[Foundation-l] Universal Library

[David Goodman]

Not only can the OpenLibrary do it perfect well without us.
considering our rather inconsistent standards, they can probably do it
better without us.  We will just get in the way.

There is sufficient missing material in  every Wikipedia, sufficient
lack of coverage of areas outside the primary language zone and in
earlier periods, sufficient unsourced material; sufficient need for
updating  articles, sufficient potentially free media to add,
sufficient needed imagery to get;  that we have more than enough work
for all the volunteers we are likely to get.

To duplicate an existing project is particularly unproductive when the
other project is doing it better than we are ever going to be able to.
Yes, there are people here who could  do it or learn to do it--but I
think everyone here with that  degree of bibliographic knowledge would
be much better occupied in sourcing articles.

David Goodman, Ph.D, M.L.S.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:DGG



On Wed, Sep 2, 2009 at 2:21 AM, Lars Aronsson<lars at aronsson.se> wrote:
> Yann Forget wrote:
>
>> I started a proposal on the Strategy Wiki:
>> http://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Proposal:Building_a_database_of_all_books_ever_published
>>
>> IMO this should be a join project between Openlibrary and Wikimedia.
>
>
> Again, I don't understand why.  What exactly is missing in
> OpenLibrary?  Why does it need to be a new, joint project?
>
> The page says "There is currently no database of all books ever
> published freely available."  But OpenLibrary is a project already
> working towards exactly that goal.  It's not done yet, and its
> methods are not yet fully developed.  But neither would your new
> "joint" project be, for a very long time.
>
> Wikipedia is also far from complete, far from containing "the sum
> of all human knowledge".  But that doesn't create a need to start
> entirely new encyclopedia projects.  It only means more
> contributors are needed in the existing Wikipedia.
>
>
> --
>  Lars Aronsson (lars at aronsson.se)
>  Aronsson Datateknik - http://aronsson.se
>
>
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