Friday, January 21st, 2011

Common Knowledge milestone and feature

Some time last night LibraryThing Common Knowledge hit three million edits.

Common Knowledge, introduced back in 2007, is LibraryThing’s “social cataloging” experiment—a fielded wiki for all the data that you can’t find elsewhere.

The three-millionth edit was made by starlightgenie, who marked Texas Ranger Takes A Bride to the Western Weddings series. starlightgenie, want a t-shirt?

I recently introduced two features that make Common Knowledge better. Inter-language visibility allows members to see what members using non-English version of LibraryThing have entered into Common Knowledge, and even to edit one language’s Common Knowledge within another site. “Borrowing” data between languages shows Common Knowledge across languages, with a notice, and allows you to edit the entry to bring it into your language’s Common Knowledge. Together, they solve a long-standing social problem with Common Knowledge–how to make sure information flowed easily, but appropriately across LibraryThing’s many sites.

Here’s a screenshot the new features:

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6 Comments:

  1. Zoë says:

    Now I’m just waiting for search improvements so we can take advantage of all this data 🙂

  2. Diane says:

    I see the information for the language feature, but where did all of the other items go? I don’t see any of the usual bits of knowledge we ordinarily fill out, such as series, characters, first and last words, etc.

  3. Diane says:

    I believe it is considered the “main page” for the book–it’s where I end up when click on the icon for a book. Here (I hope) is a link to the book where I first noticed it: http://www.librarything.com/work/book/69144276. I’ve checked several of my books and it doesn’t appear on any of them.

  4. starlightgenie says:

    Someone said free t-shirt? 😀

  5. language hat says:

    This probably isn’t the right place for this, but I have no idea what is: I just noticed the new “Combine with… Search | Never” feature, and I think it’s terrible. It should not be that easy to hit a “Never” button, which could easily happen by mistake, and there’s no explanation of what it does.

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