If you want to do this, you should first take a look at [[:en:bibtex]]. This is what scientists use to write papers/books, and they have experience with handling large databases. The main idea is that you need some form of reference. Neither the title, nor the ISBN are good enough.
If interested, I can point you in this direction.
Yours, Dpotop1
--- Bogdan Giusca liste@dapyx.com wrote:
I think Wikipedia really needs a central bibliography, because there are many books who are used in more than one article, some in dozens or even more.
Currently, a book reference is done this way:
<ref>[[Istvan Vasary]] (2005) ''Cumans and Tatars'', [[Cambridge University Press]]. ISBN 123546958695, page 22</ref>
with a central bibliography, it would be like this;
<book n="Cumans and Tatars" p="22"/>
and the book database would fill in the details in the page displayed to the viewer.
I suggest that we use the name instead of the ISBN, because it can be seen more clearly in the text, when reading the wiki-text. Also, there are many books (especially older books, but not only), which have no ISBN number and some which have many different editions with different ISBNs.
There is still the problem with two books with the same title, in which case we need to add the author, too, for disambiguation, but I think this problem is less on the kind of books we use for reference. Shorter titles are used especially for fiction.
There could be some benefits for having a central bibliography, other than not having to copy-paste the publishing house/ISBN, like knowing which articles refer to a certain book.
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