Community Wishlist/Wishes/Centralized cross-project database of user-owned publications
Description
The Wikipedia Library is a large undertaking, successfully enabling the use of a great many sources available online. At the same time, however, access to non-digitized paper sources (especially books) – which are often very important publications – is limited. Within individual Wikimedia projects, there are pages or wikiprojects that are supposed to help in the exchange and search for sources (e.g. en:Wikipedia:WikiProject Resource Exchange/Shared Resources, de:Wikipedia:Bibliotheksrecherche, pl:Wikipedia:Biblioteka or pl:Wikipedia:Kawiarenka/Giełda źródeł), but they are limited to individual Wikimedia projects and language versions.
The proposal therefore includes the creation of a webpage/list/database to which users could add information about books and other publications they own to which they have offline access. Such a database could be created within the framework of the The Wikipedia Library, bibliographic information about publications could be imported from Wikidata, and users could post information about the possession of a given publication and to what extent they are willing to help; the languages in which they communicate would be displayed and a link to user page would enable direct contact. At the same time, centralization could also include one page dedicated to source exchange/request (such as the previously mentioned pl:Wikipedia:Kawiarenka/Giełda_źródeł or en:Wikipedia:WikiProject Resource Exchange/Resource Request) and a list of users that have access to specific libraries or local databases (that are not available through The Wikipedia Library). Initiatives of this kind exist in various projects (cf. pl:Wikipedia:Biblioteka/Chemia), but their decentralization makes searching for sources in other languages difficult and requires searching through various Wikimedia projects with different page structures.
Assigned focus area
Unassigned.
Type of wish
Feature request
Related projects
Wikipedia, Wiktionary
Affected users
Wikipedia and Wiktionary editors who are looking for other editors with access to specific sources