Howdy Alex,

Thanks for writing in - yes, we're really excited about the Wikipedia trial! 
Particularly the idea of a link both ways :)

 > I became frustrated first that: Users can't interact with each
 > other and discuss issues (no help desk, or User discussion pages etc.),

For now, at least, that's intentional. When we released the redesigned Open 
Library site in May of this year, we -- or at least, I -- wasn't sure who 
constituted the Open Library community. Who they were, what people do, even how 
many edits we were getting per day.

So, the first step towards people "interacting" was simply to surface activity 
on the site much more strongly. You can see Recent Changes (recently added 
Author Merge, New Books and New Covers as subcategories), and the little 
"Around 
the Library" snippet at the bottom of each page. Each of these is intended to 
show what's going on, and let you easily click through and get to more detail.

We've certainly discussed adding a discuss page or similar, but, it feels a 
little bit like bibliographic data might not be quite as controversial as 
Wikipedia topics. I mean, either the title is right, or it's wrong most of the 
time.

But, I agree, that providing people with some forum of some sort is a good 
thing.

 > and their is no way to keep tabs on pages you contributed to (like
 > Wikipedia's watchlist function).

This is coming soon! We're working on it right now.

The idea of "Lists" on Open Library is two-fold: 1) to make it easy to keep an 
eye on any activity to an arbitrary list of records that I collect on a List 
(not only things I've edited), and 2) to facillitate export of small record 
sets 
in a few different formats, for example, a bibliography in BibTex, or plain 
vanilla HTML.

Cheers,
george



On 9/22/10 4:21 PM, Alex Stinson wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I am an active member on Wikipedia and I ran across Open Library when your new
> bot began adding links to our pages( to check out your bot see
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Bots/Requests_for_approval/OpenlibraryBot).
> As I began trying some constructive edits on pages I am familiar with because 
> of
> Wikipedia work, I became frustrated first that: Users can't interact with each
> other and discuss issues (no help desk, or User discussion pages etc.), and
> their is no way to keep tabs on pages you contributed to (like Wikipedia's
> watchlist function). From the standpoint of someone who would like to
> participate and would like other Open Projects to succeed, I think these
> are critical functions for usability, especially when they have proved so
> successful at Wikipedia and other Mediawiki Wikis,
>
> Alex Stinson
> User:Sadads
>
>
>
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