[WikiEN-l] Google Books class action lawsuit

[Carcharoth]

On Sat, Sep 5, 2009 at 11:15 AM, Charles
Matthews<charles.r.matthews at ntlworld.com> wrote:
> Carcharoth wrote:
>> http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/8237271.stm
>>
>> Interesting story there. Hadn't realised there was even a lawsuit in progress.
>>
> "With Google books, any student anywhere in the US will have the books
> in the greatest libraries of the world at their fingertips." Which is
> terrific, if you happen to be in the USA.
>
> I have a few questions about Google Books, which in general as a service
> makes it much easier for me to find references.
>
> 1. Do we have an approved and sensible citation style for GB?
>
> The point is that some people simply paste in the very long GB URL for a
> page. I tend to do the other thing, which is to treat it no differently
> from a book I have open in front of me.
>
> 2. How much do we know about visibility of GB pages in various countries
> round the world?
>
> This obviously affects what to do about 1. (There is a clear
> contradiction to our mission if the given reference as URL appears
> broken in various parts of the world.)
>
> 3. The GB interface is in beta, I think, and the recent upgrade appeared
> to be largely cosmetic (and unhelpful to people like me who would like
> to copy-and-paste citation details, since the year of publication was
> moved). Can we influence their designers?
>
> There is the issue: could there be a button so that a full citation (GB
> URL _plus_ traditional page reference) was made available? Since the
> metadata is (sadly) often substandard, could there be a routine way of
> reporting this to Google as feedback? In general, could the WMF get its
> act together as a potential large-scale "customer" likely to link to
> many relatively obscure scholarly texts on GB, and explain our
> requirements to make good linking as easy as possible?

Good points. As well as responses on this list, you might want to
raise this on foundation-l and on-wiki somewhere. I'd search in the
Wikipedia namespace for "Google Books" and hope we have some helpful
citation instructions already that would be a starting point. You
might also want to check that external links thingy that can tell you
how many links we have to Google Books.

Carcharoth