You two seem to be talking past each other. Might I suggest that perhaps the quality of information on OPL and/or Wikipdia/Wikisource sites is rather different depending on whether you are reading in French or English? I don't know if this is the case but it could explain the discrepancies between your experiences.
Birgitte SB
--- On Thu, 9/3/09, David Goodman dgoodmanny@gmail.com wrote:
From: David Goodman dgoodmanny@gmail.com Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Universal Library To: "Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List" foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Date: Thursday, September 3, 2009, 2:19 PM I have been re-reading their documentation, and they have it well in hand. We would do very well to confine ourselves to matching up the entries in the WMF projects alone. Some of the data in WMF is more accurate than some of the OL data, but I would not say this to be a general rule. Far from it: the proportion of incomplete or inaccurate entires in enWP is probably well over 50% for books. (for journal articles it is better, because of a project to link to the pubmed information) The accuracy & adequacy -- let alone completeness-- of the bibliographic information in WS is close to zero, except where there is a IA scan of the cover and title page, from which full bibliographic information might be derived, but cannot necessarily be taken at face value.
The unification of editions is non-trivial, as using the algorithm you suggest, you will also have all works related to Verne, and additionally a combination of general and partial translations, children's books, comic adaptation, and whatever. Modern library metadata provides for this to a certain limited extent--unfortunately most of the entries in current online catalogs do not show full modern data--many catalogs never had more than minimal records; Dublin core is probably not generally considered to be fully up to the problem either, at least in any current implementation.
Those working on the OL side are fully aware of this. They have made the decision to work towards inclusion of all usable & obtainable data sets, rather than only the ones that can be immediately fully harmonized. This was very wise decision, as the way in which the information is to be combined & related is not fully developed, and , if they were to wait for that, nothing would be entered. There will therefore be the problem of upgrading the records and the record structure in place--a problem that no large bibliographic system has ever fully handled properly--not that this incarnation of OL is likely to either. Bibliographers work for their time, not for all time to come.
David Goodman, Ph.D, M.L.S. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:DGG
On Thu, Sep 3, 2009 at 6:38 AM, Yann Forgetyann@forget-me.net wrote:
David Goodman wrote:
I have read your proposal. I continue to be of the
opinion that we are
not competent to do this. Since the proposal
says, that "this project
requires as much database management knowledge as
librarian
knowledge," it confirms my opinion. You will never
merge the data
properly if you do not understand it.
That's all the point that it needs to be join project:
database gurus
with librarians. What I see is that OpenLibrary lacks
some basic
features that Wikimedia projects have since a long
time (in Internet
scale): easy redirects, interwikis, mergings, deletion
process, etc.
Some of these are planned for the next version of
their software, but I
still feel that sometimes they try to reinvent the
wheel we already have.
OL claims to have 23 million book and author entries.
However many
entries are duplicates of the same edition, not to
mention the same
book, so the real number of unique entries is much
lower. I also see
that Wikisource has data which are not included in
their database (and
certainly also Wikipedia, but I didn't really check).
You suggest 3 practical steps
- an extension for finding a book in OL is
certainly doable--and it
has been done, see [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Book_sources]. 2. an OL field, link to WP -- as you say, this
is already present.
- An OL field, link to Wikisource. A very good
project. It will be
they who need to do it.
Yes, but I think we should fo further than that.
OpenLibrary has an API
which would allow any relevant wiki article to be
dynamically linked to
their data, or that an entry could be created every
time new relevant
data is added to a Wikipedia projects. This is all
about avoiding
duplicate work between Wikimedia and OpenLibrary. It
could also increase
accuracy by double checking facts (dates, name and
title spelling, etc.)
between our projects.
Agreed we need translation information--I think
this is a very
important priority. It's not that hard to do a
list or to add links
that will be helpful, though not exact enough to
be relied on in
further work. That's probably a reasonable
project, but it is very
far from "a database of all books ever published"
But some of this is being done--see the frWP page
for Moby Dick:
http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moby_Dick (though it omits a number of the translations
listed in the French Union
Catalog, http://corail.sudoc.abes.fr/xslt/DB=2.1/CMD?ACT=SRCHA&IKT=8063&SRT=R...] I would however not warrant without seeing the
items in hand, or
reading an authoritative review, that they are all
complete
translations. The English page on the novel lists no
translations; perhaps we could
in practice assume that the interwiki links are
sufficient. Perhaps
that could be assumed in Wiksource also?
That's another possible benefit: automatic list of works/editions/translations in a Wikipedia article.
You could add {{OpenLibrary|author=Jules
Verne|lang=English}} and you
have a list of English translations of Jules Verne's
works directly
imported from their database. The problem is that,
right now, Wikimedia
projects have often more accurate and more detailed
information than
OpenLibrary.
David Goodman, Ph.D, M.L.S. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:DGG
Regards,
Yann
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