Goodreads Librarians Group discussion

Considering that the vast majority of those posting quotes that they and their friends said/quotes from movie/television are people with fewer than 200 books, I think that there should be a rule that only librarians be able to add quotes. It would keep things far cleaner and make the librarians' jobs far easier.

I think there should be a box on each person's profile where they put quotes that are not from books....Just like one would imput their intrests and such.

And couldn't we put a little bit of these guidelines on the quote-adding page? I'm not sure how people are getting the idea that quotes from their friends are okay, but the only guidelines I see are:

* Only enter quotes from notable people.
* Only enter the author's name in the author field (not their birthdate or which book the quote is from).

'Notable people' is a pretty wide margin, and I can easily see why a teenager might think a television character or a band counted as 'notable'. It seems like it'd be really easy to add a bullet point that says 'Only enter quotes having to do with books' or 'Only enter quotes by authors who are present on Goodreads' or something else like that.

I completely get why my fellow librarians are against tv/movie quotes, and why those quotes are being deleted, but I can understand why a user would misunderstand the purpose behind quotes & continue adding them, perhaps scratching her head in frustration as to where her quotes had gone.

I added one movie quote myself which could have actually been from the book, but I really didnt want to actually have to *read* Naked Lunch: The Restored Text to find it. Instead I credited it to David Cronenberg, the writer and director of the filmed adaptation. Is that wrong? Should I delete it? Credit it to Burroughs even though it might not have been in the original text? (Wish I could "ctrl+F" the book LOL)

The really weird thing is, most of those putting up personal quotes appear to be middle scholars who don't want to post books; most of those posting personal quotes have less than 100 books.

I think that they know perfectly well what they are doing because a lot of them tag their quotes with things like "inside jokes."

Sherri said:

The idea behind the quotes database is to post quotes to share with others, not JUST another method of personal expression.

I understand this, but how is a user supposed to know that from the page from which one adds quotes? It doesn't say that anywhere, so maybe we should ask for that information to be added to the pages? Expecting a wide variety of users to share the same assumptions about the use of a feature seems a little optimistic of us -- especially when other sites have other uses for quotes databases. :-)

I've generally stayed out of the quote discussion, but I don't think we should be absolutely restrictive to saying that a quote has to be book related or from a book. For example, "Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country." is a fabulous quote and while it can certainly be found in a book (hell, it can be found in a book of quotations) it's genesis is not from a book and it is the genesis of the quotation which is more important than if it happened to be written down in book form.

One of the most popular quotes on the site is by Groucho Marx: "Outside of a dog, a book is man's best friend. Inside of a dog it's too dark to read." Again this is not from a book, although I'm sure it can be found in many published quotation collections (the actual source appears to be unknown...most likely it was a standard line from the Vaudeville act).

How to define a "good" quote vs. a "bad" quote can often be difficult. Many people like quoting song lyrics, and this personally doesn't bother me as long as they are quoting fairly small snippets (as already discussed the difference between song lyrics and poetry could be considered somewhat arbitrary). The larger problem becomes when they quote the entire song (the same problem pops up in poetry).

Emphasizing notable people is important, but again, there are some very good anonymous quotations (I suppose at that point they're not so much quotations as "sayings") which I think many would consider to be quite legitimate.

Some librarians have said that movie quotes should only be included if they are based on the book that the movie is based on. But what about when the book is based on the movie? Does that suddenly magically make it legitimate?

Either the quotes should be completely eliminated (which I suspect is not going to happen) or there needs to be a little more flexibility in the way they're viewed. I'm not in support of personal statements, inside jokes, etc., but one has to consider what the purpose of having quotes on the site is. It's not a quotation website, but unless you (i.e., GoodReads) define an extremely strict and specific purpose for the quotation part of the website, you need to open it up I think all legitimate quotations (whether explicitly from books or not).

Unless GoodReads creates a much more specific policy, I think we just have to let librarians use their best judgment in eliminating clearly inappropriate quotes, with a liberal benefit of the doubt that leads one to be more likely to keep (than reject) a quote of which they are uncertain.

I know a little bit about this. About a decade ago I used to maintain a fairly popular quotation website on the web. It was just a collection of quotes which I had collected over the years, categorized in a fairly arbitrary way. Many of the specific quotations on that website survive today in other websites, undoubtedly including GoodReads: in some cases I can tell that they have an evolutionary history which flows through my old site because of typos and formatting styles which have been maintained by others through the years.

Whoops, and I'm the culprit that originally entered that Groucho Marx quote. It was when the quotes feature was brand new and I must have been thinking it was a quote about/related to books and reading.

I agree with Michael re: flexibility. I leave most quotes (including those from songs and movies) alone unless they're obviously junk like "(Choose your sports team) rules!"

You're sure right about its not being valuable.

Control issues much? Sheesh.

Great points all. I agree with Michael that the quotes feature should remain relatively open, as I can't think of a way to restrict it that would be good.

We are however happy to expand on the guidelines if people have suggestions. Also note that "notable people" is hyperlinked to the Wikipedia definition.

But like many GR hyperlinks, is invisible :).

I think Sara's right--if we give people a place for their personal quotes, the number being added to the public system should diminish.

THANK YOU!!!
It has been my experience that people are more likely to do something if it's specificly labeled for that thing.