User:OrangeCorner

Proposal for Adding Stubs to Wikipedia for all Public Domain Books
The current project that I'm working on is an effort to create article stubs on Wikipedia for notable Public Domain Books hosted by Google Books. Google Books now hosts more than 1,000,000 public domain books, which offers the Wikipedia community a rich resource of notable and verifiable content for summarizing in a encyclopedia format. I would propose the use of an automatic-bot similar to ram-bot which was used to create the original article stubs for all the towns of the United States in 2002 (totaling 30,000). The creation of these stubs would open up a whole new field of valuable content for Wikipedia volunteers to expand, edit, cross reference, and draw in third party sources for other articles. The public domain books on Google Books represent a significant portion of knowledge inheritance we have passed down to us from previous generations. This wealth of knowledge ought to be properly summarized and the impact its books have had made known.

The proposal will depend on accomplishing a number of steps hand in hand with Google and creating a standard set of information for each notable book. With these elements identified and if available from the Google Books website the creation of the stub should be relatively straight forward. Below is a wish list of items that are needed from the Google Books team in order to move this proposal forward. If you are a member of the Google Books team please assist the WP community in accomplishing these goals.

Metadata Access
1. Obtain access to the information in some machine-parsable format, so we don't have to crawl a million Google pages scraping the information. This need not be direct access to a live database of any sort, a dump of the necessary metadata or a way to download the list of PD books and the metadata for each book is fine.

Metadata Periodic Notification
2. Periodic notification of new and updated PD books would also be nice, even though it would probably take over a year for the bot to get through the first million at normal editing rates (10 seconds per book that doesn't already have an article, plus 10 seconds per image if applicable, plus downtime whenever the Wikipedia servers are more than 5 seconds lagged).

Metadata Downloadable Updates
3. The ability to download a list of all PD books last modified in a given date range plus the ability to download the metadata just for specific books would probably be the most convenient, especially if the server supports HTTP persistent connection. The bot could then just download each month's worth of titles, check if each book's article already exists, and download the metadata for just the books it needs.

Metadata Formatting
4. The metadata should contain as many of the fields in (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Infobox_Book) as possible, the more we have the easier it will be to get community consensus for the proposal.

Synopsis if Available
5. Also, if available a synopsis would be helpful for including more than just "X is a book written by AUTHOR and published by COMPANY in YEAR" in the stub.

Link Back to Google
6. We need whatever information is necessary to generate a link back to Google's human-readable page for the book.

Permission or Statement of PD for Synopses
7. If the metadata does include the synopses, we probably need to get permission sent from Google to WP:OTRS for those synopses to be uploaded as part of the article under the CC-BY-SA (or, better yet, Wikipedia's CC-BY-SA/GFDL dual license) as there may be sufficient original work in summarizing the book to garner copyright protection for the summary. Or get Google to just officially and explicitly state somewhere on their site that their synopses of PD books are themselves PD or CC-BY or CC-BY-SA or CC-BY-SA/GFDL dual licensed.

Permission or Statement of PD for metadata Images
8. If the metadata contains images (or reference to images) appropriate for the infobox, we'll also need to either determine that those images must be PD (e.g. as slavish reproductions of a 2D image; asking at an appropriate Commons page (e.g. Commons talk:Licensing) would be your best course of action for that), get permission sent from Google to WP:OTRS for those to be uploaded to Commons under a free license of their choice, or get Google to just officially and explicitly state somewhere on their site that their images of PD books are themselves PD or are released under an appropriate free license.

Community Consensus
9. We'll be going through a strong community consensus process to obtain the blessing for our proposal and bot to create all these stubs. This probably means a full 30+ day RFC advertised on WP:VPR, Template:Cent, WT:BOOKS, WT:BK, and anywhere else we can think of. Since the details of the proposal in the RFC will depend on just what metadata is available (e.g. having synopses and images would be a big plus), our goal right now is obtain the items above in order to successfully complete the community consensus process.

If you would like to assist me in this effort, please leave me a message on my user talk page. Thank you.

Links:
http://books.google.com/

www.isbn.org

Orange Corner edited article featured on the home page of the English Wikipedia:
One of my proudest moments on Wikipedia thus far was my contributions to the article on "Herman Van Rompuy". On November 3rd of 2009 after reading early speculation of the possibility of Mr. Rompuy being appointed the first permanent "President of the European Council" I visited his Wikipedia article. Finding the article to consist of simply an introduction paragraph and a list of previous political positions I decided to undertake the task of seriously expanding the article.

Firstly on the discussion page I made a call for the expansion of the article given that in only a few weeks time Mr. Rompuy might be the "President of the European Council" we ought to properly expand the article on him and include a wider range of citable information. Next I added sections covering Mr. Rompuy's political positions on general issues of taxation, quotes on the financial recovery, his policy on government debt, and his negotiations and dispute with GDF Suez. Next I added a section for on going speculation of his being appointed the position of "President of the European Council".

On November 4th I added a section to the article that detailed a few of Mr. Rompuy's "accomplishments" as Prime Minister of Belgium. I then tended and updated the article as new information became available.

On November 19th Herman Van Rompuy was indeed appointed as the first permanent "President of the European Council" and the following day November 20th the article about Mr. Rompuy was featured as a news item on the home page of the English Wikipedia. Having written the majority of the article before the selection was made I felt some pride in the recognition of the article on the home page of the site and having it exposed to a large audience.

After his appointment Mr. Rompuy's article has been expanded by a number of editors and I'm happy to see the article growing in length and quality, so that it may be a more valuable resource to those seeking information about this little known politician who now holds the office of "President of the European Council".