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(a)gmail.com> wrote:
From: David Goodman <dgoodmanny(a)gmail.com>
Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Universal Library
To: "Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List"
<foundation-l(a)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 Forget<yann(a)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
> 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
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.
Regards,
Yann
--
http://www.non-violence.org/ | Site collaboratif sur la
non-violence
http://www.forget-me.net/ | Alternatives sur le
Net
http://fr.wikisource.org/ | Bibliothèque libre
http://wikilivres.info | Documents libres
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