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

1. 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. 3. 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