On 03/14/2013 04:35 PM, Tom Johnson wrote: > offering *structured (open?) data* about every book. > > Other projects stop well short of this goal. Wikipedia, for instance, > has notability rules.
Yes, going beyond the notability rules of Wikipedia in providing a better, free catalog, could be a good cause. However, the notability rules have a good reason in that it is hard to separate facts from forgeries in very obscure subjects. If someone adds information to OpenLibrary, how do we know that this book really exists, and isn't just spam noise? Wikipedia requires both notability and verifiable source references. Normal library catalogs have their holdings as their reference. If anyone doubts any fact in the catalog, you can visit the library and look at the physical book on the shelf. Even Worldcat, that aggregates records from many libraries, can point to each source library, where the holdings contain physical books. The trace is not lost. But for OpenLibrary, there are no holdings of physical books, just the catalog record. So how do we verify any knowledge, if we have no criteria that need to be met before a record is created? As a corollary, it would be pretty easy to fabricate images that look like a scanned book, but contain any kind of forgeries, and upload it to the Internet Archive. I don't know if anyone has tried this, but it could be an interesting exercise. -- Lars Aronsson ([email protected]) Project Runeberg - free Nordic literature - http://runeberg.org/ _______________________________________________ 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]
