Category talk:Articles with invalid ISBNs

message: Mediawiki software already recognizes ISBN-13s and links them to Special:Book sources all by itself. This template, , looks like it must have been created before Mediawiki support was available. It seems possible that widespread use of the template might make it harder for SmackBot to do its checking, and I joined in the call for its deletion. If you have an opinion, you are welcome to add it to the discussion. EdJohnston 03:21, 23 April 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  [[Template:ISBN-13]] has been proposed for deletion 

message: Should we use 10 or 13 number combos now? Bearian (talk) 01:51, 15 February 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: Opinions, of course differ. My take is that we should show only the ISBN-13s for any books published after 1 January, 2007, and preferably show only the ISBN-10 for older books. The reason for the apparent nostalgia is that some catalogs and book-ordering systems will find an entry for an ISBN-10 and not for the ISBN-13 of the same book. At least, this was true when the invalid-ISBN project was last active. There is a simple algorithm to convert one style of ISBN into the other (until the moment that the 13s start to be issued out of the unconvertible range), so two ISBNs are not more informative than one.  I believe that Rich F. is somewhat more favorable to the ISBN-13s than me, so you might ask him as well. EdJohnston (talk) 04:36, 15 February 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: Wow, thanks. Bearian (talk) 16:14, 19 February 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: Could wikipedia's ISBN page be adapted to automatically convert ISBN-13s to ISBN-10s for sites that only accept those, and to show both forms? --Random832 (contribs) 13:34, 9 May 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  10 or 13 

message: There is now a series of lists with invalid ISBNs at WikiProject Check Wikipedia. -- User:Docu 16:05, 13 April 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  New lists generated by [[Wikipedia:WikiProject Check Wikipedia|WikiProject Check Wikipedia]] 

message: I'm working on these atm, trying to thin it down...
I'm using the tool here, to get hyphenations.
The Library of Congress has a tool here that will give the 'valid' check digit....lots of times that seems to be the problem, and with the right check digit it pops right up on WorldCat. Otherwise, I'm actually searching for the book itself in WorldCat and Google books, and if I still can't find it, it's usually a non-English book.
If I can, I'll check the publisher's website, but by then I'm usually finding dead websites. At this point I'm commenting them out.
Some of these errors are ISSNs or WorldCat #'s just marked wrong.
Revent (talk) 04:13, 13 May 2013 (UTC)
thread_title:  Working on these 

message: Thanks for the preceding responses.
Ed Johnston noted the count of 3000+ articles sadly. Category intersection may help set priorities, at least personal priorities for some editors. For example, CategoryIntersect.php now shows  that there are 94 of these Articles with invalid ISBNs among the 18000+ . --P64 (talk) 20:07, 12 October 2013 (UTC)
replies: text: I started on these and the even more compelling FAs, and made good progress until I had to spend today dealing with Arbcom. All the best, Rich Farmbrough, 04:33, 12 April 2014 (UTC)
replies: text: FA's done, GA's going. All the best, Rich Farmbrough, 06:12, 12 April 2014 (UTC)
replies: text: Then, of course, it's on to , where there are currently 35 FAs and 173 GAs. I've been working on that category; it's down from 8,000 to 5,270, and I have a simple and quick AutoEd script that fixes ISBNs in about half of the citations. Many of the errors are two ISBNs in a single citation parameter, which is easy to fix. – Jonesey95 (talk) 06:20, 12 April 2014 (UTC)
replies: text: There are 40 FAs now... All the best, Rich Farmbrough, 16:20, 12 April 2014 (UTC)
thread_title:  Backlog 

message: Hyphens are used to separate different parts of the ISBN.  The first part but only in 13 digit ISBNs)  is 978 or 979 which effectively says "this is an ISBN" to distinguish from other EAN codes.  The second part is a language-area code, 0 and 1 for English, 2 for French, 3 for German and so forth - 9941 is the code for Georgia.  451 is the publisher code and is valid under the hyphenation rules for Georgia:
0-0
10-39
400-899
9000-9999
These rules allow one "big" publisher "0" with 10,000 ISBNs, 30 with 1,000 ISBNs, 500 with 100 ISBNs and 1000 with 10 ISBNs.
Our publisher is 451 "Saunje" and 14, the serial number, probably the 15th book published by them with an ISBN (they may have already used up one or more previous ranges).
So given that the ISBN is valid, why is it marked as "probably wrong"? There is clue on the Category page:
In 2011 the bot that tagged the article this was copied from had no knowledge of 9941 (and a number of other 99... ranges). (The Library of Congress converter still doesn't know about this range.) Subsequently it learned about these and removed any tags that were imposed as a result.  The text was not pasted back into WP until after that bot had stopped running. 
All the best: Rich Farmbrough, 16:02, 17 June 2015 (UTC)
thread_title: Hyphenation rules and She-Bears