[Web4lib] The sources of Wikipedia

[Karen Coyle]

Lars, This is a wonderful example of the difference between scholarly 
environments and popular environments. With popular environments, it's, 
well it's popularity that matters. And sometimes that gets you what you 
want (e.g. Google's I Feel Lucky), and sometimes it doesn't. I guess the 
corollary is that a scholarly research environment never gets you what 
you want, but it might point you to things you SHOULD want. ;-)

kc

Lars Aronsson wrote:
> For those of us helplessly addicted to Perl programming, one of 
> the greatest joys of Wikipedia is the ability to download the 
> entire database dump in XML format and dig through it for hidden 
> patterns.  These are available at http://download.wikimedia.org/
>
> One of the original peculiarities of the wiki markup language used 
> in Wikipedia's articles is that the letters ISBN followed by one 
> whitespace and ten digits (or an X) is recognized as a link to a 
> separate page, from where you can look up that ISBN number in 
> various bookstores or libraries.  In the most recent dump of the 
> English Wikipedia, I found 161,973 such ISBN patterns.  All books 
> are created equal, but some are more equal than the rest.  I found 
> the following ISBNs to be the most referenced:
>
> Count ISBN        Title
>
>   460 0954381157  "Trade unions of the world"
>   391 0439154049  "The official Pokemon handbook"
>   389 193020650X  "Official Nintendo Pokémon FireRed Version"
>   387 130206151   (an error for 1930206151, another Pokemon title)
>   372 1930206585  "Official Nintendo Pokémon Emerald Player's Guide"
>   357 0761547614  "Prima's Official Pokemon Guide"
>   346 0002169878  "Collins Guide to the Sea Fishes of New Zealand"
>   342 1569315604  "Pokemon Adventures, Adventure 3: Saffron Cit..."
>   334 1930206194  "Super Smash Bros. Melee, Official Guide from..."
>   334 1569315086  "Pokemon Adventures: Legendary Pokemon, Vol. 2"
>   333 1569314365  "Pokemon Graphic Novel vol. 3: Electric Pikac..."
>   332 1930206313  "Gameboy Advance Pokemon Ruby Version and Sap..."
>   332 1598120026  "Official Nintendo Pokémon XD: Gale of Darkne..."
>   332 1569318514  "Pokemon Adventures, Volume 7: Yellow Caballe..."
>
> Well, I could go on, but I'll stop there.  I guess all it takes is 
> a handful of people with a strong interest in Pokemon who are very 
> careful to cite sources with ISBN numbers, and pretty soon you 
> outnumber everybody except the guy who wrote 460 articles about 
> trade unions, always citing the same book.
>
>
>   

-- 
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Karen Coyle / Digital Library Consultant
kcoyle at kcoyle.net http://www.kcoyle.net
ph.: 510-540-7596
fx.: 510-848-3913
mo.: 510-435-8234
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