Adding new books to Wikidata manually is a lot of work, as it requires the creation of multiple items (one for the work, one for the edition, and ideally also one for the author, publisher, etc.).
The goal of this task is to create a tool that offers a simplified form-like interface that allows entering all the relevant data, and creates the relevant entities in a single step.
In Wikibase cloud, we have a Cradle. I personally haven't used it, nor I don't know weather its available on Wikidata. But the question is, if the Cradle would not be enough?
Thanks for the suggestion! I probably should have added more details to the ticket description. I know about Cradle, but it doesn't work for what I need because for books you need to create multiple items at once (for convenience): one for the work, one for the edition, and possibly more for the author, publisher, etc.
I'm not affiliated with it, just would like to put in a shout-out to the Open Library project that's been going on for well over a decade, collecting book records from all kinds of sources, and aggregating this across the community - including with Wikidata. There is a lot of experience and tools for data entry.
@Loleg Open Library is an awesome project, I played around with the book-to-Wikidata interface using their API a while ago. https://github.com/lubianat/olivro using 3 sources of metadata:
ask_google_books.py
ask_isbndb.py
ask_open_library.py
I've also taken a look at it another for the Biodiversity Heritage Library, parsing the DOIs/BHL Title IDs:
https://bhl-qs-generator-production.up.railway.app
I am not 100% aligned with having 1 Work and 1(+) Editions for every single book, though. This modelling is technically correct, but it introduces some complexity that I think is undesirable in some cases.
Say, for this old book with a single edition: https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q51400196 (O livrinho das aves [por] Rodolpho von Ihering ...)
For books with multiple volumes, especially old prints, things get even more complex.
Anyways, I think we can take these things into account for the tool and have perhaps flexibility for creating 1 (mixed item edition+work) or 2 (separate items for edition or work).
Finally @Pepe_piton will be around in Istanbul too and might be interested in book stuff, as they are the lead dev in https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Tools/Paulina
For future reference, I'm copying below the text about this project that was added to the Etherpad of the closing ceremony showcase:
34. BookForm
- Phabricator task: https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T371264
- Brief description (2-3 lines): Web-based UI to enter information about a book and automatically create the relevant Wikidata items (work, edition, author, etc.). Like Cradle, but able to create multiple items.
- Relevant links:
- Source code: https://github.com/waldyrious/bookform
- Live demo: https://waldyrious.net/bookform/
- Cradle, for comparison:
- New-Q5, as inspiration: https://new-q5.toolforge.org
- Contact(s): Waldir Pimenta (User:Waldyrious), Artur Corrêa (User:Arcstur)
- Status (e.g., early concept, ready for beta deployment, production, etc.): Prototype
- Okay with being recorded: Yes
Update on the current status: For the moment the tool is already live and semi-functional. There are a few critical missing tasks for it to be a minimal MVP, namely the ability to actually connect the items with each other, and the ability to check Wikidata for potentially existing items, to avoid duplicates. Once those are done, we can close this task, since at that point the tool will indeed be usable.
I also invite anyone interested to create issues/feature requests in the project repository's issue tracker. I've already added a bunch: https://github.com/waldyrious/bookform/issues