[WikiEN-l] Fwd: ASINs and ISBNs

[Andrew Gray]

Hello all. This was posted back in August 2005, but sadly has not been
kept by the list archives; we have a gap of a dozen days or so, and
whilst the end of this thread survives, anything before the 21st
August is lost.

http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikien-l/2005-August/thread.html

The topic in question has arisen again, and I wanted the opportunity
to quote this, so I'm forwarding it back to the list so I have a
citable source to point to. I promise I'm not just making it up... :-)

If anyone is interested, the current discussion is at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Administrators%27_noticeboard#Amazon
- basically, are Amazon internal catalogue IDs a useful and sensible
piece of data to give as a reference? As may be apparent I swing
towards HELL NO, but YMMV...

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Jimmy Wales <jwales at wikia.com>
Date: 10-Aug-2005 19:20
Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] ASINs and ISBNs
To: andrew.gray at dunelm.org.uk, English Wikipedia <wikien-l at wikipedia.org>


Andrew Gray wrote:
> According to Google, I've now done about a quarter of the pages
> mentioning ASINs. This seemed a good time to see what people thought -
> are there any real objections to me continuing, and purging all ASINs
> from wikipedia? I can't see any problem with replacing them with
> ISBNs, but it struck me some might object to removing the unique ones.

I think ASINs are very very very very bad things, and that you are doing
wonderful wonderful work in purging them from Wikipedia completely.

--Jimbo


-- 
- Andrew Gray
  andrew.gray at dunelm.org.uk