Any interest in LibriVox's representation on wikipedia?

[RuthieG]

No. There is no secret. It's this:

We spent a lot of money having the system reprogrammed. Some of that money was a grant, and some was donations. We ran out of money before we could do everything we needed to do.

We do not have money to pay a sysadmin - our sysadmin is a volunteer with limited time like the rest of us. Our hosting is provided free of charge by the Internet Archive. We cannot make unnecessary demands on their goodwill.

When we have amassed sufficient resources, we can do the things that we know need doing. When there is again a need for a development area, we shall find a way to have one. Adding links to Wikipedia pages is a side issue and nothing to do with our primary purpose of producing audiobooks.

With regard to accepting offers of free programming, I'm afraid our fingers have been burned in the past. Willing volunteer programmers left us with a system full of security holes which, without going into details, resulted in a very bad occurrence some years back. We have become somewhat risk averse.

Ruth

[carolb]

As Ruth said, no secret ... and there are 42 pages of Suggestions, News and Discussions to prove it.
Why don't you take a wander through and find out? You'll learn a lot

Carol

[dlolso21]

Timoleon,

Keep in mind that we are not a business - we don't: have a corporate headquarters, an office, a desk, a telephone or even a secretary. Librivox does not exist in the traditional sense of an organization. A lot of the things you are asking about relate to structured organizations with paid staff members to keep them running. We are an group of volunteers who fill various roles (reader, BC, PL, MC) to record audiobooks. There is not a corporate line-and-block organization chart or multi-layered structure to follow here.

There is storage space we use on Internet Archive's servers, but for the most part Librivox exists around the world on laptops and computers in volunteer's dens, basements, attics, closets, and bedrooms. It is a different way of doing things and that not everyone can understand, but it works.

David O

[ekzemplaro]

Hello,

I'm sufficiently wrong here. So I know volunteers are not welcomed here.
I'm a volunteer here. But most of time I'm a paid software engineer.
Is there a quality difference among my codes when they are written?
Are those written as an employee better than those written as a volunteer?
As an employee I make a mistake. As a volunteer I also make a mistake.
There are lots of great work done by volunteers. Linux, Git, ruby etc.
There are lots of serious mistakes caused by paid developpers.

By using opensource method volunteers can work as a team. Among LibriVox members
there are lots who wish to contribute with codes.

Cheers,
Masa

[Darvinia]

As I see it, you hit the nail on the head here Masa and answered your own dilemma.

As an employee I make a mistake. As a volunteer I also make a mistake.

As an employee you have an employer who is ultimately responsible for your mistakes as they leave your office and go out into the world. That simply does not exist here. So ... many volunteers potentially making many (or even few) mistakes can snowball without being checked.

There are lots of great work done by volunteers. Linux, Git, ruby etc.

All overseen by 'bosses' to ensure quality. We don't have 'bosses' as David explained.

[dlolso21]

Masa,

It is not wrong to want to use your skills to improve things.

We are "open source" in that the source code was published. And sharing the code was our only intent.

I am sure that you are very familiar with software development. While we are "open source" we are not "open development" as software development is not our mission. There are many organizations out there with the mission of improving software and for which open development works. Their goal being to improve and develop better software then share this openly developed product with the world. I appreciate and use some of these programs daily.

Our mission and focus is publishing audiobooks not creating, developing, and publishing software.

David O

[annise]

It is not a giant conspiracy , it is just a

Secret?

I actually find this remark offensive. Perhaps you would care to read what I said again and withdraw it. What I said was true.

Anne

[mahne]

I'm not quite sure what you are talking about - sorry , the tech bits are outside my current knowledge base but
Wikipedia will never approve of us adding links from LV automatically

I am no way against this project, but I am against automation in this project.

Only to make things clear: My suggestion on automation was not to enter any links, only to check if they are present.

Cheers
mahne

[Kangaroo692]

I understand. But I am sure Wikipedia will be against automation for any reason.

[ZamesCurran]

But I am sure Wikipedia will be against automation for any reason.

I doubt they care about automated reading of articles, or for that matter, have any practical way to monitor it (assuming we don't do all 10,000 in a few seconds)

[ekzemplaro]

Hello,

Additionally does anyone see a chance of automatically reading in all entries on this page : https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:WhatLinksHere/Template:Librivox_book&limit=500 and search on Masas catalog if all findings are marked 2 or 3? And to check if there are any additional 2 or 3s in the database (which would most likely mean that this was falsely marked 2 or 3).

I prepared a scenario.
1) By https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php, I get a following list.

A Modest Proposal (transclusion) <U+200E> (links)
A Doll's House (transclusion) <U+200E> (links)
The Metamorphosis (transclusion) <U+200E> (links)
Gettysburg Address (transclusion) <U+200E> (links)
Heart of Darkness (transclusion) <U+200E> (links)

2) At http://ekzemplaro.org/librivox/catalog/
I do title search and learn the satatus.

A Modest Proposal ---> 3
A Doll's House --> -1 b1984
The Metamorphosis --> -1 b527,b6120,b8588
Gettysburg Address --> -1 b389,b390,b1157,b1293,b8387
Heart of Darkness --> 3

So b1984, b527,b6120,b8588, b389,b390,b1157,b1293,b8387 can be status '2'.

I'm going to make this scenario into a script.

Cheers,
Masa
[/quote]

[Isana]

Here is Wikipedia's robots.txt file:

https://en.wikipedia.org/robots.txt

It might be a good idea to see if Wikipedia's API could be used instead. It might also be a good idea not to make Wikipedia think that any automated scripts are endorsed by LibriVox.

[ekzemplaro]

Hello,

I'm going to make this scenario into a script.

I wrote the script.
The result is here.
http://ekzemplaro.org/librivox/wikipedia/template/

If everything is OK, I'll change status '-1' to '2'.
When you notice somthing wrong, please point them out.

Cheers,
Masa

[mahne]

Hi Masa-san,

there are several mismatches, e.g. "The Game", The Prairie", "The Star", "Victory", "Chance", "The Lost Prince", "The Dead", "Nature", Childhood" have more matches then they should have.

Cheers
mahne

[ekzemplaro]

Hello mahne san,

Thank you for your advice.

there are several mismatches, e.g. "The Game", The Prairie", "The Star", "Victory", "Chance", "The Lost Prince", "The Dead", "Nature", Childhood" have more matches then they should have.

I added the author ID.
http://ekzemplaro.org/librivox/wikipedia/template/

My current idea is as such,
When there're plural matches, I check if their author ID are identical or not.
If their author ID are not identical, the match includes extra data. So it shuldn't be processed.

Does somebody know the method to show both title and author?
The following shows only title.
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:WhatLinksHere/Template:Librivox_book&limit=500

And if possilbe, I want the result in JSON instead of HTML.

Cheers,
Masa