Comments on: WorldCat’s meme requests

By: phoebe

phoebe — Mon, 08 Sep 2008 19:31:00 +0000

As a Wikipedian, I don’t think this is a terrible idea, really. The way the links would become spam is if they were added indiscriminately or were not useful for the article. Arguably, the links are generally useful. Basically, I consider anything Wikipedia can do to help push readers to libraries when they are looking for more information to be a good thing — and the presence of a worldcat link does not deter the presence of links to another, better union catalogs as well.

If there were a universal standard for coding identities, it could be incorporated into the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:BookSources page, which is much more democratic in where you can search for books. Unfortunately, unlike ISBNs, there isn’t really such as standard.

The mistep that OCLC took in this post is trying to promote it as a “meme”, which should really never be the case when trying to add stuff to Wikipedia and is pretty much a sure-fire way to attract controversy. Whether or not to add any link should be a considered editorial judgment. Better to just let the world know that the template exists and that it can be used if appropriate.

By: dave menninger

dave menninger — Mon, 18 Aug 2008 16:21:11 +0000

Another thing worth pointing out is that WorldCat is included in the “book sources” template pages. See for example:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:BookSources/0571205623

By: the zak

the zak — Mon, 18 Aug 2008 14:40:45 +0000

Besides http://worldcat.org what other catalogs can be tried to search for North American libraries, organizational libraries, special libraries, office libraries holdings not included yet in Online Computer Library Center OCLC data.

By: Something is always better than nothing « Alaskan Librarian

Something is always better than nothing « Alaskan Librarian — Fri, 15 Aug 2008 21:53:34 +0000

[...] West’s most recent blog post on Open WorldCat prompted me to write a blog entry I’ve been thinking about for awhile. It’s about the [...]

By: Andy Havens

Andy Havens — Thu, 14 Aug 2008 14:26:41 +0000

Rich — I get an email whenever there’s a comment left on a blog post I write, and I didn’t get one related to a comment from you. Not sure what happened, but if you want to try again, we’d certainly welcome the feedback.

By: Casey Bisson

Casey Bisson — Thu, 14 Aug 2008 02:48:10 +0000

Andrea’s got a point with the spam issue. Perhaps if OCLC’s data were free as in free speech, Wikipedia would have already integrated it.

By: Rich Lafferty

Rich Lafferty — Thu, 14 Aug 2008 01:09:49 +0000

Interesting. When you twittered about the Worldcat thing the other day, I left a comment on their blog saying that it was going about things the wrong way and stood a good chance of being autoreverteda spam. That comment’s nowhere to be found there now.

Maybe it was the “unpublishing”, but somehow that makes it harder for me to assume good intentions.

By: Andy Havens

Andy Havens — Wed, 13 Aug 2008 20:31:02 +0000

That one post went down due to an issue related to our moving the admin server for the blog yesterday. It turns out that the post was written from one server, and then got un-published after the move. The post went back up when we pushed it out again after we noticed it was down.

By: Barbara

Barbara — Wed, 13 Aug 2008 17:52:52 +0000

Oops, didn’t mean to shout. Forgot to close my italics after “doesn’t.”

By: Barbara

Barbara — Wed, 13 Aug 2008 17:47:55 +0000

I thought about these issues when linking to WorldCat for a website on Scandinavian crime fiction - not every library is an OCLC member, some are members but don't subscribe to the public database, which is what you have to do to be included in the free version, you may have a different edition of the book, or you may be in a catalog that doesn't let branches show up as locations owning the book. If you can be very clear that the list of libraries doesn't mean your library doesn't have it, it's handy, but there's nothing at WorldCat that makes that crystal clear.

By: dave menninger

dave menninger — Wed, 13 Aug 2008 14:57:46 +0000

1) I’m not sure I see how this is a violation of the guidelines. Is it because WorldCat is for-profit? It is pretty common to link to album reviews on for-profit sites ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_rainbows ). Is it because WorldCat gives the impression that it is a complete/universal catalog when in reality it is made up of paying members? I don’t see where that is a violation. I may be missing something.

2) I agree with Andy when he says this would be practically impossible to do programmatically with a bot. Even if it were possible to make a bot that made good guesses, it seems to me it would require a human to confirm that the WordCat Identity and the Wikipedia article were both talking about the same entity.

By: jessamyn

jessamyn — Wed, 13 Aug 2008 14:26:57 +0000

Thansk Roy! Any idea why just that one post wasn’t on the site all of the sudden and is now back?

By: Julie Kliever

Julie Kliever — Wed, 13 Aug 2008 14:24:49 +0000

..looks like the post is back……

By: Roy Tennant

Roy Tennant — Wed, 13 Aug 2008 14:12:17 +0000

For what it’s worth, the post was not deleted and it’s back now.

By: Andrea

Andrea — Wed, 13 Aug 2008 11:09:49 +0000

Wouldn’t building a WorldCat Identities bot end up being considered a spam agent anyway? I’m genuinely asking, given my problems with interpreting Wikipedia rules in the past.

I figure that a bot that runs around adding these links to articles automatically and having people add the links by hand would still produce the same problem of “spam” links according to the guidelines cited, since it’s still linking the articles to a specific product or service that lists *member* libraries, not an open, all-inclusive service.

I’m disappointed that WorldCat deleted the post, even though it really does sound like WorldCat was essentially asking librarians and lovers of libraries to spam bomb Wikipedia, albeit unintentionally. This could’ve been a learning opportunity for everyone: read the rules, understand how people do things, and learn to play nice with systems, instead of trying to jerry-rig them to do things.