Forum:ISBN numbers and BookSources

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Ventry Girl made an update to The Coming of the Terraphiles that included QuickLink brackets around the ISBN numbers. I noticed they were red links, so I backed out the brackets and noticed that Wikia makes it into a link just from plain text.

When I click on the link for those 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 /> ☎ ✍  <span style="">04:22: Sat 21 Jan 2012