On Sat, Sep 5, 2009 at 11:15 AM, Charles Matthews<charles.r.matth...@ntlworld.com> wrote: > Carcharoth wrote: >> http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/8237271.stm >> >> Interesting story there. Hadn't realised there was even a lawsuit in >> progress. >> > "With Google books, any student anywhere in the US will have the books > in the greatest libraries of the world at their fingertips." Which is > terrific, if you happen to be in the USA. > > I have a few questions about Google Books, which in general as a service > makes it much easier for me to find references. > > 1. Do we have an approved and sensible citation style for GB? > > The point is that some people simply paste in the very long GB URL for a > page. I tend to do the other thing, which is to treat it no differently > from a book I have open in front of me. > > 2. How much do we know about visibility of GB pages in various countries > round the world? > > This obviously affects what to do about 1. (There is a clear > contradiction to our mission if the given reference as URL appears > broken in various parts of the world.) > > 3. The GB interface is in beta, I think, and the recent upgrade appeared > to be largely cosmetic (and unhelpful to people like me who would like > to copy-and-paste citation details, since the year of publication was > moved). Can we influence their designers? > > There is the issue: could there be a button so that a full citation (GB > URL _plus_ traditional page reference) was made available? Since the > metadata is (sadly) often substandard, could there be a routine way of > reporting this to Google as feedback? In general, could the WMF get its > act together as a potential large-scale "customer" likely to link to > many relatively obscure scholarly texts on GB, and explain our > requirements to make good linking as easy as possible?
Good points. As well as responses on this list, you might want to raise this on foundation-l and on-wiki somewhere. I'd search in the Wikipedia namespace for "Google Books" and hope we have some helpful citation instructions already that would be a starting point. You might also want to check that external links thingy that can tell you how many links we have to Google Books. Carcharoth _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l