Bod Notbod, 06/08/2010 01:23:
Well, one of the things it reveals is the difficulty
of answering this
question and I hope that it has some relation to Wikimedia projects;
in particular, I didn't know that multiple books (entirely unrelated
books) have shared ISBNs.
It's supposed not to happen...
And I also thought that Google's attempt to
catologue all books was
parallel to our goal of... well, I'm not sure that we ever say we're
attempting to catalogue ALL knowledge... but we seem to be making a
decent fist of it so far.
Well, someone suggested that this would be our job, too; see
http://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Proposal:Building_a_database_of_all_book…
and links to previous discussions.
I don't like much that Google has those closed algorithms ans such to
de-duplicate book catalogues: openlibrary and national central book
catalogues do that, too, and it's a big effort. Lots of /duplicate/ work
here.
Nevertheless, I confess that I'm still not sure I
should be posting
this to Foundation-l... and it strikes me that perhaps the only
guidance I can find on what should be posted could perhaps be fleshed
out a little more:
Meta-wikis are the answer. :-p See the previous strategy link,
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Foundation-L_Proposal ,
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists ,
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Improving_Foundation-l etc.
Nemo