On Tue, Feb 04, 2003 at 02:37:31PM -0500, Tom Parmenter wrote:
|From: Jimmy Wales <jwales(a)bomis.com>
|Content-Disposition: inline
|Sender: wikipedia-l-admin(a)wikipedia.org
|Reply-To: wikipedia-l(a)wikipedia.org
|Date: Mon, 3 Feb 2003 06:36:22 -0800
|
|Axel Boldt wrote:
|> I know that I have fought and lost this fight before. ISBN numbers are
|> evil and should not be used to identify books. They identify *editions*
|> of books, and in a couple of years all these editions will be out of
|> print and all ISBN links in Wikipedia will be completely useless. Right
|> now they are already useless if you are interested in buying used
|> books.
|
|I'm listening. This sounds like a valid objection to this particular
|technical detail.
Should a system, flawed, dubious, that gives a fighting chance of
tracking down a book be replaced by no system at all?
I don't think that is exactly what Axel meant. He did not suggest that we
shouldn't use ISBN numbers at all but just that (1) we shouldn't use them as
the primary means of identifying books and (2) represent them as links that
lead to a certain book store. As an alternative we could do the following:
1. Give every book that we want to reference to its own page.
That's probably a good idea anyway because it invites people to write a
summary and perhaps a discussion of its relevance or whatever else is
interesting to tell about it. A naming convention like "<title>,
<author>" would probably be a good first approximation of a naming
convention. On this page people can also put ISBN numbers if they know
them.
2. The ISBN numbers would not link to a single book store but to a special
page that contains a list of links that each look the ISBN number up with
another on-line book store that provides such a service.
Note that this is not a big technical change, but largely a "style guide"
change. I believe that this is close to what Axel had in mind.
-- Jan Hidders