Common Knowledge explodes
It's been 48 hours since we introduced Common Knowledge, our "social cataloging" initiative and it's been a HUGE success.*Six-hundred and fifty members have contributed an edit, making 17,437 edits total (adding multiple characters, for example, counted as a single edit). Check out the changelog and watch it happen.
It's our job to support what you're doing. Apart from obsessively adding facts ourselves--Chris and I both made the top 20 contributors!--Chris has been working on UI improvements, and we've both been very active discussing it, bugs, new fields, the gender issue and other topics. There's a lot to do.
More statistics. The top contributor was shortride with an astonishing 1,383 edits. English got the lion share of edits, with second-place German coming in at 441 edits. (We're still working on how to show information from other languages.)
| Top contributors | Top fields | ||
| Shortride | 1383 | Awards and honors | 4412 |
| MikeBriggs | 614 | Character name | 3398 |
| fleela | 458 | Gender | 2297 |
| realSandy | 383 | Important places | 2255 |
| PhoenixTerran | 350 | Places of residence | 1587 |
| tardis | 336 | Birthdate | 1197 |
| sabreuse | 311 | Education | 869 |
| VictoriaPL | 301 | Date of death | 552 |
| tripleblessings | 291 | Organizations | 430 |
| AnnaClaire | 277 | Description | 200 |
| Rtrace | 275 | Disambiguation notice | 116 |
| andyl | 247 | Publisher's editor | 62 |
| rorrison | 242 | Agent | 60 |
| timspalding | 238 | ||
| SqueakyChu | 234 | ||
| conceptDawg | 228 | ||
*We're pretty impressed by all the activity, especially considering it hasn't been as blogged as much as some past features.** But I gave it a good push talking yesterday at the Ohio Library Council. (Come see me talk again today.) And something like this can only grow. APIs will be key.
**Tip of the hat, however, to Superpatron, Joshua M. Neff and Wicked Librarian.
Labels: common knowledge, new feature
posted by Tim at 7:28 AM
16 Comments:
And what about the sourcing of this information?
Congratulations. I love this feature. But I would like to call attention to the implications this feature may have on the non-English LTs.
There is just not enough critical mass on my language's version of LT to get this going too far, I think. As I can use the English LT just as well, I could feel inclined to use that instead. I fear others may want to do the same, and that is not good as these are exactly the people that weed the garden, translation-wise.
Maybe most fields should be "linked" to the main English LT, with an option to "fork" it for the local language. The character's names in Gravity's Rainbow are the same in the Brazilian edition and the original, and that is the case for most books. That would get most books right and full of data. Where that is not true (say, The Adventures of Alice in Wonderland, which has adapted character names) users would be able to fork data for that language. I am sure there are other issues with this (e.g. English versions of classical Greek works would always give incorrect character names for other languages) but probably any kind of linking would be better than no linking, and the users can take care of most of the remaining issues.
- guilherme
I love the feature as well :-)
And I agree with guilherme. I hadn't thought about it this way, but since there is CK, I've almost only used the English LT because that's where the interesting things were happening. I read that German was second when it came to changes but still it won't be able to compete with the English version...
So, being able to see what happens on the other LT pages especially the English one, might keep people on the non-English-LT-sites.
Thanks. That's an interesting idea. Our plan was to put information from one language on the pages of other, so it could be easily used or copied.
But I think you might be right about the social effect. By default having it be "unforked" makes some sense.
I agree that there should be some very interesting things to try to do with an API when you finish that.
I haven't made many updates personally, but I particularly couldn't resist marking The Stephen T. Colbert Award for The Literary Excellence on "I am America (And So Can You!)". If you haven't picked up a copy, the book even includes handy medallion stickers for the award and invites owners of the book into the Award's nominating committee. It's a funny little joke, but I'm seriously debating taking that advice and marking some more books with the award in interesting places across Common Knowledge but I haven't come up with heuristics...
I'm actually somewhat curious what sort of things might come from user-nominated awards, and Common Knowledge almost is begging for that sort of wikiality.
Would it be interesting to see users start to add in the Awards field things like "LibraryThing User's Choice Award for Best Novel (Nominated by WorldMaker, 2007)"? Wiki-style edits aren't the best place for polls/contests, and if everyone added their own personal awards to their favorite, maybe things might get too crowded... Obviously users are free to do that in their reviews of books, but you don't get the cross-indexing that Common Knowledge brings to the table in that case. I guess you could even use tags, but they wouldn't bubble up very high on a Work page because you might be the only assigning the "worldmaker-award" tag.
It's interesting, if people added "personal" awards you get something resembling Amazon's Lists bubbling out of the Wiki data... Maybe there's some idea of new Common Knowledge fields there in that space... Somewhere in the misty world between tags and wikis... ("Fielded tags"?) Something like "Recommended by ________ for _______". (ie, "Recommended by WorldMaker for cyberpunk excellence", "Recommended by WorldMaker for programmers", "Recommended by WorldMaker for learning HTML."...)
Anyway, just rambling food for potential thoughts...
I am COMPLETELY overwhelmed by all the new info around here!! New work pages, Common Knowledge.... woah. I haven't participated in the CK craze yet because I'm one of those paraniod people who have to wait until there are examples (ie other people doing it) so I know I don't do anything wrong.
But WOAH I love this feature. It's awesome!
..... This really does not bode well for my "spend less time online" plan, Tim. It really doesn't.
:) Keep on the very good job!!!
I've decided to whinge about the downtime and this seemed to be the best place to do it..
More like the only place to whinge.
I'm very impressed that when I hit save on the long list of common knowledge I'd just entered nothing happened instead of my losing all the data as it went to the downtime screen. I only realised it was down when I went to access a librarything screen in another tab. If it comes back up before I have to shut down this computer I should still be able to save it OK.
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Two questions:
Will the stats from the CK be added to the Zeigeist?
Is there a way for a series characters to bubble over to the other books? (With a check box or something?)
Gilroy
I can't get into my private group "Modern Poetry." Also, when I click on my library in my toolbar, Tim Spalding's library comes up.
Great feature, but a little whinge. The hint to 'Places of residence' is somewhat USA-centric. Why "Boston, MA", "Paris, France", and not Boston, USA? If I enter Perth, Australia this is not specific - there are a few Perths in Australia. There are a few Ramseys and Eatons in the UK. Therefore, may I suggest that states, provinces, counties (in case of UK) be added?
I agree with Rob, but geographical completeness does have it's own can of worms. For instance, we don't have "counties" in Scotland, which is part of the UK...
Would it be worth adding a field, "Translator"? I would find this useful
Didn't the reviews for books used to be on the main page about the book? With the new layout, it took me forever to find the reviews.
Ahem... sorry about griping. All in all I love the new spots for information, and I love what you do in general. Thanks for existing! ;)
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