In the end, we'll have: WS:Index > edition (property scan of?) WS:ns0 > edition WP > edition (+ work if exists) WD:Author > edition (+ work if exists) I'd really like to settle this one and for all :-) Aubrey On Mon, Jun 29, 2015 at 11:02 AM, David Cuenca Tudela <dacuetu(a)gmail.com> wrote:

2015-06-29 11:25 GMT+02:00 Nahum Wengrov <novartza(a)gmail.com>om>: Virtual International Authority File https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_International_Authority_File Not 100% sure but I think there is both entries for works and for editions. Cdlt, ~nicolas

Yes, it is right. But that is solvable with single properties. Aubrey On Mon, Jun 29, 2015 at 11:30 AM, Nahum Wengrov <novartza(a)gmail.com> wrote:

2015-06-29 11:46 GMT+02:00 Magnus Manske <magnusmanske(a)googlemail.com>om>: Same for me. 1. A Wikidata (Qx) item is an edition of another Wikidata item (Qy) It's a bit more complex than that but I agree. A large number (a majority?) of works have only one edition, in this case there is only one item on Wikidata, it's even easier : no problem. There is disambig-like pages on wikisources for works. In this case, no problem again, you can link Wikipedia and Wikisource directly : https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q83186 Somtimes, there is wikipedia article about editions, again there is no problem here. https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:WikiProject_Books is very useful, most of the cases are describe and explain. Cdlt, ~nicolas

On Mon, Jun 29, 2015 at 11:16 AM Andrea Zanni <zanni.andrea84(a)gmail.com> wrote: FWIW, there is a new property that hopefully takes care of this: https://www.wikidata.org/w/index.php?title=Property:P1957&redirect=no

There's an underlying many-to-many relationship between works and edition, data structure IMHO should be built accordingly with the worst case: an edition that collects many different works, any of them being published in many different editions. At it.wikisource we are going to simplify a little bit things using a convention based of the fact that "book" is a physical entity; 1. one djvu file for one book; 2. one Index page for one djvu file (this is simple :-) ) 3. at least one ns0 page exactly matching one index page. So, given a simple one-to-one relationship between these entities, a unique wikidata edition item is sufficient for all from them. This simple approach solves the "edition" side of the issue; the "work" side, IMHO, can only be solved with a different "work" abstract item, as we are doing into the new Work namespace. Alex 2015-06-29 12:40 GMT+02:00 David Cuenca Tudela <dacuetu(a)gmail.com>om>:

2015-06-29 11:30 GMT+02:00 Nahum Wengrov <novartza(a)gmail.com>om>: Yes, both apply to the translation. Yes. But that already done in Wikidata (and in most of the cases the date of death is more important thant date of publishing). For VIAF, there is entries for both works and edition (called « expressions » like in FRBR), qv. https://viaf.org/viaf/178622639/ (work) and https://viaf.org/viaf/175353827/ (expression). For Romeo and Juliet, there is around 222 expression of the work in VIAF.