(For the record: I'm a user like most of the people around here, not an Internet Archive employee. I share problems I encounter and ideas I have on Open Library with the discuss and tech lists hoping to get new ideas to solve the problems and feedback to sharpen the ideas. :))
If you write a bot that could perform a specific task or set of tasks and have it checked by Anand, Edward or Raj, they can give the bot account the authorisation to access the API and do things you can only (or more easily) do using the API. I wrote VacuumBot [1] (not from scratch, though) to do some cleaning up and got permission. Here's an idea for merging without relying purely on a bot: let (logged in) users suggest that record X needs to be merged with record Y. Don't execute every suggestion right away, but when 3 or more users agree, merge. (That's more or less how (database) records are merged on Discogs.com.) You don't need API access or be in the openlibrary.org domain to collect suggestions for duplicate records. A bookmarklet or GreaseMonkey script could be used to easily send the suggestions to the "collector" with one or two clicks. A list of already suggested duplicates could be made available for others, so that suggestions are quickly picked up by others. Automatic duplicate detection will probably be part of my Master's project, but I won't be working with the Open Library data. Maybe in the future I can try some methods on OL :) Ben [1] http://openlibrary.org/people/vacuumbot On 22 August 2012 23:50, Sarah Breau <[email protected]> wrote: >> I agree that more options for users to handle duplicates are needed. >> But I am afraid efforts have to come from users (I'd love to try >> automatic duplicate detection on the OL records, but I have no >> experience yet, except for having MySQL find duplicate work titles, >> and need to do other work). > > Well that's interesting. What would a user have to do to get the power to > merge duplicate records? ;-) > > Sarah > > _______________________________________________ > Ol-discuss mailing list > [email protected] > http://mail.archive.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/ol-discuss > To unsubscribe from this mailing list, send email to > [email protected] > _______________________________________________ Ol-tech mailing list [email protected] http://mail.archive.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/ol-tech To unsubscribe from this mailing list, send email to [email protected]
