Forum:ISBN numbers and BookSources

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When I click on a link for ISBNs, they go to a special:BookSources page, and thence to a few different book sellers. Most of those book sellers are either offline or no longer recognize the URLs we send them.

Who is in charge of those links: Tardis or Wikia? Who would be the one to get those fixed/updated?

-- Gousha ^{talk to me} 04:20, January 21, 2012 (UTC)

Well, it's not quite a plain text thing. Note that I can type the number 978-1-84607-983-2 and nothing happens. Type ISBN 978-1-84607-983-2 and ya get a link. ISBN is essentially a magic word, when it's followed by a proper number of digits (either with or without hyphens).

As for who manages the booksellers, I dunno. It's not us. And as this is a core part of the MediaWiki software, it may not even be Wikia. I'll put in a query to Wikia to find out. Watch this space!

Having said that, we at the local wiki level can leverage the BookSources feature by building a link onto a page. For instance, we could do something like:

 * [http://www.amazon.com/s?search-alias=stripbooks&field-isbn=MAGICNUMBER Find this book] on [[en:Amazon.com|Amazon.com]]

That would create something like this:

• Find this book on Amazon.com.

But I doubt we would ever implement such a feature, because that would be tantamount to direct advertising for Amazon.
czechout<staff /> ☎ ✍ 04:22: Sat 21 Jan 2012 

Okay, question officially asked of Wikia. We probably won't hear anything back before Tuesday.
czechout<staff /> ☎ ✍ 08:53: Sat 21 Jan 2012 

Sorry I've not come back to this thread earlier.

I've been having an email conversation with the ever-helpful DaNASCAT about this one throughout the week, and we're sorta mid-process on it. As I suspected, this is basically a MediaWiki problem more than a Wikia one. He's brought up the very reasonable point that if he makes alterations, those alterations will be overwritten by the very next upgrade to the MediaWiki software. Wikia need MediaWiki to change things, so that Wikia won't have to keep applying a minor bug patch after every incremental change to the base software (which, btw, happens every few months). I think there's a reasonable change for some sort of improvement to occur, though, because some parts of this are so obviously flawed.

What I've discovered at this point is that the PriceSCAN link doesn't work at all. In fact, PriceSCAN — full stop — doesn't work. If you entirely eliminate Wikia, and go to their site directly, no ISBN lookup works. Nothing about their whole book section works. You can't even put in "Charles Dickens" in their author search and get anything. So that site is just plain down. For Amazon, the problem is the format of the ISBN number. It does work with 10-digit ISBN numbers, but not 13. So if you click on The One Doctor's ISBN and then click on the resulting Amazon link, you go straight to the page. If, however, you go to The Silent Stars Go By and click on the ISBN link, you get a 404. The short-term answer is to just use 10-digit ISBNs.

I'll report back here when any major developments happen.

In the meantime, DaNASCAT has suggested that we consider making our own links to booksellers, as I described upthread. This would mean that the link would not be at Special:BookSources, but on the book/CD page itself. I personally think it would look like we were advertising that particular bookseller, but we would be able to choose from a much, much wider range of not only sellers, but also libraries and the like.
czechout<staff /> ☎ ✍ 15:11: Wed 25 Jan 2012 

I'm wary of the advertising element.

I'd suggest going with something more community orientated like; LibraryThing, which does have links off to other places like Amazon and AbeBooks on their own pages.

And we can make linking simple with ISBNs (see LibraryThing APIs for more info); For example http://www.librarything.com/isbn/978-1-84607-983-2

It seems to work for any length of ISBN number. --Tangerineduel / talk 16:00, January 25, 2012 (UTC)

Update: DaNASCAT still working on problem; email received today. I sent him back another email seeing if we can't just get the page moved to the Tardis namespace so we can edit it freely. This possibilitiy is given in the MediaWiki manual on the feature, and it's the way that the Wikipedia installation works. See here. So they can edit the page in their project namespace, and then have those changes reflected on the special page. Hopefully Wikia will allow this, as it would take a flick of a setting on their part, but give us the flexibility to present the page however we want.
czechout<staff /> ☎ ✍ 19:01: Fri 27 Jan 2012 

Resolution

User:DaNASCAT has made alterations to the trunk BookSources coding which will remove PriceScan from every wiki. He's also added in a link to GoogleBooks and improved Amazon coverage to include .fr, .de, and .co.uk as defaults. So on almost every Wiki, Wikia wide, you'll have access to these better links. He's really worked hard on this so we should definitely give 'im a hand!

Oddly, though, you'll not see any of this here at tardis. Instead, I'm busily creating a more elaborate BookSources page. You can see it in action by clicking on any ISBN link, like ISBN 0563405767. It's still a bit messy, but it'll improve over the next few days.
czechout<staff /> ☎ ✍ 21:19: Wed 01 Feb 2012 

You rock, Czech! -- Gousha ^{talk to me} 03:21, February 2, 2012 (UTC)

The initial redesign of the BookSources page is now complete. It's a little more "blah" than I originally wanted, but it seems to work well in both Wikia and Wikia-Mobile skins. So you shouldn't have any problem with the page using your handheld devices or regular browsers.
czechout<staff /> ☎ ✍ 19:52: Tue 07 Feb 2012