Re: they won't allow you to use facts to embarrass them

On Sun, November 25, 2012 4:52 pm, Greg Newby wrote:

> Karen's suggestion isn't that far from what we can do now, and
> actually have done in practice: a note in the bibrec.

Credit where credit is due, this was actually Mr. Hellingman's suggestion. Ms.
Lofstrom's suggestion was simply a reiteration of my suggestion of allowing
"the crowd" to evaluate the quality of any given version.

> The bibrec for
> #11 says to also look at #928.  These are added by hand... any of the
> team at gutcat-4LCm/o+qPMZ96Xl/[email protected] can add them (usually Andrew Sly does
> these, but Marcello and I also tweak the records).

I suspect that if we knew the schema of the bibliographic database someone
could probably write a script in about a half an hour to programmatically link
all corresponding works. Unfortunately, it seems that the schema is a closely
guarded secret, so this tedious manual process is the only, inadequate
alternative.

> Currently, the bibrec is not the main "tab" (see
> www.gutenberg.org/etext/11 if you're not sure what I'm talking about).
> But I'm sure the Note could appear on the Download tab instead.
>
> A simple technique to raise awareness of alternate versions would be
> to add them to the bibrec as a Note.  There might be some situations
> when there is ambiguity in whether a note really refers to an
> alternate edition of the same book.  This applies with Alice, for
> example: 11, 114, 928, 19033, 19573, 23716, 28885.

And yet, the notes for bibrec #11 still only references #928 and none of the
other texts you have just identified. And neither #928 nor #19033 (I didn't
look at the other records) have a reverse reference back to #11 or to each
other. It appears that the manual system is so error-prone as to be simply not
worth the effort. And good luck getting Mr. Perathoner to change the default
tab for texts.

It is time to retire public references to e-text numbers. A search for
_Alice's Adventures in Wonderland_ should return a single page. That page
should link to downloadable files differentiated by modification date, file
format and contributor's notes. A customer should get the file s/he wants
without having to select 11, 928 or 19033; to the customer, this is just
noise.

[snip]

> Editing the bibrec is easy enough to do.  I encourage people with an
> interest to simply email "like" records, and we can edit them in.  The
> Note field is flexible, and can be duplicated within a bibrec.

This is clearly a hack, attempting to force the system to support a feature
that it was not designed to support. If I know enough to follow the notes
field on the bibrec tab (when it is actually correctly populated) I know
enough to find the best version using other search tools. Squirreling data
away in a "notes" field is hardly a user-friendly way to help higher-quality
texts to become more visible.

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