Many more Wikipedia citations
You'll notice many more Wikipedia links from work pages. The total has increased by about 200%, and the coverage by at least that.
This improves what I did in February. That worked by looking for ISBN patterns. Of course, not all books cited in Wikipedia have ISBNs. And even when there is one, many Wikipedia contributors omit it. (As far as I'm concerned, ISBNs look chintzy in a bibliography anyway.)
I've redone it, this time also looking for telltale title/author patterns, and running the matches against LibraryThing's vast and usefully messy dataset. The logic is somewhat fuzzy and therefore imperfect. But I haven't noticed any problems.
The number of citations expanded a lot.* Some entries exploded. Take Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions:
Notably, it caught casual references to books, not just structured ones. For example, the article on Science wars mentions Kuhn's work in running prose, not in the bibliography or footnotes.
I haven't updated our free Wikipedia citation feed. That maps articles to ISBNs, but the new data is work-based. If anyone wants to use the new data, let me know and I'll tackle the problem. Cool as I think it would be, I haven't seen any libraries adding Wikipedia links to their catalogs yet.
*The fact that its a new feed, and the somewhat fluid interactions between ISBN-based and work-based matching make it tricky to estimate, but it looks like a 200% increase.
This improves what I did in February. That worked by looking for ISBN patterns. Of course, not all books cited in Wikipedia have ISBNs. And even when there is one, many Wikipedia contributors omit it. (As far as I'm concerned, ISBNs look chintzy in a bibliography anyway.)
I've redone it, this time also looking for telltale title/author patterns, and running the matches against LibraryThing's vast and usefully messy dataset. The logic is somewhat fuzzy and therefore imperfect. But I haven't noticed any problems.
The number of citations expanded a lot.* Some entries exploded. Take Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions:
Notably, it caught casual references to books, not just structured ones. For example, the article on Science wars mentions Kuhn's work in running prose, not in the bibliography or footnotes.
I haven't updated our free Wikipedia citation feed. That maps articles to ISBNs, but the new data is work-based. If anyone wants to use the new data, let me know and I'll tackle the problem. Cool as I think it would be, I haven't seen any libraries adding Wikipedia links to their catalogs yet.
*The fact that its a new feed, and the somewhat fluid interactions between ISBN-based and work-based matching make it tricky to estimate, but it looks like a 200% increase.
posted by Tim at 12:07 PM
5 Comments:
Tim,
This is great stuff. I didn't really pay attention to this the first time around, but I'm seeing now what a great idea it is.
Take, for example, this book, a book of Thai short stories. It's not translated into English, and yet there's a link to the author's English Wikipedia page I helped write (and which I added ISBNs to a year or so ago--glad I did!). What a cool way to easily learn more about the more obscure books and authors.
Thanks Tim!
...But please can we finally extend the character limit on the title and author fields? And make Unicode searchable? Heck, you have the site translated into Latin with all it's 2 members, for Pete's sake. I'm trying to preach LT to my bookworm friends in Thailand, but I still can't quite recommend it fully without these issues being resolved. I'm happy to help translate the site whenever you're ready to let me. :)
Hello.
I think that my blog could interest you. It's about literature (Cormac McCarthy for example, and many others), with texts in French.
You do a nice job here.
Bye.
Tim,
Where can we offer suggestions for site improvement? Don't see a "help" or "comments" link on the home page of Library Thing, or on my home login page...
kissed a friend full on the lips for suggesting your site. Cheers!
One more thing, Tim:
Would it be difficult to match up 10- and 13-digit ISBNs when searching Wikipedia?
Wikipedia did a bunch of automatic converting to the 13-digit ISBNs a while, back, and I've input only the 10-digit versions in my library. So for books I have such as this one by Win Lyovarin, for example, there is no Wikipedia citation, because the 10- and 13-digit ISBNs aren't matched up.
What do you say?
Thanks for all your hard work, Tim. What a movement LT has become!
coffeekid1 - have a look in the Groups tab. On the left side of the Group list you'll see the group called Recommend Site Improvements,
cheers, ryn
Post a Comment
<< Home