Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Biography/LibraryThing top authors

Comments:

• This page was set up on August 6, 2007, by user:LA2 who is also /profile/LA2 on LibraryThing.com. The list was copied without prior permission. I think the list is not copyrightable and that LT founder Tim Spalding would agree anyway. I intend to withdraw the list if he does not. The purpose is to compare a popularity ranking of authors with Wikipedia's coverage of the same. I think such a comparison can be of great value to the WikiProject Biography. LibraryThing is one of few places where you can find such a ranking based on a large number of observations.
• The reported numbers in parenthesis are holdings, as reported on LibraryThing. That means if one person has two books by author X and another person has one book, that is 2 + 1 = 3 holdings.
• Names with a "(was: ...)" parenthesis at the end contains names as listed on LibraryThing, which are different from Wikipedia article titles. In most cases, this is where Wikipedia puts a space between initials, such as J. K. Rowling.
  • Several of these could be caught automatically, by running the LibraryThing name through the list of Wikipedia redirects (which exists as a separate dump file) Dsp13 20:21, 8 August 2007 (UTC)
• Some publishers (and the infamous "Various") are listed as authors. This is because enough many LibraryThing members cataloged their books this way. One can wonder why people would do this. In the case of "Merriam-Webster, Inc", LibraryThing listed this with "Inc" as the forename.
• A few of these very popular authors apparently don't yet have Wikipedia entries. They are popular, more than a thousand holdings of their books are reported. But does that automatically make them "notable"?
• For being a rank 622 author (in this list), Winston Churchill has a rather long biography (104 kbytes). But of course, his bio is not based on his authorship alone.

Very nice! I'd put a couple of similar lists on my user page, but without your fancy display. A few of your redlinks seem spurious & unicode-related (e.g. there are certainly pages for Hergé and René Descartes). Dsp13 19:17, 8 August 2007 (UTC)

• I see LibraryThing's count for Gladys-Marie Fry is spurious (the result of one user repeatedly tagging it there). Dsp13 20:12, 8 August 2007 (UTC)

Dsp13, yes, you're right on every point. I'm thinking of a m:Toolserver application rather than this static list. In addition to automatic redirect following, one could also do interwiki links, to analyze other languages of Wikipedia. I'm also having positive feedback from Tim Spalding, founder of LibraryThing. --LA2 06:35, 9 August 2007 (UTC)