Earlier in March, LibraryThing Common Knowledge hit five million edits (and flew right on by: another 53,000 have already been added since then!).
The five-millionth CK fact was … drum roll please … the term “American Revolution” added in the “Important events” field on Barbara Tuchman’s book The First Salute by member berry25. Hey berry25, want an LT t-shirt or a CueCat?
Common Knowledge? What’s that?
Common Knowledge, a part of LibraryThing since 2007, is our vast fielded wiki system of bookish data, capturing everything from characters (Frodo Baggins, C-3PO) to series and awards information to related movies, dedications, author information, and much, much more. See the wiki page for a full rundown.
Some of these pages are ridiculously, awesomely complex: check out the Star Wars series page, for example (872 works, with something like 70 sub-series!). To get a sense of the depth and breadth of everything included in Common Knowledge, check out the clouds page.
Who’s added all this info?
CK would not be the amazing resource that it is without the hard work of the many LibraryThing members responsible for those 5 million+ edits. (Back in 2007 Tim predicted it would prove “insanely addictive”, and that seems to have been spot-on). More than 1,000 LTers have contributed at least 600 edits, and some of the totals are extremely impressive. Here are the top five all-time CK contributors:
- Collectorator: 128,697 edits
- DisassemblyOfReason: 116,549 edits
- bw42: 93,479 edits
- Shortride: 81,067 edits
- whirled: 73,206 edits
Can I contribute?
Please do! It’s super easy to add Common Knowledge data – you’ll see the fields at the bottom of every work or author page on LibraryThing. And if you have questions, thoughts, or suggestions, chime in over at the Common Knowledge, WikiThing, HelpThing group.
Here’s to you all, and here’s to five million more Common Knowledge contributions!
Labels: common knowledge, milestones
That’s great.
But it’s a shame that you have all this data and can only access edges of it. http://www.librarything.com/commonknowledge/ has been saying
“Data browsing has been temporarily disabled. A new, more interactive version will return soon.”
for at least 5 YEARS now. I hate that definition of “soon”.
Agreed, entirely! Would that we had lots more hours in the day, and an army of programmers!
As a frequent contributor, I’ve often wondered how the data is used. Is it indexed for LibraryThing search results? Is it syndicated to other sites? Is it helping people discover new books?
At the very least, 5 minutes could be spent to change that notice. There’s a LOT of that all over LT. It just gives it a bit of a run down look.
You had me at “vast fielded wiki system of bookish data”.