Them: if you set aside all the ethical concerns…

Me: this is what evil is. This is how evil talks.

Want to improve book info on Wikimedia? Join #EveryBookItsReader 2026

Every Book Its Reader is a campaign to incentivise everyone to improve quality content about books through Wikipedia, Wikidata, Wikimedia Commons, Wikibooks, and Wikisource. It usually runs through the whole month of April. You can go to the campaign website and follow the instructions to link your Wikimedia account to the campaign and thus have your contributions counted.

This means you can create a new Wikipedia page for an author or book that doesn’t exist yet or, if you want to start with a less demanding task, you can search for Wikipedia articles about your favourite authors or books, read them and add information or add references for the information already published. You can also contribute to the other platforms of Wikimedia, like the Commons, the Wikibooks, or Wikisource (if you’re uploading an item, be sure to check if you have the copyright of the work or if it’s in public domain).

Another more easy option is to contribute to Wikidata (at least for me), a wiki of structured data. This means that once the data is there, you can ask (create queries) about what you want to know. Some examples:

You can also use the more easy visual query builder here. But to ask questions, we need the data there.

This year I thought I would add information about Elizabeth Fair books to Wikidata. There’s already an item for the author, but not her books. I started by creating an item for the work Bramton Wick, published in 1952. But I also wanted to add the 2017 edition by Dean Street Press, so I added a new item for that edition (one work can have several editions). And I wanted to describe it as much as possible: that it was published by DSP (there was not info about it, so I created a new item for the publisher), in the Furrowed Middlebrow collection (for which I also created an item) with an introduction by Elizabeth Crawford (that was already on Wikidata, so I linked to it directly). At the end, I went to the item about Elizabeth Fair, that was already on Wikidata, and was able to link Bramton Wick to her notable works. I’m linking here all the items to Wikidata, so if you have more info, you can go there and add to them.

So I’m hoping to find some time during this month to add at least Fair’s other books (yeah, I know you can tell I love her books 😍).

In the 2024 campaign, I added to Wikidata information about (autolink, in Portuguese) titles to Agatha Christie’s books to solve a problem I (and probably many others that read in more than one language) face: the fact the same book can have very different titles, which means that you can find what it seems a new to you book by a given author, but it just has a different title of a book you already own or read.

Steven from @christie_in_translation at Instagram shares regularly different countries’ editions of Agatha Christie’s books and reflects about the different translations of her titles. In Christie’s case, we even have the same book in the same language (English) with a different title, depending if it was published in the UK or the US.

So this year I decided to extend it to new authors and I’m using a Portuguese collection of crime fiction (Colecção Vampiro) to add the Portuguese titles to the original items’ titles in Wikidata.

As you can see, you can go from simple to more complex contributions to the Every Book Its Reader, and each one is as much important as the other. So, why not give it a go?

Voter registration is more important than ever! Make sure your community is ready to vote!

https://www.everylibrary.org/nvrd2026

So here you go, today's PLA presentation. Not verbatim, because I always riff a bit and I skipped one slide for time, but talk notes are included.

"Protecting Patrons' Privacy with Digital Vendors"

https://speakerdeck.com/dsalo/protecting-patrons-with-digital-vendors

And no, I am still not Sarah Lamdan. Wish I were.

My #Wikipedia request for comment just closed, finally banning #AI content in articles! "The use of LLMs to generate or rewrite article content is prohibited"

Kudos to all who participated in writing the guideline (especially Kowal2701) and the whole WikiProject AI Cleanup team, this was very much a group effort!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Writing_articles_with_large_language_models/RfC