[Web4lib] ISBN linking to Wikipedia

[Lars Aronsson]

Eric Hellman wrote:

> Here's an example of how to access the service:
> http://xisbn.worldcat.org/webservices/xid/isbn/9789574760442?method=getEditions&format=xml&library=wikipedia&fl=*

This sounds great, even though I don't understand the example 
right away.

> During the implementation, Xiaoming Liu, the developer who is 
> continuing to enhance the xISBN service, suggested that instead 
> of working on a Wikipedia-specific service, we should generalize 
> the functionality to encompass any sort of identifier-based 
> collection. So that's what we did.

Note that Wikipedia also uses the "templates" {{ISSN|0123-4567}},
{{LCCN|123456}} and {{OCLC|1234567}} for literature references 
that don't have ISBNs.

There is also a new development where entire literature references 
(including ISBNs) are hidden inside templates.  This improves 
Wikipedia, but makes it a bit harder for LibraryThing and OCLC to 
find which article references which work.  A good starting page is
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Specific_source_templates

For example, the article
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salomon_III_of_Ethiopia
contains the wikitext:
  {{Ref Ethiopia|Pankhurst-1982|pages=177}}
which produces a literature reference according to
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Ref_Ethiopia


-- 
  Lars Aronsson (lars at aronsson.se)
  Aronsson Datateknik - http://aronsson.se