Forum:ISBN numbers and BookSources

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: * Find this book on 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.  04:22: Sat 21 Jan 2012
 * Okay, question officially asked of Wikia. We probably won't hear anything back before Tuesday.   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.   15:11: Wed 25 Jan 2012