[Foundation-l] How many books are there in the world?

Fri Aug 6 08:35:20 UTC 2010

Bod Notbod, 06/08/2010 01:23:
> Well, one of the things it reveals is the difficulty of answering this
> question and I hope that it has some relation to Wikimedia projects;
> in particular, I didn't know that multiple books (entirely unrelated
> books) have shared ISBNs. 

It's supposed not to happen...

> And I also thought that Google's attempt to catologue all books was
> parallel to our goal of... well, I'm not sure that we ever say we're
> attempting to catalogue ALL knowledge... but we seem to be making a
> decent fist of it so far.

Well, someone suggested that this would be our job, too; see 
http://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Proposal:Building_a_database_of_all_books_ever_published 
and links to previous discussions.
I don't like much that Google has those closed algorithms ans such to 
de-duplicate book catalogues: openlibrary and national central book 
catalogues do that, too, and it's a big effort. Lots of /duplicate/ work 
here.

> Nevertheless, I confess that I'm still not sure I should be posting
> this to Foundation-l... and it strikes me that perhaps the only
> guidance I can find on what should be posted could perhaps be fleshed
> out a little more:

Meta-wikis are the answer. :-p See the previous strategy link, 
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Foundation-L_Proposal , 
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists , 
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Improving_Foundation-l etc.

Nemo