I think a fair, easy non-controversial request would be to place a simple text dump with text schema of the database tables on readingroo.ms. Sent from my Phone From: Lee Passey Sent: 11/26/2012 10:15 AM To: Project Gutenberg Volunteer Discussion Subject: Re: [gutvol-d] they won't allow you to use facts to embarrass them On Sun, November 25, 2012 4:52 pm, Greg Newby wrote:

Karen's suggestion isn't that far from what we can do now, and actually have done in practice: a note in the bibrec.

Credit where credit is due, this was actually Mr. Hellingman's suggestion. Ms. Lofstrom's suggestion was simply a reiteration of my suggestion of allowing "the crowd" to evaluate the quality of any given version.

The bibrec for #11 says to also look at #928. These are added by hand... any of the team at gutcat@lists.pglaf.org can add them (usually Andrew Sly does these, but Marcello and I also tweak the records).

I suspect that if we knew the schema of the bibliographic database someone could probably write a script in about a half an hour to programmatically link all corresponding works. Unfortunately, it seems that the schema is a closely guarded secret, so this tedious manual process is the only, inadequate alternative.

Currently, the bibrec is not the main "tab" (see www.gutenberg.org/etext/11 if you're not sure what I'm talking about). But I'm sure the Note could appear on the Download tab instead.

A simple technique to raise awareness of alternate versions would be to add them to the bibrec as a Note. There might be some situations when there is ambiguity in whether a note really refers to an alternate edition of the same book. This applies with Alice, for example: 11, 114, 928, 19033, 19573, 23716, 28885.

And yet, the notes for bibrec #11 still only references #928 and none of the other texts you have just identified. And neither #928 nor #19033 (I didn't look at the other records) have a reverse reference back to #11 or to each other. It appears that the manual system is so error-prone as to be simply not worth the effort. And good luck getting Mr. Perathoner to change the default tab for texts. It is time to retire public references to e-text numbers. A search for _Alice's Adventures in Wonderland_ should return a single page. That page should link to downloadable files differentiated by modification date, file format and contributor's notes. A customer should get the file s/he wants without having to select 11, 928 or 19033; to the customer, this is just noise. [snip]

Editing the bibrec is easy enough to do. I encourage people with an interest to simply email "like" records, and we can edit them in. The Note field is flexible, and can be duplicated within a bibrec.

This is clearly a hack, attempting to force the system to support a feature that it was not designed to support. If I know enough to follow the notes field on the bibrec tab (when it is actually correctly populated) I know enough to find the best version using other search tools. Squirreling data away in a "notes" field is hardly a user-friendly way to help higher-quality texts to become more visible. _______________________________________________ gutvol-d mailing list gutvol-d@lists.pglaf.org http://lists.pglaf.org/mailman/listinfo/gutvol-d